The journey from journalist to programmer

Hello, in the following lines is Dan’s story (Dan has chosen to share his journey from journalist to programmer, but preferred to remain anonymous, name is fictive). This article is the first of a series of articles aimed to show us that programming can be learned without specialized studies. In order not to distort the message Dan wanted to convey, I chose not to intervene on the text. I will leave you to enjoy the story. :-)

What are you doing now?

Now I’m working as a freelance web developer. Freelancer, meaning that I work full time but from home and I don’t have to worry whether or not projects are coming. Used technologies: Laravel, HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery, PHP, MySql and that's all. Photoshop is useful for web developers (especially for front-end). I played with angular, react etc. but I got to the conclusion that you don’t have to use a pulley to remove an apple from a bucket. :-)

What were you doing before working as a programmer?

In the past I worked as a journalist and I was poorly paid, I wasn’t very inquisitive and the salary was disastrous. I had some knowledge of html (minimum). I decided to move to Bucharest, get myself a temporarily job, attend courses (there were no courses in Galati 3 years ago) and that was it ... I lived in a college hostel, I worked for about 2 years in jobs like call center jobs, while I watched tutorials at home and at the office when I was on night shifts. In November 2014 I got my first job as a front-end developer (CSS and so). I gained a bit of confidence and I resigned to work with a guy wherewith I was already working for at $ 50 projects on freelancer.com and it’s almost a year since I’m working like this.

What were the impediments in the process of learning programming?

The greatest impediment for someone coming from another field I think is not having a bachelor’s degree in computer programming. Those who finish college are much confident because they are already "programmers", in theory. Instead, those who finish a course will never know when they will become programmers. They will remain in stage "I still have to learn …" for a long time, until working within a team and manage to make a real comparison between what they know and what the others who work full-time in the field know. When I was hired as a front-end developer I was very complexed (both at the interview and on my first day), but after one month I realized that there was nothing new for me to learn. The first money was made on freelancer.com, 30 $ for a project I worked for about three days ... Now I'm working for that guy and I think we will continue our collaboration for a long time.

What is your advice for someone who starts today to learn programming?

The advice would be not to despair if you can’t find a project/job very quickly. Go to interviews, don’t be ashamed of what you know/do not know. Ignore all the crappy HR requirements (who have no idea about the job requirements ... for a front-end developer they require knowledge of network admin/linux databases etc.) and send email. Nobody hires you based on the interview, you need to do something practical in order to see where you stand. 95% of programmers are still facing problems and use Google to search for possible solutions, so it's ok to do this, and only about 10% really know how to code (others only change the existing code).

I wouldn’t choose to do anything else because I like what I do.

I forgot to tell you about the impediments. The time and the fact that very few people know how to explain/want to explain so that you can understand what they want. It’s more like a job that is "being stolen" and you can fill the gaps by attending a course. Those who want to become programmers for money should quit the idea right away ... they will never reach the wages they read about in the press if they do so because it’s a high paying job..