HACKER Q&A
📣 35mm

Getting into Development from Marketing?


I have a marketing background and enjoy programming. Mostly I’ve built small web apps, for example a site that scrapes Kickstarter and generates a nice looking gallery of the videos from campaigns which exceeded their funding goal - the idea being to showcase Kickstarter videos which are likely good / effective.

I also like making scripts to automate boring things, for example I’m writing a Buffer clone to schedule content uploads to my client’s CRM (which doesn’t have such a feature built in).

I’m starting to enjoy these projects more than the actual work I’m doing.

Is there a good route into getting a job? What area would you recommend?

Most of the projects I’ve been doing involve a little bit of back-end (Django), web scraping (Selenium, Python, Chrome Webdriver), and front end (React, Meteor).

  👤 strongbond Accepted Answer ✓
You could be me! I was in a similar position but could not afford the salary decrease (however temporary) from senior marketer to junior developer. So I segued into technical writing from marketing - my salary dropped a little but there were a fair number of transferrable skills, plus an enjoyment of programming, so it was reasonably smooth. Fast forward 15 years - I am now a senior technical writer but can't afford the salary drop to junior developer! Hey ho, I get my fair share of coding in my day job and the pleasure of helping people get intimate with software. Good luck!