Some advice please from seasoned devs

Career Advice
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I’ll give as much context as possible. I’m middle-aged, pretty much all my working life has been as a digital creative: photographer/graphic designer, I have very basic HTML/CSS knowledge, did a web design course years ago and have built a few basic websites for my photography stuff. Comfortable with basic Terminal commands and I can navigate around the interface of a home Wi-Fi router to customise settings etcetera.

For the past few months I’ve been doing a Python bootcamp (which has been very stop-start due to feeling demotivated at how much there is to learn). Yes, obviously you can’t know it all as a junior. I have an environmental science degree but my math is average so I was reading that DevOps may be an option. Not really interested in web design.

I guess I’m concerned about time. Everyone learns differently, but it generally takes 6 months to a year to land a first role from what I can gather, but I don’t want to spend several months learning Python and related frameworks only to find that the job is not what I thought.

How was your transition from the exciting bit of learning and writing code/building a portfolio, to arriving at your first job and realising how much technical reading was gonna be required of you? How did you deal with a junior role that I believe doesn’t really involve writing much code at all? Were you able to stick it out?

I’m not against doing the entry level stuff at all, I’m worried I’ll invest months into this (I’m not 18 with time to waste) only to find that I don’t actually enjoy the day-to-day. It’s different sitting at home learning and writing fun programs.

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Hi @WC01 !

Welcome to the forum!

That’s really common because learning to code for the first time is a lot.
My advice would be to focus on the big picture concepts and core programming knowledge.
Once you develop a good base for the fundamentals of programming, then you will realize that a lot of the same concept transfer to multiple languages. This is how more experienced developers are able to pick up new tools and languages so quickly. Its because they understand the underlying concepts and patterns and have had tons of practice.

There are a lot of more options to choose in tech besides DevOps and web design.
There is frontend, full stack, backend, testing, security, etc.

So my advice would be to continue learning through your bootcamp and focusing on the core concepts and building tons of stuff. Then once you enter this industry as a working dev, then you can start to exploring other areas, if you want, once you have learned more about them.

People pivot into different roles all of the time.
Just because you start in one doesn’t mean you can’t pivot into another later on. :+1:

This was more true in the 2020 and 2021 years where everyone and their mother was hiring developers. The learn to code movement was in full swing and companies were building tons of new products and hiring tons of devs. Then everything crashed and the layoffs started happening and they started working with much smaller teams.

The market is in a better place then it was say 2023 but it is no where near as hot as it was in 2020. So for most people it will take probably a couple of years before they land a job. The ones who land a job sooner will be part of the small few.

So my first full time job was in 2022 at a javascript consultancy.
At my time there I worked on a variety of projects for either the company itself or client projects.

There was a ton of stuff to learn but I learned and grew a lot in the process.
In my experience, there was reading documentation but I probably spent most of time studying and learning the existing codebases. There were only a few greenfield projects I was a part of. The other projects were already existing apps that were a few months old or legacy apps that were several years old. So the biggest transition was learning how to read other people’s code and get use the existing systems in place to be able to contribute effectively. That and learning how to debug errors effectively.

I would argue that the opposite would be true for a good portion of developers.
You will probably end up writing the most code earlier on in your career compared to later.

As a junior your role will be confined to smaller scoped issues. As you progress through mid and more senior roles, then you will be responsible for large parts of the code and be making more of the architectural decisions.

If you get to levels like staff and architect then you are more in a leadership role and making the larger decisions and leading teams. that usually means more meetings and definitely more responsibilities. That doesn’t mean these higher up roles don’t code anymore, but the role will look very different from the earlier junior and mid days.

I guess fun is subjective and everyone is going to view the job differently. For me I still enjoy the work.

But at the end of the day, it is still a job and not all aspects of the job will be fun and exciting all of the time. You will need to deal with deadlines, managers, clients, product owners, possibly being on call, production going down, and more.

My advice is if you enjoy the problem solving, life long learning and accepting the pros and cons of the job, then you will be fine :+1:

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Generally, I recommend that people plan for a minimum of a year of learning before they’re really ready to apply for jobs. Even once you feel like you’ve got the necessary skills, the process of finding your first job in the field can also take several months.

My observation has been that the “Oooh! This is so exciting!” phase of learning to code is an early part of the learning experience. By the time you’ve built up enough skills to do the work of a junior developer you’ve learned that a lot of it is tedious or frustrating. The amount of technical reading isn’t something that I’d say had any significant shift.

Everywhere I’ve worked, junior developers are expected to be writing code.

I’ve been doing this for over a decade, so I guess so.

By the time you actually have the experience to be employable, you’ll have a better sense of how much you actually enjoy writing code.

Most of your concerns represent some of the reasons that experienced devs advocate for self-taught students to build at least one large project that you spend several months working on, on a consistent basis. Trying to keep something running when stuff goes wrong, adding features without breaking any existing code, dealing with your own tech debt, etc – these are a big part of the daily life of a professional developer.

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Thanks for both your replies. Some interesting perspective. It’s wild how much variation and conflicting information is on the internet surrounding time taken to get into software development at a junior level.

The common theme, including advice from working devs in my local area seems to be around six months or a little more to find a really junior/entry-level role.

Knowledge required for an entry level role seems to vary drastically from the absolute basics of Python and related frameworks depending on the area in which you want to work, to advice like above saying to spend several months maintaining a large project with regular updates, or two years to find work, which is a first for advice on getting a junior role.

Anyway, all good advice, I realise it’s a bit like a how-long-is-a-piece-of-string question, every employer will have different knowledge requirements.

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There are several reasons for this. It boils down to the individual and their circumstances and their approach.

Some will be able to put an immense amount of time up front and learn very quickly and get a job soon.

Others will learn at a slower rate and get a job later.

And then others will learn the basic skills but they excel at networking and are able to land something much sooner then most and will play catch up on the job.

For other industries there is a more predictable timeline where you do x,y,z and get a job. But in software there are dozens of paths into software.

Ariel and I have the experience of seeing literally thousands of people come through various programming forums learning to code and most don’t make it unfortunately. And for those that do, for a lot of them the job hunt was really rough and it took longer than 6-12 months.

For the ones that choose to post online about getting a job, most of them it took shorter amount of time. So it easy to think “ohh this is the norm” when it actually isn’t. For those where it takes a lot longer, there are not going to be as free to post about it.

IMO, it is always best to plan for things to take longer. And if it happens sooner, then great. Otherwise, you have already set your expectations for it to take longer. :+1:

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This is utterly unrealistic. Your competition is people with 4 year degrees, and they are struggling to find jobs. You should anticipate years of effort to become job ready.

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I’m in a very similar boat to you. I am also middle aged and trying to transition into coding. And I’m struggling with a lot of the same things you are as far as finding the time to work on coding and feeling like that career has already passed you by. I don’t have a lot of advice, but here’s what I’ve picked up. I hope you find it helpful.

As someone else in this thread stated, there was a hiring frenzy a couple years ago, but now the hiring market is very cold. The people I know who’ve been in it a while have told me that this is the coldest market they’ve ever seen, but they also are confident it will turn around in a year or two. Which is comforting in its own way, but for us middle aged folks, it’s unnerving because we can see the window closing for how much longer we can have a career. I’m approaching 50 and I’m not super confident that the world is excited to hire a 50 year entry level junior coder. But we’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, I hope that helps. I don’t really have great advice to give you, but I hope that it helps to know there are other people struggling with the same things you are. Good luck!

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Welcome to the community! I agree with learning to start when coding, too many concepts and it becomes overwhelming and demotivating to learn to code. I had the same problem. What I did was try to build an interesting project and learn coding that way instead of directly jumping into the coding concepts.
This way, you’ll build an interesting project that you or someone will use every day, and you will learn about coding concepts more easily, as this is more of a practical learning approach.

FreeCodeCamp has several interesting projects that you can try building to see what interests you more. For beginners it’s always good to start learning with Python, as it’s the easiest and fun programming language to learn!

Good luck on your learning journey!

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Yep, tick tock, tick tock. I’ll be 50 in two years. I feel a real disconnect with the world when age is seen as barrier to entry for jobs in general. It’s the way things are though, I know employees are investments for companies and so the company wants its value in time and input from an employee, but businesses move far too slowly in terms of moving with the times. I mean, who sticks around with a company for decades or more these days? A very small percentage of people lucky to find the job with the company.

It’s good to know the industry may turn around in a year or two. Us older folk don’t really have a year or two to dedicate/potentially waste on something that seems so out of reach and that may never amount to a job, but hey, on the flip side, where there’s a will there’s a way.

Thanks for your comment, good luck, hope you manage to get what you want from your learning.

What has demotivated me is not so much the amount there is to learn because you’re learning daily in this field and can’t be expected to know that much in the grand scheme of things going for an entry-level role, but the demotivation for me comes from age, and the fact that time is far more precious, specifically as I said above, potentially investing a year or two only to then find that a job is never going to materialise.

Good luck too.

It’s just a competitive word these days whatever field you go into. Part of the motivation for me trying to get in to programming, or the way I convinced myself that employment wouldn’t be too difficult to find is that programming is probably one of the most remote-friendly jobs out there, so there are global work-from-home opportunities

Of course there will be exceptions to the remote opportunities, and this also means every aspiring dev is competing with the rest of the world for a job, but rather than staying in my photography/graphic design field where I’m restricted to local jobs, and restricted to competing with companies willing to employ anyone with a smartphone or a piece of design software calling themselves a photographer/graphic designer, which means less work and less well paid work as companies settle for mediocre content from a saturated market, I thought I’d upskill in something that interests me and in a field where I can use my grey matter.

How are you guys working in the field finding AI-assisted coding will change things for junior devs looking to break into the field? On the one hand, AI can write somewhat satisfactory code, on the other, if you’ve got junior devs coming through a 4 year degree having used AI to help them code, which is already happening en masse, and they don’t understand and can’t really read the finer nuances of the language they’re using even at a junior level, what use are they?

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Programming is becoming less remote friendly and junior devs with college degrees are struggling to find jobs right now, so I would not expect it to be easy to find work right now.

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Care to offer some context, rather that applying your point of view as a demotivational blanket statement?

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Context - I don’t believe in lying to people about how hard the job market is right now. Lying about the state of the job market can be very dangerous if people expect to have employment in under a year and need financial safety.

I instead like to give reasonable expectations, like the fact that if your competition is people with 4 year degrees, then you should expect to put in equivalent effort to be competitive against those candidates, especially since CS majors are seeing high unemployment right now.

Why would a company hire a less competitive candidate when they can have their pick of people with a well understood credential - a CS degree. There are ways for self taught developers to give good answers to that question and be an equally or more compelling candidate, but it still takes roughly as much effort as those people with CS degrees put in.

With respect to remote work, we’ve been seeing remote work roles shrink across the board (though not as strongly in CS for now) (though, that article is based upon job postings and we’re seeing an phenomenon right now where tech companies post jobs they do not intend to fill and companies have started lying about if the role is actually remote, so it is difficult to get a clear picture). Couple that with the hiring market being really cold right now, especially as we still are figuring out how AI will impact the industry, and that leaves us in a state where its harder to get any work, let alone remote work.

Also , if I lie and say that its easy to get any job (especially a remote job) in 6-12 months, and then that doesn’t happen (because its unlikely), then what happens to the motivation of the learner at that point?

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Why would I think you were lying? That’s a strange thing to say. I’m under no illusion about how difficult this will be, I was simply interested in some context to your blanket statement, and scanning the article you linked to, it has no industry relevance to me in my location with regards to layoff trends etcetera, not that you were to know, but again why I was interested in the context surrounding why you said what you said.

The reason for my (maybe misplaced) optimism is because I’ve spoken to many local devs here who have also said it’s a tough nut to crack given the current state of the industry, AI advancements, but I live in a country with a huge, emerging tech field, which is also a country that has a very poor education system, and so good talent is hard to come by; another reason people who work hard here have to be optimistic. But globally, I realise finding that elusive remote position will probably be harder that I thought, not easier because of more opportunities.

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I did not say that you thought I was lying.

I said that I do not believe in lying.

If you want to believe that it will be easy for you to find a job, that’s up to you. That’s just not something any experienced developer I personally know would say right now. I would not recommend betting your financial security on it, but it is still your choice to make.

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I don’t believe it’ll be easy to find work as a middle-aged junior dev, as already said, but my original question was about the transition into that first job after a very long learning process and what it felt like.

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Just curious—where are you based? A lot of the advice tends to come from a U.S. perspective. If your developer friends are saying it usually takes around six months to land a job in your area, that sounds like a solid benchmark. At the end of the day, the real picture will come into focus once you start interviewing. Wishing you the best—definitely keep us posted on how things go!

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I would say that you have a HUGE advantage with a graphic design background to transition into a front-end developer role. I know you said that you don’t want to be a “web designer”, but you can be a front-end developer who brings design skills to your role.

Why did you choose Python over JavaScript? Python is used in back end development and data-intensive fields like Machine Learning. For someone with a graphic design background, I would suggest starting with websites built with CSS and JavaScript.

I have worked as a full-stack developer for about 5 years, and I am still jealous of developers who have design skills. In the right job, the combination of a design background with coding skills is a killer combination!

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Yeah, this is just it, I have to take the advice read online on mainstream forums and realise it has a US/Europe slant to it. Used to live in London, UK until relocating. Software development seems like it would be easier (not easy) to crack here than in the UK or US where the leading development companies are. We have a few local websites dedicated to software dev info & stats, but no developer-specific forums that have as much input or activity as this one or any of the other big name forums.

This I know, but Python is more straight forward to learn from what I’m seeing (I’ve researched JS), and I would like to try to use Python with my environmental science degree going forward.

That said, I would learn JavaScript (I have thought about combining my design knowledge with JS) if I thought it was relatively straight forward, but it being a weakly typed language seems confusing to me and I imagine would trip many beginners up, like dynamic typing with coercion, which doesn’t happen in a strongly typed language like Python. Feel free to educate me if I’m wrong.

Edit: I suppose I have two options, Python and environmental science, which is no doubt a tough nut to crack, or try to wrap my head around JS before I get too far into Python, and as you said, that with a design background could be valuable.

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Python and JavaScript are very similar in difficulty. Both change the types of their variables whenever a user wants and will coerce types as needed.

I’m not sure I would count on having fewer programming jobs in your local job market making it easier to get a job.

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But Python conversion is explicit, so the programmer retains full control, whereas JS will convert implicitly and automatically which is where I see it as more confusing than Python.

You’re not wrong, it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.

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