# Would You pay twenty grand ...



## PMc (May 3, 2019)

... to become a developer?

I'm actually shocked, as I've seen such a price tag yesterday. I never had considered that there might be formal education classes. I had always thought, well, you take these things, you look how they work, you learn, you find the thousands of ressources on the internet, and sooner or later you will know how to do the things.


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## drhowarddrfine (May 4, 2019)

Back in the day, you'd see ads for people learning electronics and commercials for "Welcome to the wonderful world of broadcast!" for radio announcers where people would do the same thing. Now it's web development and the same trickery applies. There's money to be made in that and certification for anything you can think of which, if anything, makes people look at you sideways and definitely won't get you hired. I have a link somewhere by a known headhunter who says large companies, including Microsoft, will not hire you if you have one of those certs.

There are scammers everywhere.


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## Deleted member 30996 (May 4, 2019)

W3Schools didn't charge me a dime to learn XHTML or CSS. But I never meant it as a career and have never made a dime off it either, I'm in the hole on hosting alone.

I did have a friend who said they paid someone $10,000 make a website for him. It looked like something made at GeoCities in a template and could not believe what I as looking at. Or that he thought it looked $10,000 good. 

That was the problem. He didn't know the difference or see it as being amateur in appearance, presentation or organization. It was awful even for GeoCities standards.

I offered to rework it for $50 an hour, he could afford it, but balked at the idea. $10,000 is bigger so it must be a better website. It had lots of text letterboxes and articles haphazardly placed and he was happy.


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## sidetone (May 4, 2019)

No, because it's not necessary.
For other fields, it may be required, but not even that much for most fields.


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## funkygoby (May 5, 2019)

Trihexagonal said:


> I *did* have a friend who said they paid someone $10,000 make a website for him. It looked like something made at GeoCities in a template and could not believe what I as looking at. Or that he thought it looked $10,000 good.


He is not your friend anymore?

Anyway, I can totally relate to your story.
A friend of my dad needed a website to advertise her new activity. A static ~3 pages website+domain on wix would have sufficed.
Fast forward 6 months later, she has 3?! websites (one is a wordpress) + 2 domains that make no sense. She spent 4000€ or so on those, asked 3 differents devs.


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## sidetone (May 5, 2019)

It's not hard to learn CSS and html 5, but, it is time consuming when you need to focus on learning and to move fast on your website's objectives. Php is more difficult, but it has great capabilities. For css and html, I used outdated books, then used web resources to replace old informatio. For php, I just bought a good book, then looked for more specific examples of what I wanted to do.

There was a suggestion I read, to pay someone else, because time for launching and implementing an idea is important. It does take away time and energy to learn html, css and php, from focusing fully on an objective. You can do it all, but it slows you down. It seems like website developers overcharge by thousands of dollars, and there's not an easy way to measure the quality of their work to the amount paid. There are already templates, web authoring software, ready to go frameworks, and some hosting providers charge to develop your site for a price but unlikely overcharge by a few thousand. Web hosters are in the business of making money primarily by hosting, and keeping customers for that.

Other types of development than web are important too.


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## SirDice (May 7, 2019)

It depends on what you actually get for that 20.000,-

If it's for a stack of photo-copied print-outs then, no, never in a million years.
If it's for a year long, twice weekly, intensive training by a good developer/teacher and you end up with a proper masters degree in software development then yes, maybe.

Just that number on its own doesn't tell me anything.


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## Sevendogsbsd (May 7, 2019)

To be a developer, no, but it's all relative - I paid much more than that (I think?) for my graduate degree but it didn't give me a specific skill, just (potentially) more earning power and it was an accomplishment. Tech skills come slowly over time - a good class is one thing, but then you apply those skills and learn from that. 

Sounds like someone is selling something - "pay this and instantly be a developer!" which is typical of modern society: get rich quick, etc...what ever happened to good old fashioned work and earn and climb the ladder the hard way?


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## Crivens (May 7, 2019)

SirDice 
A master in one year? Where do you do that?


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## SirDice (May 7, 2019)

Crivens said:


> @SirDice
> A master in one year? Where do you do that?


I wish I knew. But it was more to illustrate an example. Just a dollar amount doesn't mean much if you don't know what you get in return. If I only look at the Dutch Universities I'm sure you will have to spend a multitude of that amount (education is getting ridiculously expensive here).


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## Sevendogsbsd (May 7, 2019)

My Masters took me 2 years of work - wouldn't want to do it in a year, probably wouldn't survive


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## PMc (May 7, 2019)

Some background:
I have a postgres running for some housekeeping tasks, and, because entering pure SQL is rather boring, I had a GUI in front of it; databases/pgaccess, which went out of support somehow around 2006 (I don't know the current status).
So at that time I was in need for another (scriptable) GUI, and there weren't many for postgres, and none appeared suitable. So I found Ruby-on-Rails, which already had full postgres support, and certainly fulfulls all needs for a scriptable GUI.

I hacked my way along, albeit there was documentation which I would term non-existant - and much later I found what I would have needed earlier: a tutorial on how to get around with the piece. There I recently had a glance at the current introductory page, and from there I got the notion:



> At the end of this tutorial, no matter where you started, you should be ready for the many more intermediate-to-advanced Rails resources out there. Here are some I particularly recommend:
> [...]The Turing School of Software & Design: A full-time, 27-week training program in Denver, Colorado


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## Crivens (May 7, 2019)

I once had a coworker who bought himself a ph.d in ufology as well as angle studies. Using one of these titles may well end in criminal charges around here. Too much risk for the lulz, I think. But that is what I think of when I hear about these $IMPRESSIVE_TITLE in your spare time offers.


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## BSD User (May 10, 2019)

No


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