Coding: The Best Path for Career Switchers?

As a history professor with well over 10 years of university and another 7 years of teaching on the tenure track, I know a fair bit about the world of higher ed.  Students arrive with great hopes of finding themselves, their dreams, and their calling all in one four year stay on campus.  For this training and admittedly life altering experience students pay a hefty price often accruing tens of thousands of dollars in student debt.  As a recipient of my own tens of thousands in debt, I feel perfectly fine about the exchange as I am sure most people with fulfilling careers do.  I would much rather be in debt with my current job than debt free doing something I totally loathe, even if I might be a little more wealthy in the long run.

However, if one ever wants to enter a different career path, college is pretty daunting.  Not only does one face the cultural adjustment of returning to school, a host of real life challenges such as family, but the possibility of accruing even more debt with less time to pay it off.  That said, for entry into most alternative career paths, a person will likely need to go or return to college.  For most people, this just is not realistic.

Enter: coding.  Since I first took a notion to start coding in July, I have logged in nearly 100 hours working on it.  My total expenditures on the endeavor total $41.  I have paid for Pine's Learning to Program book (which I could have gotten for free online) and $25 this month for TreeHouse which is a service I really love.  Compared to university, this is pennies.  If I keep my TreeHouse subscription all year and buy one new book a month for $20 (and honestly, most of them are actually free!) I will spend under $600 this year on coding.  This amounts to 2 credits (of a minimum load of 24 annually) at a university and if I mastered 12 books and worked TreeHouse all year I would be in a good spot to at least consider applying for jobs competitive or better than those college graduates would compete for after 4 years in college.

The magic of coding is that it is an measurable (as we say in the academic world) skill.  If one successfully navigates themselves to the point where one can code, the proof will be in the pudding.  That person can create a host or programs for local businesses, non profits, or even just to build a portfolio to prove they can code and share it with the world on GitHub.  Unlike many fields, coding can be assessed - you either can or you cannot.  This makes it much easier to break into than other degreed fields.  With skills you can demonstrate, you are employable.  While I am not discounting a computer science degree, I am sure this is actually much more well rounded and includes a lot of deep theoretical knowledge that practical self study simply can't provide, for a career switcher coding is gold.

The languages are free, the editors can be had for free (or for less than a basic into biology book if you really want a nice one), the training materials range from free to cheap, many of the best books and tutorials are free online!  Additionally, coding has a tremendous community.  In the past month, I have met so many super nice people who are encouraging and helpful - many of whom are already successful programmers!  Unless you sign up for one of the high priced bootcamps you can figure out if coding is for you primarily with an investment of time.

Finally, let me also point out what an amazing time we live in for all of this stuff to be to accessible.  When I was a teenager, coding training, languages, etc were hundreds of dollars, now they are there for the taking!   To me, making computers do new and interesting things is one of the most powerful things we could ever learn to do in 2015.  We do not have to pay dearly for this power, we only need to apply our time and efforts to learning it.  If I told you all the ways that programming a computer could help change the world you would expect it to be very expensive training with a line out the door to learn and an elitist community hellbent on protecting their interests.  Actually, it is a welcoming community which freely exchanges training materials and is seeking to recruit more people to help do this important, interesting, and potentially revolutionary work.  I am by no means a programmer yet, but right now I can't think of a better investment of my evenings.


Resources in Progress:
Total hours into Programming: 92 (2 since last time )
Total Weeks Programming/Hours per week: 4/23

Progress on Gaddis' Starting out with Python: Done With Chapter 1, Appendix A,B

Progress on Shaw's Learning Ruby the Hard Way: Finished Exercise 1-13

My Text game: 3 hours, 118 lines

TreeHouse (1939 Points, 24 Badges)

Code Academy Points: (704 points, 72 badges)

Progress on Hartl's Tutorial Ready to start Chapter 3! 

Resources Finished:
Josh Kemp's No Degree, No Problem 8/14/2015

Chris Pine's Learn to Program 8/9/2015

TreeHouse Make a Website Track 8/17/2015

TreeHouse Ruby Basics 8/20/2015
TreeHouse JavaScript Basics 8/22/2015
TreeHouse Console Foundations 8/24/2015 

Code Academy Ruby Course 8/5/2015

Code Academy Make a Website Course 7/29/2015