That seems pretty reasonable. Is self-directed study not a real option?

I've worked with self taught people before and they were good but I don't know that it's right for everyone. I do much better in a classroom situation than on my own where I can be distracted fairly easily.

I already have a technical co-founder but sometimes you want to be able to do things yourself.

I appreciate the thoughts though I'm definitely not decided.

Totally. I understand the benefits of the route you're talking about. I just think its a REALLY high cost.

Well the 5-10 years is the amount of time I can save enough money to never have to go back to working for someone else ever again, ideally.

You'll always work for someone. You'll just be replacing a manager with investors.

How much $$$ do you think you're leaving on the table vs simply spending those 5-10 years doing what you're already good at? As a hybrid option, it may be possible to simply take the sales or some other job that will maximize your salary now at a technology company and look to transition within the company. You may be less prepared than going through the bootcamp from a purely engineering perspective and it may take more time but being familiar with the product from a business perspective and understanding the organization behind engineering is useful even as a junior engineer, especially if you're talking about specialized domains. This will also minimize the resume hit if you somehow decide that you don't want to be in engineering after all.

What exactly is your goal?

Do you just want to make a career change because you don't like what you're doing ?

If you are capable of getting a 150k job now at a startup, I don't understand how a bootcamp+lower paying job is going to help you at all financially. Seems like you could keep the high paying job and learn to program on your own too.

Sales sales sales. Lol anyone who can sell should never do anything else. You'll get way higher lifetime ROI sticking to sales.

So you have someone who is starting a business with you now... or committed to starting a business with you in 5-10 years?

This is getting weirder and weirder to be honest. Is this just a friend that you've wanted to work with for a long time? Just seems utterly bizarre.

You can actually start businesses that monetize and can be bootstrapped. You don't have to get on the VC treadmill or raise money externally. Unless all your billionaire buddies wanna toss you a few million here and there to make sticky notes on the internet.

There are really two roles at every early stage startup. You either build or sell. Nothing else really needs to occur. (That is extensible to a ton of businesses actually.)

My goal is to be able to build companies having both the technical and business acumen required. Right now I'm 50% of the way there. I realize once the companies get going I'll be switching to 99% business focused.

When I'm in the zone and working on large competitive deals, meeting and presenting to execs and closing, sales is fun. But I often feel empty. I really enjoy making and building things and sales is just a different sense of accomplishment. The highs are probably higher, but the lows are lower and you look at your life and don't feel like you have any real skills. Also wanting to build things and not being able to, even knowing it wouldn't be hard is frustrating. I've tried to learn on my own but I'm never able to stick with it long enough to really immerse myself. Maybe I should give it a better effort on my own though again before the bootcamp idea.

I'm not sure what thremp finds so weird about the technical founder thing. One of my best friends from college is an engineer and we have always planned to start a business together with both of our skill sets, and we regularly talk about business ideas and sometimes build prototypes. Except it is him building the prototypes and me not able to contribute much. If I were able to also contribute to the early planning and building phases, we would move way faster, and while our communication is nearly perfect, it woukd clearly improve, and I would be able to test stuff out on my own that may not work, with less consequence.

I understand the ability to sell seems very valuable but it's literally the oldest job that humans have had and 90%+ of sales people go into it for the financial success only and have huge egos once they accomplish anything. You get a huge amount of mostly brainless, self-centered jock types who are willing to slam their head against the wall a million times until it works. It's like the guy who you see at a bar asking a girl to leave with him and getting rejected 10 times until she has had a couple too many drinks and relents at the end because even tho he's an arrogant jerk he's persistent.

Sure, high tech sales avoids much of that, and there are exceptions everywhere, but I don't see the oldest job in history being near as fun as being an engineer in a time where technology is moving incredibly rapidly and issues with scaling are mostly non-existent. If you can dream of changing the world, the easiest way to accomplish it seems to be by being able to build software applications.

Sounds like you're already doing startups. What happens when one of your prototypes gets traction?

We quit our jobs and start working on it feverishly.

Sounds like you're already starting up.

I don't think this is necessary for the start-up founding that you want to do, but its a reasonable feeling.

But going bootcamp + >5 years career of engineering is going to teach you a lot of extra skills that aren't necessary for what you describe above. And I think you pay a big price.

Alternatively, self-teach yourself just the skills you need to do what you describe above. Take a problem you want to work on and figure out how to solve it without worrying about learning a bunch of engineering best practices that aren't directly relevant to you. Have your buddy point out high-value areas that you should improve on.

Yeah, I think JJ is right, regardless of what you write for the prototype you're going to have it re-written by real developers if the idea is any good. Coding the idea isn't that tough, not if you have the idea and understand what it is actually going to do.

Why not just try to solve the problems for the ideas you have? If you're interested in building something, just start doing it. I still don't grasp the need for 5-10 years of engineering, when you probably (since this applies to everyone) will end up not being talented enough to work on the product long term in a meaningful role.

I feel the bootcamp is probably a great plan (no idea on this particular one however), but the ~5 years work experience just for the sake of it not so much? Tho after that he could surely class himself as a "real developer"?

Hey Larry give me one of your ideas in the mean time. I need a startup project

A lot of my ideas are around artificial intelligence and using it to help those who are less fortunate, and in solving major problems that humans are incapable of solving.

One idea was basically a bot that you could communicate with (kinda like that movie Her) that would sense things like a heightened emotional state to help you avoid mistakes you would later regret. Basically like an Alexa type thing that tries to provide advice about decision making with the goal to help people make better, more logical choices, by tapping something which is inherently logical when they need advice.

The first step could be a tool that can measure your heart rate, speed of speech, etc. to just tell you if you are at a "normal" or "heightened" state so people could become more aware of their mindfulness. It could connect to something like myfitnesspal to understand the amount of energy you should have from food/water and help you understand if you are in a bad state to make decisions. I think a lot of people struggle with that.

Best of luck if those are the type of ideas that you've been working on.

0 relevant experience here, but I'm in a similar situation in different fields. After years as a poker pro making $, I'm moving on to something that contributes to the world. I'm aiming to become an essayist/writer.

Anyway, the same questions arise there. Do you go to college again? Do you try to get a job in journalism? Or do you do it all on your own, writing a bunch, publishing it so you can seek criticism and get better, figuring out how to apply deliberate practice to it (!), maybe getting a coach? And basicly, I think the last way is clearly best. Both regular jobs and college(/bootcamp) is going to have so much you don't need.

If I understand you correctly, you'd like to be an engineer so that you can get paid to learn, is that correct? That might not be a bad idea, although an (probably easier since you're used to it) sales-y job + your own work on the weekend might be better.

Anyway, if this is what you want to do

I have a hard time seeing how 'just go and do that and figure stuff out as you go' would not be both the best and the most motivating path

I wouldn't worry too much about being prepared for a startup, the whole process is very malleable and I think most of the time it's probably better just to deal with the challenges as they come up.

The stress idea is interesting, perhaps you could work on proving the concept cheaply? I imagine if you got 10 test subjects, you could probably design a short questionnaire for them and ask them to complete it every time they are faced with an important decision.

Measuring bio metrics seems to be a pretty hot area right now, if you're going to design a device that can measure heart rate/rate of speech etc perhaps it would be better to just design that device as your business and allow other people/businesses to create applications for it? Better to sell pick axes in a gold rush etc.

I don't know your background LL but I'd be pretty skeptical of someone without a deep and relevant theoretical and practical background in bio metrics / machine learning trying to compete in this area. It's a hot area with big players already competing.

I'm not sure what data the current 'wearables' expose but seems much better to rely on them for data and then build the application on top of that. But even then you're going to need to do some complex **** and I'm not sure self taught (or boot camp) is the way to go. That door is probably closed to you already.

And yes, there are always examples of scrappy people beating the odds but startups are hard enough to succeed that it seems silly to make it harder by picking a domain you're not really qualified in.