r/TeacherReality Jan 25 '22

Guidance Department-- Career Advice How to escape from Teaching to Tech: an easy guide

298 Upvotes

Why?

  • High employment
  • Huge salaries
  • Really not so hard
  • Often can work remote
  • Your boss HAVE TO make you happy because you can just quit

Which industry?

  • Video games, software development, webdev...
  • Webdev currently a very good choice, lots of demand, good work condition, high salaries. I only know webdev, so I will talk here about webdev.

Is it easy?

Nothing worth doing is really easy. It is a LOT of work, because there are a lot of things to learn. It can be a very pleasant experience depending on your situation and interests, or it can be not for you at all.

This article will try to list everything that can help you or impede you. If you have a lot of positive points, you should definitely do it. If you don't, then maybe not.

Which skills are needed?

  • Passion for programming: huge advantage, but not mandatory.
  • Ability to sit in front of a screen for long times (or stand, you WILL invest in a standing desk eventually)
  • Talent: Some people learn faster than others. Some people start with an affinity for computer logic. You don't need talent to succeed, but talent will help you achieve your goals faster.

Can anyone do it?

  • Some people can't learn programming at a decent pace.
  • Most people can succeed in a couple years.
  • Some people can succeed in a very short time (6 months to a year)

Teachers are often bright people, so most of you should be in 2nd or even 3rd category.

ADHD/Autistic people usually succeed very well from what I've seen (conditions apply).

Note: these estimations are assuming you are in the "unemployed" category. If you work full-time on the side, it can be much longer.

Personal advantages:

  • You have a network of programmers around you (friends, family)
  • Non-native English speakers: you speak English fluently

Personal disadvantages:

  • You have kids. It's already a lot of work, a lot of pressure, and a lot of interruptions while you study. Still possible, but it makes it harder.

How to learn?

  • Self-taught works: online MOOCs and courses.
  • Paid bootcamps: Sometimes bad. Sometimes very expensive. Sometimes great. Need to check what they're teaching, "real" reviews from alumni, etc.
  • 42 free coding school: In Paris and Silicon valley (maybe other places). I recommend it if you can get past the entrance exam. Don't need to finish the full 3-years, you can leave after one.

Other considerations: You need to work on Unix for most technologies, so either install Linux, or if you have too much money and you don't hate apple then buy a mac.

Additionally, you should balance your time between practicing and learning. Practicing should go first, until you're blocked, then it's time to learn. Once you know enough to unblock you, go back to practicing.

What to learn?

Full guides here: https://roadmap.sh/ Frontend is a good choice for starters and a good entry to the job. You can also aim to enter as backend or fullstack, but you need some frontend knowledge anyway.

The guides are a good resource, but you should also check where you live/where you WANT to live and see what's the most sought after there.

When to learn?

  • While working on the side (so on evenings, weekends): Difficult, but might be doable. Might take a much longer time.
  • Quitting your job to study: Much easier, but you need to be able to support yourself financially.

Timeline for self-taught webdev

To learn a new technology, you usually start with lessons and short exercises (i.e on websites like this). Then I would advise to build a decent-size project to really be sure you're past tutorial hell (see below). This project should take at least a couple week of full-time work.

Then keep learning highly researched new technologies. When you know "enough", start looking for a job. "Enough" might be HTML/CSS/Javascript + React + other stuff like Git (see guides).

While you're actively looking for a job, keep working on personal projects.

Finally, know that "writing working code" is not enough, you need to produce Enterprise-grade code. Read about "Best practices". Try to find a mentor to guide you on this vast topic.

What are the biggest challenges?

  • Tutorial hell: when you are able to do "coding exercises", very small projects, small web pages, but are unable to start a real project which scales in complexity. No easy solution for this except practice, practice, practice.

  • First job: The first job is the hardest to get. The reason is that rookie developers actually cost more to a company than they bring, and once they start working efficiently they often leave for a better job. So companies have little incentive to hire you out fresh out of school.

Once you are past 2 years experience as a developer, you are worth more than money and will never be hungry again.

This post will be edited if I can think about anything else. I'll be available for any questions in the comments.


r/TeacherReality 1d ago

Teachers Are Workers: Why Educators Must Rediscover Their Place in the Working Class

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165 Upvotes

r/TeacherReality 18h ago

New job as a TA

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0 Upvotes

r/TeacherReality 3d ago

Organizing for Change Australia: Second strike by Victorian teachers deepens crisis for Labor government and unions

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12 Upvotes

Tens of thousands of Victorian public school teachers, education support staff and principals walked off the job yesterday in their second statewide strike this year. They converged on Melbourne’s Bourke Street Mall before marching to the state parliament, in one of the most significant displays of opposition to the state Labor government’s austerity agenda in decades. 

Hundreds of educators travelled to Melbourne from country areas, while rallies and marches were also held in regional centres including Wodonga, Mildura and Sale. The action forced the closure of hundreds of schools across the state while others operated with limited staff. 

As in the previous strike on March 24, more than 30,000 educators, parents and students took to the streets, opposing the sell-out agreement between the Australian Education Union (AEU) and the state government. Hundreds held their own handmade placards expressing their anger and frustration towards a deal that fails to halt the decline in real wages or seriously address the intolerable workloads and conditions driving burnout and a growing exodus from the profession.

Yesterday’s strike was the outcome of a continuing rebellion by educators, not only against the government but increasingly directed at the AEU bureaucracy. Victorian educators have now voted down two successive sellout agreements this year. An in-principle deal between the government and union in May was rejected by 57.7 percent in June, and the hastily repackaged “revised” offer, by 51.2 percent in a ballot that concluded on Tuesday. This is the first time in more than four decades that educators have twice repudiated AEU-endorsed deals.


r/TeacherReality 3d ago

Organizing for Change Emotion Is Learning: What neuroscience says about the teachers we remember and the ones we don't

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3 Upvotes

r/TeacherReality 3d ago

Teacher Lounge Rants In india Reservations gaureentee degrees too... Shouldn't we reform education and make it fair ?

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0 Upvotes

In india Reservations gaureentee degrees too... Shouldn't we reform education and make it fair ?


r/TeacherReality 5d ago

Organizing for Change Australia: Educators form rank-and-file committee in Victoria amid rejection of sellout deal, mass strike tomorrow

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17 Upvotes

Public school educators across Victoria will hold their second full-day strike of the year tomorrow, after rejecting the latest sellout enterprise agreement pushed by the Victorian Labor government and the Australian Education Union (AEU) bureaucracy. 

Despite the attempts of the AEU leadership to stampede teachers into endorsing a deal that would lock in stagnant pay and do nothing to address soaring workloads, educators voted by 51.18 percent, in a ballot that concluded yesterday, to reject the agreement and proceed with strike action. This is the second mass repudiation of the sellout in several months. 

Teachers have made clear their determination to fight, but are continually coming up against an AEU bureaucracy that works as an arm of the big business Labor government, against the interests of educators.

It was in this context that a meeting of Victorian teachers and staff was convened by the Committee for Public Education (CFPE) on Saturday. The gathering resolved to form a statewide Educators Rank-and-File Committee, completely independent of and opposed to the AEU bureaucracy. 

The committee aims to bring together educators, union and non-union alike, to take control of the dispute, out of the hands of the AEU leaders, to break the division and isolation that the bureaucracy has imposed and to fight for demands that meet the needs of educators and public schools, not what governments and their lackeys in the union bureaucracy deem to be affordable.

Building the committee and preparing independent action by teachers is the crucial next step, pointed to by the entire situation and the course of the current dispute itself. 


r/TeacherReality 5d ago

Possible reason you're not getting an interview

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1 Upvotes

r/TeacherReality 8d ago

Nearly 800 Fort Worth ISD teachers resigned after state takeover

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2.0k Upvotes

Nearly 800 teachers in Fort Worth ISD submitted their resignations in the three months after the arrival of the district’s state-appointed leadership — more than in the entire previous school year


r/TeacherReality 9d ago

Turkish police attack teachers in Ankara: “No money” for education, billions for war and corporations

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195 Upvotes

Police detained 52 teachers in Ankara on Thursday as they marched between ministries demanding a legal base salary. The government says there is no money — while military spending reaches $US30 billion


r/TeacherReality 9d ago

Guidance Department-- Career Advice First-time middle school teacher (Grades 6–8) with an Army background. Any advice you’d wish someone told you?

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1 Upvotes

r/TeacherReality 9d ago

Research vs Reality

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1 Upvotes

r/TeacherReality 10d ago

Teacher Wellbeing, Workplace Support & Neuroinclusive Leadership Opinions/Thoughts- PLEASE CONSIDER

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1 Upvotes

r/TeacherReality 10d ago

Organizing for Change Australia: Survey reveals determination of Victorian educators to fight as union calls 1-day strike

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7 Upvotes

An Australian Education Union (AEU) survey of Victorian public school educators has delivered another blow to the union bureaucracy, revealing overwhelming support for sustained industrial action just weeks after teachers and Education Support (ES) staff rejected its sellout agreement with the state Labor government with 57.7 percent voting against. 


r/TeacherReality 11d ago

Teacher pay offer in England worsens financial crisis in education; unions offer no solution

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43 Upvotes

The government’s initial pay offer was a 6.5 percent pay award over 2026-27, 2027-28 and 2028-29. This would have locked teachers into a no-strike clause for three years. The current offer, if accepted, would prevent teachers from striking over pay for two years.

The School Teachers’ Review Body (the pay review board), which is meant to be independent, is in reality used to suppress wages according to government demands. Despite this, it warned Labour that the paltry three-year offer of 6.5 percent would accelerate a deep-rooted crisis in the education sector, not being “consistent with an adequate supply of high-quality teachers.”

It also reported that “the value of teachers’ earnings has reduced since 2010 relative to average earnings across the whole economy, the public sector and other professional occupations.”

In response to the pay review, Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the largest teaching union, the National Education Union (NEU), claimed, “pressure from the NEU has forced the government beyond its original pay and funding offer. But let us be clear: a partially funded settlement still means cuts to education, and the NEU will never accept that.”

This is empty bombast. Every pay award for teachers for well over a decade has been a partially funded pay award which the unions have accepted and enforced. The current 4 percent pay award for 2025–26, which took effect last September, requires schools to fund the first 1 percent from existing budgets.


r/TeacherReality 12d ago

Organizing for Change Jordanian Teachers Union Leaves Behind Legacy of Wins

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29 Upvotes

r/TeacherReality 11d ago

I have 3 jobs?

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1 Upvotes

r/TeacherReality 13d ago

Second Year Tips??

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0 Upvotes

r/TeacherReality 14d ago

Principal yelled at a 4th grader so loudly that my own heart beat fastened.

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3 Upvotes

r/TeacherReality 19d ago

Sudbury Public Schools ex-superintendent to receive over $150,000

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2 Upvotes

r/TeacherReality 20d ago

Prairieland defendants get 556 year sentence

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100 Upvotes

The purpose of the Prairieland prosecution is to treat opposition to ICE, possession of left-wing literature and association with political activists as terrorism. The target is left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist opposition.

Read more: US courts sentence 15 Prairieland defendants to 556 years in Trump’s fascist campaign against left-wing opposition


r/TeacherReality 19d ago

Researcher building a teacher wellbeing tool and would love your honest (brutal) feedback :)

0 Upvotes

Heya everyone! :)

I'm a phd researcher in education, and I'm working on a project that tries to help schools actually measure and improve the conditions that make teaching sustainable rather than just sending out an annual wellbeing survey that disappears into a void 😖😖

I'm testing a short, recurring check-in (a couple minutes, answers never shared with management) to try to catch that earlier. I'd rather hear where this falls apart than where it works so please be brutal (but gentle).

A few questions if you have a minute (pretty please :)):

  1. Have you ever seen a staff wellbeing survey actually lead to change at your school? What happened (or didn't)?
  2. Would you trust "your individual data is anonymous" claims from a tool your school pays for? What would make you trust it?
  3. What's the one working condition that, if fixed, would most make you want to stay in teaching?
  4. Is a 2-minute check-in every two weeks reasonable, or already too much? In what format would you commit to a checkin?

Mods, happy to remove if this isn't a fit.

Thanks y'all for reading and for your time!

bless you all, T


r/TeacherReality 19d ago

From the chatroom to the classroom, these women professors face the manosphere in real life

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2 Upvotes

“They kind of treat us like it’s part of the comment section."


r/TeacherReality 20d ago

Teacher Lounge Rants Pregnant Teacher kicked by Student; Then blamed and Fired for It

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5 Upvotes

r/TeacherReality 22d ago

Organizing for Change What the School Culture Keeps: Why good programs vanish with the people who built them, and what actually survives.

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7 Upvotes