[Help] Training as a coder - where to start?

[BBassic]

From my experience, coding is far more down to aptitude than language. When I started (nearly 40 years ago), all the investment was around finding people with right aptitude. Languages and technologies come and go, but the only thing that is constant throughout is logic and whether you can deal with complex logic. Learning to code doesn't necessarily result in a good coder (see KZN post 3 up)

I'm sure there are aptitude tests around still that may help (although there are other indicators such as a pasty complexion, few friends, Personal Hygiene etc )

Definitely this.

If you enjoy puzzles and making something out of nothing but can also endure the occasional period of mind-numbing tedium where you're just writing variations on the same old stuff then it's a great career.

 

[WATFORD zero]

Definitely this.

If you enjoy puzzles and making something out of nothing but can also endure the occasional period of mind-numbing tedium where you're just writing variations on the same old stuff then it's a great career.

Exactly, it was a revelation all those years ago to actually find I could get well paid for something I enjoyed doing

 

[KZNSeagull]

Definitely this.

If you enjoy puzzles and making something out of nothing but can also endure the occasional period of mind-numbing tedium where you're just writing variations on the same old stuff then it's a great career.

Yup. Writing Assembler code to read a bitmap at the beginning of each record on a file then formatting that record accordingly was good fun, year 2k COBOL changes not so much

 

[WATFORD zero]

Yup. Writing Assembler code to read a bitmap at the beginning of each record on a file then formatting that record accordingly was good fun, year 2k COBOL changes not so much

Proppa old school, Assembler, COBOL, Fortran, PASCAL, CICS although I always thought calling a language PL1 was a little pretentious

 

[ConfusedGloryHunter]

The main skill you need to be a programmer is the ability to code complicated stuff simply. It is all very well googling and copying stuff but when you or especially someone else comes to maintain/change that code (particularly in an emergency), it is no good if they have to spend ages trying to understand it. Too many people think that coding is a competition - it isn't. Good, professional coders code simply.

I don't know why I got that rant aimed at me. The OP is asking how someone should start and I was suggesting they should simply have a bash to find out if it really is for them before they jumped into identifying what language/course etc. As for my final, throw away, google comment, I didn't say copy and paste from Google results I said "be good at googling stuff" as a gentle hint that they will definitely need to be able to figure stuff out for themselves from time to time. In my book being good at googling stuff is to not just copy and paste the first thing you find on the internet but to read the various alternatives, understand what is being suggested and evaluate if that is really what you need. Someone wondering where to start training as a coder really doesn't need to be boning up on SOLID principles, design patterns or getting to grips with the agile manifesto, they need to be seeing if they can get the lights to dim and Barry White to play out of the speakers when they say "Alexa, it's business time".

 

[Wardy's twin]

In my experience contractors always used to make their coding complicated and undocumented so that they would keep employed.....

 

[KZNSeagull]

I don't know why I got that rant aimed at me. The OP is asking how someone should start and I was suggesting they should simply have a bash to find out if it really is for them before they jumped into identifying what language/course etc. As for my final, throw away, google comment, I didn't say copy and paste from Google results I said "be good at googling stuff" as a gentle hint that they will definitely need to be able to figure stuff out for themselves from time to time. In my book being good at googling stuff is to not just copy and paste the first thing you find on the internet but to read the various alternatives, understand what is being suggested and evaluate if that is really what you need. Someone wondering where to start training as a coder really doesn't need to be boning up on SOLID principles, design patterns or getting to grips with the agile manifesto, they need to be seeing if they can get the lights to dim and Barry White to play out of the speakers when they say "Alexa, it's business time".

It wasn't a rant, just a counterpoint to your last sentence which, if it was a throw away comment, needed some sort of stupid emoji at the end of it like this which some programmer somewhere spent hours developing.

 

[Badger]

Yup. Writing Assembler code to read a bitmap at the beginning of each record on a file then formatting that record accordingly was good fun, year 2k COBOL changes not so much

I've heard COBOL developers can pretty much name their fee these days. Lots of ancient business critical systems written in COBOL and only a few developers left who have a clue how to maintain/migrate them.

 

[Official Old Man]

I can make my own programmes on a Sinclair Spectrum, does that count. Remember back in 1987 I put messages up on a TV screen and everyone thought it was very clever.
Meanwhile just looked at the odinproject. What the heck is 'ruby on rails' or 'nodejs'?
But would love to do it. May give it a go.

 

[KZNSeagull]

I've heard COBOL developers can pretty much name their fee these days. Lots of ancient business critical systems written in COBOL and only a few developers left who have a clue how to maintain/migrate them.

Dunno about that, have tried a couple of times to get back into it but without luck. Not having used COBOL for over 20 years and not being in professional coding for 15 years probably doesn't help!

 

[Rowdey]

Talking with a client the other day and bemoaning (my) school kids wanting to be 'coders' he countered with 'dont worry too much, i work for DAZN and we cant get enough good coders... and we pay £50k a year to early 20 year old if they're good enough..'

Put me back in box a bit..

 

[KZNSeagull]

Proppa old school, Assembler, COBOL, Fortran, PASCAL, CICS although I always thought calling a language PL1 was a little pretentious

Yes, I hope they didn't pay a management consultancy vast fees to come up with the name PL1. I did COBOL, Assembler, CICS, REXX (I met the guy who wrote REXX when I did some work at Hursley - Michael Cowlishaw, very clever chap, wandered around work wearing full hippy gear), then I did some SAP ABAP/4, VB and Perl. Mixed bag, all good fun.

 

[Badger]

Talking with a client the other day and bemoaning (my) school kids wanting to be 'coders' he countered with 'dont worry too much, i work for DAZN and we cant get enough good coders... and we pay £50k a year to early 20 year old if they're good enough..'

Put me back in box a bit..

That explains why the DAZN app is so sh**

The salaries being offered to junior developers these days is mad. I spent 8 months trying to recruit a developer for my team. We made a couple of offers for some mid-level coders and lost out because one of the big Silicon Valley companies had offered them about $190k plus a big chunk of shares.

 

[WATFORD zero]

That explains why the DAZN app is so sh**

The salaries being offered to junior developers these days is mad. I spent 8 months trying to recruit a developer for my team. We made a couple of offers for some mid-level coders and lost out because one of the big Silicon Valley companies had offered them about $190k plus a big chunk of shares.

Very early on I thought (and pushed the case) that best salaries got best staff and learnt the hard way that best salaries simply got staff who go after best salaries. Third quartile was where I always got the best staff, although even 15 years ago we were paying our best coders 40K+, it was always the case that you got what you paid for.

But that was best coders and in coding teams, they were fairly rare. Funnily enough, they often needed careful 'management' but were worth it, and I don't remember any of them having less than 10 years heavyweight coding experience though, no matter how 'clever'

 

[The Mole]

Most highly paid programming jobs are either C or Python.

If they want to go in to building websites then that's html, PHP, java script and css.

I currently doing a Cyber Security Technician Degree and they are teaching Python which I already have a hand at through creating automating scans and enumeration.

I think Python is the easiest to learn, and like someone else said, it can be learnt in a month.

Really? I might be missing a trick, although it is about 25 years since I last wrote a program ( I was quite proficient in C)!

 

[Springal]

Also consider cyber security / threat hunting type work or anything around Cloud / AWS is hot at the moment

And with VMware due to implode in the next couple of years - technologies to replace them will yield a lot of work I reckon

 

[FamilyGuy]

Yes, I hope they didn't pay a management consultancy vast fees to come up with the name PL1. I did COBOL, Assembler, CICS, REXX (I met the guy who wrote REXX when I did some work at Hursley - Michael Cowlishaw, very clever chap, wandered around work wearing full hippy gear), then I did some SAP ABAP/4, VB and Perl. Mixed bag, all good fun.

I'm happily retired after a 40+ year career in "DP" / "IT" (mostly on the operations/management/sales sides) so I've seen a lot of (impressive) change and progress in that time.

One thing that has always stuck in my mind is that when "PL1" was released, it was reported that the company (IBM I believe) had also reserved/copyrighted every name from "PL1" to "PL99" - made me smile at the time, and thanks to this, it has done again. Whatever happened to ..... ?

 

[FamilyGuy]

I've heard COBOL developers can pretty much name their fee these days. Lots of ancient business critical systems written in COBOL and only a few developers left who have a clue how to maintain/migrate them.

Absolutely this. I've seen the reality of this at "a major international airline", " a major UK based energy company", " a smaller UK Building Society" ..... there must still be others.

 

[FamilyGuy]

Most highly paid programming jobs are either C or Python.

If they want to go in to building websites then that's html, PHP, java script and css.

I currently doing a Cyber Security Technician Degree and they are teaching Python which I already have a hand at through creating automating scans and enumeration.

I think Python is the easiest to learn, and like someone else said, it can be learnt in a month.

Python is what they teach 14+ year olds in Secondary Schools around here - which presumably gives evidence to its "easiness" but also its widespread professional use??

 

[PoG]

I guess it depends on what kind of development you want to do; frontend or backend? Ignore the spiel about fullstack developers, they dont exist but I'd say a good start for backend would be the C# .NET route but then I've been doing it for 10 years...never a shortage in jobs. Also probably worth looking at something like React for some frontend framework exposure.