Why a teacher, a civil engineer, and a BCom grad taught themselves coding

Free or almost-free online courses in programming are opening up new opportunities for non-techies

Shobita.Dhar@timesgroup.com

15.12.2019

Till recently, Mariam Fatima taught social studies at a private school in Delhi. “After my marriage, I moved to Bengaluru and didn’t want to take up teaching again. I started exploring different avenues and coding caught my attention. Initially, I did some free courses from Khan Academy and Codeacademy to understand if I could do this. Then I enrolled in a programming course on Udacity in 2016,” says the 29-year-old who found the leap from humanities to technology difficult but not impossible.

“It required motivation and persistence, but not maths,” says Fatima who is now fluent in Javascript ES6, HTML 5 and CSS 3. After completing her course, she got a job with a startup in Bengaluru as a web developer. Last year, she and her husband moved to Berlin, and now she teaches web development to refugees and those on unemployment benefits.

Whether it’s non-techies like Fatima who want to switch careers or engineers who realise that languages like Python can boost their pay packets and futureproof their jobs, the rank of DIY programmers is only rising.

A 2018 survey by HackerRank found that 33% developers in India are selftaught and 37% picked up the skills partly from school and partly on their own. In other words, over two-thirds of developers are self-taught. One of the major reasons for this trend is the absence of programming and coding education in schools. Even at the college level, technology courses lack updated content on programming and provide very little practical experience.

“I am studying computer science engineering but 80% of my curriculum is theory and just 20% is practical. We are taught only the basic concepts,” says Mrinal Jain, a third-year B.Tech student and web development consultant in Indore. In his second year, Jain learnt CSS, HTML and Javascript (programming languages) from W3school, an online educational tool that helped him bag a job as a consultant web developer. “There’s a huge gap between technical skills taught to us in college and skills needed by the industry. For example, in college we are taught C, a programming language developed in the 70s, while most big companies expect their employees to know Java, C++, Python and React. So, students try to fill this gap by taking up online courses,” says Jain, who is also a community manager with Free Code Camp (India), a non-profit community making web development accessible to all.

Code is the language of the modern world. Whether it’s the app that gets you a date or the car that knows how many kilometres to go till the petrol runs out, any smart device needs code instructions to tell it how to operate and communicate with the outside world. It’s no surprise that the appetite for learning programming languages is growing. As many as 190,000 Indians have enrolled in Coursera’s Programming for Everybody by Michigan University, making it the online platform’s second most popular course in India after machine learning. It teaches the basics of Python while Udemy’s Complete Python Bootcamp: From Zero to Hero in Python 3 launched earlier this year has 77,329 users globally, including a sizeable number from India. “Every industry is hungry for programming talent –– from healthcare to hospitality, e-commerce to education... Today, most technical jobs require basic programming skills. And so it comes as no surprise that at Udacity, our School of Programming is one of the most popular schools,” says Gabriel Dalporto, CEO, Udacity. On EdX, CS50 Introduction to Computer Science, an introduction to programming from Harvard, was the most popular course of 2019. Most of these portals offer a mix of paid and free courses. Coursera also offers fee waivers to deserving candidates.

Earlier, companies would hire students from engineering colleges and then train them with the specific programming skills they needed. “Nowadays, students are ready with programming and software application skills when these companies come for campus placements,” says Amit Shekhar, who taught himself programming after realising that he had wasted four years doing civil engineering from IIT. Shekhar, who feels that the key to becoming a good programmer is practice, has co-founded Mindorks and AfterAcademy, both online ed-tech platforms.

A vanilla engineering or MBA degree is no longer enough, says Vaibhav Srivastav, a data science consultant with Deloitte Consulting India Pvt Ltd. “Those who don’t know the latest programming language, machine learning or data science are let go off easily when companies want to downsize while those who keep updating their tech skills get better appraisals and promotions,” explains the engineering graduate who had already completed online courses in Python, data science and machine learning by the time he graduated from college. “And I continue to learn,” says 24-year-old Srivastav, who has completed 25 online courses so far.

For non-techies, coding can be the difference between a non career and a flourishing one. It was six years ago, when Junaid Qureshi realised that his B.Com degree and a diploma course were getting him nowhere in life. At the age when people enjoy well-settled career, Qureshi was still working in a full-time job as a network engineer earning Rs 6,500 per month. On a friend’s suggestion, Qureshi signed up for a free online courses in programming. Two months later he bagged a web developer’s job in WittyFeed, an online content startup, in Indore with a jump of 200%. “With this job I got everything, more than I ever expected. Now, I own a house and a car, plus I have grown immensely as a professional,” says Qureshi, 39.





After learning coding, I got a job with a 200% hike. Now, I own a house and a car, plus I have grown immensely as a professional

—JUNAID QURESHI

WEB DEVELOPER, WITTYFEED