Leverage layoff and severance to pivot to SWE
Apr 30, 2020
7 Comments
I’ve been considering pivoting to SWE from Ops for a while now. If I were laid off, what should I focus my time and effort on studying/learning with the 2-3 months of (hopeful) severance in order to accomplish this?
Top courses/topics/books? Whats not important or worth studying just yet? For context, I have a degree in industrial engineering, have taken some intro level CS courses, and frequently use Python/SQL.
(and yes, i know i need to grind LC lol)
#layoff #SWE
TC: 100k
comments
Then try to build your own data scraping app in Flask. Scrape job, scheduler, a simple ETL layer, db storage, file storage, and a simple UI with tables to show the data.
An example would be scraping a forum you read, or stock quotes plus enrichment of the data by also downloading news articles.
Doing this takes 4-8 hours for a senior dev, and could be 100-300 hours for someone new. It’s a great way to lightly touch on many of the core software patterns to actually build something.
The most important thing is finding something to build though.
The credentialed undergrad DS&A course is only if you want to apply for a CS masters degree - because they’ll ask for it.