IT Manager to Developer Through FCC?

The time has come. I live in a rural area and job opportunities are scarce.

I have a rather introvert personality. I still remember my manager saying “You are an introvert” on the day of my interview. Yes, that I am, and I hate to boast, but I can do my job very well. I have implemented so many solutions, deployed servers and network devices with ease. Any issue that comes my way, I am all over it until it is resolved, which is typically quick.

In my past, I enrolled with a few Universities. I completed 1 year of CS at a University, 1 year of Mathematics (Secondary Ed. Teacher), and finally 2 years (Associate) of Information Technology w/ Networking Concentration.

Upon initial consideration of my education, it would appear that I should know SOME programming, and I do. However, I do not know enough to contribute to programming projects at work. We have a team of developers who heavily use C, JQuery, ASP.NET (but no MVC)…and Microsoft SQL with very complex queries.

My dream is to land a job that can look past the whole “You don’t have an outrageously expensive degree, so you aren’t qualified.” I am so tired of this mindset employers have. I’m a manager myself and I know upon initial review of applicants, I find myself looking at the college they went to; they get a few extra gold stars if it was a well known institution with an aggressive education program.

However, I think examples, internships, and volunteering to USE the skills and then placing this into a portfolio seems to be the way to go.

Before I found FCC, I was about to spend $10,000 on an online training course for Front End Web Development…not sure I need to lose that amount of money. I’ve read the same thing; alternative education paid or free can cause some additional hurdles when trying to get a job. From my experience, it seems like employers want to know where your internship was and want you to gain years of experience before they will hire you for a sufficient wage.

If you want to learn .NET Pluralsight has some good courses (much cheaper). I made a similar transition from Network Support to Developer but I did have a Computer Science degree.
It was not easy but I got there.
Visual Studio is one of the best IDEs out there. Get familiar with that and start building things!

The job market is really strong for developers right now, companies need good people on board and are paying lots of money on recruitment strategies. I would recommend reading through the “Getting a Developer Job” and learning from other people’s stories. I have actually showed FCC curriculum to the Front End Lead where I work and he was really impressed with the TDD nature and project-heavy nature of FCC.

I think you should make friends with the developers at your work, especially the lead/leader. Tell him you’re interested in making a career switch to programming/development.

in the meantime, learn C#, ASP.NET (and maybe get a jump on them by learning MVC and Core 2.0), CSS and jQuery on your own. Make your own projects, get them online, then ask your friends/developers at work to take a look at it and ask for advice/feedback. – In other words, show them that you can build a site/complete project from start to finish and when they’re sufficiently impressed/surprised(?) tell them youre thinking of switching careers, maybe joining their team as an entry level developer to learn more and be part of the team.

Excellent advice! Pooling the resources I have already is probably the best way to do this. However, the only problem is I am not sure if the company would consider this a waste of time.

HOWEVER, I do have “Web Design” and “SQL / Database Management” as part of my job description. I think I just found a loophole.

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Right. I believe it. The problem with IT hardware is that it is a) very expensive, so you are reliant upon books and simulation to learn the technology. If a company does not have the money to buy technology so they can benefit AND your can learn, then you don’t advance and neither does the company b) so, so many certifications. You might be an excellent Cisco iOS programmer but this doesn’t mean much unless you have an $800 sheet of paper “CCNA” and months of hard studying.

Coding is so fluid and flexible. It changes all the time too but the cool thing about code is it is mostly free! Hands-on, writing code in the middle of your living room involves no wires hanging all over or hefty electric bills. You can work for a wide range of industry and essentially the job is the same - write code, learn what you need to successfully integrate your code or design a new system.

I know coding isn’t a walk in the park and it can be very difficult / frustrating, but what I love about it is that you aren’t doing 20 different things at once all over the office. It’s more straight forward.