A Business grad wanting to jump ship to Web development (employment, alternatives)

[healthy_]

I like tinkering with things and actually affecting how sites, apps or OSes behave... writing cose is creative but the program and markup languages are more logical than foreign natural languages. Learning a natural foreign language is next to useless if you don't plan to live where they speak it. But you can practice coding any time and place. I'd rather code than using accounting software for inputting numbers.

Omg again the boring business analytics, I can't believe it. I don't want anything like that. I find geeks and artsy ppl are usually much better than the evil bores (grads in economics, accounting, business, journalism, foreign languages, statistics).

[DanielWayne]

Business analytics is where the jobs are right now. That and data science, but data science will require stuff like calculus and statistics.

Web development has it's pros and cons:

Pros - Lots of jobs.

Cons - A bazillion people are jumping on the bandwagon right now because a lot of jobs have a low barrier to entry. Also web development programming changes FAST. You will need to be perpetually reading or watching videos or taking some kind of class.

[Serious Conversation]

Originally Posted by healthy_

Because I don't like the aggressive marketing types.
Btw I've worked with Windows registry, customizing my OS etc. most business grads don't know how to do. I am great at breaking computers by stumbling into bugs and circumventing system protections of any kind. Want to test your new software, let me discover its bugs, I sure will. I am like the pied piper of software/web bugs.

The Web Dev market here in Bulgaria is huge. Too few people, too many jobs.... and an IT guy sure lives better here than in Western Europe due to the big salaries and the low standard and taxes.

The thing is that the hobbyist style work with OS' and such basically leads to do desktop support jobs. You might be able to land an entry level system engineering job in a Windows shop with some certs.

[healthy_]

^Do those pay more than an accounting review clerical jobs and the like?

I can tell you that - writing web pages was way more exciting than discussing politics or music on some message board. That excitement when the site finally loaded correctly!

[MLSFan]

We aren't in Bulgaria, we don't know what the pay scale is for your region... but most likely, it is about the same

[healthy_]

Well for now it's my new (rediscovered old) hobby. You never know what might come out of it. There are many stories online and maybe I can get a job at a small firm where I can basically learn on in the job and follow-up with something better.

On first look JavaScript looks more logical than a natural foreign language which makes it look not so scary (I can never gasp the logic behind French for example!).

[Serious Conversation]

Originally Posted by healthy_

^Do those pay more than an accounting review clerical jobs and the like?

I can tell you that - writing web pages was way more exciting than discussing politics or music on some message board. That excitement when the site finally loaded correctly!

A systems engineer would make more than an AP clerk. It's probably about the same as a standard GL staff accountant.

[Vasily]

Originally Posted by move4ward

Isn't the web development market saturated? I know a few guys that started in web development in the $40k-$49k range in Texas. They quit and moved into analytics or cybersecurity for a 50% raise.

Yep, it's saturated at the low end, and most of the freelance projects on sites like Upwork are snapped up by offshore developers with very low hourly rates. I had a company in India help with a project about 15 years ago, and I asked the manager how they could afford to run a company staffed by top notch software developers at their hourly rates; he said salaries that are peanuts in the U.S. provide a very good living over there.

However -- I worked as a SharePoint business analyst in my last IT position before retiring from a 35+year software career. You need a specialty like SharePoint to compete today - just "knowing some HTML and CSS" isn't enough, everyone's nine year old nephew has that skill set. This article lists some of the hot trends in web development today:

https://blog.soshace.com/en/2019/03/...ends-for-2019/

The international bank I was working for when I retired was aggressively moving toward cloud computing (virtual servers in the cloud), meaning no more big server farms. Also, security is obviously a huge thing in the banking industry. The key is, you need specific skills that are in demand. I've been retired for a year and a half and my inbox is still full of emails from headhunters looking for SharePoint design skills.

This may also be of interest to the OP:

https://thebestschools.org/careers/b...chnology-jobs/

[healthy_]

Accountant clercs here barely make the equivalent of 500 Euro (if they're lucky). A financial call center worker makes 400, yet you have to be like a polyglot (waste of time obviously) . A low level coder can start from 1000. A better one at 1500 Euro. With a rent of 300 for a whole apartment it's better to be an average coder than an excellent foreign language or statistics wiz in Eastern Europe. My ex classmate (an excellent student) who graduated in French language is seeking a job as a secretary. That much studying for becoming a secretary to a businessman that's not smarter than you (many businesspeople here are gangsters that got lucky instead of self-made).

[bobsell]

Originally Posted by DanielWayne

Business analytics is where the jobs are right now. That and data science, but data science will require stuff like calculus and statistics.

There are no business analytics or data science jobs that require no experience, so a career changer can't get in.