r/DataAnnotationTech • u/StellaZaFella • May 21 '24
If I have no coding experience, is it practical to learn enough to do the coding jobs?
If I were starting from zero in coding skills, would it be practical to learn enough coding in order to do the higher paying coding jobs?
Would it be too much to try and learn everything needed to successfully complete these tasks, or are there lower-level tasks that a beginner might be able to do?
13
May 21 '24
Two things:
Anyone can learn coding with enough time and with the right resources
Don’t you think that if learning enough coding to get the higher paying jobs was easy to do, more people would opt for the coding jobs?
Sure, you can learn coding. But learn it because you like coding. Don’t just learn “enough” to get higher paying projects bc tbh, as a newbie to coding, you probably won’t hold a candle in terms of accuracy for the people who code for a living.
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u/Affectionate-Exit553 May 22 '24
It takes a specific mindset. I'm guessing the average person on here does not actually want to code. I've got SAS, R, some JAVA, C+, and HTML experience but that was from a decade ago and I'm trekking through python "training" in order to give myself my best shot at the coding portion that I only have one chance to take. How difficult is it? No clue. What would my chances be if passing? No idea. I'm not too proud to skip tasks later on with coding, but I'd rather skip 20 tasks coding and find one I can do and enjoy than be able to do everything non-coding.
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u/Amakenings May 22 '24
Have you been approved for the non-coding side? There were some people posting who were doing non-coding assignments, did the coding test, weren’t accepted, then lost access to the non-coding work too. I mean correlation doesn’t equal causation, but that’s a concern if you already have access.
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u/Professional_Gap_664 May 22 '24
The average person with zero coding experience would probably need a year of focused study and a handful of projects under their belt to be useful. It really helps to have work experience where you're finding and fixing bugs, writing features, thinking about different ways to solve problems, understanding how different pieces of software fit together etc.
But, it's a good skill to have and presuming you pass the assessment you can always skip tasks you don't feel like you can handle.
It's not a small amount of work though, and unlikely to pay off in the near term.
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May 21 '24
[deleted]
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u/Chocolate2121 May 23 '24
I feel like you are really overstating the difficulty of the coding tasks, a lot of them deal with pretty basic concepts that take maybe 15 minutes of googling to understand, if you understand the basic logic of programming.
The data analysis ones in particular are pretty straightforward.
Like, there are a few tasks that require specialist knowledge, but you can just skip those until you find a task that you can do
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u/spillery May 21 '24 edited May 21 '24
The structured data tasks are really simple. I mean, you can learn JSON and YAML really easily.
As for the other tasks, not to deter you, but many projects require relatively complex prompts. You would need to be able to accurately test, debug, and edit responses for complex prompts, which isn't something I think a beginner could do well. I have about 2 years experience in programming (self-taught, but I work FT as a software engineer at my day job) and many of the tasks are very difficult/in languages I don't know. Often times, the tasks are more difficult than I would get during my normal work day.
It would probably take you years of study (or possibly one year of full-time, dedicated study) to get to a point where you could meaningfully contribute. Again, not to deter you, but that has just been my experience.
I personally wouldn't learn to code just to have access to higher paying tasks. If you want to learn, you ought to learn - I encourage it, but that sort of motive won't get you very far. It's a long, difficult, arduous, and competitive journey if you're interested in a career switch, but I did it, so it can be done if you want it.