In highschool I remember changing HTML markup and seeing how that changed how the page was rendered. That entertained me. I've always loved picking things apart and figuring out how they work.
I studied economics in college (practically no programming was part of that education). After college I worked in sales/client support for a large financial software company for a couple of years. I like to learn on my own so I studied the financial derivatives markets. That got redirected into learning some more math.
After working on a few projects with software developers I decided that I may actually enjoy their work more than what I was doing at the time (helping sales people position our product and training clients how to use our product). Until this point in time, my only experience with code was getting through levels on pythonchallenge.com and projecteuler.net, and recording and tweaking Excel VBA macros. I approached my company's R&D recruiters and asked to be interviewed for an entry level position as a software developer. After a few rounds of interviews and many questions "Why do you want to do this?", I earned a spot in our entry level training program. I was advised that if I wanted to make it through this program, I would need to be up to speed on C, basic algorithms and data structures and vim. I listened and in 3-6 months I worked my way through a book on C and Tim Roughgarden's class on coursera.org. I finished that training program successfully a few months ago and am now a freshly minted entry level software developer.
It's pretty refreshing to be a novice in a field that's interested me for such a long time. So far I am significantly less stressed at work and really enjoy what I am doing. It's also fun being a 'new employee' after already working at the company for a few years. Sometimes I feel like a spy. Some people doubted whether I'd be able to make the switch so I am pretty happy that it's working out so far. I like being able to prove people wrong.
I studied economics in college (practically no programming was part of that education). After college I worked in sales/client support for a large financial software company for a couple of years. I like to learn on my own so I studied the financial derivatives markets. That got redirected into learning some more math.
After working on a few projects with software developers I decided that I may actually enjoy their work more than what I was doing at the time (helping sales people position our product and training clients how to use our product). Until this point in time, my only experience with code was getting through levels on pythonchallenge.com and projecteuler.net, and recording and tweaking Excel VBA macros. I approached my company's R&D recruiters and asked to be interviewed for an entry level position as a software developer. After a few rounds of interviews and many questions "Why do you want to do this?", I earned a spot in our entry level training program. I was advised that if I wanted to make it through this program, I would need to be up to speed on C, basic algorithms and data structures and vim. I listened and in 3-6 months I worked my way through a book on C and Tim Roughgarden's class on coursera.org. I finished that training program successfully a few months ago and am now a freshly minted entry level software developer.
It's pretty refreshing to be a novice in a field that's interested me for such a long time. So far I am significantly less stressed at work and really enjoy what I am doing. It's also fun being a 'new employee' after already working at the company for a few years. Sometimes I feel like a spy. Some people doubted whether I'd be able to make the switch so I am pretty happy that it's working out so far. I like being able to prove people wrong.