Careers possible if only two beginning computer programming courses taken?

[symbolipoint]

What are the chances of finding work or a career if an average person were to take two beginning programming courses? Would this be enough for a possible career as a computer programmer?

 

[jedishrfu]

Very low, I imagine. Thirty years ago, it might have been possible where companies trained new employees in mainframe software because colleges didn't produce enough graduates to cover their programming needs. However, now you can find a lot of CS people around to fill the gap.

If you have some self-taught skill + courses and its a small company desperate for a programmer then you might have a chance. The pay will most likely be low with little chance for advancement unless you strike out on your own and start a new company.

 

[symbolipoint]

Thanks, jedishrfu.
I only had one BASIC programming course many many years ago and did not do much programming until about 13 or 14 years ago using a more modern but lesser known form of BASIC. I made many fairly small or simple programs during this time, but nearly none of them were for any of my current employment situations. Most were personal projects, mostly fancy calculational programs, and a few with graphical or visual features. I made some programs that I would have liked to use for laboratory chemistry purposes if they were available at the time when I did those jobs. I was not sophisticated enough at that time to actually create those programs. I also created a few programs for educational applications. None of my programming projects is currently published.

 

[jedishrfu]

If you have a degree in STEM then its fairly easy to go back to school for a CompSci MS degree or at least it was. I've been out of the loop for a while but I've seen night school advertisements at the local college for getting a CS MS degree.

The more popular languages are now Java and its derivatives for business related stuff. JavaScript for web stuff and JavaScript via node.js for the web application server. Web programming however is a mashup of a lot of things though and can be quite daunting as you must be familiar with these and HTML and CSS and application servers like Apache Tomcat, or Jetty or JBoss...

If you want to play though there's Processing IDE where you can write simple java programs that draw cool pictures that you can interact with. It has a lot of examples floating around.

 

[206PiruBlood]

At my university the electrical engineering students were required to take two java programming courses through the computer science department. With only these two courses and perhaps an additional course in data structures and algorithms, the electrical engineering students were highly recruited by software companies in the area. It seemed about 70% of the companies to attend our career fairs and to advertise open positions to the department were software.

 

[MarneMath]

Alone, no I don't think it would be enough, but there exist a fair number of companies willing to at least interview someone on the phone if the resume makes it seem like they acquired a good level of knowledge. At my company, the Senior Data Engineer (read backend hadoop whatever dev) often interviews people without courses in programming if the person has provided a github, a website presenting a large range of different works, passes a coding test, or in the phone conversation showing a good understanding of agile and efficient algorithm and oop techniques.