I've been thinking of going to school to code/program. The problem is, I do not have any experience with computers besides the "normal stuff." I helped my friend build a computer yesterday, and though he has done it multiple times, I seemed to understand it more than he did and took the lead of actually putting it together.

I'm just needing a career change and I don't know if I should do something in computers.

A little about me:

I'm turning 26 years old next week.
I have a degree in Social Sciences.
I am very "business minded."
I consider myself to be pretty smart and can learn anything, though not a great at self teaching.
I have a high IQ and am an ENTP personality.
Diagnosed with ADD but do not take medication because it kills my creativity.


Looking for advice.

None of the above things make good programmers. And saying ADD spawns creativity is the most asinine thing I have heard in a while. Diagnosed? Yea self diagnosed. Real people with ADD aren't able to focus on one thing long enough to be creative. Shame on you thinking you are cool and quirky for pretending to have that disorder.

And building a computer is nothing like programming. You think because you can build an awesome house with legos that you can design a system which builds it's own Lego houses?

I know you said you are not great at self teaching, but i would still go ahead and take a couple of online courses (coursera has great options) or simply try to read up some tutorials on a language like java and try to get a base understanding.

After that,j ust mess around and try to solve some math problems using code (projecteuler) or other simple programs

If you have fun solving these puzzles and making programs, then i'd say go for it. it's never to late to do something you love

But I definitely wouldnt base this career choice off simply building computers. You have to really enjoy programming and challenging yourself with code if you want to get into this field.
Anyways I know how it feels to be lost and not knowing what to do, so i hope it works out for you

This post was edited by oOn on Apr 8 2014 03:11pm

+1 to above posts

building computer =/= programming

Well, I have very limited experience in the subject, but from the top of my head:

(For an 'overall' good developer):


-Communication skills

-Documentation skills

-Business sense (kind of like Comm. skills but also includes etiquette, etc)

-Problem Solving Skills (Can you think outside of the box and apply/modify previous methods to suit your needs?)

-Time management skills (including software development techniques and models)

-Being able to use search engines to find stuff you need (aka not always pestering senior devs)

and probably more

if you have ADD, programming is not for you. you'll spend 8 hours a day digging through log files, debugging code, writing new code. if you can't sit still and pay attention for hours at a time, you might wanna try something else. office jobs in general might not be great.



Unless i misread it, i don't think he said that. he said the medication he takes kills his creativity.

This post was edited by carteblanche on Apr 8 2014 05:44pm

I'd suggest you give light scripting a whirl and see what you think of it. Start with something repetitious that could possibly be automated. Pick a language (perl, powershell, python) and figure out how to automate something. Once you get that puzzle figured out, move onto something completely different and more complex. Also, check out the Intro to Computer Science class at udemy.com. That is a great introduction to programming.

You could also look at something more along the lines of traditional IT work instead of programming. Look at job descriptions for jobs like helpdesk, desktop support, desktop administration, server/systems/network admin.

Yea, rereading it, I may have jumped the gun. Dunno why I read that as he refuses to take his medication because he felt his ADD made him more creative.

In my defense, I had 4 people in my ear:

One Test engineer talking my ear off about issues they were running into deploying recent build to beta region
One Test engineer talking my other ear off about issues she ran into during regression testing due to her 0 experience with web services for a job that deals with nothing but web service testing.
QA manager harrassing me via IM as to why I am not dropping all of my DEV tasks to fix the problems her team members are having (ie: do her work for her)
All the while attemping to pair program/code review with a coworker via teleconference.

Maybe I took my frustration out on him. My bad, bro.

Where do you work?

I do integration services development for a company that produces software for financial institutions. I would rather not say exactly. It is a high probability that you use software written by me though