Hello everyone on the forum today. I am asking a question regarding these type of codes for my brother. My brother was doing IT for a company. He use to do DOS and possibly C in high school. Is this something he should start with, or not? The reason I am asking is at the moment he lost his job, and I want to make sure if this would be a good fit for him.
There are many kinds of programming. This forum is to support the FCC curriculum for web development. All are welcome and all coding questions are cool, but that is our focus.
“doing IT” can mean a lot of things. What does he want to do? If he wants to learn web dev, he can visit the curriculum. It is free, online, and self-paced.
I don’t know how useful DOS is nowadays. C is still used, but “C in high school” is not going to be marketable. But the concepts that he learned would be useful towards learning another language.
My perception is that jobs for C coders are probably going to (mostly) want a degree, or at least a heck of a lot of experience.
There is a Python section in the curriculum, but it does depend on a little bit of coding knowledge, afaik, but with a little C, he might be there.
The core of the FCC material is towards learning web dev with a MERN stack, a marketable stack. It lays the foundation, and with 6-24 months of hard work after that, continuing the learning and building things, getting a job developing is a real possibility. #ymmv
Swift is specific to developing on iOS devices. It is roughly based on C (as a lot of modern languages are, Python being one of the exceptions). FCC does not teach Swift - you’ll have to look elsewhere.
If mobile development is the interest, he could do what I did, JavaScript → React (taught by FCC), which led me to React Native (React for mobile devices, coding for iOS and Android at the same time). That is what I do for a living now, thanks in a large part for FCC. I’m not saying that is a better option, but is a possible option to consider.
If your brother does not have a degree, I think (imho) that web dev is the best option to get work - I think there are more jobs there where they are willing to say “she doesn’t have a CS degree, but she clearly knows what she’s doing…” Mobile would probably fall into that category, too.
But this is a big commitment that will require at least a couple years of hard work - your brother is really the one that should be doing this research. And your brother needs to decide what path he wants to follow, or at least the general direction.
1 Like
I’m also curious why you bring up Python and Swift specifically?
My family mentioned it, and asked me where he could learn. I agree he needs to figure it out. Thank you for the advice. I am just going to worry about my own journey.
It’s just that those are very specific languages. Python is a little trendy, but is common in scientific computing, ML, some other things - imho, those are fields where a degree will likely matter. It can also be use for backend web development, but of the areas in web development, backend is a little harder to break into without a degree/experience. Swift, as mentioned, is very specific to iOS computing.
Unless he has a very specific reason for those two languages specifically, I might suggest that he cast a wider net and just work on learning coding in general and see where his aptitudes and interests lie. Most programmers don’t end up doing exactly what they envisioned when they started - I certainly didn’t imagine I would end up specializing in mobile.
This topic was automatically closed 182 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.