How I Became a Software Engineer Without a Computer Science Degree

Key Takeaways

for doing six courses on corera 10 courses on udmi and countless other tutorials on YouTube I finally got into Google as a software engineer not only that I received job offers from Facebook Amazon and Uber I did all this without a computer science degree today I want to share my journey with you I'm doing it for two reasons one if you are just starting out and you're completely confused about what exactly to learn like I was this will answer some of those questions two if you are feeling demotivated because people keep telling you that you cannot become a software engineer without a CS degree I want to let you know that there are ordinary people like me who have done it you can do it too before we begin there are three things that are essential for picking into software engineering as a self-taught programmer I'll share these three things as I walked through the steps I took to become a software engineer when I first started out I did not know that learning programming is going to be an intricate Maze of choices the very first choice I had to make was which programming language to learn I had the option to do it the old school way by learning Java or C++ another popular option was to use Python which is much easier to learn I ended up choosing Java for two reasons one online courses that I found to learn Java were much more in depth than python courses two Java is statically type language whereas python is dynamically typed what this meant in practice was that for a beginner python is harder to debug than Java as a new programmer we are all thrown off by that error message that pops up when we run program so I gravitated towards Java another reason why I chose Java was because I wanted to get into Android development at the time I thought it would give me an easy side project to put on my resume as it turned out it was a grave miscalculation on my part as I didn't understand how complex programming can be at that time to learn Java they found a free course on udem the course is called Java for complete beginners by John forel this course taught the basics of programming like how to define variables how to write IFL statements and Loops Etc I also learned about objectoriented programming through this course this course provided an introduction to data structures like hashmaps link lists cues Etc once I learned Java I started working on my Android app I decided to make an alarm clock that can wake you up to your favorite music on Spotify to do this I learned Android development using this course from Udacity after completing the course I was very confident about my ability to build this app I guess I didn't know about the Dunning Krueger effect at the time within a couple of weeks I hit the bottom of the Dunning Krueger curve and ran to my programmer friends for reassurance this is where I learned the First Essential thing you'll need to break into software engineering whenever you get out of your comfort zone and Venture into a new field by yourself you'll always face roadblocks in the times you feel you at the bottom you'll need friends or some form of support system that will cheer for you no matter what my friends reassured me that I was doing great and also helped me debug the issues with my app some of them commended my coding abilities which now when I look back at my code was very generous of them in the end I was able to finish a working app was not perfect but it worked and that gave me a lot of confidence knowing programming and having side projects is not enough to become a software engineer you need to have a solid understanding of data structures and algorithms to get into big tech companies to learn about data structures and algorithms I did a free course from corsera the course was taught by Professor svic from pinston University this course taught me simple algorithms for sorting to complex algorithms like Union find and dynamic programming this course also introduced me to bigo notation which is a closing question for most coding interviews however the best thing about this course was that it explained me the internals of many data structures for example many of us know what an array list or list is but do you know what happens to the memory allocation when you add a new element to the list to this day I come across Engineers who don't know the fundamentals that are taught in this course so I highly recommend this course knowing data structures and algorithms is one thing but cracking the coding interviews is a whole new ball game I had implemented many popular algorithms by myself but applying all these algorithms to a new question under the time pressure of an interview was going to be very difficult to sharpen my interview skills I chose to practice interview questions using very popular book called cracking the coding interviews this book covered all the theory needed for interview preparation and it also introduced me to some popular interview questions and then Solutions however this approach had two major problems one this book was originally published in 2008 and the landscape of tech interviewing has changed a lot since more and more people want to get into software engineering now and thus the field is much more competitive the questions in the book are a little outdated and don't represent those that are currently being asked in Tech interviews second major problem with using the book was that there was no easy way to practice the interview questions from the book even if you write solution to a question locally on an IDE there is no way to know if your solution is robust enough to pass pass all the tricky test cases and this is where I learned second essential thing you'll need to become a programmer you have to work smart not hard if you encounter friction using any tool to learn programming more often than not someone has already developed a better tool knowing what tool to use and how to use it effectively is much more fruitful than working hard using an outd tool in the case of interview preparation I found out about this very popular free website called lead code where you can practice questions for Tech interviews questions are marked easy medium and hard based on ulty level to pay for their premium version you can also find out questions asked by a particular company in the past this can help you streamline your preparation if you're targeting any particular companies as I hone my interviewing skills I was also looking for more projects to build my resume I was hearing a lot of terms like front end and backend believe it or not I did not understand those terms at the time in order to learn about what front end and back end exactly means I started learning web development I took a course on how to build an e-commerce website from scratch using using PHP and MySQL in this course I learned how to hook up a mySQL database with PHP in the back end and dynamically show this data in the front end though this course provided me with a good introduction to full stack development it also served as one of the many mistakes I made on my journey to become a software engineer as I already mentioned software engineering is an intricate Maze of choices knowing what to work on is much more important than working hard as it turns out vanilla PHP is not used much these days for that matter there are Frameworks like node and Django that are are not even based on PHP and are more popular when I realized this I quickly pivoted to learning M Stack which includes mongodb for database Express a node for backend and react for front end to learn M Stack I did this course called node with react on Udi by following this course I built a website that can be used to send out survey requests in bul through email pretty much like Survey Monkey does this course served as my introduction to no SQL databases I also learned how to build single page web apps using react and how to manage the St of your web app using dedu along with learning web development I was also doing two lead code questions a day by the time I finished my course on webd I had completed more than 100 questions I was consistently able to solve lead code medium questions in 45 minutes I had gone past the bottom of the Dunning Krueger curve I got my confidence back and I was ready to start my first job as a software engineer I applied for jobs took interviews answered behavioral questions and did hiring manager interviews in the end I received hundreds of rejection emails and this is where I learned third and the final lesson for getting into software engineering people will not take a chance on you if you perform as well as someone with a CS degree in an interview hiring managers would most likely play it safe and choose the other candidate for you to get an offer you'll have to outperform others with a CS degree that too by a good margin rejections are always hard and you might start questioning your abilities in those times you have to know that the only person who needs to believe in you is you so I just kept applying and didn't give up in the end Amazon better on me and I managed to land a full-time software engineer job there and for that I'll be forever grateful to my team at Amazon after 2 years of working there I got a job at Google if you want to learn about the interview preparation strategy I use to get into Google you can watch this video at the Top If you want to see my 5-year coding journey in 5 minutes you can watch this other video I'll see you in the next one