Keynote article ...
Looking for a career change - Physician to Web Site Designer
A change of career mid-life has always been popular, and something more sedentary has often been the choice of people who have started off in something that's predominantly active such the military or sport. I have trained an Olympic Judo Champion ... in programming. And with the current economic changes around the world, there are far more people exploring this sort of option at present. For some it will work, and will work well but for others it will be a frustrating road if they're lacking in the commitment or aptitude. So - should you take this route / this new career path is you're thinking about it?
It's worth looking at. It's worth considering the options, it's worth seeing if you enjoy the challenge. And it can be done. I headed this article "Physician to web Site Designer" as I have just completed an email response to someone who's considering that route, and asked if I could write him a series of tutorials so that he could learn at "nominal cost" and save himself course and travel fees; I had to write back and say "no" as it doesn't make sense for me to invest all my time (and time = money) into him when he's not prepared to invest his own money and - I suspect not enough of his time. But at the same time, I have given training - and just a very little training - to a surgeon who has gone on to do really great things in IT. There was an aptitude, a clear thought process, and a focused mind there and I was very much the facilitator rather than the ogre pushing him along, or the encourager who kept picking him up when a code issue or other frustration arose.
A change from xxxxx to IT / Web design / PHP is a huge change. There's a lot to learn and there are a lot of good people out there ahead of you.
Still reading?
Then let me share the second tranche of my answer to "Craig", who wrote 'I expect you'll know what this issue is and sort it quickly' as he wrote about something I didn't actually know, but read up on within a couple of minutes and could offer some direction on.
I wrote:
I've been in IT for the best part of 40 years - you talk about me being quick sorting these these things out and, yes, I probably am, simply because I've seen so many things happen. An aptitude for it is just one small element - it's the experience of saying " yes - I've seen that sort of pattern before and the type of thing to look for is xxxxx".
I used to say that I could often do in a day what a newcomer would take a week to do, but I have changed that to "I can often do in a morning". And that's simply the time saved by experience of being able to code quickly (near automatically), to reuse my own and other's code, and to spot errors very quickly indeed - and again there's an experience factor there. There are probably eight to 12 really common errors in PHP, for example, and some of them are not obvious from the error messages to the newcomer. The newcomer often blames PHP (or the other language he's using) for this obtuseness, but in my view is wrong to do so. For every time you run a script and get an error message, you'll run that same script thousands of times after correcting the error, and the last thing you want is a performance hit added to the language because it's spending time making the messages really useful for 1 case in a thousand. (If you're concerned with this, go for the Java model where code is not compiled every time - but that's another story!)
Why am I writing this ... even in an answer like this - for efficiency / re-use. This is not the first time I've been asked a question like this, it won't be the last, and it's going be added to my resource kit ;-) .... a.k.a. my blog. Then I can refer back to it easily. And even in that statement there's something of the philosophy of coding coming through.
If you are looking at a career change to web sites / computing (and this change, which has always been a popular aspiration, is even more prevalent at the moment) then you need to be prepared to invest heavily in doing so, and know that there's a lot of competition out there and you will need the aptitude for it to work for you, or enjoy it so much that you can put in long, long hours which will often be frustrating. The investment I talk about will certainly be an investment in time - on projects that take you five times longer than they would take me, and at the end of which you say "if only I had known when I started" so you may end up redoing them. And it may be a financial investment too. Training courses such as the ones we offer can seriously short-cut some elements of the time taken, and can save you an awful lot of experimenting by helping you learn how to read code and fix code errors, how to code for re-use, and how to avoid blind alleys - and the gains carry on for years and years after the course.
Naturally, as a training provider I recommend the use of such courses but if you choose to say "they're not for me" then you can still get there. Your road will be a longer one, and if you value your time even at 25c per hour, you'll probably end up spending more in the long term, finishing up with code that's not going to be as clean / robust / maintainable. Ah - but I did say "probably". It's possible that you could be a budding Rasmus Lerdorf, Larry Wall or Guido van Rossum and produce something that's quite extraordinary, very quickly, and takes the world by storm. But come to think of it, I don't know what courses if any they attended!
Enough of my writing ... good luck however you choose to go. And do look us up if you happen to be in the UK and passing near to our area at any stage in the future.
(this article written on 2009-04-28) |
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A little more about this newsletter ...
At Well House Consultants, we run niche IT training courses ... and we run a hotel for delegates on those courses and other visitors to Melksham too. And we make a lot of friends - have a lot of ambassadors with whom we want to keep in touch. So every day Graham (that's me, writing this piece) puts together an article or two which might include the latest sample programs that I've written during the current course, new information about
Well House Manor - our business hotel, tips on search engine optimisation,
announcements of upcoming public courses, pictures of local places, and even (on occasions) rants and whimsical pieces to keep those friends up to date and in touch. The feeds are available directlt via the Blog -
"The Horse's Mouth", they're on our
Twitter Feed and you can find me at my
LinkedIn profile.
But most people just want to look us up occasionally - every month or two, and then to catch up on the latest news just for their particular subjects of interest ... and that's what this newsletter is about
You'll find above the titles of ALL the new articles written in the last two months, listed by major subject area, and showing as
(new) with their date of publication. You'll find additional articles in each category too - topping each category up to a minimum of five articles. And you'll find a link at the end of each section which lets you expand that section to show the titles of every article that's been published in that section. After all, "the old ones are often the best ones", aren't they?