I think your general premise (that management is becoming less relevant) is true, but you're approaching the problem incorrectly.

If I had your goalset, I would cram hard on EdX, OpenCourseware, etc. You need a good first principles education starting with Algorithms, Data structures, etc. I'd also start to learn how to do SWE interviews, which are a whole other skill set.

One last note: even if you do all of the above, the best way to ensure you're working with cool technologies is to start your own company. I work for a major SF tech company, and our ML team is two orders of magnitude smaller than our monetization team. At the end of the day, companies exist to make money and a lot of the stuff you've highlighted is currently speculative/nascent. There's just not going to be many jobs until these technologies prove their financial value.

Most don't feel like they're building lasting career skills, as agism persists in the industry and most people work on web applications to satisfy enterprise project business specification and project managers. During lunch, I hear conversations about the future of technology and the type of technology that we can work on if we only quit to start or work for a cool start up (e.g., Tesla, SpaceX). The consensus is that there is a tremendous opportunity for these emerging technology area's while other disciplines such as closing JIRA tickets will become marginalized. So I'd advise you to stay away from the enterprise coding bootcamps and only apply for the specialized tech bootcamp that emphasizes on these emerging technologies. The few that come to the mind are, creating new cryptocurrency payment models (for Paypal), writing self-driving cars hardware/software (for Tesla) and harnessing deep/learning AI (for Google DeepMind).

I'm not a big fan of JIRA myself, but even cool startups need to use an issue tracker?

>> vi main.ex

>> # No tests needed thanks to BEAM ;)

>> git add -A

>> # No need for descriptive commit messages; we spend our time on the important stuff ;)

>> git commit -m 'New commit'

>> # Rockstars push straight to production

>> git push origin master

Am I doing this right?? /s

But elixir does not have main file so it is ok :p

I conditionally disagree.

If the OP chose to do this, they should fully commit to it as if there is no other way if they want to succeed.

But, if the OP thinks they are crazy (and they definitely have doubts if they posted this here), they should indeed immediately take responsibility to hire a replacement and start interviewing elsewhere, hopefully in such a way that it will limit CV damage.

Lots of enterprise coders are tasked with evaluating new technology, working on greenfields experiments, like building a Hadoop cluster or starting out an OpenStack test deployment. Other times, there are extremely specialized jobs in enterprises. I have some friends who write Erlang in enterprises, and they go home at 5, don't find the work too stressful, and have plenty of interesting problems to solve.

Yes, there's a lot of great tech to play with out there. You can do that on your own time as much as you can do that at an enterprise. Yeah, startups might be more inclined to work with this stuff, but they're also just as inclined to make a big tech mistake and end up 1 year down the wrong road.

Finally, I am not a fan of bootcamps to learn to code. I think they're fine to get you started, but I doubt you can actually make a real career out of just a boot camp. You'll need experience and a lot more real-world time to learn how things work when you're developing software with a dozen other people at the same time. It's a lot more complicated than just knowing how to write functions and use git.

Everyone I know who did a coding bootcamp and got a job, got a job doing the absolute most basic stuff imaginable: bug reports, bug fixes, testing, etc. There's a lot of stuff you won't learn at the bootcamp that needs to be done in an enterprise: compliance and governance work, requirements gathering, documentation development, CI/CD concerns, how to build and tweak a delivery pipeline, deployment stuff, provisioning stuff. There's a ton to learn in enterprise software development, and learning how to whip out a program in Ruby or JavaScript won't adequately prepare you. It may get your foot in the door, but expect another 2 years of working there before you'll be truly ready for a promotion or better job.

And, yes, ageism is a thing, but the absolute best programmers in the world tend to be over 50. They may not know JavaScript, but they can write an entire OS in assembly, and they tend to understand the hardware/software stack down to the bit. Old coders are absolutely incredible and wise. Anyone who is ageist in the valley against coders is really fucking themselves over.

I think the best bet for you is to do the coding boot camp, then go back to being a PM. Knowing how to actually write software is probably the most valuable skill a software dev PM can have: it'll make it a lot easier to understand why everything takes so damn long. It'll also make you much more appealing to a Google or a Facebook.

I also extremely disagree with the do a bootcamp and then go back to a pm. You will have wasted a lot of money and will definitely not absorb much. We have bootcamp grads who have done that and they forget everything they learned. You need at least a year of professional experience to really get any meaningful knowledge. Not recommended.

The really interesting stuff usually requires deeper knowledge and skills. For problems worth solving, 15 years experience as a CRUD developer is no better than 15 years experience as a project manager. Making this career change won't necessarily help you gain the skills you want.

The analogy is you wouldn't necessarily take the Olive Garden line cook training class if you wanted to be a French chef. Sure, it won't hurt to learn how to use a knife and it might be a decent Step 0, but it won't get you much of the way towards your goal.

You should really consider a more in-depth CS education, whether that's through a traditional university or something like a Coursera / Udacity nano degree in your areas of interest.

As a practical matter, it might be better to stay employed while you pursue that. But that's up to you. Plan on spending some significant time learning (1-2 years at least) before you can do what you want, not just a few weeks.

You're very smart to consider getting into something like deep learning. The opportunities will be good over the next 10 years like you said - but only for those who are really good at it. It's a very technical field that requires lots of continuing learning. The competition for the best jobs is high. Don't get into coding unless you are very excited about it and willing to invest in learning it for the rest of your life.

If you are excited about coding and willing to put years of learning into it, go for it! But otherwise you could take the impressive skills you already have and find a way to reinvent yourself and apply them in the deep learning industry without becoming the actual coder yourself.

Calculate the opportunity cost of doing this in dollars. That cost is REAL.

People seem to think opportunity cost is an abstract concept. It isn't. Your retirement and your personal situation will be less $Oppurtunity cost.

Other false assumptions I see in your thinking:

1. Underestimating the difference in competition in engineering versus PM

2. Large error in the number of years of low beginner status in programming

3. Your personality as a PM puts you at a disadvantage when trying to get technical buy in from other engineers

Investigate other paths:

1. Study on the side.

(If you can't do this for 6 months, you won't be able to sustain it full time either.)

2. After Work 1-on-1 face to face engineering coaching

Use the money you make now to have a full time tutor who sits right next to you (I.e. they only have 1 student and thats you and you sit side by side and code) after work. I think this is a much cheaper and much more effective way to learn that isn't available even at bootcamps. You keep your optionality but you also learn more/faster than at a bootcamp.

(Ping me - I'll do it for $150/hour. :)

As you learn more, you should keep in touch with those devs, and you can ask them for feedback on the projects you work on (clearly, the onus is on you to not abuse their time, but most people like to help someone who is hardworking, enthusiastic and respectful). Then, by the time you've developed your skills to the point you could take an entry level developer position, you will also have a bunch of developers in the company who know you, know how hard you've been working, and will often be willing to pass on knowledge of openings, and put in a good word for you in the hiring process. Also, don't ignore the possibility of joining a startup once you have sufficient technical skills, a growing startup is exactly the kind of place that would greatly benefit from someone who understands team and project management and can deliver good code. They will hire you for the technical skills, not the PM skills, but that doesn't take away their value. Email me if you'd like to discuss further, and best of luck!

Some of the problems I deal with in programming can take months of thinking to solve and any course that says yo can become a professional programmer in three months is a joke. What happens when you stumble a problem that doesn't have a ready made answer for you or you encounter a bug take days to discover.

If you want to become a professional programmer, just start coding. You don't need certificates to tell you who you are. Programmer is an occupation based mostly on meritocracy, It's a well known understanding in the industry that the best programmers are self taught.

Start by learning some text books and doing side projects. Try and get a job from there. It will take you 4-5 years of hard work to get to the level you mentioned. And note. There are many bad programmers out there that stop learning after 6 months and just accumulate time. Don't fall into that trap. Learning is hard but the personal reward is great.

If you want to become a much better PM and have the tools to start building apps on your own, then yes DO IT! Right now the economy is great, if in 3mo you are back on the job market saying "I'm an awesome PM and I did a coding bootcamp to increase my understanding of the products I manage so I can be an even better collaborator" you will just have increased your value significantly. Probably you could just go back to your old job with a promotion.

I decided to quit my last job and study full time to become a developer. Not through a bootcamp, but through cheap or free resources online. I chose freecodecamp.com to go for now.

I did an Ask HN too and I did not receive much support either from the HN crowd. I don't know if people here think being a developer is not a good career path, or they are tired of wannabes and impostors, or they consider a developer career is just for a few selected ones; but I was expecting much more support here for people wanting to learn to code.

My answer to your question: I think you should go for it. Just consider very carefully if a bootcamp is the best way. But if you have the cash reserve to use, I think might be a good first step. After that, keep searching for knowledge in other places. And follow with laser focus the exact field that you consider interesting.

If in one year you regret this decision, it is not too late to reverse the career change and go back with your great resume as a PM, with more added value by your experience learning to code. Go for it, it is not a path of no return and it will be a valuable experience either way.

I think there's a reason for that, and you touched on some of them. There's undoubtedly an ageism to the tech industry, and being an older junior developer is likely to be a huge uphill climb.

There's also skepticism around the coding bootcamp industry for the same reason that there's skepticism around University of Phoenix: The certification isn't really useful or impressive, and the kind of person who benefits highly from a program like that would likely learn just as much through self-study at a severely reduced cost (or free).

Compounding that, there's a glut right now of alternative software development education. It's hard to imagine a future where being a software developer isn't significantly less prestigious in the future, except for software development in highly specialized areas (e.g. machine learning).

Not that prestige is so important, but the reasons for the loss of that prestige will likely cause salaries to plummet significantly. It's entirely possible (and some would say likely) that most web development will become analogous to traditional trade professions like plumbers in the future, with:

* Significantly less initial investment: There's no standard or certification for being a web developer)

* Significantly larger pool of competition: Your web developer doesn't need to physically be located near you, unlike your plumber.

If you're fine with all of these things, then that's great! Be a software developer. Just be aware that it's likely to experience significant changes in the coming decades, not many of which are likely to be beneficial. You might very well do better for yourself and your family to actually just become a plumber instead.

A friend of mine just did a bootcamp -- from a stalled career as a lab technician in which she was making something around $60k/year (in the Bay Area) -- and sure enough, three months later she got a job at $110k coding the consumer website for a bank.

Now. Is that the quintessential job that everyone on HN longs for? CLEARLY NOT. But is it pretty impressive to jump your salary up two really solid tiers in three months and at least be in a place where you might see another $50k/year over the next 5-10 years? From where she was? Hell yes.

Some people who are amazing autodidacts don't need a bootcamp for the skills, and lots of people who aren't amazing autodidacts could get the skills in other ways (but slower, and almost certainly cheaper). The credentialism is going to be a problem, though -- Google isn't going to hire a bootcamp grad, but they also almost certainly won't hire an autodidact. A big boring enterprisey place apparently will hire a bootcamp grad, and almost certainly wouldn't hire an autodidact. Startups, well, who knows, but they're a crap-shoot.

Sure, and similarly there isn't anything inherently wrong with for-profit universities: You can certainly find people who excelled in an environment like DeVry and don't regret their decision to attend.

Over time one can expect that the "cream will rise to the top" and good bootcamps will have a certain reputation associated with them. Similar to for-profit universities. Still, I hope it goes without saying that many of the same concerns about for-profit universities also apply to coding bootcamps.

> I do think that the credential is important.

Why? What does the credential prove in this case?

> sure enough, three months later she got a job at $110k coding the consumer website for a bank.

That's great! I'm happy for her. Still, I hope that sentence gives you (and her) some pause for concern.

If three months is enough time to train someone for a $110k job, I would suggest that job is unlikely to remain paying $110k in the foreseeable future. It's hard to think of other professions that pay so well for so little investment. The supply can (and will) increase precipitously to match the demand, and salaries will drop precipitously.

For a recent example, see the recent glut of law students and freshly-minted lawyers making a pittance. There are quite a few parallels between that scenario and the current one facing software developers, except that law school is even more of an investment than coding bootcamps.

> at least be in a place where you might see another $50k/year over the next 5-10 years

That's my point though: I don't think that's likely. Maybe over 5, but it seems unlikely that 10 years from now she'll be making $160k. I'm suggesting that those kinds of salaries will be reserved for people working in specialized fields, not people doing basic web development.

For a more realistic future salary, I'd say look at developer salaries in places like Canada, or much of western Europe (where $60k/year a year is probably much more realistic than $110k).

> Google isn't going to hire a bootcamp grad, but they also almost certainly won't hire an autodidact

Google absolutely hires autodidacts. I know a few of them. Clichés about "non-Stanford students need not apply" aside, Google just hires smart people. Smart people don't always have degrees or certificates.

Is this something where you could first try some of the online courses (Udacity, EdX, Khan Academy, etc) to see if you're actually interested and also able enough to do the job well?

Also, while I worked as a Software Engineer, I was not really doing much in the actual job and felt I was stagnating and falling behind. Most of the advancement in ability came during my free time where I'd try to learn new things, dive into new interests, create software I actually wanted, etc.

Eventually, work hours resulted in less and less time to do things on my own, and the crap at work got more and more irrelevant, tedious, and stupid. Also, management was all about trying to rid you of any competitive edge or anything else that makes you worth anything (or that brings you happiness), so in addition to all that was in place, it was known/realized they were going around each day looking for more ways to ensure every path would lead to a dead end.

It wasn't long before I wanted to quit and before I realized the only way to make it work would be to create my own company (or maybe become a freelancer/consultant).

I understand how having some social structure helps one learn, but I've often seen this misapprehension from PMs and MBAs that you either "know code" or you don't, and if one can just cross this chasm then all of a sudden you can be the one building things and realize your own vision. But in reality you won't be a good coder unless you have the tenacity to keep learning continuously over years and decades. Self-learning is not only free, but it's a good litmus test for this tenacity, and there's a huge amount of resources out there that make it trivially easy to get started.

Boot camps are like dipping your toe in the water. Most people are not qualified after only a few months of learning. It might take a year or longer to become skilled enough to get hired . A small number of very talented and lucky folks can get there in 6 months with no prior experience.

Before quitting, it seems important to validate the assumption that you will actually like programming and have some success in it. Try building a few toy/example applications on the nights and weekend for a month or two.

That being said, after much consideration, if you want to do it and feel strongly it is the right path for you, go for it. I personally love writing software. It feels like magic sometimes -- you type some words into a file, and very cool things happen :)

Most bootcamps that I'm aware of are for training web developers, with a few going into mobile app development. That will give you some basic coding skill but is probably not going to get you very far in the direction you want to go.

You'd most likely be better off seeking an online CS degree.

> Most bootcamps that I'm aware of are for training web developers, with a few going into mobile app development.

Yeah, I'd actually be pretty interested in a bootcamp that teaches deep learning. AFAIK that doesn't exist, but it should (?)

So yeah, maybe the only way it could work is if you already know it. They just give you a refresher and find you a job.

I would say, a PM has to understand the user needs, and drive the product. The former has got two parts 1. Understanding the user needs which the user can articulate 2. Understanding the user needs which the users cannot articulate.

I have had the opportunity to work with some of the best coders. Though I greatly admired their intellectual capability, I was not a big fan of their ability to think from customer's shoes. I have figured out that "Common sense is not so common". Now, having an MBA does not guarantee common sense, but if you think that, you can communicate effectively with your users, understand their needs, empathise with them, and can comfortably put yourself in their shoes, your are definitely adding value as a PM on Point No 1

Understanding the user needs which the users cannot articulate - This is where innovation begins. Now, if you are a PM without the ability to code, you may be at a slight disadvantage here. The ability to code, or perhaps the understanding of the fundamentals, would help you to structure your thoughts. It gives you a clear picture on what is possible and what is not possible at the present, from where, you can start to innovate.

To me, Quitting the job appears certainly crazy.

Anyway, one good way to do this may be to:

1. Take a hiatus. You may either tell your employer that you want to learn coding, or you may decide not to. Either way it's fine. Even if you tell your employer, if they are really top 3 tech company, they will understand and even encourage it. You can spin it as "I want to be a better PM and want to understand coding."

2. Learn coding

3. While you're learning, you may feel the urge to really jump in and become a professional programmer. Then be so.

4. If no spark comes during your time at those bootcamps, come back to work and continue. But even in this case, the world will be a completely different place for you than now.

Don't worry about people telling you that's crazy. Crazy is good.

Edit: Let me try a more helpful response (though I did intend to make a point there). You seem very focused on what you have: a good salary, a top 3 education, a job at a top 3 company. Things you expect should make you happy, basically, but you aren't, and this is confusing, and it's always scary to give it up if you haven't figured out why those things don't make you happy. But IMO, if that interpretation is correct, it's more important to attempt to find things that do make you happy rather than dwell too much on why the things you have, which are often equated with success in our culture, are not doing it.

I quit my job went into a bootcamp and have been a software developer for a year plus. I've been pretty happy with the decision. My reasons were completely different though and were more about understanding what I was good at and passionate about.

I think I can help. Ask me anything.

FYI I agree with many of the commenters that your reasons for doing a bootcamp seem a bit misguided. I did one because I'm genuinely excited by building things. I feel like I could be building boring crud apps for the next 5 years and I'd still be happy. If you don't feel that I would reconsider.

But yes, by all means, if your goal is to learn to write software yourself, go ahead and get that extra education.

Coding bootcamps produce people who are conversant in the hot technology of the week, but if they were weak on fundamentals going in they're still probably going to be weak on fundamentals coming out. If you want to be a leader in the field, and not in the rank and file, you need strong fundamentals.

Even as a former PM, PM's at your company will try to exert power over you if you are a dev. They will be backed up by executive management, board members, investors, the media who all have an interest in maintaining this outdated view of the programmer who takes the specifications and simply types in the code. Why not fire PM's and just hire PM's that code? PM's don't like that, executives (who don't code) don't like that, even the janitor doesn't like that. Nobody likes that except for devs and devs have no power in companies because of self reinforcing old school ideas about job roles.

But might be a good life move!?

Like "I don't feel like I am building tangible skills as a PM, it is more about project management and coordinating." Perhaps you are learning many tangible skills (just not ones you prefer). Also, "I have a feeling tremendous opportunity will be available over the next 10 years to software developers while other disciplines such as management become less and less important." That could be true, but maybe it won't be.

My 2 cents

They either come very natural to you, hence why you think they're easy, or you're not good at your job and oblivious about it or you have a very junior position and someone else makes the difficult decissions.

Either way, I would love to be a PM with an interesting product, not to mention being in a top 3 tech company. The money must be really good and the feeling of fully conceiving and creating a product has no equal. Coding it is fine and feels good too, but steering the ship is where it's at.

You will learn none of these things at a coding bootcamp. If you are really interested in going deeper, check out Georgia Tech OMSCS - you can do it while you are holding your current job (employer may even pay for it for you if yr lucky) and more importantly the courses are relevant to what you state actually interests you about future of tech. http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/current-courses

I have a feeling tremendous opportunity will be available over the next 10 years to software developers while other disciplines such as management become less and less important.

I disagree, solid managers and leaders will always be important. Perhaps you are focusing on the negative, rote aspects of yr job too much?

Because they are trying to compress a lot into a short period of time, and because they are trying to keep it interesting and give students early wins, they seem to not spend nearly enough time on the basics, and jump straight in to using frameworks that do everything for you, the end result being that a bootcamp grad can quickly whip up an ok looking app that has basically no functionality but as soon as you ask them to do something complicated, they get stuck. Sure, that's not true of all grads, but I'd argue that the ones who come out of a bootcamp with serious skills are the passionate ones who would've done just as well or better on their own, so at best they wasted a bunch of money.

You are much better off going the self taught route to start off, maybe take community college classes on the side. If dabbling like that doesn't inspire you and give you the fuel you need to learn what you need to know on your own then software engineering may not be the ideal career for you anyway, what you know is a small part of the job, what you can figure out and learn are also huge factors.

Several of the people in my cohort didn't become a developers though, as they didn't seem to have the proper motivation to put in the necessary work (at least not to manage it in a 3-5 month period).

You can read about my experience going from non-technical to technical here: https://medium.com/learning-new-stuff/from-non-technical-to-...

Unless you feel your PM role is a complete dead end, build on your experience instead of trading it away.

Edit, adding: A PM who understands software development, or a developer who understands project management, is a good set of skills to have.

Most technical careers are competitive and short.

The skills you pick up learning to code will be tremendous for managing others to build what you need.

Coding is hard to do well and takes years to get really good at it, and you will likely need to start at the bottom of the food chain to get the right coaching and support. I'd recommending learning enough code to be dangerous but get experts to help you do the hard stuff.

That said if this choice is about happiness, then go with your heart. Money shouldn't factor into that decision, it will come over time.

Maybe do the bootcamp to get started, but keep your job and the opportunity it gives you to meet other great developers and learn from them.

My recommendation is: 1. learn the basics however you prefer, 2. study open source code, 3. build something medium-size that you can use, either home or work. If you're very good & lucky this may be your next gig. If not, you'll be a PM with coding skills, which usually is a pleasure to work with from a dev perspective.

Having some kind of hard technical skill very important. It help you tackle harder problems that arises in the future. For example let say AI becomes increasingly important. Since you know some code, you ability to lead in this a new technical field will be better than someone with no technical ability.

FYI i'm a coder and founder of a software company. Most of my time is spend on PM now.

People aren't saying he's crazy to learn coding (though he's going to need some solid actual CS for deep learning / blockchain stuff I'd imagine); they're saying he's crazy to ditch his job and switch to a boot camp.

I took a >50% pay cut and switched to a field I had no experience in. It was absolutely crazy and high risk; it was a lifestyle move though rather than a career move as such.

Also, does he want to be "a better PM", or does he [think he] want[s] to be a software engineer (or similar), it seems like the latter to me?

Why not contribute by launching a startup as CEO? If a Harvard MBA with deep pockets and PM experience reached out about her startup idea, that is a beer or coffee I would take seriously. In other words it sounds like you have the background to attract a talented programmer cofounder.

I've worked in startups and the game industry as a programmer, designer, producer (probably more like your version of PM), and kind of as a PM (which, in gaming, is probably like some percentage of your job now, but not all of it).

It's definitely true that having worked as a designer and programmer was INCREDIBLY helpful in making me a better producer. The ability to communicate with people you manage or need to make decisions for at a passable level of their domain knowledge will be very fruitful and will help you command their respect. You'll make better decisions too, of course.

Feel free to email me if you want to know more. (That goes for anyone here, I'm always happy to give advice.)

Tutorials on various common "patterns" (RoR web apps, iOS apps etc.) are of good quality and easily available these days. As a PM in big tech, you can try to find little ways to contribute into the product's code base, which will teach you both programming and engineering practices. In my experience (disclaimer: was a PM), engineers are delighted when PMs show interest in code, and at least a few would be excited to hand hold you through the process of setting up your dev box, building the product etc. It's not a bad way to get better while making hand and fist full of money.

That said, like any other craft and practice, programming is layered and specializes. It takes 5-10 years to be "good", and it takes equals amount of time to be good in a specialization (say machine learning for example). Even for a good ol' engineer to move from building web apps to building machine learning systems, the barriers are still non-trivial. Furthermore, consider that a career in software engineering is perhaps more akin to spending 20% of your time building somewhat sexy* new thing, and 80% of your time doing boring boiler plate work, trying to pull your hair out digging through other people's APIs and code, and wondering why the build and CI system is so broken. If that's what you want to do, then go for it.

* most likely it's just a boring CRUD app using somewhat unfashionable technology.

In particular, if you want to go for sink or swim, switch to a technical PM role in your dev platform (like the Dart, STL, app model, or cpp teams). You'll be forced to learn more about how developers work and what goes into a language. Can highly recommend it.

Otherwise, it's quite odd. It seems you ought to be in my spot and I ought to be in yours. I plan to pursue a career as a product manager after I graduate (hopefully join a rotational product management program). I am currently studying computer science at a University of California. I have yet to have my first internship though but I plan to attend Recurse Center (https://www.recurse.com/) this upcoming summer to work on some iOS projects (I am more interested in mobile than say back-end or front-end engineering). And while I have good grasp of a few programming languages and tools, I do not think I would like to code for a living. It's fun building things and the future of software is indeed bright. I just find the aspect of programming on a daily basis will result in burning out, personally. Plus even when I do a gig as a product manager, I will still would like to develop mobile applications (particularly iOS).

Above all, there's nothing wrong with changing your mind and learning more. Plus you have an MBA and now you are going to have some coding skills. You are golden. So long as you are excited about what you are pursing, and not let that excitement fade.

And truthfully, most companies today are really bad at management, particularly related to technology.

Learning to code is a great idea but I would think of it as supplementary to your management work.

You're right about all these amazing technologies that are being developed, but truthfully, the stuff you learn in a bootcamp is not going to put you in a position to do much in those fields. It might be a small step in that direction, but you would need to go way beyond it. Advancements are coming from folks with deep knowledge of math, algorithms, systems engineering, etc.

But hey, we all get a little crazy when it comes to the things we love. Just be aware that a bootcamp is just the first of a great many steps before you can contribute to something you'd consider the 'future' and not 'move the button 10 pixels to the right'.

We're in a period when everyone is "learning to code". This means the potential pool of developers (ignoring their actual talent levels) is growing.

Someone has to check whether the stuff people are making is following whet needs to be created. Someone has to be able to manage the teams of people making these things.

I'd suggest your premise is the wrong way round.

Like several other commenters have said, a better approach would be to learn coding on your own time. (Choose a language—any language will do, learn the basic from a introductory book and codecademy.com, then work on small weekend projects)

As for learning to code because of things like the blockchain, etc, keep in mind that bootcamps teach you to build web apps, not that level of programming.

Usually, the people who do that stuff have the additional skill of programming to apply more advanced ideas. It is a tool to leverage existing knowledge.

You can start right away with HMM, MFC, pattern recognition, classifiers, neural networks, and make them work but this is really not enough.

I had two professors as supervisors, one in Energetics and the other in Signal Processing (usually you have a Doctor supervisor). I was told the problem: figure out a way to do multiphase flow pattern recognition from void fraction only (measured with electrical capacitance tomography not to disturb the flow). I was left unsupervised in an ocean of knowledge and I drowned. I dropped the ball.

I'm not doubting how smart you are but the chances you are a genius are as slim as the Gaussian tail that goes with it.

You have a good job. Heck, you have a job. You can gain these skills on the side and use them to leverage your domain expertise.

You're probably where you are because you have good self control, it might be time to exert it to tame your impulse.