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Discussion on: Welcome Thread - v50

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csbatchelor profile image
Christian Batchelor (he/him)

Hey everyone! My name is Christian and I'm a self taught Software Engineer. I just got my first full-time software engineering job and I'm starting on December 2nd 2019. Working with JavaScript for the last two years has made it my language of choice, but I love learning new languages and technologies. This week I stared my journey to learn C# and .NET since my new job requires me to learn it, but I'm very excited about it because I've wanted to learn C# for awhile now.

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Kyle Hearn

Congratulations on the job dude!! Good luck :)

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Brian Ketelboeter

Dude! Congratulations. I am just beginning the self taught Soft Eng. thing now. How did you get started?

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Christian Batchelor (he/him)

My situation was very unique; I was working as a Reconditioning Manager at a car dealership, and we just started doing rentals on the side. I had been doing a lot of programming since I was 13 so I decided to make some web tools to help manage the rentals. The rentals became very profitable so the little car dealership converted to a rental car company completely and the owner asked me to design their website and build their internal tools.

I did that for about 2 years and I learned a lot. I also had a paid internship as a web developer for 3 months right before I got my current job. When I was job searching a really wished I would have gotten a degree. A lot of jobs that I wanted to apply for asked for one, but looking back on it over 90% of the companies I applied at gave me an interview because I had some experience.

The #1 thing that will get you hired over someone with a CS degree is experience. So my advise would be to go build things. Start with things that either interest you or are useful to you, maybe something that will help you be more efficient at your current job if possible.

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Brian Ketelboeter

thank you for your response. I agree with what you are saying: build things ('build them and they will hire you') Could make a new field of dreams' movie,computer of dreams'. build the programs and they will come'. Ghosts of Steve Jobs, von Neumann, George Boole all appearing.