> With all that said, now that you're established in the Industry and you likely have Senior Dev status, how would you go about this: how could one pitch this i

> With all that said, now that you're established in the Industry and you likely have Senior Dev status, how would you go about this: how could one pitch this in order to take you on for X sum of money and not have it fall on deaf ears? This is something that I think about very often but I don't have a good answer to it. I started at $10/hr doing web dev work and in a short amount of time moved up to $15, $20, $25+ before moving to a salaried position. My best advice to other people is to teach yourself "enough to be dangerous" (online tutorials, code camps, etc) using a tech stack/framework that a local company uses and then apply at an intern-level. Then try to either work your way up at that company and/or pivot to another company after a year or so. For me it was Wordpress and Drupal, I found a local web dev/marketing shop and did that kind of work for them for about 3 years, during which I learned Laravel and Angular for personal and professional projects, before moving on to a product-based company and getting into more complex problems to solve. Personally I learn best by being forced to do something, as in "Build a site that does X, Y, Z" where I don't know how to accomplish X, Y, Z. I enjoy learning on the fly (Maybe I should call it JIT learning?) and having a goal I'm aiming for. Most of my comp sci education felt like "let's pour all these concepts into your head and hopefully you will remember them and they will be useful in the future", that kind of learning doesn't work well for me, I need to see it applied. It's my goal to own my own company at some point and aside from figuring out a salary/pay structure that I'm comfortable with (something like ESOP) a big thing I'd want to do is offer an on-ramp for people who want to get into the industry. I've helped a friend go from an aborted CS education to working full time in the industry (I helped him learn enough Drupal to get hired at where I worked and then he took it from there) so I know it's possible and it's something I want to incorporate into a future company. EDIT: As for project managers not buying in, I feel your pain, the sad thing is that it's such short-term thinking. Unfortunately they often don't have the political pull or desire to roll the dice on an unknown candidate and it only worked for me in past because I knew the candidate well, taught him myself, and vouched for him. That's not really sustainable IMHO and there needs to be a better way.