Towards career change, software developer, advice = very welcome

Dear all

I am a 33 yo speech pathologist who would like to change career and become software developer…
Yes, I understand that sounds a bit insane and let me first of all let me apologize in advance for any inaccuracies, misconceptions and any other parts I may have gotten wrong (and accidentally insult people) but this is also the reason I am writing here cause I would love to hear professionals opinions.

I have always had an interest in software development (even if I chose an entirely different career) and I have been working (the last 1 year) with a bit of Java and a bit of Unity to develop some apps. Of course as you can understand, baby steps and simple apps. Mostly small games.
Recently, mostly due to personal reasons, I ve decided that this is the time! The time to leave behind my old job and become a software developer. I know for sure that I would like to get some relevant education and I ve been looking in various options. One option, for example, will require to get back to the uni, study some math, then programming and get a relevant bachelor in approximately 4 years from now. I feel however that I would like to be job-ready sooner than that (if possible).
I found an online course here: https://openclassrooms.com/en/paths/61-front-end-developer which is an 1 year study online. However, I would also like to get some teaching related to back-end developing and developing of android apps. Should I therefore look for other courses that offer both front-end and back-end and/or android app development or should I just start with this course and try to also learn some things on my own…?
I always assumed that someone who is proficient with a couple of programming languages should be able to easily learn new ones and develop apps for different platforms. Is this correct or have I gotten it wrong? I have also heard that web-developers is a dead-end career… could that be true?

Thanks
A.

The internet is quite important w/r/t to the global economy at the minute, and web development involves programming…stuff…for that platform, so I don’t think i’m going out on a limb by saying that isn’t true.

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If you have a degree already, you may find the pace of college too slow, as the curriculum is designed to build on top of each other quarter by quarter or semester by semester and since you already been through university, you may find some unrelated requirements tedious and pointless. The important thing you miss out on really, are resources like internship, co-op, research and alumni networks that helps the job finding process.

Your assumption is not necessarily wrong, but not totally correct either. Programming language is only a tool, the very basic one at that. While it’s true that being proficient in one language enables you to learn another probably faster, it does not necessarily enable you to be able to develop anything. The important thing for a development job is not the language you know, rather the domain knowledge you possess.

JavaScript is a common language for web development, but knowing how to write JavaScript and knowing how to write web application and cloud applications are very different thing. Same thing applies to Python with Data science or C++ with game development. Different domain requires different domain knowledge, and the domain knowledge is probably more important.

Just take developing a web application front end for example. Front-end requires developers to understand ux/ui design, the basics of browser display model and render, adaptive/responsive design, the basic of HTTP networking and asynchronous request, common security exploits, accessiblity features, content delivery network…etc. Pretty much nothing I mentioned is really related to language, rather they all more or less has to do with how the browser works and network.

That same set of domain knowledge wouldn’t totally apply to a developer developing desktop or mobile application and it may not apply at all to person developing embedded systems. So while somethings are transferable and ubiquitous, you probably shouldn’t assume it’d be easy, certainly don’t base that assumption on language