Ask HN: I will quit my job as a PM to join a coding bootcamp. Am I crazy?
You&#x27;re absolutely insane and you need help. Seek professional advise from your school counsellor, if required. Below I wrote some paragraphs to help you. If you do this, someone should go, figure out who you are in real life and revoke your MBA. Or you should just request a refund of your $150k tuition.<p>If you really work in top 3 tech firm, your colleagues are Stanford&#x2F;Berkeley&#x2F;MIT&#x2F;CMU grads, who ate rice and ketchup writing operating systems and compilers. This will be the level you have to get to to contribute to any technical project in a meaningful way. But basically: when you were doing business case studies and traveling around the world to meet world leaders and learn from the best CEOs how they handled corporate crisis, they kept hacking algorithms in a black window with grey letters. I know--I did that too.<p>I have 15+ years of UNIX experience, 10+ years of programming experience and 5 years of real-world software engineering experience. I&#x27;m thinking how to get your job all day long :-) This requires reading tons of books: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.koszek.com&#x2F;reading&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.koszek.com&#x2F;reading&#x2F;</a> which I do and I sacrifice time with my gf because of that. If you look at this list it&#x27;s business, management, investments, people stuff. You&#x27;ll have to do the same, but read about software and hack code in front of the computer, etc.<p>Most of HN experienced crowd are smart technical people with worse credentials, who are attempting to move from coding job to architecture&#x2F;design&#x2F;management job, which you now have. You are our target :) You can see it in many threads. It&#x27;d be like moving from a coffee shop manager to a waiter. Ask some senior buddies from a random technical team whether they&#x27;d like your job. It&#x27;s good to see people appreciating each other professions, and we appreciate that too, but don&#x27;t do this job switch yet or we will crucify you :)<p>My advice is this: take a break from work (just because you can -- you have a shitload of money anyway, or maybe just &quot;enough&quot; due to loans; go on leave, but for god&#x27;s sake, don&#x27;t quit your job), join the bootcamp if you really like, and don&#x27;t tell anyone you did it. You see from this thread bootcamp, unlike your MBA, don&#x27;t have established value in the industry yet. It won&#x27;t harm you, for sure, but you won&#x27;t be a software engineer. Bootcamp sounds good for you--you&#x27;re a smart person and wants to learn more, since I think you haven&#x27;t hacked much code before.<p>Better idea is what other guys say: just get yourself all online programs there are. All of them. They are $30&#x2F;month at most, and Udacity is $200. Get them all for a month. You&#x27;ll spend maybe $200 + 5*$30 = $350, but maybe $0, since first 2-4 weeks are free. You&#x27;ll pick one that you like, because it&#x27;ll fit your learning style. Stick to it and just do exercises. On top of that get books. Books are dirt cheap compared to value they bring to your portfolio. Whichever books you need; all of them. I think you&#x27;ll have to end up doing bs I do for business&#x2F;management books: google &quot;top 10 programming books&quot; and get them. Even if you don&#x27;t read it, get it. It&#x27;ll be maybe $350, since you may end up getting 10 books. So it&#x27;s $350-$700 investment at most -- you&#x27;ll get a grasp on what&#x27;s going on. Then maybe $30&#x2F;mo for 6 months to teach you one thing well and 2 in a sloppy way you&#x27;ll kinda understand. And repeat it maybe 2 times. Basically: watch classes, do exercises and immediately after that write your toy programs on the side or (better) real products.<p>So you&#x27;ll spend at most $1k to learn something you want. It&#x27;s also spending $1k to save your $150k investment you&#x27;ve made by doing MBA in top 3 school. It&#x27;s 0.7% cost of what you&#x27;ve spent on school, and still much, much cheaper than a bootcamp.<p>If you&#x27;re a good MBA you&#x27;re a cheap, stingy bastard that can get people to pay for your stuff. And top 3 high-tech companies have educational grants. Some up to $9&#x2F;yr. They pay you for your education. So have the company pay for this bootcamp, if you come up with good enough reason, it&#x27;ll be all free.<p>Now:<p>If you absolutely truly love hacking code and are obsessed with it and you think that yes -- this is your 2nd calling and you basically don&#x27;t see yourself talking to people anymore - congratulations. You are eligible for leaving your job, retraining yourself and entering coding workforce. Trade your suit for dirty sweater and you&#x27;re all set to apply for a junior dev role.<p>But I think it won&#x27;t happen.<p>What will happen thanks to my advise instead is this: you&#x27;ll make yourself be in like 0.1% top category of MBA people who truly understand what software is all about AND have a PM job. People who you work with will see that, so you&#x27;ll be getting good reviews etc. You&#x27;ll come back to this thread, see how wrong about PMing you were, and you&#x27;ll apologise. You&#x27;ll then keep studying and getting better at being a PM and being technical manager. You&#x27;ll learn how to manage technical people, how to partition tasks, build features, build products and build tech companies. And no, it&#x27;s not very easy and it&#x27;s not fading away. I see you posted some stuff about machine learning in the past. If that&#x27;s your field of interest: go and get TensorFlow original publication from Google. It&#x27;s a paper where you see an abstract is shorter than a list of authors. Do you think these guys would have built Tensorflow without any PM of some sort?<p>Anyway, story goes: then you will quit your top 3 high-tech firm, and start a high-tech startup, get $20M in funding. And then you&#x27;ll come back here, DM me personally and offer me 1% in your new enterprise for having a profound impact on your life and you&#x27;ll offer me a PM role in your new startup. I&#x27;ll gladly accept it for this 1+ hr free of charge advising.