Software guys of the OT. Questions about coding/getting started.

I was coming to post similar lol.

It seems like AI is going to take over most coding jobs long term and the real niche is going to be understanding AI enough to ask it the right questions.

What kind of software are you most interested in building? What sort of companies are you interested in working for?

Coding is one of those things where you either have the aptitude for it or you don't. I've known people who didn't but somehow got an IT or CS degree. I've certainly known people with no degree who did have the natural ability. I have hired people from bootcamps who did well. The main thing to be sure of is that you're honest about whether you have the ability.

As for the AI thing, it's really just yet another example of "trying to make programming easy or fast." Those efforts have largely failed... COBOL and SQL were intended to be more human-friendly, but they're really not.

If the future of programming is "writing prompts for AI to write the code from," I can assure you that writing those prompts will be exacting, difficult, error-prone, and time-consuming. It's still programming. It's not like you can just tell AI, "uh, yeah, make me an e-commerce site kind of like, Uber for taxidermy, and make it compliant with PCI and Sarbanes-Oxley and stuff." You'll be authoring very precise instructions using a subset of the English language, and that is not that different from the original (failed) vision people had for COBOL, SQL, and Visual Basic.

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My question is that if I completed a coding bootcamp would I be likely to land a job in the field and what kind of entry level pay would I be looking at roughly if so?

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I'm not saying don't learn to code, but AI is going to kill coding in the long term, maybe even medium term. What it's not going to kill, at least not as quickly, is problem solving. I have had AI write entire scripts for me, but I had to very explicitly tell it what I had and what I wanted. When it ran into problems it didn't know how to solve, I had to figure out how to get it to approach it another way.

If you are serious about this, I wouldn't approach it as "what language should I learn." I would pick some problems to solve with the help of an AI coder. Remember that most programs are doing some variation of taking input in, transforming it in some way, and spitting the transformed data back out. Do something with advanced stats in a sport you follow. Take some pictures of your grandma's handwritten recipes and turn them into a phone app of digital recipes. Scrape a message board and perform a sentiment analysis of the messages to prove which board sucks the most.

The point is come up with a real "problem" that you want to solve, because that's what coding is, using computers to solve problems. And if you're looking for a job in "coding" these projects will be your resume. Businesses aren't looking for someone that can write a Hello World program, they want someone that has experience solving the same kind of problems they are trying to solve.

Probably the best place to start for you is Bing Copilot or Google Gemini. They are free AI chat bots. You can even ask them to be your coding teacher and come up with a curriculum for you.

You need to figure out what category interest you - front end, backend, full stack - along with what type of software, industry and OS. Do you want to work on mobile apps, gaming, social media, modeling and simulation, AI, etc. They all have different languages, you should focus on a niche after becoming exposed to the main ones.

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Now we learn how to ask AI to code.

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Used more for fixing errors than writing the important stuff.

Engineer or analyst is the fork in the road for this career. There are certifications that you can get that open the door that there are free resources for.

EBRP library is underrated because of the free udemy courses you can access with your library card.

You’ll get started in the 60s but have to get more certs or stand out within 3-5 years to make six figures with a quarterly bonus. You have to choose where to land well when that time comes.

That being said, management style matters in tech. You are either a ticket or report factory. Make sure you choose a factory that cares about you. But I feel this is the most important thing regardless of trade nowadays.

Don't do it. It's not the same anymore.

I'm not a programmer, but have a casual interest in the field, and read an article here and there to the point I think I have a little bit of insight, which I'll get to, but first, the joke...

"Learn to code" has specific context as a joke. In 2019, Biden had a rally in 2019 in West Virginia, where he advised coal miners to learn to code/program. It was a callous statement, I think in response to a question, and he was was basically telling them that he was going to get rid of their jobs in the pursuit of the green agenda. In this way, it was reminiscent of Marie Antoinette's, "Then let them eat cake" response in reply to hearing the peasants didn't have bread to eat. At it's heart, the joke is a joke by virtue of its flippant indifference to the suffering of people losing their livelihood.

This actually has bearing on your greater question. Coding isn't dead and there is some chance to still breaking in and having a decent career, but it's a largely mature / no longer booming industry at this point. (Recommending coal miners to just switch jobs and become programmers showed indifference to the fact that domestic employers have been increasingly screwing over their own programmers, replacing them with lower cost overseas options and H1B types, not to mention that becoming good at coding isn't for everyone.) And if you look at the news, many of the big tech companies are laying people off by the thousands (though how much of that is inefficient middle management positions vs programmers, I don't know).

The issue I think you're going to have to prepare for is that there is a glut of people on the front end who are vying for entry level positions and employers can afford to be picky and want to see you have some sort of portfolio of work... a catch-22 of sorts.

My intention here is NOT to black pill you on becoming a programmer. While there is a glut of people on the front end who try to break in to the industry, many lose hope and drop out of the race. If you're talented, and willing to put in the work on the front end and persevere (think: starving artists and actors who toil for a year(s) before breaking through) then you can succeed and have a good career. And as others have said, AI isn't there yet. People with good problem solving skills and ability to guide AI are still needed. Further, even if programming on the whole is not booming anymore, there are some subsectors which will be hotter than others for jobs. It's my understanding that data science, AI, and cybersecurity currently have better prospects for tech/programmers. And since governments are working towards implementing CBDCs, there will likely be a future in understanding and being able to create smart contracts in crypto ecosystems. Also, sometimes new languages emerge which fill a special need and quickly learning them can put you ahead of the pack. For instance, some are saying the new "Mojo" language combines the usability of Python with the perfomance of C and may displace the Rust language in a lot of AI/data science projects.

A few pieces of advice:

- If you're interested in the field, become interested in the field. I'm not in the field directly, but am interested enough that I've clicked on articles in my google news feed and various articles about data science, cybersecurity, etc. show up as recommended articles for me every day now.

- Someone else mentioned this in a way, but it's in your best interest to develop your skills with logic and system thinking to facilitate your problem solving skills. There are courses devoted to this. I would add continuing to hone your skill in math is useful as well, especially if you gravitate towards data science.

- Be prepared to join groups on Discord (but be awere of scammers) and Telegram, get on Github, etc. and volunteer on projects as you start to build skills and make a portfolio. Work begets work.

- Before you commit more money to buying courses, etc., you might also try free resources like:

freecodecamp
Freecodecamp has a ton of online courses, tutorials, certifications, etc. and a lot of supplementary youtube content.

Another good resource is Open Culture:
Open Culture
Scroll down to the Comp Sci section and there are hundreds of courses taught by professors from Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech, Princeton, etc. as well as directly from Amazon, Google, etc. I think all of these are free to take if you are content to just learn. Many have an option to pay if you want to formally get credit / certified for taking the course.

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Coding is one of those things where you either have the aptitude for it or you don't. I've known people who didn't but somehow got an IT or CS degree. I've certainly known people with no degree who did have the natural ability. I have hired people from bootcamps who did well. The main thing to be sure of is that you're honest about whether you have the ability.

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I’ve written an awful lot of code having worked in IT. Plenty of people, in my opinion, have the ability. For me, one of the most important things is that you simply must like doing it if you’re going to do it well.

I don’t like writing code. It’s tedious and requires an attention to detail that I don’t naturally possess. I can do it. I like having done it. I just hate it while I’m in it.

The tools are so much better these days, though. I was required to take assembly language. These days, unless you’re writing drivers for hardware, you’ll never get that far down to the metal. You no longer have to study processor or ancillary chip errata because your code won’t execute precisely as it is written and the workaround is poorly documented.

A good place to start coding is scripting. You can learn the fundamentals and concepts. That’s where you’ll start to see the power. It’s a far cry from writing a stand-alone application, but it will go a long way to gaining an understanding.