I am more optimistic overall after reading this. You'll get more screens from the 150 you sent off after more time passes. Just keep sending out 8-10 applications a day and you'll be overwhelmed soon enough with coding challenges and scheduling screens (all of which will make you better).

what sites do you use to find job listings? I just searched Florida for Rails on S.O.F and there were just a couple of listings and every listing said CS degree + 3 years experience.

Personally I use angelList, indeed, linkedin, and company websites. The guy who moved back to Florida used career builder.

If they say CS degree and 3 years experience apply anyway. Everyone says CS degree, but not everyone actually means it. 2 years actually means entry level.

@penguinpoker,

hey, Are you currently or just recently got out of HR?

I'm in HR40 (end of week 3). Let me know how the job search goes. I also don't have a degree in a technical field.

edit: nvm, read ur posts

i am just hoping the market is just way different where I live than out in cali.

one thing is that I seem to understand this stuff more than other people in my class with a few exceptions.

I despise these web dev boot camps. They fill their applicants with these lies that they can be a "full stack developer" in 8-12 weeks, when in reality 8-12 weeks is probably enough time to be familiar with a language, and that's about it. Never mind learning testing, HTTP, text editor of choice, design patterns, enough dev ops to deploy and maintain a production/staging server, etc.

The only school I've seen generate people that are actually ready to be junior devs was Turing, and I see a lot of Rails applicants apply to our apprentice program at work.

to be fair, my bootcamp did not have such a pitch. they were up front that we would not be experts or even competent. the idea was that we would learn just enough to land a junior developer job and be able to learn from there.

i guess we will find out in a few months how viable that is.

Honestly I havent read through the thread so I don't know details, but the people who generally succeed in boot camps are the ones who code from 9-5 at boot camp, and go home and code till they go to bed at home.

Obviously no one can keep up that pace for an extended time, but when you're going from 0 to job that's what I'd recommend.

I'm hoping two years of CS fundamentals and three months of hard core web app training will be good enough to land an entry level job at the least.

Often I do this. I usually extend our given exercises and projects further than required. But I don't think I am nearly on the level of even a first week app academy entrant.

Those last few pages are so depressing made me rethink about my plan to change career. Reading you and some random blog make me think of Coding is pretty much like online poker.

That and the fact that I read that Software Engineering is almost minimum wage in Japan.

Good. And I don't mean that in a bad way, but the people who succeed in software are the people who do it because they like it. If you are only doing it for a paycheck you will be miserable and not go very far.

But if you like it, and actually put in work away from your job (just like away from the tables in poker), you will be fine. Do you live in Japan? If you don't then why does that matter...

Also, working on real production software is hard. Poker is also hard at high levels, but with variance. Programming seems like a clear winner to me.

No, I absolutely like it. I look forward to spare hrs when I can code.

Being a programmer is very much like being a technician. Or a mechanic, a plumber, a welder or a carpenter. It's a blue collar job for the digital age - we're maintaining and improving the infrastructure of the future. And for the most part, it pays similarly. When you hear about programmers getting paid like, 150K+, we're talking about a fairly small group of highly talented and competitive people generally in the right locations - where the software industry or other industries that demand high-level software talent set the expectations. It takes some good combination of luck, aptitude, credentials, right experience, work ethic and willingness to move to where your skills are in demand to go significantly above 90K and this may be more difficult for those who are starting out now.

Where are you located and where are you looking to move to? In most countries (and outside the major metro areas in the US, excluding highly-credentialed programmers and domain experts/specialists) 90k would be at around or above the upper end pay for programmers.

I really like working with computers and new technology, solving problems, creating new things, always trying to innovate etc. But I can't lie to myself, I'm not some kind of wonder boy. I'm just little above average smart.

The more I read about finding a job in that field, the more information I gather. Unfortunately it's not exactly as I imagined. I don't want to do this for the paycheck only, but I'm expecting to earn enough money to live. Some people talk about high salaries, some, like Japan talk about minimum wage and some people can't even find a job.

It seems like that field is getting more and more competitive and capitalist. Everyone can learn to code, software engineerting seems to be the most casual engineering field. There is alot of ressource on the internet and Bootcamp are growing like mushrooms (Make me think of poker coaching website).

Also with remote work option, business can hire hard working contractors cheaply, India is a very good exemple. I'm not sure how the future of Software Engineering look like and that's what's scare me the most. I wish we were in 1995, exactly like poker player wish they still were pre-Black Friday.


I don't live in Japan atm, I'm in Canada. But I lived in USA, China and Cambodia before and Japan always been a place I'd like to move.


Thanks for taking my comment seriously. I pretty much agree with that blue-collar thing you said. I was pretty exciting to switch career with something realted to new technologies. I guess I'll have to keep searching for a different field. I missed the boat for programming and I don't like to join the party late.

No... not even close.

A first-job JR developer can get 70K or more.

A carpenter or plumber would start as an apprentice, earning $12 / hour for the first 5 years, then if they are "lucky," get into a union, which makes their base pay about $35 / hour, which is a nice gig if they managed to work more than 6 months out of the year since work is basically gone from November until January, and yes, it is unpaid. Also, the work is very dangerous -- what happens when, not if, you get hurt, and what happens when your back is thrown out -- and good luck retiring.

There is no free food and coffee, no A/C, no extra perks like free Car2Go, etc. The pay doesn't compare at all.

Just to address this specifically, I think the long-term trend for programming careers is positive and much more so than non-programming careers. Programming also offers, for those who are willing to learn and grow, fairly unprecedented upward career mobility for a professional field - you can do the equivalent of going from a medical assistant to an LPN to an RN to a nurse practitioner to an internist to a surgeon all without going back to school. But we're talking about exceptional cases in exceptional situations.

Just out of curiosity which field you think have the best future perspective, Software Engineering or Electrical Engineering?

Honestly, I think that soon enough coding is going to be almost like humanities. Everyone will know how to code a little bit soon enough.

Not only has "The programming boat" not left the docks, it hasn't even even started boarding. In fact, it's not finished being built.

Yeah, everyone will know how to write an if statement and a for loop, just like everyone knows basic algebra now. That doesn't mean we're all mathematicians.

A first-job jr developer can make 140k or more if they are of the right type but that's not the point. It's not because programming is a better career that these people get paid that much but because they are starting with a level of knowledge, experience, credentials and background that would be unheard of for a carpenter. It's like saying a junior finance person can get 150K or more because that's what some investment banking or private equity analyst programs pay and using that to argue that it's better to become a bank teller than to become a plumber.

There are programming equivalents for all of these - I thought of all people, you would know? I thought despite being a pretty good programmer with years of learning while living in one of the largest metro areas in the country, you struggled to get to an acceptable level of pay. There are coders who make less tha $12/HR. You don't get a programming job @ 70K without years of training in math and significant experience and/or a fancy background. The level of experience, knowledge and sheer aptitude that even an average CS graduate from an average state school brings is staggering compared to what apprentice carpenters bring to the table. If you want to get a programming job with no skills, experience or proven aptitude, you'd make about the same as apprentice carpenters. Conversely, if you're a carpenter who's as good at your craft as programmers who earn 6-figures are, I expect you to be earning 6-figures as well - good ones make a lot of money.

Again, of all people, I thought you should know that the world of programming is not like this - you're looking at a fairly elite slice, one that happens to be overrepresented in the US and specific areas within the US since practically all top software companies are located here and top software people everywhere migrate to the US. This isn't remotely the case if you look at all programmers everywhere.

Are you an ethnic Japanese? Japan is not a very kind place to foreigners - it's virtually impossible for foreigners to move up the management ladder and Japanese corporate culture is such that you kind of have to move up the management ladder to make something out of your career. And software engineering isn't the kind of special snowflake it is in the US - it's just another office job and I assume it pays like 30K-50K or whatever is a standard salary for entry-level officer workers. Assuming you're a native English speaker, I'd look into getting an ESL teaching certificate or something - I think that's a better career bet than trying to make it as a software engineer in Japan.

Software Engineering but if you study electrical engineering at any kind of respectable place, you'd learn enough to get a job as a programmer whereas the reverse is not true. The flip-side is that there are probably like 100 times as many jobs in software engineering as opposed to electrical engineering. And the gap will continue to widen as there's less and less need for specialized hardware and hardware design is more software-driven than ever before. For example, Deep Blue that beat Kasparov was a combination of specialized hardware and software written specifically for that hardware. AlphaGo that beat Lee Sedol is basically software that ran on commodity hardware.

hardly relevant. Your claim is that programmers are somehow equivalent to manual skilled laborers in pay and lifestyle, and that is categorically false.

My personal issues aren't relevant. There are many factors that play into my situation, but none of them have to do with my abilities, or lack of. I'm working on those issues and slowly learning: 90% deals with me, and about 10% deals with the environment, and I think the 10% is merely aberration, thus can mostly be ignored.

I also worked in construction for many years, and just as well, struggled to get to an acceptable level of pay, despite leading teams of workers.

Then you clearly are anti-bootcamp, and apparently find these stories pure myths:

http://blog.ilovecoding.org/6-figure-developer-job/

http://adzerk.com/blog/2015/11/getti...-as-you-think/

I could pull up another 100 articles if I was in the mood, but to say the least, there are dozens of articles about people starting to code, and in 6 months, hitting the $70k and more milestone.

Like all things, this is situational and prone to error. I always said it before and I'll maintain my opinion: some of the dumbest people I worked with were the highest paid people on the site, and trust me, I'm not being a h8er or anything. Like, they were truly dumb as bricks, careless in their work, and had to be taught to use a measuring tape. There is so much more to life and earning some 6fig, much dealing with luck, especially in fields where 6fig is considered rare and mostly unattainable.


Once again, totally irrelevant. A mansion on the lake in Cleveland, Ohio is about $150k. A 5 bedroom mansion with large yard and two patios in Mississippi can be rented for $400 / month. This is a reflection of how hard money is to come by in those areas, and a reflection of the average cost of living, and shouldn't be compared to cities like LA.

This disparate pay is not isolated to programming, but includes other high paying fields such as law, accounting, medicine, etc.