And how long did it take you after finishing school(if you went to school)?

About 3.5

About 3.5f

3.5 what?

3.50

bout tree fiddy

lol at the tree fiddy references... But okay, I'll give a more serious response

I got lucky, as I don't have a college degree. All my programming knowledge has come from books and experience.

Two years ago I got my first coding job as a C programmer. It started out as Help desk with some C programming to keep me interested but after a few months it grew into full time coding. I learned the C syntax by reading a book while I was in high school about 10 years ago but never grasped the more complex things such as pointers until I started working there.

I've since left for another programming job but both of these companies are farily small places. You can forget getting on with a big corp if you don't have a degree, unless you are some sort of genius and then maybe they'll consider you. I got this most recent job by turning in a programming exercise that they requested be done in the job ad. Apparently I was one of a very few that actually took the time to do the exercise.

My advise is to look for the small businesses advertising for Junior or entry level developers. (I even saw one ad that was for an entry level programming job that requred both a 4 year computer science degree and 5+ years experience so I guess the definition of Junior and entry level varies depending on who you talk to).

Provide samples of projects you have worked on no matter how small it is. Show what you can do preferably in a wide vareity of languages and you should be fine. For instance, though I prefer to write PHP, I have several small projects that I've done in a variety of languages such as C (with GTK for Linux), C# for Windows, PHP/MySQL, jQuery, Javascript. Show them that programming to you is not just your 9-5 job but something that you love to do. If you have this then you should have it easier than people like me with a degree to go along with it.

Good luck. Most employers are extremely picky so it may take a while.

3.4999999962 imo

To OP: I did well in school, wrote a truthful but flattering resume, showed up to my first internship interview buzzed on caffeine pills, impressed the interviewers, got a job offer the next day, and then wrote good code during my internship.

I have taken this route as well. I started off in Tech Support with a bit of WordPress Development (proprietary plugins mostly) that interface our core product which is built with Ruby on Rails with WordPress. Worked hard and went home and did even more studying and programming (you seriously have to do this in this day and age, especially if you don't have a degree).

When I was very young and first learning to code in Classic ASP (lol) I used to distribute some scripts for free on my website. I got an email one day from someone asking for help with one of the scripts I wrote, and I couldn't be bothered to fix it so told him I didn't have the spare unpaid time to help him. He said fair enough, how much do you charge and I just said what at the time I thought was a ridiculous hourly charge and he just said OK let's do that! It was a bit awkward when months into the contract he realised how young I was but those were good days indeed!

From everything I've read and seen and experienced, contributing or giving away free code is a great way to build a CV and lead to jobs, for example open source projects are great for that nowadays. If you show commitment and genuine interest/passion outside your basic responsibilities you will naturally go further than someone who just does it as their job I think.

I sent a pretty informal email to the CEO of a company that spoke at my university and the answer was pretty much "if you can be here tomorrow, chances are we'll take you as a (payed ) intern and if you do ok during that time we'll hire you"

have they paid you yet?

Yes I worked my way up to VP Marketing