[TamDenholm]

Golden Rule: Do things, tell people.

Seriously, coding skills matter less in the real world than you think, those will get better with time anyway. Eventually you'll get to a point where you can work in places where coding skills do matter, like dev studios, startups, big companies etc, but for non-tech small to medium businesses, they only care what you've done, not what the quality of your code is. You can make a damn good living setting up wordpress sites, installing a theme, adding content and managing it with social media accounts if you wanted, and that requires the least amount of skills out there.

Lets take the above scenario of being a wordpress installer. First, its about selling yourself in the right light, you're not a wordpress installer that makes people websites. You're an online presence consultant that helps SME's engage with their audience and thus increase their profit.

Second, get your first client, ask everyone you know to put you in touch with small business owners, get meetings and show them the package you're offering, do it for $500 or something, hell do it for free if you have to, just get something you can use as a case study, anything, a local pet shop, whatever. Once you've got your case study, get your own presence setup, put your case study on your website, get business cards printed up etc. Prepare a powerpoint presentation and a few handouts with the benefits of an online presence, making sure your contact info is on this.

Now join your local non-tech business groups, chamber of commerce, networking events etc, and get yourself speaking engagements, make presentations to local SME's explaining that they can increase their profit and talk to their customers using an online presence, tell them about social media accounts and how successful companies use them, show them they can build a mailing list, show them stats on how well conversions work using the mailing list, and at the end, show them how you did all of this for your local pet shop.

You are now the expert in all these guy's minds on how to do this, they will call on you if they need it done, they will recommend their friends to you cuz you knew what you were talkin about. Get their email addresses and add them to a mailchimp account and send out a weekly newsletter re-iterating techniques on how to communicate with SME's customers online.

Work will flow in. Now, i've used a very low skilled example for you, i dont know if thats what you want to do, but this can be applied to just about anything you want to go for, generic stuff like iOS/Android apps or specific stuff like ordering and invoicing systems for oil and gas companies.

Do things, tell people.

[atacrawl]

Seriously, coding skills matter less in the real world than you think, those will get better with time anyway.

I wish I could upvote this a hundred times. The thing to remember is that most people don't know the first thing about how stuff works on the internet. So you could have the shittiest spaghetti code in the world, but if the site looks and acts like it's supposed to, 99% of your clients will be satisfied.

Edit: Don't take that to mean "shitty code is okay," it's just that you don't have to set the bar as high as you think when it comes to feeling like you're good enough to charge what you want to charge for the work.

[mbrock]

I wonder if somewhere there's a forum where electricians or plumbers discuss things like these... "Most people don't know the first thing about how wiring works." On second thought, maybe I don't want to know!

[lifeisstillgood]

Because software is like writing. It is a creative process.

When we want life or death critical software, like life or death critical writing, we take a lot more care, as in making laws, writing treaties and contracts.

But we can never make it prescriptive.

[TamDenholm]

Theres not really any standard qualifications for us, plus, if an electrician or plumber screws up, its much more serious than if we do.

[mbrock]

That's an unwarranted generalization.

Say you work on an online calendar app. Might not feel so critical. But when a bug loses someone's appointment, who knows how serious that is? You probably don't really know in just what ways people are relying on your product's quality.

I work in the field of electronic medical data. If some banal UI flaw causes a certain icon to scroll out of view, a doctor might miss your medication allergy. If two columns of a certain table are too close to each other, your lab result might be grossly misinterpreted.

Whatever you work with, the only ethical position seems to be: be careful, and do things properly. Of course, with skill and experience comes an understanding of what corners can be cut.

[astine]

I think that depends a little on what you're writing:

"Oh no! The flight system on this rocket ship is going haywire!"

"Ok, ok, but at least it's not the plumbing!"

[mattbrewsbytes]

Building a flight system for a rocket ship is probably not something you're going to find as a job on elance or craigslist.

[6d0debc071]

IME a lot of low level jobs, especially where the company is offering to train people themselves, without any sort of regulatory oversight and where results are difficult to measure, have that sort of culture. If your rep's not that important to you....

[wikwocket]

Judging by the state of the electrical wiring and plumbing in the houses I have lived in, this is absolutely the case...

Sadly when their 'code' has had 'buffer overflows,' I have needed to fix water damage or put out a small fire!

[mark212]

there's also the building code and inspectors, at least here in the US. A complete PITA when doing remodeling, but this system truly does save lives.

[pnathan]

Not sure about online, but yeah, this sentiment is not unique to softwre people.

[casual_slacker]

"Bad code" is something that a lot of people worry about. Honestly though, it's all made up and it doesn't matter. The vast majority of "bad code" that I've worked with was written by good programmers, but the requirements changed so much over time that the core models no longer represent the domain. Even bad code written by interns is usually just in need of a bit of refactoring before it becomes good code.

Just wanted to throw that out there. At the end of the day, "good" or "bad" is less relevant than whether it passes QA, and how maintainable something is depends on what "maintenance" means to your project.

[Moto7451]

This.

Every single time I do a hackathon I get job and freelance offers. Being visible and impressing people is key.

[EnderMB]

Really? What kind of hackathons have you attended? I attended one once and all I got was some (crappy) pizza.

[pauletienney]

I have been freelancing for four years. I am graduated from business school (not the kind of place where learn to build websites) and learnt web dev by myself I can say this is the best piece of advice. I would just complete the golden rule : Do things, tell people and train your skills

[dynamic99]

I love this.

Just get out there and do it.