Ask HN: Can I change career to dev without taking a huge pay cut?
I'm 29 and a Support Manager, I've worked in support since getting my degree in Computing and IT a few years ago. A number of poor decisions, wrong place, wrong time scenarios (resulting in being made redundant) and a certain amount of naivety has kept me in support, despite wanting to be a developer for as long as I can remember. I'm desperate to make the jump into a development career but I've also got myself into a situation where I can't realistically take a large reduction in salary. I'm currently doing courses on Codecademy and working on a small private project for a friend, so over the next few weeks I will finish these and then decide what to do next (another private project if I can find one or more courses on other sites). I'm aware that getting involved with open source projects, having a public repo and personal website will all look good on my CV and so I think I'm pretty well geared up to be able to showcase my skills 'once I'm ready'. For what it's worth, I'm learning web skills, HTML, CSS, JS and some Ruby\Rails.
So back to my original question, will I need to look for a 'junior' position? From what I've researched, these positions pay anywhere from £18-25k, and I've calculated that the most I could reduce my salary by is about £9k which would take me to about £33k. Is this realistic for someone with little real world experience? Am I going about this the right way? You feedback, criticism, personal stories and advice are all gratefully received.
Thanks for reading!