I know I've made a few posts in this thread before. I took one of them bootcamps(what a joke). But I'm determined to get my foot in the door somewhere.
You guys gave me a resounding suggestion to get into backend work instead of frontend or full stack
I'm looking at taking a udemy course, or just an online course to really solidify my skills and build some portfolio projects that make sense.
I could really use some suggestions/feedback on which language(s) to focus on so I can actually land the job. I dont want to make the wrong choice and end up being shit out of luck after doing a course. Please help. I'll even post some titties in the SS of that motivates you.
In anycase, thanks for your time, yet again.
When I moved from the role of IT Support to Development, I took the first Development Job I was offered.
COBOL Development on an IBM Mainframe.
Not the illustrious languages that the bleeding edge Developers are using, but I was unblooded, and didn't get to choose.
Fortunately, I virtually avoided Assembler (HLASM/Assembly), but yeah, I had to learn Job Control Language, and VSAM (keyed files - think of the green Matrix screens, no seriously people have to read those, that's not just a movie).
On top of having to become a useful developer, becoming good at DB2(SQL), learning how to build JCL's, learning the Source Control for our system... I had to learn the Z/OS environment itself, aka: TSO on a QWS ISPF...esentially one step above a Terminal/Shell/Command Prompt, a step above vi, but far from an IDE.
Eventually, after switching to different groups and working my way up, I was able to get into different platforms, currently I run a group that still maintains Legacy Z/OS Applications, but also develops in .NET (C#, Visual Basic.Net), as the situation requires.
What you probably need to do, if you haven't done a degree is look for internships, or entry positions where they are willing to train you, and not try to be choosy about what they teach you. Even if its some 40 year old Sybase system, or People Soft, or whatever, you need to have time to shadow, and to sweat, you need to spend 8 hours working on finding the cause of a bug for an entire week, sweating and not having the answer, only to wake up in the middle of the night on a weekend to go, "Oh shit, it was because X didn't get passed to Z, it just looked like it got passed because Y never got initialized!"
Writing a "Hello World" program is never going to leave you with the feeling of "Ok, I've got this", which is what you're looking for, right now you're probably typing in statements, because a Youtube tutorial told you, and you hit the "run" button and it works, and that's cool for 10 seconds, but it still feels like its magic to you, you need to know that its not magic, and you have to sweat, that's the only way you will know that its not magic.
As far as languages on the backend, I would look at Java, or C#, get proficient at not just writing basic programs, but using the IDE and all of its functionality, even the free one's like Eclipse are extremely robust. Get really, really, acquainted with SQL. Source Control, coming from the Mainframe where originally, there wasn't even such a thing, we actually had a very easy to use product. off the Mainframe, GIT has been a brutal learning process, but ultimately its considered the most robust version control around, so if you want the full developer experience, you need to at least get the basics of it.
The thing about recommending languages, is that, yeah once you've developed on something remotely close to the metal, you can essentially pick up most languages (not to say it's easy, e.g. the jump from a close to the metal procedural language ,to a garbage collected, OOP, with huge library support is still a tremendous learning curve...just that the principle logic is the same). The basic algorithmic logic that runs most businesses is not a dense science onto itself. . Usually its more so that it was built a while back, wasn't maintained, and now most developers don't want to do the tedious task of finding out how it works, unless they're getting paid a lot...that's were you come in. But learning a language for a job that does not yet exist, honestly are you really going to bother?
If you started learning Kotlin or Rust, how many systems are using those languages? If I tell you to work on Java or Python exercises, and you end up getting hired to work on a Siebel platform...well honestly yeah, it would help in almost every case, I just question your resolve to really learn the language if there isn't a carrot or stick involved.
*Edited*
