For people who actually got hired self-taught, how many months was it from first line of code to first payslip

Nineteen months for me, from zero to a junior data role, at roughly your hours. The shape mattered more than the total: months one to twelve were fundamentals and small projects and felt like nothing was happening, and then months thirteen to nineteen were almost entirely applying, interviewing and fixing what interviews exposed. I sent 154 applications and got 9 first-stage conversations, which sounds grim until you notice one of them was enough.

Going to disagree with the whole framing. Months from first line to payslip is a number you cannot control, and treating it as a target is how people burn out at month fourteen when they miss it. What you can control is whether you shipped something a stranger used this quarter. Track that instead and the months take care of themselves.

Not hired yet so take this as a data point rather than advice, but the pattern I see in every one of these threads is that the people who got there had a non-code job that made them useful. Warehouse, retail, nursing, accounts. If you are managing a retail floor you already know rotas, stock, waste and shrink, and internal tools for those things are written by people who have never stood on that floor.

Career changer at 38, took me 27 months and I would not call any of it wasted, but I would sequence it differently. I spent the first year on breadth because every roadmap tells you to, and I now think you should pick the narrowest job title you can tolerate in month three and aim everything at that. My offer came from a company whose stack I had accidentally matched, not because I was broadly good.

Two years and two months. The last three months looked like: one project rewritten properly instead of three half projects, a CV rewritten by someone who actually hires, and applying every weekday morning before work rather than in bursts. The applying-daily part changed the response rate more than anything technical I did.

Eleven months, but I am being honest that I had an unfair advantage: my employer had an internal transfer scheme and I was already the person who fixed the spreadsheets. Going outside cold at twelve hours a week is a different race. If your current company has anything resembling a data or ops team, that door is far shorter than the front one.