Hi all,

I'm 29, graduated with a degree in biology, and have worked at a medical products company for ~4 years now. At this job, I started w/ tasks somewhat related to my biology degree and slowly transitioned to a role unrelated to my bio degree and more related to programming. I'm now a data analyst (for data related to how medical products are performing in the market), and I've been programming in VBA for around 1.5 years now (self taught by reading things online and some trial and error). I'm now extremely proficient in VBA and have written some complex programs to automate tasks.

I want to make a career switch to computer programming. I haven't taken a coding bootcamp yet, but I plan to within the next year. How do my job prospects look for a career switch to programming if I pass a coding bootcamp?

If you can code you will get a job. I interview a lot of engineers. My basic phone screen question is to merge 2 sorted linked lists in place, and 80% of people take over 30 min and need a lot of help to do it. If you can pass technical screens some good company will probably take a chance on you.

Basically, my hiring strategy is to mostly ignore resume and test technical proficiency. But HR usually screens resumes for degree and school so the most important thing for you is network network and get your resume directly into hiring managers/engineer hands.

Cool, I've heard similar things: that this field is more merit based than background based, but it makes sense that you won't even make it past HR (to get the interview) if your background looks bad on the resume.

And I'm interested in trying that question, just for my own curiosity. If it's not too much trouble, could you provide specifics for that question so I can give it a try? Of course, you don't have to actually review my results (unless you want to). Thanks.

is it better to just spend all day and night studying program interview books or do a bootcamp? or some combination?

The bootcamp will teach you more useful stuff for the job. But practice questions will help get the job. If I had to choose between the two I would choose study interviews and do side/open source projects onside instead of bootcamp.

Bootcamps can also be really good for networking (depends on the bootcamp though).