I may have the opportunity to go to a 4 month coding bootcamp free of charge (normally they are like $10-15k). I would be receiving severance and unemployment so financially I can afford to do it without any stress.
I would love to work for a healthcare tech startup and eventually (5 or so years from now) start my own company. I am a bit of a Luddite but I have done some basic coding on CodeAcademy. My aim is just to understand technology and software engineering better and develop some basic coding skills. I know a coding bootcamp won't make me a real SWE.
My sister @NotFrozenYetStillChosen is against it because she thinks ChatGPT will make any basic coding skills obsolete and if I do a SWE course then that sort of funnels me into that line of employment. She also thinks I can develop the skills I'm seeking on my own & that any startup is more focused on the team you bring. If I want to be a CEO/founder I should learn more business. She's very successful and knows business stuff so her opinion is pretty informed.
I do think she has a point but I'm still very drawn to this. My knowledge of technology is embarrassingly inadequate yet I find it so interesting….computers are like magic.
My other option is to get another big pharma job & pocket the severance as a bonus.
What do the nerds here advise? Especially the business nerds.
Edit: thank you business nerds, I will finish my project management certification instead and learn tech things on my own!!!
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PM would probably be a software job that you'd enjoy more than coding? You might not even need a bootcamp to get into the industry that way.
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Oddly enough I already paid for the project mgmt certification course, just abandoned it when I got my current job. I will def look into this and see what my sis says!!!
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Project management?
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Yeh sorry, I hate people who use unexplained acronyms online, and now I'm one of them.
Becoming a coder as a successful woman in your thirties would be a bit strange. People would think you were in witness protection or something.
PM lets you use your people management and organisation skills, it's a pretty easy job and you already have experience wrangling r-slurs all day.
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Awesome! I really truly appreciate this. I think you're right. I will learn more about software engineering on my own but do something else career-wise.
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True facts that mastering software engineering sucks it out of you and not everyone is cut out for it.
However, knowing how to code is just a useful skill in general for the understanding, and if you take to it you can prototype ideas.
However if you want to be a professional (or able to contribute to rdrama code for example) then you'll probably need to grind for 1-3 years learning design patterns, engineering lifecycle and all the common cowtools, security, algorithms etc. There's a reason bootcamps are 4 months and CS degrees are 4 years.
However… depending on your educational background, you might have half a CS degree worth of transferable knowledge, just unorganized. Moving from physics to CS was easy because I had the mathematical maturity and proven autism… if your pharma degree was more technical, you might be in a similar spot.
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I think it's helpful to know the basics about the things the people you are managing (cat wrangling) do so you can speak their language and have a good idea of when they are bullpooping you about how long something will take. But, I don't think it's really a necessity.
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Thank you!!!!
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Nobody in IT hires a manager with under 8yrs of experience in a big IT firm.
My advice would be to avoid IT entirely.
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Eh, I hate PMs that don't know how to code themselves.
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Me too but they're few and far between. I've worked with a couple of good PMs who can't code but are super-organised and can understand the general plan.
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you'd be better suited. Its pretty rough finding junior swe jobs right now anyway, especially for boot campers. PMs and TPMs jobs are still pretty decently available. TBH if I were you, I'd just take the pharma job cuz MONAYYYYYYY
Your sister is right though, you can always learn enough to be dangerous about coding for free online. Or just take a community college class on the basics.
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Thanks
i think I will or pursue this
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PM's are worth their weight in gold if they're good but kind of a meme about how useless and lacking of technical knowledge they are if they're not. Tbh, having technical knowledge will be fantastic if you can apply it, but more pay attention to keeping communication constant so everyone always knows what's going on.
Also, keep the motherlover moving. So many PM's just "well Bill has these reports due and we've been waiting on him for 3 months so no updates :)". Like b-word your project is stillborn. Can you take me off the mailing group if i don't actually need to do anything?
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A project manager is someone who believes that nine women can develop and birth a baby in one month
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