Excerpts from sheila miguez's message of 2016-02-28 16:47:46 +0100: > You may not have realized it, but your framing makes it seem more daunting > than it is for people who haven't had a chance to work on open source > projects.
well the question was about people who did not study programming, but want to change their career. but even for computer science students, i keep seeing people who manage to get a degree without doing any programming. so for hiring people into their first software development job, they have to demonstrate somehow that they already learned programming. for a computer science student, a programming test as part of the interview will do, but for anyone else they have to do more than that to convince me that they have what it takes to work in software development. and that's where contributions to Free Software projects help. and as for working two jobs, if you want to change your career you have to invest the time to prepare for that. if you don't have that time, i don't see how you want to achieve any kind of career change. heck, even if you are in the IT industry already, if you want to switch from being a java developer to work with ruby on rails, you better have worked on some rails side projects if you want to raise your chances, or if not rails, at least work with some other languages and frameworks besides java to show that you are not just a one-trick pony. if your job does not give you the opportunity to expand your skills, then you have to do it on your own. Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) in his book The Clean Coder, expects professional programmers to spend 20 hours a week on top of their 40 hour work week to be reading, practicing, learning and otherwise enhancing their career. that said, if i have the choice to hire a computer science student who did not do development work besides his or her assigned classes, and a biology student who spent any time that he or she could on software projects, then that biology student has a realistic chance of getting picked. greetings, martin. (oh, btw i am hiring :-) -- eKita - the online platform for your entire academic life -- chief engineer eKita.co pike programmer pike.lysator.liu.se caudium.net societyserver.org secretary beijinglug.org mentor fossasia.org foresight developer foresightlinux.org realss.com unix sysadmin Martin Bähr working in china http://societyserver.org/mbaehr/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
