First, a quick response to your questions. I learned to code on my own, after graduation. I simply took all my savings, moved half-way across the country away from my parents, and locked myself in a room (quite literally) for a while, until I was able to create the applications that I wanted to create.
My background was in Industrial Engineering, which is part design, part engineering, part lots of math and BS courses that I've since long forgotten. I think the degree helped me to be more user-oriented, but I am pretty sure it had nearly 0 to do with my ability to code.
Now, let's get to the paid gig. Technically speaking, I think my "paid" digs were for friends and family. I am saying paid because of course, they all want a discount and you end up being paid minimum wage for a while :) My first real gig was a great experience, but a total disaster, so far as payments were concerned. The guy was very legit, up until the point where he skipped town and didn't pay any of his developers. I was out like 5k?
All-in-all, that was a great experience and a kick in the butt. It opened my eyes to the real sucky parts of freelancing business, and eventually led to me building Scoutzie.com where we built plenty of tools to help freelancers shield themselves from ass clients.
Now, back to making money. This might surprise you, but the most money we made because it had nothing to do with ability to code. In the early version of Scoutzie, circa early 2012 when we just got into Ycombinator, my co-founder Jenn said that it was time to make money. I was actually afraid - charging people money for your online product - that's crazy! So, Jenn put together a WuFoo form[1] and we pushed it live.
It was absolutely astonishing when a day later someone actually paid us $5,000 to find them a designer, without even talking to us. It was totally unreal!
So, my point here is - you don't need to know how to code to make money. Sure, we had an original product that required code and was running and collecting interest, but the actual money part was done manually, for the longest time.
If you're learning to code, that's awesome, but making money and coding has probably little to do with each other. You can be the best developer on the planet and completely suck at making money, or you can hack together a few lines of code and get a consistent income month-over-month[2].
[1](the forms are all private, but here's an idea of how the product started to scale once we realized that people were willing to pay -> http://cl.ly/image/2j2C3m2k3x2A)
[2]Right, I forgot to mention, I built PresenterMate.com once, juts for fun, and it's been in App Store ever since. People are still paying money for it every month, which is very cool :D
My background was in Industrial Engineering, which is part design, part engineering, part lots of math and BS courses that I've since long forgotten. I think the degree helped me to be more user-oriented, but I am pretty sure it had nearly 0 to do with my ability to code.
Now, let's get to the paid gig. Technically speaking, I think my "paid" digs were for friends and family. I am saying paid because of course, they all want a discount and you end up being paid minimum wage for a while :) My first real gig was a great experience, but a total disaster, so far as payments were concerned. The guy was very legit, up until the point where he skipped town and didn't pay any of his developers. I was out like 5k?
All-in-all, that was a great experience and a kick in the butt. It opened my eyes to the real sucky parts of freelancing business, and eventually led to me building Scoutzie.com where we built plenty of tools to help freelancers shield themselves from ass clients.
Now, back to making money. This might surprise you, but the most money we made because it had nothing to do with ability to code. In the early version of Scoutzie, circa early 2012 when we just got into Ycombinator, my co-founder Jenn said that it was time to make money. I was actually afraid - charging people money for your online product - that's crazy! So, Jenn put together a WuFoo form[1] and we pushed it live.
It was absolutely astonishing when a day later someone actually paid us $5,000 to find them a designer, without even talking to us. It was totally unreal!
So, my point here is - you don't need to know how to code to make money. Sure, we had an original product that required code and was running and collecting interest, but the actual money part was done manually, for the longest time.
If you're learning to code, that's awesome, but making money and coding has probably little to do with each other. You can be the best developer on the planet and completely suck at making money, or you can hack together a few lines of code and get a consistent income month-over-month[2].
[1](the forms are all private, but here's an idea of how the product started to scale once we realized that people were willing to pay -> http://cl.ly/image/2j2C3m2k3x2A)
[2]Right, I forgot to mention, I built PresenterMate.com once, juts for fun, and it's been in App Store ever since. People are still paying money for it every month, which is very cool :D