Here's what I did when was in my late teens & early 20s, and taught myself.
1. Copy famous artworks that you admire -- even just drawing in a notebook is great, to start.
2. Once you can copy art that you really like, start adding your own flair to things, develop a personal style
3. Experiment more & more
Just like with programming -- there are a ton of great books about how to paint, how to mix colors, etc.
You can buy books and work through them, whatever is most fun.
There are 2 key points, though:
* The only way to get better is by painting... you'll have to paint a lot
* You'll want to paint a lot +only+ if you're having fun.
So don't worry too much. Just grab some paints and enjoy yourself. It's a great hobby.
And try everything you can -- watercolor, oil, gouache, ink brush, encaustic, using the palette knife only, mixing with collage, pastels, all will teach you something. Just be consistent, and you will get good.
I transitioned into software development in my late 20's, and am very happy with the decision. I went back to school at ~27, and graduated just a few months short of 30.
34 is definitely not too old. While in school, I had classmates ranging in age from early 20s to late 40s. Everyone I graduated with is now employed and doing well. (Including those who started a decade later than either of us.)
Getting a 2nd Bachelor's degree in Computer Science worked for me. It only took 2 years, because I had a prior bachelor's degree, and it sounds like you'd be in the same situation.
Employers have generally been respectful of my prior experience as well (it was business focused, project management), so I don't think having worked in a different field is a bad thing at all.
Moreover, I work with plenty of software developers who started off in other scientific fields and made a transition to software more organically -- so it certainly can be done.
Ultimately, if you can pass programming interviews, you will be able to get a software dev job. It will be challenging, but you'll be happy you invested the time. Wishing you the best of luck!
Last time I traveled internationally (~10 years ago), I had to buy a separate international cell phone.
Not for privacy reasons -- but instead because my US-based phone wouldn't work in some of the other countries I'd be in. (At the protocol level, I suppose.)
Assuming it's not prohibitively expensive, why not do the same thing, now?
I agree that this is a troubling policy. But it seems simple to get around, if you were interested in doing so. It's also possible that this suggestion is naive, and feel free to let me know why, if so. =)
There's a short compilation of his essays called "Writings" that is a great place to start, for anyone interested. Most essays are < 15 pages long, IIRC.
Very simple, elegant arguments, with little fluff. One of the few philosophers I know whose writing is absent the usual obscurantist cruft.
I've read some of his more famous articles (i.e. - "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"), but I remember them being very political. Sort of an art-historical and aesthetic-theory application of Marx.
Which, personally, I enjoyed. But was surprised to see Benjamin's work referenced in that context. Could be that I'm missing something, or mis-remembering, though. This was years ago, now. =)
One positive thing about being in a fraternity -- it provides experience in dealing with and resolving conflict in a large organization.
For better or worse, navigating the internal politics of a clique such as a college fraternity is often similar to what many people later experience in the wilds of the corporate world.
You also get a lot of practice meeting & building rapport with a wide variety of peers (both male and female), if your fraternity socializes frequently.
These 'soft' social skills are just as much of a factor in determining salary as technical ones. And for all their warts and downsides, fraternities do provide you with good practice. Of course, you need to be wealthy enough to pay the dues, etc...
However -- more time socializing means less time for studying. So GPA goes down, but interpersonal skills go up. These new interpersonal skills pay off dividends later, though.
It's not that it's hard to learn this stuff. More so, it's tiresome and hard to care after watching the JS community re-inventing the same wheel(s), repeatedly.
Personally, I'd rather see the JS community solve a wider variety of problems.. instead of the same ones, over and over.
The amount of talent focused on building JS tools really is incredible. But it seems like the tools that generate the most hype always do the _same_ things, just in a shinier newer package. Which is frustrating.
I wasn't around at the time, but reading about programming languages past -- it seems like these are the same kinds of problems that fractured Lisp, back in the day.
The problem is this: It's fun, exciting, and relatively simple to roll your own X. So everyone does it. That's good. But too much fractures the community, instead of uniting it. Which.. may be more harmful than helpful, in the long-run. Time will tell. But the strongest & most productive communities typically converge on 'best-practices', once a problem is solved well enough. JS doesn't seem to do that. (At least not yet.)
So, I worked as a PM for about 3.5 years, in total. That was in the past, and now I work as a developer (not a manager anymore).
My guess is that a lot of this depends on the organization, and product/projects.
But as an opinion...
The politics/posturing & social aspects of the job are integral to shipping products, making positive incremental changes, and "getting things done".
As a PM, I definitely was not the boss. (Even though the success of the project was ultimately my responsibility.)
This meant I had to lead, persuade, and _negotiate_ very effectively -- always arguing what's best for the product, or the end-user.
So I guess I'd say that these sorts of politics aren't separate from building a good product. They're sort of the process for getting things
done.
But again, that's limited & personal experience. My companies were relatively small (20 - 50 people). In essence, I was figuring things out as I went along. (These were small businesses, and we all were.) Big organizations with lots of really established process may be different.
That's a very long story... But here's the essence.
I got a degree totally unrelated to CS. (Think "arts". Decent school. Top 50. But not prestigious.) Bounced around at not-great jobs for awhile, living in NYC and barely making ends meet.
Then I managed to get a job at an online media startup (essentially a management role), which was a very lucky break.
That got me into software, and I was able to use that experience to move into product/project management. I did that for a few years at some boutique companies, working crazy hours but learning a lot.
Then I decided to go back to school and study CS (starting at undergrad level again)... so I spent a few years re-learning everything from the ground up. That includes all the math, stats, etc... that you'd expect from a typical undergrad engineering program. It took awhile to finish, and was frustrating at times, but it was worth it.
Fast forward a few years... and now I work as software engineer. I focused on ML during my studies, and again (with lots of luck) managed to get a job at an R&D lab doing machine learning, during my final year in school.
I've since moved and now work at a company that does low-level OS-type work. (Which I actually enjoy more than ML.)
It's been a wild ride, but it's been fun.
Non-linear paths like this rarely get mentioned, but I met dozens of people with similar stories when I went back to school. It's hard, but can definitely be done.
I changed careers more than once between 20 and 30. To/from radically different fields.
Besides that, your skill-set as a programmer is _much_ more than your choice of language/web framework.
You have skills in:
- Building things
- Decomposing and solving abstract problems
- etc..
And don't let a perceived lack of math skills intimidate you. This stuff is learnable, with effort and time. ML is most-decidedly not magic. You can learn it, if you have an interest.[1]
That said, if programming is losing its luster, but you still enjoy software -- try product/project management. Good pay, and it's a very social job where your tech skills will be valued.
If you want something dramatically different -- the sky's the limit. At 20, you could switch to Business, Law, Medicine, Journalism, Banking, whatever. Biggest lesson I've learned: don't be afraid to try. Good luck!
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[1] (For context, I started studying math much later than you (~27), and have worked on ML in a research lab, since then. But when I was 20, I barely passed college algebra... Point is, you have time and can learn if you want.)
Personally, I think that written language is a more natural way to describe and reason about complex systems and symbols.
It's the same difference between writing mathematical proofs as systems of equations vs. proof by drawing a diagram, or making a visualization.
Proofs can be written using both methods, but if you have a strong command of the written/symbolic vocabulary, it is faster and more succinct.
Put another way: I can describe the landscape of a lush, green Tuscan Countryside--with rolling hills, morning dew, and and crisp feeling of the first rays of sun cutting through the mist--in just a few lines. You get a picture in your head, and it is likely very similar to what was in mine.
Imagine now, that we can't use words. We have to draw pictures. It will take much longer to get the same point across. Language--for certain purposes--is more efficient, and more information dense.
Just like the stock market, college is also an investment. There is risk involved.
One of the main problems is that this is NOT communicated well. (If it all.)
Too many people take on huge long-shot risks that are unlikely to pay off.
Yes, if you get an English degree and become a professional writer selling books and screenplays at $1MM a pop -- that's an awesome and incredible gig. But not many people can get it. The $30k - $150k for that degree is a very risky investment.
On the other hand, spending $30k for a degree in engineering, CS, physics, math, etc... is much less risky. And it's a better investment. However--even in this case--maybe it's not worth the extra $100k for a private college. Maybe Big State U is good enough, and a safer bet with similar outcomes.
When I first went to college, everyone around me said: "it doesn't matter what you major in, just get a degree and you'll be fine." They were wrong. It doesn't work that way anymore (if it ever did).
Communicating this risk/reward tradeoff, and what it means for one's future, is the source of most college-related money problems.
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Personal anecdote: I have a CS degree, but started out in a liberal arts discipline. So those experiences form my opinions.
Early in my career, I worked at a few different businesses where management expected us to work 12+ hour days. Mostly web development & design.
We did it, but the secret was that we didn't spend all of that time actually heads-down, working. (Surprise.)
We were in the office for 12+ hours (sometimes until 3am, having client calls and presentations at midnight), but how much of that time were we actually getting creative, productive work done? Maybe half.
And here's the problem:
The hard part was, I was managing projects, and I had developers putting in 12+ hour days against my budgets, when I knew that maybe 6 of those hours were actually productive work time. Everything went over budget, across the board, for everyone's projects. At least on paper.
'Moral' of the story: you can require people to work whatever time frames you want. And if you pay well enough, people will do it. (At least until they burn out, or find a more prestigious/higher-paying job.) But it's a waste of everyone's time and money, and it creates more problems than its solves.
Worst of all, you're creating an environment where the culture of working 12+ hours is nothing but theatre. You spend half your time creating and carefully cultivating an artifice, just to meet management's expectations... which they know are unrealistic. Talk about being unproductive.
Don't worry -- you will be 100% fine. What kind of jobs are you applying for?
If you're looking at true entry-level jobs, then having 0 work experience is not a problem. And those jobs do exist, just look for them specifically.
Beyond that, interviewers often make remarks like this, even if it isn't really a big hang up for them. Don't let them see you sweat, that's the only mistake you can make. Just own it, and say ok -- but I have, x, y, z -- and I can do this.
It's like when you try to sell a car. The buyers like to kick the tires and see if they deflate. They aren't trying to disqualify you, they're __already_negotiating__, and trying to bring the price down.
I had never studied business before (at any level), but found myself in a position where I was managing software projects, and dealing with MBA's from our client companies every single day.
I wouldn't say this is a replacement for going to business school, but for me -- it helped me understand the world my clients were coming from, and how they were incentivized.
So yes -- very practical book, easy to get through, and highly recommended. Gives a broad overview of the field, so you can at least speak the lingo.
There's nothing wrong with slow growth--that's how most small to mid-size businesses operate, both in the US and abroad.
But as a Silicon Valley tech investor, you're not incentivized to fund companies that grow slowly over time. You're incentivized to fund moonshots that rapidly explode, take over the world, and get you the highest ROI in the shortest period of time.
So, if a company isn't growing exponentially every year--and as an investor--my salary/job-evaluations are dependent on successfully funding companies that grow exponentially, I'd have no incentive to invest.
And as a result, if the company needs a constant cash-infusion to stay alive--it needs to grow exponentially.
It's either: (A) get cash, grow fast; or (B) no need for new cash, grow slow.
(A) is the SV way.
(B) is more common in other industries/sectors, parts of the world.
Neither is inherently/morally better (my opinion only), but both are a functional result of the systems and incentives in their respective professional ecosystems.
1. Copy famous artworks that you admire -- even just drawing in a notebook is great, to start.
2. Once you can copy art that you really like, start adding your own flair to things, develop a personal style
3. Experiment more & more
Just like with programming -- there are a ton of great books about how to paint, how to mix colors, etc.
You can buy books and work through them, whatever is most fun.
There are 2 key points, though:
So don't worry too much. Just grab some paints and enjoy yourself. It's a great hobby.
And try everything you can -- watercolor, oil, gouache, ink brush, encaustic, using the palette knife only, mixing with collage, pastels, all will teach you something. Just be consistent, and you will get good.