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Thank you. That is very helpful.

As time unfortunately is in short supply, it seems like it will probably make the most sense for me to just jump right into QA/testing and go from there.

Noted. Thank you so much. In that case, it sounds like software Q/A testing or business analyst are my best bets.

If it matters, my programming experience is a couple of Java classes in HS, an intro to algorithms and data structures (in Java) in college, the research project I mentioned (which was in Matlab), and many small Python scripts for various math/physics classes.

I'm pretty confident I could self-teach and/or learn on the job whatever programming I need to get up to speed as a professional developer, and I've heard of people who got programming jobs right out of college with an unrelated technical degree. So I guess I'm just wondering whether they are outliers or if this is actually a feasible thing to try (and if so, how I would go about doing it).

Also, as far as getting into larger or higher-tier companies, I could really care less about the size or prestige of a company as long as it meets all my other goals (esp. salary). And I actually would rather not live in Silicon Valley (or California in general) due to the high taxes and cost of living.