Comment by XR Technology on "Bartender to Full Stack Engineer - How did I make it happen? 🍸 => 💻"

Hi Gabor,

One of the most inspiring articles I read in a long time! Thank you so much!

My personal journey is quite different from yours, but you asked for comments from a "senior" perspective, so here we go.

I am in this game for 27 years now, also learning how to code at the tender age of 11 or some such and founding my first software company at 20 (and because of this eventually dropping out of college without a degree). It was quite the trip with a lot of ups and downs, but still standing after all those years and still loving what I do.

What I can tell your readers here from my experience:

The market for software engineers (also junior) has never been better. It is extremely hard to find good people and all companies I work for struggle to staff their projects. This will not change any time soon.
The best colleagues I knew over the years have been career changers like you, who brought in their experience to an otherwise rather homogenous work environment.
Degrees or certificates are much less important in the software industry then in other fields. What matters most is your track record (of projects or jobs) or - lacking that - your portfolio and proof of work.

So I would also emphasize some of your points:

If you are new with no track record to show, find some topic that you really care about and build something around this.

Your D&D app (which being a DM myself, I would love to check out btw) is a perfect example. Start and solve all problems you encounter by googling and trying things out. This is what 90% of software development is all about anyways.

"HelloWorld"-kind tutorials are good for learning but irrelevant as a showcase. Rather go for a bigger (even if eventually unfinished) project where you really put your own thoughts and heart in.

The market is huge, so apart from "software" try to define what industry you want to work in. Entertainment / Games? Web / e-Commerce? Finance? Big Business or rather the small Startup?

The workplaces you find will be hugely different and this can make all the difference from a job you love vs a daily grind. If as a career changer you liked your former work and there is any IT in there - why not focus on it? Bring in what you know.

I mean as a bartender you can probably innovate with a bit of tech - be it reservations, ordering via app, ordering your own custom cocktail though an app. You know your workflows best. I bet with a bit of research you will find a couple of companies who specialize in this and they will want YOU even if the next guy is the better programmer.

The jobs are there. Guaranteed.

Thank you very much for your response Tobias, I really appreciate the insight, you confirm quite a lot of my suspicions I'm having.

I strongly agree with you, recommending to work on strong, complex projects with active problem solving, and I love the approach of using your past niches and interests as a focus for projects. Helped me building the trading app, I love working on anything role playing based, and I have multiple future side projects planned in bartending and hospitality, once I gained some experience. There are some pain points nobody is even trying to address. I am loving my current job, and working really hard on that particular product, so that is where my focus is at the moment.

I would love to show you the D&D app, but unfortunately, we decided not to finish it. It was using an old (3.5) version of D&D that not many people use it anymore, and for the new versions, there are official, free alternatives we don't want to compete with. It was a blast to build it, benefitted us both, and we will find other cool projects to work on on the side :)

Thank you again for weighing in, I always love to see a more experienced opinion, adds a lot of value to the post. Keep pushing everyone, the jobs are there!

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