Code is ubiquitous. This is especially obvious as one looks around today's educational landscape. Learning to code, whether to become a software engineer or just to be more technical, is an extremely popular topic.
At the same time, tech jobs that require some element of writing or understanding code are among the highest paying gigs, so the demand for technical education makes sense.
Nowadays, there's an abundance of ways to learn how to code, but the four main ways are through:
- A traditional university Computer Science degree
- Teaching oneself via online or textbook resources
- A coding bootcamp
- A MS in Computer Science or 2nd Bachelor's
This is a topic near and dear to my heart: I began my career as a Technical Project Manager at consultancies before ultimately getting a Master's degree in Computer Science and pivoting to software engineering. At the time, I had multiple options and tried both self teaching and a coding bootcamp before ending up back in a university.
Rather than just give you the pros and cons, which are easy to find online, I'll also sprinkle in my personal observations when going through them, and share thoughts about who should go in what direction.
Before talking about options for non-traditional students, let's talk about what the traditional path is.
