1) Would this site be considered as commercial, or just a random website?
http://apexfencebuilders.com

2) I have a BS in Math and about 20 additional credits in Computer Science. Assuming I had some better projects is that education satisfactory?

I find smaller companies and startups care a lot more about your projects and programming experiences than formal education. You are given more responsibility in these places adn they want people who can get stuff done. With limited experience (outside of classes) you could try bigger companies. You might be stuck doing QA, testing, or maintaining old code in the beginning. But you'll still learn and gain experience. In either case the best thing to do is to start working on something NOW. Pick a project you're passionate and see it through to completion. Don't stop when the major technical hurdle is overcome. For example if making a simple side scroller game. Add music, a few levels, a menu screen, ability to save games, an installer etc. These are small details but they are essential in a real project and you'll learn a lot.

You generally have to be exceptionally and already accomplished to have no college education and land a job. However, some companies will take candidates with any bachelors. Others looks for anything science, engineering, or computer related. Some are jerks and require computer science.

Personal projects, open source projects, freelance clients... they all carry a lot of weight (especially if you have no work experience) since that's what most closely correlates with the day-to-day job. Plenty of CS majors can't program their way out of hello world. In fact, no matter what level of experience, all good interviewers will first screen candidates using exceptionally easy code tests, e.g., Fizz Buzz ( http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/200...s-program.html )

My first boss told me he hired me because I posted an open source audio synthesis program and he thought I was the only candidate that really loved to program, and that in his experience those are the only ones who make it.

My roomate in college was a CS major. I'm relatively fluent in c# and vb.net but some of the work I'd see him bring home was intense. Especially when it came to anything to do with assembly language or other low level coding. The arithmetic that kid had to learn was not only intensely hard, but mind numbingly boring and unpractical. Funny thing is he had 4-5 close friends in his program, and by 2-3rd year he was the only one left still enrolled. Last I spoke to him after graduation he had landed a very good job though so I guess it paid off.

From what I gather, most of the job prospects right now center around cross platform development (with all the smart phones), which makes native coding all the rage.

The sites I've seen are mostly not very good. You can get a monthly subscription to safari and get access to most of the good books out there. It's like 20-30 dollars a month but so far I've found it well worth the price as it also gives me access to books and videos about SQL, Perl, and R.

I highly recommend a safari subscription also. I've gotten my money out of it for sure. You can actually go search the books they have there to see what you like and get them a la carte if you choose.

The past few months, the job market around here has been very hot. I haven't seen it like this since I graduated from college, in 1999. Indianapolis is hot with .NET jobs.

Some companies are looking for junior developers. If you have the time and do this through college, get some experience while you're in college. Write an app or a great website, get an internship.

I've been doing development for 12 years and have never been unemployed. Even during the good and bad times in the market, there have always been jobs.

I can't help but find that link to be an exaggeration. It seriously can't be that bad... can it? FYI I have no college degree. I find Web Development to be a bit more forgiving in regards to this. I'm perfectly fine with never having a "comfy" job at some mega corporation. Small startups where I get equity is more of my thing I guess.

This is highly market dependent. Starting pay for graduates from good schools (not necessarily good graduates, mind you) at companies located in downtown NYC or Silicon Valley can approach six figures, but after adjusting for housing and transportation expenses and taxes and so on they won't be netting much more than the guy in Podunk, Kentucky who's making 60k and getting an extra hour of sleep every morning.

Also, if you waste the time to 'learn every programming language available' I doubt many managers would want to hire you. It's better to be highly skilled in two or three than be able to write hello world in 20 but not understand what a Singleton is.

True story: we had somebody come in to do our technical test at work, for a job as a PHP Web Developer, and the first thing out of her mouth was "I don't really know PHP". Which would be fine, if the only language she did know was something other than HTML.

She wasn't lying, either. She got everything wrong. Even some of the (very simple) HTML.

After you have a couple year's experience, your degree doesn't matter, with a few exceptions.

True, I'd even say it doesn't matter period. I think for programming formal degrees are kind of a waste these days. I mean at least you have some skills but I'd much rather hire someone out of HS and stick them into some sort of training program for a year or two. I think the only real problem is that HS grads lack a bit of "experience in the world"
If you need someone to do heavy algorithm work you can hire a mathematician.

I think it's the same problem with MBAs i.e. Mintzberg's "Managers not MBAs" could probably be transformed to "People that enjoy coding and get stuff done not CS degrees".

Are there any companies that have "we'll train you, don't go to college" programs? I mean obviously you pay less during the training period etc.

First, it's ridiculous to say a degree doesn't matter period. There are TONS of companies that will treat a degree as a major factor in hiring. Even if it was just a piece of paper - it's one that lots of people put meaning in - which, for better or worse, gives it importance.

Second, good formal degrees are more than just advanced algorithms. Again, its silly to think that students don't learn important skills in these programs. And on top of that - there's a lot of truth to the overused cliche that university degrees are about learning how to learn.

Third, I would suspect it would be ridiculously hard to get good people using a private non-college training program. Everyone is going to know that other companies are going to look at it as nothing more than a certification program (aka useless) - and the good candidates are going to go the traditional route because they can. Maybe if you're someone big like Google you could get away with it - but even then I doubt it.

I'm in a pretty similar position to you OP. I'm a lawyer too but my career isn't developing the way I'd like to and I think it would be cool to get a job as a programmer. Have you signed up for the free online classes? I think that's the way to go if you already have degrees. I have a decent amount of student loans so I'm not considering going back to school. It seems like there are so many opportunities out there to learn this stuff for free. Its really cool that they are even beginning to offer accreditation of some kind now as well.

Is it best to try to learn one language really well or diversify? Right now I'm putting 100% of my effort into python and ignoring other languages. The only CS class I ever took in school was Java but python seems like it might be a good bet right now.

Good for you DMACM. I wish I had started with Python.

Yes it's important to diversify and I'll tell you why:

1. Integration is a big part of the job. Your best "expected value" will come from taking existing applications written in other languages and porting them to the favorite flavor. For instance I just ported a php application(drupal) to python(django) last year. Why? Because the bossman wanted it that way. He was a python junky.

2. Well-roundedness. Knowing other programming paradigms will help you understand what you can accomplish with your own language. There are really only a few popular paradigms and knowing how the popular ones work will help you.


How much time to spend on these? Only what you think gets you up to speed. Read the docs, maybe write a hello world, a macro, etc. You don't have to be able to teach a language in order to get your head around it and use that knowledge to "leverage" yourself into some fat dough. Business-types love to hear you're familiar with a platform or language, even if it's just a vague notion.

Well learn your first language well enough to build stuff. Build stuff, learn about improving your building process (design, testing, bug tracking, repo use) then build something else and then you can switch to the next language imo
So basically I'd recommend that once you build your first whatever in python you read a book on design patterns and something like code complete and maybe something on agile development (because it's best for one man or small teams imo)...tweak the process of developing before hopping to the next language

Once you're good with one language and have build working software it shouldn't be hard to pick up a similar one anyways i.e. python means you should be able to pick up java, ruby, php, perl etc. pp really quickly

Your boss is an idiot and should be fired for wasting resources. Drupal is just another CMS. I'm sure dozens must already exist built on Python/Django.

Pretty sure he meant to say a drupal based app was ported to python+django not that he ported the entire drupal framework.

Even if he did just port the app, it's pretty stupid and a fairly large waste of resources, especially if the reason was "he likes python". Who gives a **** what language it's in, if it works?

I don't get this logic. Considering the quality of what is out there, even those that do have a MS, and most tech companies are already flustered by people lined up out the door who can't program even though they have said degree, why would anyone in their right mind take on a fresh-face with no legitimate background and train them?

The average newbie could take years to learn HTML / CSS and probably still be screwing that up by the time your done "training" them. During that time, you are doing what with their code? Releasing or spending a ton of time and money to review it and rewrite

If you are taking this approach, of course it's important to select for people who won't suck, so you don't waste 3 years teaching them to do something badly. Seems a Bsc or MSc is no guarantee of this, but maybe some other test can do a better job.

Yeah, and it was the first time in the history of software that a bad decision was made. . This is part of software. I remember sitting through a meeting where I was told that we were moving everything to Java. Why? Because IBM had just given us a ton of money. This is part of the industry.

I think I'd be pretty happy to take on a young kid who's smart, willing to work hard and learn than somebody with experience and background who's not willing to learn. I've had an employee who thought he knew everything - he didn't last long. His 10 years of professional experience didn't count for **** when he wasn't willing to learn what he needed to do his job well.

In contrast, I have a kid on my team with 3 months of experience out of school, and he busts his ass, listens to everything he's told and learns fast. After two weeks, he's more productive than the other guy was after 6 months.

Yeah pretty much +1 to that. Willing to learn+reasonably smart+motivated (+ gets along with people) is kind of all you need. The most costly thing is investing your time because I'm sure you can get HS grads reasonably cheap if they get a solid education and potential to move up in return.

I mean in the day and age of agile and very high level languages it just makes a lot of sense depending on the projects you work on.
My gameplan would basically be teach them the fundementals of programming in two weeks, plug them into some agile team (pair them up with someone experienced) and have them do some simple stuff...you could also have them start by writing BDD specs, then tests etc.
You'll see within 3 month (which is the hire or fire deadline here) if they are worth it...probably a lot sooner.

I'm obviously biased and only concidering small team scenarios because I have no clue how huge companies run their stuff (nor would I want to find out) but some reasonably smart kid will learn so much more in a customer project or two than in a year of university (imo)

I'm a new learning myself. I started up with Python. It's a great language for learning many concepts, plus there are tons of free add-ons and third-party programs that make Python immensely usable. The only bad part of this is that there is arguably too many third-party options and nothing that you can consider "the best," but of course, this opens a debate.

I moved on to Scheme and now I am working on Common Lisp; both of these languages come from a very different philosophy (and feature many constructs that simply can't be done with Python), but at least for me, peeling away the layers of programming and diving deeper into the nether-regions is interesting. I also enjoy trying to see if what I can do in either Lisp is possible in Python, and many times, the answer surprises me (and I'm not talking about Macros here).

My personal experience strongly suggests that getting good at one language is not good enough, and I think the sooner you move on, the quicker you'll learn about the language you originally worked on.

I hope the new-and-improved version was actually new-and-improved.

It would probably be much better if there was an apprentice program in conjunction with the kid's current learning. For example, kid is attending X college, and he is required to go into an apprenticeship during the summer after year one. This would help not only improve the quality of the education, but also quickly weed out the kids who can't cut it. Some professions have this requirement built in already, and it's not a bad idea especially if you are talking about doctors, who, if they screw up, can cost lives and major lawsuits, but all a programmer does is screw up some code or a project, which sucks for the main company, but no one is getting seriously injured. The reality is that there is no need for this hard-core assurance because it is apparently too difficult (impossible?) to sue a programming company over bonkers code and programs.

In today's age, where most companies will not do what you suggest, and it is very difficult to prove your code / program is better than the next guy, when a potential customer calls you and a competitor, you basically gave the competitor a compelling reason to give to the customer to NOT use your company. The conversation may go something like this:

"Yeah, I'm shopping around"

Sales person is of course, going to pitch is "helpful" spiel: "Well, I'll let you in on something. There are some companies that hire and use a bunch of HS kids to program. All of our guys and gals have degrees and go through intensive code reviews."

"You mean they are hiring kids that might not know what they are doing?"

"I'm saying they most certainly ARE hiring kids that don't know what they are doing, so you end up paying for hours to teach a kid that may not be doing anything at all to help your project."

"......"