As someone without experience programming, how long would it take me to get enough knowledge to be able to get a job...

As someone without experience programming, how long would it take me to get enough knowledge to be able to get a job? Which direction should I go to? I'm pretty free so I could study a lot.

please respond

About 8

if you can program well you can get a job with it. nobody learns at the same speed so how will we know how long it will take to get competent at it?
i suggest instead of asking these questions start learning and programming

Idk are you good at problem solving? Good at math?
Learning the syntax of any given language takes about a month or two.

I'd say I'm fairly decent at problem solving, but my math is very rusty. I haven't done any math since highschool and I'm 25.

I'm about to, but I don't know which direction to take. Should I get into webdev? Is there anything I can do to increase my chances of getting a job after I'm done learning? How do I know I'm done learning? How do you get experience that would make it easier to get a job?

make some interesting projects

Get a degree at a good university. Doesn't matter that much if its comp.sci, infosec,
pure maths with some programming courses on the side, ...

No money for that or time, really.

What kind of stuff counts as interesting? What's the line between interesting and interesting but useless? Thanks for replying user, I'm trying to pull my life back together after getting a degree in humanities.

you are never done learning, especially in webdev, since new technologies come out 'daily'

If you want an entry level web dev job and work your ass off in the free time you have. About a year. but thats going to mean sacrificing going out on weekends, evenings, all the time. Above all build a decent portfolio, have an online presence and network. You're 95% likely to find the job through networking so go to meetup.com and start talking to people.

Even at that point youll still be very junior but you should be over the initial hump of not understanding programming.

>I'm pretty free so I could study a lot.
I take its the money then.

Read SICP, if you can't finish it don't bother with proper programming and start learning webdev.

7

Just go to college and get a degree.

>how long would it take me to get enough knowledge to be able to get a job
About the time it takes to get a bachelor's degree

Whats SICP?

lol, bro they want a "get rich quick" scheme.

They think that b/c of IT certs they can somehow learn about data structures, algorithms, programming languages, essential maths all in their "own" "short" "free time".

Sure, you can if you're autodidact; buuuuut if you've never done any of this before you should literally go to school.

Even if by some off chance you were able to learn everything from an applied IT degree or CS degree you'd still have to get into the door for an interview which is the hardest part.

Hey OP, it took me a year of dedicated studying (I aimed at 8 hrs/day, but realistically I was doing 5 or less) to go from 0 to employed, doing Python backend. My advice is study webdev (in4 the incoming shitstorm) because it's the easiest way into getting a job as a self-taught. Once you have that first job, keep on studying and branch off to whatever you want. No math is needed for webdev, but logic and problem-solving is welcome. For the specifics of what to study, go to /wdg/. If you know what's good for you, stay away from /dpt/ for the first year. And please, ignore all the SICP shills. Also, install gentoo, because this is Sup Forums after all.

How did you manage to get an interview?

>t. (((quota))) employee

Going from 0 to employed with nothing but free resources and a lot of free time, it took me 6 years before I got an engineering position. If you actually invested focus in education and then contributing to projects, you could probably do it in 3-5 years without spending a cent on anything other than electricity and bandwidth.

Google is your friend for projects. There are thousands of them out there, just pick 1 that seems interesting to you. For example, I'm a networking newfag and setting up a SFTP Filezilla server is interesting for me.

Not all places require a degree, you just apply to tons of places, someone will be interested. Also, like some user said before me, network like a bitch. Go to at least one or two meetup.com meetings per week. Especially if they are hosted by some company (as opposed to a random bar or whatever), because that means the company is having trouble hiring enough talented people, so they put on that show and agree to host events in the hopes of sifting through the crap and finding talented programmers more easily.

Not much. Learn Java. They’re always looking for Java devs.

You’ll be in direct competition with pajeets though, but you got to start somewhere.

Once you learn a language it’s easy to learn other languages. For webdev, you’ll have to learn the ‘stacks’, Python and/or JS for backend, a bit of CSS and HTML, alongside JS for the frontend, database design, frameworks to hold it all in, and a bit of troubleshooting the ecosystem you’re doing it all in. Oh, and you’ll have to learn version control as well, and getting used to it is a must.

A meme book that uses an ancient meme language that is completely different from every other language on earth.

this was meant for

Can I join existing projects and help with them, instead of starting one on my own? I have a little bit of experience programming (python and c#) and know some IT (webapp stuff and some low level exploitation) and a little bit of asm. Would pursuing an IT career be a better idea? What has better chances of employment after a year or two of studying? Also I should mention that I'm from a poor country so I wouldn't mind some lazy americans outsourcing their work to me, that would be huge money for me.

you can join any open projects on github, sure, the problem is that the barrier of entry is kinda high because people who are actually developing projects have got the basics down, so the stuff they need help with is not something a beginner learning to program could do.

I still haven't figured out how to get into a project that doesn't have perfect documentation or 1 on 1 communication with people on the team. Trying to grasp a project even from it's main entry point is just impossible for me for anything non-trivial.

I'm actually already a part of one project (c#) but this project isn't something I can show off for an interview. I can understand code, make edits and do code monkeying.
How do you actually report your projects tho? Do you give them your github account? Do they check your commits to see how much you contributed to the project? What gives your projects legitimacy in the eyes of the company you're applying to?

If you can copy from stackoverflow you can find work.

Are you ready to be a Code Monkey? There's your answer.