If you have independent software development experience, and curiosity/discipline to acquire more software development skills, you might consider trying to become an “X who programs”. This thread has some info. Basically, get official credentials in some fairly lucrative & difficult field that has a need for software developers, and do independent study in software development (and maybe statistics/data science type stuff). More links: 1, 2. This could also be a good way to come up with an idea for a software company in some fairly technical industry (meaning relatively high barriers to entry, and possibly corporate customers that will be willing to pay good money for the product you offer). Going in to traditional software development will be a solid fallback plan, since software company employers care more about your skills than your degree, and computer science knowledge isn’t actually all that useful for practical software development.
This data suggests that combining software development with stats/machine learning/big data skills can be relatively lucrative, at least in the current job market. My understanding is that data scientist employers are also fairly lax about official credentials.
I highly recommend the “X who programs” path-it helped me increase my earnings by about 150% over the course of 2 years. It was substantially more useful than concentrating solely on my programming skills or marketing/risk/statistics skills.
Sure. The gist of it is that I worked in fields like marketing and analytics which were high-impact, but where people spent a lot of time doing things manually (this was ~5 years ago-there’s a lot more automation in these sections of companies today.) I wasn’t the best marketer or the best programmer, but I realized a lot of things that people did every week could be automated. So I automated those tasks, saving a lot of man-hours for a lot of very expensive people. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s very easy to make the case for an 80% salary increase when you’ve just completely automated 4 jobs.
Today there is a term for this role-”growth hacker.” But in general, if you work in an environment where not much automation has already been done, then automation is massively valuable. I’ve saved/earned companies millions of dollars with awful code that happened to solve the business problem.
Heh, now I feel silly for not noticing your username… I actually linked to the Quora question where you left an answer in my original comment. Thanks for the info!
If you have independent software development experience, and curiosity/discipline to acquire more software development skills, you might consider trying to become an “X who programs”. This thread has some info. Basically, get official credentials in some fairly lucrative & difficult field that has a need for software developers, and do independent study in software development (and maybe statistics/data science type stuff). More links: 1, 2. This could also be a good way to come up with an idea for a software company in some fairly technical industry (meaning relatively high barriers to entry, and possibly corporate customers that will be willing to pay good money for the product you offer). Going in to traditional software development will be a solid fallback plan, since software company employers care more about your skills than your degree, and computer science knowledge isn’t actually all that useful for practical software development.
This data suggests that combining software development with stats/machine learning/big data skills can be relatively lucrative, at least in the current job market. My understanding is that data scientist employers are also fairly lax about official credentials.
I highly recommend the “X who programs” path-it helped me increase my earnings by about 150% over the course of 2 years. It was substantially more useful than concentrating solely on my programming skills or marketing/risk/statistics skills.
Cool! Can you give us details?
Sure. The gist of it is that I worked in fields like marketing and analytics which were high-impact, but where people spent a lot of time doing things manually (this was ~5 years ago-there’s a lot more automation in these sections of companies today.) I wasn’t the best marketer or the best programmer, but I realized a lot of things that people did every week could be automated. So I automated those tasks, saving a lot of man-hours for a lot of very expensive people. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s very easy to make the case for an 80% salary increase when you’ve just completely automated 4 jobs.
Today there is a term for this role-”growth hacker.” But in general, if you work in an environment where not much automation has already been done, then automation is massively valuable. I’ve saved/earned companies millions of dollars with awful code that happened to solve the business problem.
I’ve written this up in a bit more detail on Quora and on Hacker News
Heh, now I feel silly for not noticing your username… I actually linked to the Quora question where you left an answer in my original comment. Thanks for the info!