Asking for some career advice

I have a background in tech support: installing and maintaining workstations and servers, hardware and also have some experience in setting up websites.

I am just wondering if it really would be worth my while to go into coding full speed.

What do these jobs pay? Would I be better off and be paid just as much in tech support or even administrative assistant?

I have read that 6000(?) people have gotten jobs after doing this course work at FCC. How many coding jobs are there in the USA? 100,000?

I am guessing that they would only pay entry level coders about 30k.

Well would appreciate any feedback on this. thanks!

why not dip your toes in the water by starting on the freecodecamp exercises - career info will make more sense as you progress through the curriculum

also you’ll be able to ask more focused questions e.g. a “coding” job spans pretty much all industries and all skill levels these days

For personal growth and future possibilities/ooportunities, I think it’s worthwhile to learn coding.

What do jobs pay? Depends on your location, city, skills you have, companies you apply to. I think the big 4 Internet companies pay interns 60K-$80K — INTERNS. Some other companies would probably pay minimum wage for internship positions. Some maybe even $0.

I think around $40K is average entry level programmer position, again, depends on skillsets and experience you have. (in my city at least … if you’re in San Jose, CA probably much higher entry-level salary — but that’s kinda misleading because cost of rent/living is also very very much higher in CA.

Would I be better off and be paid just as much in tech support or even administrative assistant?

At the entry-level position? Probably same level. But you also need to consider future opportunities and career path.

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If you already have knowledge of setting up servers/workstations have you considered DevOps? The pay is generally much, much better than the JS frontend coding that FCC mainly teaches. Still coding (so general concepts from FCC are useful, ish), as everything seems to be moving toward using code to automate all the things (Ruby, Python, Bash, Perl scripting mainly, Docker, tools like Terraform, Ansible etc). It’s an absolute pain deploying and running environments for tech, businesses pay an absolute fortune for people who can make them work well.

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Thanks for the response!

Like I said, I have built many websites in html and JS and CSS but not with Github, node.js, mungo etc.

I have looked through job ads and have not seen entry level coding jobs. Seems like they want 5 years experience mostly.

If you see any good job ads please post the URLs maybe I am looking in the wrong places.

Thanks, I will research dev ops.