Plenty of none coding tech roles you can get into as well.
"Just learn to Code" they said... the TRUTH about Coding / Programming Jobs
- Thread starter Carlton Banks
- Start date
King
The black man is always targeted.
Every major company has these departments that dont require full stack coding skills
Cybersecurity
risk and technologically controls
audit
application support
Just off of the top of my head.
So many cacs with degrees that have nothing to do with IT/cybersecurity/risk have been able to get into this space.
No coding skills required
Rhyme n Tekniq
Superstar
I'm going to try not to rant but "Passion" is a tirgger word for me. It sets me the fukk off and to be super real with you, is probably the single driving force behind me going so hard Initially.
When I was unemployed, feeling like the walls were closing in on me I attended this job fair at this IT boot camp school I was attending, I got a couple of
vibes from a few of the vendors I slid my resume to which I was totally prepared for, But then I got to the table with this Asian guy.When I handed him my struggle resume with all these manual labor jobs with just an A+ cert to my name, he had the
face and instead of just saying "thank you for your time" or "we'll be in touch", He proceeds to go on this elitist fake -ass wanna be Ted Talk monologue about "passion", not even talking to me , but talking at me like a wall and was basically insinuating I was a bum who didnt belong and was just trying take any job I can get and that I I dont posses the passion and qualities to have a career in tech... Iike the only way I could have a career in tech is if I was some uncouth hobbyist incel who's been building Rasberry Pis and studying quantum computing since I was 5 yrs old or some shyt.He kept going on and on about passion and the more he kept talking the more I felt the need to physically assail him and murder him right there on the spot. I'm not joking or being exaggerate. I felt so low that I seriously considered just duffing him out and stomping his face in. It was a split second decision that made me not act on my impulses.
I swallowed my pride, made peace with not only my rejection but my then current lot in life and I thought to myself "yeah I'm fukked up in the game, But this'll never happen again, Ima make these bytch ass nikkas a believer"
I learned to ignore the inner voice of my own self doubt and other people's opinions and just grind grind grind.
There were no preacher's, life coaches, mentors, confidants or self-help gurus; I had to spiritually and mentally reconstruct myself as a person and become my own man and make shyt happen.
I spent mad nights staying up to 3 am just asorbing as much knowledge as possible, building my own vison board and drawing up practical ways to execute my long-term goals. I had never studied this much ever...at any point in my life for any reason, but the more I researched, and labbed, shyt begin to snowball FAST.
Even my wife noticed the change, and while she loved my new found ambition, she also thought I was falling into unhealthy obscession territory in pursuit of some pipe dream. Understandably so as I was uncharted territory for the 1st time in a long time in life. But sure enough shyt started changing FAST.
Jan, 2019 - I was working my 1st job in IT following a shaky two years of unemployment making $15 hourly, PT imaging PCs in setting up workstation
Jan 21, 2019 - a few weeks later I landed my 1st real enterprise IT gig doing Desktop Support, asset management and mobile device management for this huge ass company making $18 dollars an hour. I got exposed to alot of shyt in a short amount of time, but muthafukka didint want me to spread my wings so I dipped immediately.
July, 2019 - I landed a job as system administrator making $28 dollars per hour, 7 months later I got an increase to $36 Hourly. Again a picked up on alot of shyt in a short amount of time, and I was thrusted into a leadership role while juggling my self study in home labs and stacking certs.
Aug, 2020 - Just accepted and started this Cloud / Infrastructure Engineer @ $85,000 annually with a few more companies after the fact all offering me $95K-$115K for similar roles. Hell, I just got off the phone with a talent aquisition manager talking about $90K-110K is a very doable range.
I'm not cac benefitting from nepotism or any other ism, I'm not well-connected in the industry(yet), I didnt benefit from some incentivized program t\o hire minorities and I sure as hell didnt have a mentor or people holding my hands every step of the way. All I had was an old Dell laptop, several accounts spread across Udemy/Oreilly/Linux Academy/ITPro, VMware workstation to spin up VMs, and my ambition. Through my nonstop grind I started achieving and leapfrogging to the next level and higher paygrades and it made my wife a believer, She saw the method to my madness and she cant stop smiling now, She held me down too.
Lemm just wrap this up by circling back to "Passion".
Throughout my entire journey in IT thus far, I have never encountered someone who exuded unwavering extreme levels of "passion" about the shyt they do on a daily basis. What I do see 30% of the time is people dedicated enough about their crafts to keep their lights on, a roof over their head and their car not getting reposessed. What I do see is people who take pride in their profession but still maintain a great work life balance and are not really pressed to be in the office any longer than they have to.
The the other 70% is a combination of people looking to get into IT and washed up career tech support bums looking to get out of IT due to career burnout because they never had the wherewithal or ability to succeed long-term in Tech industry.
In short you dont need 24/7 365 passion, not even close to resembling passion.
What you do need is an 'always be growing' mentality, self-sufficiency and hustler's spirit. get a few certs and some experience under your belt and you should be gaining decent traction in your career. But you still gotta know your shyt, but that goes without saying.
This is a career...treat it as such
If you're meandering around and doing the bare minumum like its some forklft driver gig through a rinky-dink temp service; especially with all the resources you can parlay into a six-figure lifestyle then as the OG coli brehs use to say....
You pouring jelly on your self.
Step your hustle up brehs
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Rhyme n Tekniq
Superstar
The come up! I felt the perseverance and the grind all throughout this post. And only 1 year and 8 months in too??
Get your money, black man!!
Much respectappreciate the love breh
I try to inspire these negros, but some people dont listen
Coded since I was a teenager, CS grad, and currently a Systems Engineer specializing in managing and building solutions for Windows/Linux Hybrid environments.
If I listened to cacs or haters, I would still be stuck in Help Desk answering BS calls for the next 40 years of my life....nope...never....
Project after project, taking the lead, being aggressive, being proactive, working hard....that is how you succeed....I encourage all the Black folk here who code to keep grinding and understand it isn't about the language, it is about the ability to problem solve....
Being a coder is very similar to being a music composer, you need to know the theory solidly before you can implement a song, otherwise you are doing things by raw talent and luck vs detailed knowledge.
If I listened to cacs or haters, I would still be stuck in Help Desk answering BS calls for the next 40 years of my life....nope...never....
Project after project, taking the lead, being aggressive, being proactive, working hard....that is how you succeed....I encourage all the Black folk here who code to keep grinding and understand it isn't about the language, it is about the ability to problem solve....
Being a coder is very similar to being a music composer, you need to know the theory solidly before you can implement a song, otherwise you are doing things by raw talent and luck vs detailed knowledge.
It's more like needing to learn Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.
Rhyme n Tekniq
Superstar
A lot of people saying you have to be dedicated to coding and have a passion and constantly keep up with the latest technology to get and keep a job, but I disagree. Maybe its because I don't live in a major tech hub and don't work at some cool company but for the most part 90% of the people I work with come in, do there 9-5 and go home to do other stuff. And these guys are very good at what they do. I feel like a lot of people in tech make it seem like tech should be the center of your life and that after you get done your dev job for 8-10 hr you need to go home and write more code, work on personal projects, do coding problems to "stay sharp" etc. Working in a large company I find there's not this need to stay up to date with the latest and greatest technology for most people. These established codebases are HUGE and there not about to do a damn re-write of it every year because a newer "better" technology came out. Most of the stuff I'm working on is 10+ yrs old. Again, the question is "Does it work? If so, don't break it". Small updates here and there as needed but never anything major to fast. I work with guys that have been doing Java/.Net for 15+ years working on large enterprise systems and there doing just fine. For me personally, I'm working on getting good at a few languages (Java, C#) thrown in a popular framework here and there and just learn things as the need arises
I like coding/technology and all, but, I wouldn’t say that its a passion per se.
This This and This all day!!
The reality is Technology advances faster than most business can adopt them. Nobody is uprooting their Windows Server 2012 R2 / SCCM infrastructure over night to implement and building a fully open source/ public cloud infrastructure.
Another thing with all these hot new technologies that get hyped every month. They're just like the XXL Freshmen 15; Some will find their niche but most will get a hot summer and go on to do nothing.
TheAnointedOne
Superstar
Yeah in that phase of your life you got to stay away from women. Stay in a cheap apartment and live frugally. Stop buying Jordans and designer clothes to impress women. First pay your bills then put the rest in either a low-risk investment vehicle and/or a savings account for emergencies.
True Blue Moon
Superstar
Everytime I think to myself, "Gee wiz I should get back into trying to learn programming". I get hit with a thread like this and the grim reality that 80 percent of programmers are on the struggle stance while the 20 are complete sociopaths. Plus, I get "nam" flashbacks of trying to debug a simple project for school that took fukking a whole weekend, until I found out that I missed a letter
This one hurt to read
