>Did you learn to program in school or teach yourself?
School, I had a few credits to fill out my Econ degree and thought the CS intro classes would be interesting.
>Did you do unpaid work to establish yourself?
Nope, but I did work for pennies. $11.50/hr writing code at my first job, and then later $1000 for an Android app with another $500 to port it to IOs.
>Roughly how long did it take you from day 1 of learning to day 1 of being paid?
Six months.
>What was your first gig?
Working on campus making Salesforce magic happen. I graduated recently and now work as a Salesforce/Java/web-backend developer.
As idealized as being self-taught might be I think there's a lot of value in getting your base knowledge in the classroom. Data Structures and Algorithms especially is a great course to learn with a professional as a resource.
Ex .mil graduating with a degree in Economics. One year's development experience dealing mainly with Java. I'd prefer to do something mobile or web front-end related. Currently picking up Objective-C, and JS. Fluent in Dutch/Flemish.
I have an Android project in "the second 90%" that you can check out here, excuse the mess while I refactor some stuff. https://github.com/Brabon/MACSv1.0