Ask HN: Switching to a career in software development in my 30s?

5 points

5 years ago

Like many others, the pandemic has me thinking of a career change. Programming has always been of interest to me, so I’m seriously considering making a move in that direction. Realistically, how difficult will it be to make this change from a totally unrelated field, and what do I need to do to prepare myself?

In particular, I’m wondering about education. I see anecdotes all the time saying, “you don’t need a degree to become a programmer,” but many job postings list a CS degree as a requirement. Either way, I have no doubt that there is a lot that I’d need to learn before I could start applying for jobs. I’ve started working on the “Front End Development Libraries” certification on freeCodeCamp.org – is something like this enough to get me a junior level position somewhere? Are there other courses/programs that would be better? Should I instead be looking at going back to university to get a four-year degree? Or am I better off doing one of these online bootcamps and focusing on building my github portfolio by creating some hobby projects/contributing to OSS?

Some things I do already have that may help me along the way:

* A bachelor’s degree and some graduate work in an unrelated field (theology)

* In university I ran my own business creating WordPress website for local small businesses; so I am/was quite comfortable with HTML/CSS and somewhat competent with Javascript/PHP/MySQL. Unfortunately most of this was 8+ years ago, and I know a lot of things have changed in that time.

* Many of my hobbies include elements of programming: maintaining a blog I built in 11ty, home automation using Home Assistant, etc.

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