This is a good post. I had similar credentials coming out of school last year (but I did graduate with a CIS degree). I have a strong (maybe stronger than CS) b

This is a good post. I had similar credentials coming out of school last year (but I did graduate with a CIS degree). I have a strong (maybe stronger than CS) background in finance, but I love programming. I was hired in less than a month as a PHP Dev (I have ~ 3 years PHP experience), making a decent living. Most of my interviewers seemed to be looking for a strong grasp of the fundamentals (particular languages didn't really matter as much as understanding OOP concepts and SDLC stuff), as well as a desire to learn and get better. I completed a lot of programming logic tests - mainly a bunch of pseudocode - during my interviews, which I assume tell a lot more about the quality (or potential) of a programmer than writing an actual program. I can't be sure that any of this is true... It's just what I took away from a recent, similar situation.