6 years (Score 1)

So I see a lot of people saying "it won't happen". Having just gone from a systems admin job at a public school district office for five years where all I used programming wise was powershell within the last year or so (a lot of what you're describing, right?), to a full time programmer job, I wanted to comment. My job search lasted 5-6 weeks and at the end I had two job offers. I had never been a full time programmer, but do have a bachelors in I.T. . What I did was this: I found a few things that needed to be fixed, a.k.a. automated. So some things you'll see are just bad to do manually. For example at my job they had a script some contractor wrote to create student AD accounts at the beginning of the year, but nothing to update for changes. I worked at a military proximity school district so there was a lot of changes during the year. These were done by hand (or not at all). Using powershell I was able to write a program to query our SQL database for current info, check it against our AD database, and make changes if they are needed (new student, change of schools (and drives, groups, etc.). I also made a script (powershell again) to create a tool for our staff to be able to simplify and speed up the creation of new staff members. The thing is this: Learning sucks when it's for an hour a day out of a book when you have my learn by doing needs. By finding a relevant project and taking a stab at it, you'll learn useful things fast. Sometimes reading the super nitty gritty book stuff just puts me to sleep. If the programs I wrote looks intimidating, know they were to me too. You google, then you google some more, then you analyze, incorporate, change, and fit. Some code you borrow entirely, some you create entirely, and a lot of "new" stuff is somewhere in between. I also read seven languages in seven weeks which I liked. Then I got into programming with C# mostly (bought two books), and was fighting between that and Ruby (bought a book). I decided C# was the path for me, then wound up with one job offer C#, the other Ruby, and chose Ruby for it's ease/enjoyment of programming. The future of this looks like web programming with RAILS, though my current position has me automating software verification for medical devices. My advice on switching careers is this. Do something relevant that'll help you learn (and make you look like great to your current employer), after that try a few languages to see which you like, then look at job listing to find what people are hiring for (don't get too intimidated here, which is easy, as employer's "require" a lot they don't necessarily hire based on), and get to learning. Write some examples in your chosen language, make them tight (refactoring, look it up), and start applying.