I only suggested patent lawyer because he already is an actual lawyer, and aside from becoming a patent lawyer, getting a second degree in CS seems a little bit like "the grass is always greener.", at least that's my gut reaction.

And I don't care for software patents either. I'm probably trying to hard to be helpful.

What about for someone looking to kick-start something relatively quickly? Which language/field would I be able to get a foot in by doing a specialized technical course or something similar in < 1 years time of classes?

Just out of curiosity, how long would it take someone to get a 2nd bachelors in comp sci? Do you have to take all those ******ed gen eds again?

I'm going to get my MSCS next semester and my bachelors was not comp sci. I took 1 year of community college + 3 years at the university. I could have done it in 1 + 2 years but I kind of went "Old School" status. I party more than anybody else in the comp sci department. What a bunch of nerds.

You could maybe do the 2nd bachelors in 1 + 1.5 years.

coughman told me as little as 2 years, depending on what pre-reqs you have.

Not sure if it is like this everywhere, but at my school a computer science degree was essentially an engineering degree. You had to have all or much of the math that your average engineering student had to take. IIRC the first math course that counted towards degree credit was Calculus I. Most people in non-science/engineering fields don't even have that one math course under their belt, let alone the others. (I started out in CS but changed my major because a. I hate math and b. the dot-com bubble had burst by my sophomore year so I was worried I wouldn't be able to find a job post graduation)

Of course that was a long time ago so things may have changed.

I'm sure that the Western Civ, Psychology, English Comp and English Lit etc classes would all transfer, in any case.

Also, what languages are most in demand nowadays?

Depends on what you want to do. But Java and .NET are never bad choices.

I am pretty happy with my career at this point. I just got hired on as a Senior Programmer at a Fortune 100 company. I switched to Java as my primary language, after spending the first five years of my career as a VB.Net guy.

The work-life balance of this company is good. I go for a jog everyday during my lunch break and have a place to take a shower afterwards. I can wear jeans everyday if I so choose to.

I think you need to tell us more such as your expectations for living standards.

Software industry is healthy now and will be for quite some time. don't listen to all the crap about jobs getting offshored. They said that 10yrs ago and I don't see much difference. Otoh law is always going to be a profession with high demand (much more unemployed programmers than lawyers).

I'm assuming ur not in ur early 20's which means you will be competing with younger programmers. One thing many ppl don't realize is that to be a good, marketable developer; you need to constantly be learning new skills. The harsh reality is that many ppl don't want to do this once they hit 30. Be it family obligations, life balance, etc. it's a common sentiment. I mention this because at that age, you may not be so enamoured with coding as you are today, or maybe you still are but cannot invest the time to learn new things in order to program that next killer app.

There are arguments for both. I speak with almost 2 decades of work exp in the s/w development field and just want to give u the perspective that is most likely to be very different than the opinion of a younger person with only a handful of yrs exp.

Btw I agree that if ur not passionate about it, don't bother. You will become one of those middle aged programmers who learn nothing, do nothing exiting or challenging, and only maintain legacy apps...waiting to pay off their mortgage and retirement.....although that's fine to some ppl I imagine...but u seem to have a choice and that desc doesn't fit you.

Ah yes, the mythical passionate great programmer that works well with others and can save kids from burning buildings. I wish I could find him. I got a guy that can code 3 times as much as anyone else. But I wouldn't want to send him out to do sales. Or interact with anyone for that matter. But it's interesting, this search for the mythical white whale of software. Let me know when you guys find him or her.

As for the OP - go for it. I don't know any career that gets more "bang for the buck" when you look at it as a life investment.

That's like saying, "ah yes, the mythical technically knowledgeable sales guy that knows the difference between a hard drive and a CPU and doesn't constantly spew nonsense."

There are plenty of programmers that you can put in front of a customer. Not all of the good programmers are socially awkward.

Yeah I'm aware of that. I'm talking about the "you gotta be passionate" speel. I work everyday with guys that are top notch and when they go home they don't think about programming. Stay on top of your game yes. But interview questions about how passionate they are? Worth very little.

I'm losing my own passion honestly. 15 years of overtime will do that to a person. I'll always code, but probably not for a living. Maybe that's why I'm jaded.

Agreed, the gotta be passionate speel is highly overused and exaggerated.

I don't think anyone mentioned "interview questions about how passionate".

Unless you have a job at a company like Google, I find it hard to believe those guys you're talking about can "stay on top of your game" without doing anything extra. Maybe you work at an excellent company with lots of freedom. If that's the case, you're lucky and in the minority.

I'm in my 40's. How many +35yr old programmers do you know? My point is, I speak from many years of experience.

I speak from many years of experience as well (admittedly not as many as you).

There are lots of companies where you get the freedom to learn new skills as needed and many more companies that simply don't require cutting edge technology skills (or at they don't change technologies very often). There's lots of people doing interesting work with the same technology they've worked with their whole life who don't fit this silly description:

Not to mention there's a lot of people in this world who are able to do hard work without having a passion to do it. They see a way to make a good living and just do the work needed to make that living.

Passion is nice. It's a great edge. But it's hardly the differentiator between someone that does exciting work and someone that does boring work.

Edit: One big reason the "You have to be passionate speel" annoys me so much is that it's just one more way people brag about how hard their job is. We want people to think that our profession changes so much that we have to be really smart and skilled to keep up. The reality is that a couple hours a week is more than enough to keep up with most changes in the industry and maybe a day or two of work a year when you start using a new technology/language. In this day and age that's pretty standard for most industries and significantly less than some.

This is what I was thinking when people were talking about passion. You obviously enjoy coding but maybe not the work environment you find yourself in.

I am new to programming and doing a MSc to convert from engineering to CS. I really enjoy the programming parts of the course and have less interest in the network (as an example) aspects of the course.

I know so many people who think I am crazy for wanting to do programming as they don't understand the logic behind what you are trying to achieve. I didn't do the course for the career aspects. I enjoy coding and I think that is important.

outlook is excellent. demand for programmers far exceeds supply and it's getting worse

depends heavily on what market/location you're in. java and .net dominate the IT landscape at older (non-tech companies) and java especially is a back bone of a lot of the internet (people don't use it much on desktops but i'd guess that a third of all servers are running java code as we speak).

java also has a ton of 3rd part support and great tools.

but the trend in programming for years has been to sacrifice performance for developer usability in the face of increasing computational power. so ruby has had a lot of traction lately.

and c/c++ are widely used in hardware and embedded apps or low-level systems stuff.

ranking of popularity based on google results: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/conte...pci/index.html

best best is to search dice.com for your city and see what's hot.

Yeah I really do love programming. It's the most abstract creation in human existence; Pure information. I was coding long before I ever thought about it being a career.

I'm actually on "hiatus" right this moment because I was burnt out from working 80 hour weeks. But even now I'm in the software forum and have a terminal open with my editor up looking over the pokersource c++ libs .

If that's the passion you mean, then yes it's great to have. It's my world. I just see plenty of others around that do it 9-5 and do it really well and I wanted to point that out. For instance I have a friend and colleague that is actually going to Columbia for physics and he only works 9-5 (if we're lucky) but he's an excellent programmer. He came out and said he hated programming to me. But he does a good job so I can't complain. I have another friend who's actually trained as an architect and loves that, yet works as a programmer for a living. He's only passionate about the money. But it works for him because he's an awesome programmer. One of the best I've seen. It's all about what works for you.


I will add one thing though - programming is really a great career right now. It's growing very rapidly, again. Plenty of work in a lot of fields.

You don't need to be a that good or passionate to make a very good/comfortable living as a programmer.

I posted this in the "learn to code" thread in OOT, thought it was relevant:

my point is, no one is going to hire some guy just because he learned Ruby, JS, Java, C++, C#, whatever and has no relevant experience. A lot of people I talk to get the misconception that if you learn how to code, there will be companies walking over each other to pay you 100k a year.

The reality is, if you can learn how to code on your own, create 1-2 small projects, that should be enough to land yourself an entry level position at a large non-technology company making $50k a year. If that's the description of a "golden goose" then so be it (I understand your point that this is one of those rare fields that you can self-learn and you usually get back what you put in). Just be aware that you aren't going to make $120k+ a year unless you are top notch, and most people are not capable of doing that even if you learn every programming language available.

To add, the reason why companies like people with CS degrees is that it shows you've been able to work through a myriad of complex problems and did OK. Learning to code is not complex, its much easier than learning a foreign language, for example.

If you have any other questions let me know. I work at one of the more well known software companies and I interview candidates for software engineering positions all the time. You would be surprised how many poor candidates we get, and those are the ones that pass the resume and phone screening.

any good places to learn VBa? or should i just use books? i need to improve.

if you can learn how to code on your own, create 1-2 small projects, that should be enough to land yourself an entry level position at a large non-technology company making $50k a yea

Wow, really? How would one go about finding these positions?

my point is, no one is going to hire some guy just because he learned Ruby, JS, Java, C++, C#, whatever and has no relevant experience.
But you just said they would. relevant experience = 1-2 small projects?

lots of places. Costco, Boeing, etc. Basically any large company with an IT department would be happy to hire you. $50k for a software engineer is really low-end, even for a starting position.

small projects isnt just some making some random blog/website/programming assignment you threw together. Its like having impactful and documentable changes to a major open source project, or websites that some commercial (or non-profit) entity is actually using, an android/iphone app that looks good and works well (doesn't necessarily need to be successful), etc.

So yes, if you have 1-2 of those that you can point to in your resume, and have a college degree, you should be able to find a job at one of the aforementioned companies.