I’m almost 30, and I want a drastic carrier change.
I’ve self taught myself PHP for years now, I technically don’t have any diploma, I’m a waiter for 10 years and I would like to get a job, coding related, how would I do without experience at all, at 30 ?
PS : I live in France
First, your case is not at all unique, many people I know did the same. Means you can do it for sure.
Next, obviously, you need to get the experience. Obviously, the best way is to get a job. It was much simpler in my time, a gamer buddy approached me and asked if i want to work on his e-commerce. I looked up a PHP tutorial, successfully run the code from it and said yes. Nowadays it’s almost impossible I presume, to get a job without any experience, given the number of people willing to write PHP. But nevertheless you can always teach yourself first.
Luckily, PHP has a very low learning curve, literally anyone can pick it up. However, it makes a very big problem also. Many people who just picked up a few hints of the language, consider themselves gurus and start teaching PHP left and right. I’d say there is only 1 good online tutorial to 99 courses/videos that would teach you how to be a very bad programmer. Ones from some Dani Krossing guy on youtube are especially bad. Most of coursera and tutorialrepublic are also a complete crap. The best course would be to buy a book. There are bad examples also, notably from Welling/Thomson which was written like 20 years ago and taught you extremely bad practices, with all subsequent editions being but a facelifting, making it comically self-contradicting. But at least the ratio is not that bad with books, I’d say 1:1. I would have recommended PHP & MySQL by Jon Duckett which is aimed exactly at your level, but it’s not out yet. While it’s not available I could suggest Modern PHP by Josh Lockhart, though it could be a bit hard for the first book.
Either way, give me a holler if you need some guidance/help. Or there is r/learnphp where you are more than welcome to ask post.
A good thing, PHP is very strong in France. Given your native country, I would suggest to look at Symfony framework which, although being internationally acclaimed, originates in France and getting the information and support in two languages is better than one. But a framework is a bit a distant goal for now, you need a solid foundation with basic PHP and mysql.
I second the recommendation of Symfony, it’s amazing.
I feel I need to elaborate on the difference between a good and a bad programmer. Or, rather, between being a programmer and non-programmer at all.
Many, too many people are taking programming as sort of a masonry. Their idea of creating a program is just to lay different bricks in the correct order. And once you learned all the brick types and the patterns you can lay the bricks in, it makes you a first class programmer. Boy, they cannot be more wrong. Unlike a building, a program is never static. It’s closer to a living organism. It grows, evolves, picks up diseases, reproduces. It’s always dynamic. You cannot just lay it down and leave alone. You always upgrade it, listen to it, care for it.
If something goes wrong, the non non-programmers’ idea is that they choose a wrong brick and need to find a correct one. But it’s never like this in the programming world. If you contacted a fly, it doesn’t mean you were built wrong. It just means something went wrong just now, and you’re up to find out what and fix it. If your program doesn’t work, you don’t just sit and stare at it. Instead, you should always run it, and listen to its aliments. It would be much more productive and sometimes the only way to get the idea what goes wrong. And it means that a good programmer always makes their program vocal, while a non-programmer tends to mute it.
Of course, at first we are all just mindlessly copy and paste some code patterns. But it’s very important to understand what does this part of code do and why. There is a big difference between “this problem is solved with this code” and “I do understand what the problem is and going to write a code to fix it”.
And here comes a problem with bad tutorials. They never teach you “why”. They only show you a couple bricks and a handful of patterns. They never teach how to make a program to talk to you. They never teach how to run a program, what to do after you wrote all the code. But in reality the program’s life doesn’t stop when you wrote the last line, it rather only starts there. and you need a tutorial that would tell you how to grow your program, not how to lay it out.
If you’re willing to accept an entry level salary this should be doable. Look for some positions for junior coders that match your skills and just apply. Make sure to add any valuable experience to your CV, even if it’s “just” hobby projects.
I started as a freelancer, found my own work, essentially got paid to learn the ropes, and then used that experience to get salary positions at various companies. I only have a high school diploma.
Security!
PHP is synonymous with self taught programmers who think of security as an afterthought, if at all. In fact PHP was developed that way.
So my advice is read up a lot (if you haven’t already) on security.
When applying for a job, press that you are very security conscious and can reel off the top 10 exploits
https://owasp.org/www-project-top-ten/
BTW this advice is not PHP specific. No matter what language you code in, even if its for internal use only think security first.
Advice I give all new programmers:
It doesn’t matter how smart you are, what language you’re working in, where or if you went to school, what your ethnic or economic background is, what your sex is… your first 100,000 lines of code are going to suck. It doesn’t matter what they are, they’re going to suck. Everyone’s first 100,000 lines suck. That’s OK. Keep writing, keep coding, keep rewriting the same thing in 4 different ways to learn about it. Get through that 100,000 lines as quickly as you can, whether it’s paid or not.
And give yourself the time to eventually not-suck. It will take time, just like for everyone else. That’s OK. 🙂
Do personal projects, read books and blogs, and get to the point where you can make an application on the own, then volunteer your time to build resume experience while you start job hunting. Be sure to use a major framework (I like Laravel), since you’ll likely need experience in one of them and will learn good code practices from it.
>Be sure to use a major framework
Good idea. To find out what will benefit you most, have a look at the job openings in your area. You can get a great idea and there will be no question about what is popular.
Do you really mean he might get some good coding habits from laravel the framework of magic?:)
Two suggestions: Coding boot camp and System specialization
I’m not sure if similar organizations exist in France, but I transitioned from a non-IT career to a full stack developer role after attending a coding boot camp.
The one I went to is called General Assembly and it was focused on JavaScript full stack web development. PHP is a different animal, but I was able to teach myself PHP based on the skills I learned in the boot camp.
Services like the one I mentioned above are not accredited universities and you generally reap what you sow (ie you can be successful if you work hard and learn), but they’re not guaranteed successes; < 50% of people I attended the course with work in software development. The courses generally involve projects that exhibit experience with the fundamentals of software development, which you can use a resource to point towards during the interview process.
It’s a time and financial commitment, but it was worth the costs to pivot to a career with higher potential future earnings.
2) Also, there are a lot of framework recommendations in this thread. Have you considered specializing in a platform or system? If you have any interest in CMS development, Drupal is open source and runs on PHP. More of a niche than most software development but I’ve been able to find work for it consistently in the last few years.
Best of luck.
If possible, find a local PHP developer group (even if they’re only online at the moment)
<opinion>
If you want to head towards senior quicker, learn the base language before diving into one of the big frameworks. You said you’ve been doing some PHP for years, but please brush up on OOP and basic design patterns. I have conducted way too many interviews where the developer has too much reliance on a framework (I simply call them framework developers). Some of them can’t even write a class from scratch. If you are unable to understand or replicate what the framework is doing for you, you have no business using the framework.
If you feel you must start with a framework, use a microframework that gives you minimally some glue, a DI container, and a router. A framework can be a wonderful tool if you understand its pros & cons (and every framework has both).
</opinion>
Also remember, with the world how it is now, don’t just search for work within your own country/continent.
As others have said, once you’re past the basics, look into the ecosystems like WordPress, Symfony, Laravel, etc and see what direction interests you. At the job level its probably going to involve something like that.
Look into the local job market and see what is available. Both on the main IT sites, and also more specific markets. ( https://larajobs.com for Laravel, etc..most big frameworks have them.)
The bootcamps and such can be a total waste of money or very valuable. There was one in my US city that was local and had excellent job placement rates with good local connections; I made hires from them. But this varies a ton, and if you’re considering it, talk to some graduated students first. Others give you a piece of paper and say good luck.
And…consider coding to be the job, not PHP. You’ll end up learning a lot of other languages and sort-of languages as you go.
I technically don’t have any diploma
…but PHP is probably good for that, as a start. I work for a Fortune 50 now and don’t have a degree. The last guy I hired has a dual masters. Its about what you know of course, and for me, also how well you fit on the team and can learn new things. I don’t have much use for brilliant jerks. 🙂
My way was coding plugins for frameworks, then raising into an operations job where I get to solve problems and automate ad-hoc work that our main app doesn’t handle by quickly gluing things using PHP. Technically I’m not writing PHP for a living, I’m solving technical problems for a living and I happen to use PHP (because it works wonders).
Tu es où en France ? Je suis un peu plus vieux mais je fais le même genre de reconversion, Effectivement miser sur Symfony, en France, c’est pas idiot !
Dans la Drôme !
Getting experience and simultaneously keeping eyes out for beginner jobs is good. Finding odd websites on craigslist etc as freelance is always a good way to get experience. Don’t go for the startups unless they’re paying up front, a lot of scams there.. There’s several other freelancer sites.
If you start developing sites with Drupal, WordPress, or Laravel, there are lots of examples of how to solve problems in those codebases you can learn from. There are also some comprehensive Udemy courses. Good luck!
Lauch your own Business. May it be a some freelancing or development of some Service. Make Demo projects which you can show to people and future employers. These are more valuable than degrees to companies
Sell your own software.
If he was proficient enough to build high quality software he wouldn’t need to post this question.
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