Ask HN: Some career worry questions

Since you're a mechanical engineer, you probably have a network there. Couldn't you ask one of them for an internship? Anything from an internship at a CNC builder to a custom system to organize drawings to a plugin for a CAD tool?

Your MSc will be a +.

It could be due to your age that you didn't get the internships since they are looking for young college kids.

I would focus on what type of programming you want to do.

What experience do you have.

I do full stack development/web applications.

So I'd recommend you learn HTML, CSS, js, jQuery, PHP or ruby, then Laravel or Rails. It's a long process but you have to start with the basics and work your way up.

Think about what type of development/programming you want to do and follow that path.

Once you are a skilled Rails or Laravel developer finding jobs should be relatively easy and pay well.

It's the in between transition time that is the trick. It's lots of learning/hard work. But I enjoy programming and web app development so it never feels like work (at least not yet).

Personal projects are a big plus. Think of an app that would make your life easier and build it.

Sign up for a github account, find some open source projects to contribute to.

Are you still working as a ME?

As a ME you have some good project management/engineering experience that you can apply to doing/running/managing software projects.

To find work you're going to need to network so meet developers in your area network with businesses that could potentially hire you. My best clients/leveling up has came through knowing someone who needed a developer.

Good luck with the transition.

Are personal projects enough to get you an entry level coding job? Yes especially if you can talk about some coding you did as a Mech-E.

By the end of my MSc study in US, It was extremely difficult for me to get an internship. My professor was inclined to try to push me further into looking for opportunities but it was dry (a recession). Internships give you, as others mentioned, a foot in the door - but also launches your career at the 'level' that would potentially mean a certain level of income in X years. And not to mention the mentorship you will get.

What I did was, through my local contacts, get a a semi-paid gig for building an e-commerce/catalogue for a vendor. I took that opportunity to learn, on my own, as much as I can. I networked heavily. I went to all tech events I could. I built it in Java/Struts-1/MySQL (the stack of the day) in 3 months.

I then moved back to my country (maintaining my launch app for 2 years). I had a job opportunity waiting.

I never said no to work, network opportunities or pet projects. Anything that I came across I'd try to learn/build. I was married with 1 kid (with a very supportive wife).

Forward 15 years - I'm a Canadian software consultant. Reasonable pay. Lots of challenges especially with the economy. Success? Perhaps.

Email in my profile if you want to discuss further.

When I went to find my first internship I only just got it almost right before the deadlines, I was devastated, but something eventually came along and internships afterwards went much smoother than that. I know a lot of friends with similar stories.

So don't take this personally, all I can suggest is keep applying to jobs, get people to practice interviews with you, keep working on questions, and if you have the time working on some personal projects. Normal school projects aren't good enough, when interviewers ask you about those projects they would've heard of the same project 50 times already, work on something that you're passionate about and that you can solve some interesting challenges with, think about what the projects mean to you and how do they help you learn. They should be something that's interesting to talk about during interviews.

Also I'm not sure if this is a good advice or not, but imo don't set the expectation too high for your first internship, it may be a no-name company that you've never heard or cared for and not Google Facebook or whatever you desired, but you will still be able to learn a lot, and getting your foot in the door is important.

I worked at a "no-name" firm in my first internship, but looking back it probably taught me the most out of all of my internships. And things only got better for me since there.

Don't give up on internship, they really matter. You have an age handicap (you'll be lying to yourself if you don't admit it), however you can overcome it by being better then what your classmates are offering.

You bring something very unique to the table, experience and knowledge, try leveraging what your learned as a mechanical engineer into the interview, show them that you have a unique and broad perspective (especially if you're going to intern in an IT department in a company that is relevant to that process)

The first route would probably make more sense (there aren't that many people like you I guess), but it would require you to move (the market for such skills is small) - maybe even to another continent.

If, on the other hand, you want to be a "generic" SE (that can work anywhere in the world and maybe has a shot at remote work), you need to pick a specialty and prove employers that you can deliver within it. That's worth more (although less fun) than cute CS projects you've listed. Just select area/technology/stack you like and start learning about it and eventually build something non-entirely-trivial with it. If you want to see what's hot, take a look at monthly "Who's hiring" threads posted here - they give a good overview of what tech is currently in demand and/or trending up.