Covid career change – from cruise ship cleaner to developer | Hacker News Reader

Covid career change – from cruise ship cleaner to developer

nocsdegree.com

21 pointsPete-Codes17 comments

Good to know there’s another 10-15 years of high salaries before the gravy train stops. The number of people learning to code and switching careers now is insane. And anyone anywhere with a laptop and internet can do it.

I’m hoping I can stretch my career out by getting good at mentoring and management and helping all this new talent. But those entering now should seriously plan towards finding other sources of income as well by the time they hit 35+.

> Good to know there’s another 10-15 years of high salaries before the gravy train stops.

Sorry but how did you arrive at this conclusion with exact year ranges?

Thats around the time it'll take the students / college students to learn and become experienced developers. Plus everyone switching now because of bootcamps and Covid. Its also a pretty wide range.

What about the concept that some people stop working in this industry? Especially as tech stacks ever evolve, and some people grow weary of having to keep up when they can go do x job and be just as happy. It's not like the world of developers is just gonna explode with talent and wages are gonna go nilch so easily.

The BLS expects another ~300,000 software engineering jobs in the next decade.[1] Will the fresh grads really be enough to hit that goal and more?

Besides, an influx of talent to the industry also brings the immeasurable future possibility of new innovation and growth. Is it really impossible that this will outpace the rate of entering labor, so that wages dont stagnate hard? I don't have all the answers, but I'm not entirely sure doom will come that quickly for us ;)

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

I expect increasing remote work and global outsourcing to take a big chunk out of the 300k. Covid has changed how we live and work. Remote first means global first.

If you are experienced you are probably fine as long as you can make senior in the next 5-10 years. Its the n00bs who will struggle to move up.

It’s actually a conservative estimate with the variable being tech growth (10-15 years no tech growth, I’d honestly put that number lower). If these tech ipos don’t realize their supposed profit potential (trading at large valuations), the industry will retract. The inflow of labor will then just sort itself out (job cuts, no new jobs, wage cuts - standard race to the bottom).

We need tech growth to justify the inflow, or else. :(

The bootcamp runners are not really invested in career stability. They make their money at the entrance, what happens after is, literally, not their business.

It’s the same as Comp Lit professors in college. Their business is to sell you that between 18-22. What happens after? They don’t give a shit. It’s odd, it’s like the same enemy that got you the first time, ends up getting you again.

Shame on who? I lost count. If you are seriously going to make a career change, try Medical. It’s harder for a reason.

Or you could work towards having a higher moat skillset. It's hard to work in distributed systems or embedded systems without a lot of training.

The moat is the difficulty in getting practical training / experience. I'm all ears for say how a JS developer can break into distributed systems.

It's really tough but you could take online classes and read textbooks. Also side projects. But it being difficult to teach yourself is the whole point, I rarely see bootcampers working in certain disciplines because of the amount of CS education (networks, OS, algorithms) they need to self teach themselves. I'm in the camp that CS degrees are valuable for that reason.

But less money than software.

I think there is much more to programming/being a developer than just knowing the syntax: anyone can type on a keyboard, but considerably fewer can write applications.

What are you planning to spend those 10-15 years doing that these people are competition?

Most developers can't actually code, once the motor skills has been assumed it is nothing but brute intelligence.. and then you can become a lead/architect... It takes 10 years to become good enough. I feel pretty safe ;)

Funny that the whole thing reads like an ad for Scrimba but when asked what he'd recommend for others Scrimba barely makes an honorary mention.

I am ready for metric fuck ton of downvotes.

Why don’t people keep this shit a secret man? This profession has been looked down on for years, and this is just bad for my brand man.

I’m happy for everyone that makes it, but Jesus, ‘nocsdegree.com’, like we’re proud of this now? Keep it on the down-low.

Anyone can learn to code, that's the democratizing force of tech in action.

Maintaining a "brand" is mostly about upholding a reputation. If you're good at what you do and can prove it to others then having more people in the field isn't really a threat.

One of the most highly-skilled, highly-paid engineers I know has only a high school diploma. But he also has a reputation and over 15 years of proven experience in the field.

I like hiring people out of coding boot camps because they're easy to hire and I love mentoring people. I don't really feel threatened by them because it takes a lot of work experience to actually level up in this field.

Looking down on people is human nature. I'm self taught myself, no formal education of any kind and I'm the first person in my family to work a white collar job like this. My experience is even people in my own family can't help but make snide comments when I succeed. Some time ago I walked out of ear shot at a family gathering and my own grandmother dismissively mentioned that my success was simply because "he applies to a lot of jobs", she loves me and means well but even she can't resist. Let it roll off you like water on a duck.

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