How I left a 4 year career in finance and became a software engineer in 5 months
gulnara.svbtle.com
gulnara.svbtle.com
By the way, as part of a cost-cutting measure many years ago, the state government standardized on a single certificate form for all professional certifications, which means the PE certificate looks exactly like the "Certified Hair Technician" certificate the barbers at Great Clips are required to display at their work area.
Really great stuff and nice hear about a career move that made you happier :)
Your four years of schooling to get an engineering degree had plenty of exams, spread over the four years. At most you only had to study for one or two of them at a time. The Professional Engineering exam covers everything you were supposed to learn during those four years, all at once. You can't cram for a test like that; you have to actually know things. That's the whole point: did you absorb the knowledge completely, or did you just get by from test to test?
It's done this way because, for most Professional Engineers, decisions have to be made which can cost people their lives if mistakes are made. You gotta know what you're doing before you're allowed to make those decisions.
For most software engineering mistakes aren't nearly that critical, plus for most organizations doing software development preventing bugs to the same degree that a Civil Engineer prevents bridges from failing is too expensive and not worth it.
I've made the very tough decision to not pursue a residency after medical school and to finally commit to jumping into the startup world. It's both really frightening and exciting to go in a completely different direction after dedicating 4 years of my life to rigorous education. I graduate in May, so I've been trying to absorb as much information and to develop as many skills as possible in preparation for the leap. I'm hoping to perhaps find some good opportunities during Startup School weekend.
So I really commend you for making the jump. And thanks for writing about it. It's encouraging and reassuring, especially since I've been told I'll end up homeless if I take this risk.
Reading HN from the other side of the pond in UK sometimes I get the feeling that there's more money than sense flying around the startup world and that this sort of switch to work in this startup ecosystem is why there are so many dreadfully poor app ideas that should never see the light of day being funded with millions of dollars of VC cash.
I may just have a slightly distorted view of startup world but is it really that easy to score a highly paid job with so little experience because they're so desperate for bodies who can write some code or is OP someone very talented who's just rolled with it and got very lucky?
The hard part is I think he might have a point, there is a lot more to been a professional software engineer than I think can reasonably be taught in 5 months (even if you spend that 5 months learning 20 hours a day 7 days a week).
Of course this is all entirely my own opinion, I've seen evidence neither one way or the other to back it up but if I where hiring a software engineer (lets say a web developer because that's mostly what I do these days so the most likely hire I'd make in the near time).
This is at least what I'd expect of someone calling themselves a software engineer :-
At least two programming languages (I don't really care what they are a good programmer can be competent in any of the major web languages fairly quickly).
A solid grasp of HTML, CSS and Javascript (I don't care if you have to google some of this stuff but you should understand the DOM, the CSS selector model and enough Javascript to write a jQuery plugin)
A solid of grasp of relational databases including the following (primary keys, normalization, key constraints, indexes - I'd also expect but not require they'd understand some of the internals and how a query planner works) and a solid grasp of SQL.
A solid understanding of DBAL's, ORM's.
Solid grasp of common design patters (active record, repositories/entity, unit of work)
Solid grasp of MVC and the pro's and cons
Good understanding of either Windows or Linux.
Good understanding of source control.
Good understanding of why comments are important.
Good understanding of unit testing/integration testing.
To use an analogy (I deal with lots of business people, analogies help) You could teach someone to lay bricks to a good standard in 5 months, You could not teach them to be a safe civil engineer.
That is where my area is, I've no idea what I'd want for an embedded developer but I suspect the list is no less complex.
- Two programming languages: JavaScript and a Server Side languages (rails) in 5 months is not impossible.
- HTML/CSS/JS: A couple weeks.
- Databases: A couple days.
- Linux: Learn the commands on the go on these 5 months.
- Git: A night for the basic add/commit/push/pull. Maybe a couple more nights for branching.
- Unit Testing: A couple days at most.
To use an analogy (I deal with lots of business people, analogies help) You could teach someone to lay bricks to a good standard in 5 months, You could not teach them to be a safe civil engineer.
Not really. The average student takes 36 months. A more enthusiastic and invested one can perform better than the average in 5-6 months (in my opinion). Don't forget that the guy has industry experience even if it's not related to the field in question.
A couple of days to learn SQL, triggers, views, tables, database theory...oh dear god.
Unit testing a couple of days.
I'm sorry I'll give people the benefit of the doubt usually but haha I don't want to live on this planet anymore.
Seriously maybe this program condensed all the necessary experience into 5 months, while the traditional academic path is poor at creating career coders in 4 years. I would totally believe it. There should be some head to head competitions.
In terms of employment as a developer, sometimes I wonder if we would have been better off attending one of these San Fran developer schools. I wonder though how much of the fundamentals do they learn? Do they ever hear the words "Big-Oh"? Do they know what a binary tree is?
And then I wonder -- does it matter? They're getting $90k offers. Perhaps these things don't matter as much, at least for web development.
So I suppose this is one of the benefits of a traditional path: you're well prepared for many types of development, not just web. The web is pretty cool though. :)
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Question: if one wanted to teach themselves at home, is there an online curriculum that covers the same topics as these schools do?
We should be welcoming him into our field! But instead we're too focused on the terminology he used.
I think it's fantastic that the author is now in software and programming. Software development is one of the most affordable ways to change the world. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection :D
I'm happy you're doing something worthwhile now, and glad you made the switch.
To me the greatest joy is actually working on my own projects.
This term Coder has always irritated me. I'm surprised it's not on Tee Shirts yet? "I'm a Coder", or better yet, "I'm a Koder". All very cute.
Right now--I guess in San Francisco--you can go to one if these schools, and land a cute job as a Coder--at 90K?
I wonder if these people will be employed when the bubble ends though?
I agree it's fun at first, but once you do it for a few years on a daily basis, it gets old. I suppose most things in life are like this though. Maintaining enthusiasm about work is difficult, for me at least.
I disagree. I hate bugs and I do everything I can to prevent them from ever occurring. To me I find it fun to get better and better at preventing bugs.
1. Each bug can teach you something
2. You start to write code that is easier to debug if you have done a lot of debugging, because you know what you want to see to help the debugging effort.
3. Both you and the customer are happy when you find and fix a bug.
4. Solving problems is fun.
http://henrikwarne.com/2012/10/21/4-reasons-why-bugs-are-goo...
To bring it back to bugs, a bug can exist in any of these "views" of the system, and sometimes (often) simultaneously in several of them. That's what makes them such a rich signal for our own ignorance.
(Quick editorial: I think that's why rails, Play and meteor have gone/are going in the right direction of removing, sometimes dramatically, some of the ways you have to view your system, and incredibly tight tool integration. People just don't - can't - keep so many views of the system in their head at once. We can't think about the build and low-level plumbing, for example; we need a "synchronization" abstraction. We want the build to just work. We want design- and run-time tools that are easy to update, configure and run. And so on. Meteor is the bees knees, for that reason. Although, ironically, I find my Meteor code to be incredibly bug ridden. Writing JavaScript against new libraries is fairly painful if you're used to learning through IntelliSense!)