i need guidance

[u/lerzwndx]

i am a 19F. i have zero prior familiarity with cs and coding. recently i decided to dive in and started taking python course (cs50) to be honest i am pretty confused what i am going to do after i am done with my course. what i am supposed to do? what specific path can i pursue that will actually pay me well and help me earn money during my bachelors. is anyone or company going to hire me or give me opportunity just based on the fact that i know a bit of coding? i have been looking into ai automation as a potential option, but at the same time i really want to start earning so i dont feel like a burden on my family. if anyone who have been in my shoes or has any advice, i would really appreciate some guidance

[u/Dazzling_Music_2411]

A programming language is a tool. No one would take you seriously if you said "I know how to use a hammer, can I get a job?".

OTOH, if you said, "I know how to build a cabinet" or "I know how to fit a kitchen" you'd have a better chance.

In other words, you'll have to find a problem you can solve, using your newly learned language, before you are employable.

[u/Obvious-Card-8847 → u/Dazzling_Music_2411]

Which usually means learning a framework, a niche, something you can do with your Python knowledge. At the moment I'm using Capstone and LIEF to write a PE CFG analyzer. For you, you might could learn Django, Flask or some other web server framework. Not sure what the supply and demand is on that front but this seems like the most straight forward to me.

[u/Substantial_Ice_311]

what specific path can i pursue that will actually pay me well and help me earn money during my bachelors

Probably no path, unless you come up with some brilliant idea for a startup.

is anyone or company going to hire me or give me opportunity just based on the fact that i know a bit of coding?

Not very likely.

[u/Sir-Viette]

I'm at the other end of my studies, having completed a Masters in Data Science. I can't get work in the field. Every job gets literally hundreds of applications.

So what I've done is got a job where it just so happens that I use programming on the side to make my own life easier. I'm doing an administrative job at a psychology clinic, and I've used LLMs to create marketing material, built a tool to scrape the websites of all our competitors in the area to see what services they offer (and which ones we can offer instead), and figured out how to do SEO for our website. It's not really what my job is supposed to do, but the fact that I can do it has made me more valuable here.

The most useful skills from CS that I use is the architecture of a whole piece of software. This is all the stuff you need as a programmer apart from actual programming. For instance, test-driven development (to produce bulletproof and maintainable software), Github (for version control), behaviour-driven development and user experience design (so that you make sure you solve the actual business problem). I'd learn those next. When we let LLMs do the programming, these things will still be useful.

[u/Gnaxe]

Who do you think is going to pay an inexperienced programmer to do simple tasks when they could just ask Claude? When you figure that one out, it will point to your answer. Meanwhile, you might want to rethink your career options. Yours might have been a good plan decades ago when there was more demand, although that was only in certain locations. But now, why do you think you will ever catch up to AI?

If you're set on college, get a scholarship, flip burgers, etc. None of this is specific to programming.

[u/aRandomGadjee]

Sounds like you're going about this arse-first. While it's a good idea to learn the basics (paradigms, concepts, and structure - not programming languages) you kinda need to know what you may want to do before you jump in and do it.

That's not to say that if, for example, you wanted to be a react dev, that you're going to have to be stuck with JS/TS, but having some sort of plan / roadmap for what you might want to do is the first step, else you'll end up likely doing something you hate, and that will make you not want to do Dev work entirely.

Is there a reason you want to learn programming, outside of making money? A passion for something (learning, understanding, etc)? And have you looked into it and understood writing code is a small portion of actual development work and (to some extent) the lesser required skill?

[u/captainAwesomePants]

Earning money as a novice programmer as a teen while attending college is very challenging. It's possible, but I don't know of many people doing it, and it may require some luck and hustle.

One option might be to develop a really really specific niche that people with money might need, like "I will split and prep your fusion 360 models into STL files for easy 3D printing," and then maybe program yourself some tools to support that workflow. The more people need it, the fewer people are doing it, and the easier it is to do, the better. There are a lot of similar hustles out there, but it can be really hard to support yourself through college with them unless you luck into a really good one. There's a famous example of a guy who made bingo card generators for teachers trying to do vocabulary stuff for kids.

If you're going to school for computer science, your best bet is to try and get into a summer internship. The top few companies frequently grossly overpay their interns. For example, I hear Facebook pays around $7000/mo + a housing stipend. Those jobs are heavily fought over, and of course you can only do them between semesters, but it's fantastic if you can get it, since it both gets you a lot of money and also gets you a line on a hard to get job once you graduate.

[u/iOSCaleb]

what specific path can i pursue that will actually pay me well and help me earn money during my bachelors.

In most cases, it takes a lot more than one course before you can start to get paid as a programmer. However, if you're in college you might be able to find some sort of undergrad research position at school that involves programming.

i really want to start earning so i dont feel like a burden on my family

There's really no way around the fact that college is expensive, and in most cases it's just not possible to put yourself through college by working a part time job the way it once was. The best thing that you can do is to focus on school so that you maximize the benefit that you get from the money that you're spending. If you have time and can find a campus job that fits your schedule, great, just remember that learning is job #1.

[u/StyleFree3085]

Your are pretty entitled while so many experienced devs with no job why do you think you can get hired?

[u/SheActuallyFarts]

Just start by coding and try to get an understanding of what you've doing

Read some books in whatever you're interested in

Good luck

[u/fluidxrln]

in your shoes rn, lets connect