Blind Community, Any FAANG product design (or hardware or other) engineers out there that can advise? I have 6 YOE in automotive body design, and automation machine design experience. Skills in CAD, sheet metal, stamping, machining, nuts, bolts, some plastics, gears and tangible machine stuff. I want to break into the tech world to advance my career and to match my wife’s level of benefits and remote work flexibility. I’ve dabbled in Objective-C and VBA a little and enjoy the challenge of coding and find tech really exciting. I’m new to Blind so hopefully this post isn’t way too long. Let me know if so. Question 1: would it be more effective if I target the very few and competitive FAANG product (or hardware) engineering positions or restart career as SWE to target the abundant SWE opportunities I’ve seen on job sites? Question 2: if I target product design (hardware or other), how do I get there with no electronics or programming experience, which a lot of positions appear to require? Should I take an online C# or Python course? Question 3: if I try to restart career as SWE, are there any Blinders out there that have done a SWE bootcamp or self educate or MSCS and any recommendations related to your experience? Thanks for any feedback!
Nm, I'm in HW too and no idea what I'm talking about. In for the learning
I will give you my 2 cents . With your design focused experience you can easily get in to apple and then move to google or amazon. As far as I know the pay is not comparable to swe. Getting into swe might be ok but you will be competing against people with more experience and training. Alternatively you can try machine learning as it is based on statistics calculus and linear algebra - topics you must have studies in CFD and computational mechanics. You will not be starting from zero and can easily pick up a lot of topics. Even deep learning etc are chain differentiation ans matrix calculus. The trick is to learn the application side of things which is doable as mechies also analyze a lot of operations manufacturing and test data.
Thanks for the two cents. I’m in Seattle area and I haven’t had much luck in the past year, which is why I’m looking for a different avenue. I’m mostly targeting Amazon. The ML idea is interesting and I found a few ML/AI openings that look to be asking for SDE experience and Comp Sci major... am I misunderstanding? Is it that I should focus on studying the application side of ML like CFD or computational mechanics in order to find an ME position in tech? Now that I typed that it makes more sense, having seen CFD, FEA and other qualifications requested.
In my limited understanding, ML AI on the modeling and analysis side may not require too much sw background. If you got in to database design distributed computing or actual product implementation of the models, then yes you will need sw engineering knowledge.
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I typed more but lost it. Honestly, try and get a hardware position. I'm sure some Blind people can help. Switching to software is a long azz journey. I'm MechE and self educated with The Web Developer Bootcamp on Udemy plus a few CS courses in college. Now doing MSCS although leetcoding might be a better use of time.
Much appreciate the reply. Are you doing SWE now or still ME? If you have transitioned, how long did it take you through self study plus CS courses to land that offer?
Technically my role is software but I haven't really done development at work. Looking at switching out although I am pretty confident in my skills from a bunch of self study. I don't want to give you a timeline but if I were starting, I would watch Harvard CS50 lectures, then do Zero to Mastery courses on Udemy to learn web development, then work on personal projects