To answer your question honestly, it has been a long time. At this company I transitioned from a Graphic Designer to a Software Developer. After my first year I took the role of a Web Developer and ended up building a custom internal application for the Art Department which opened a lot of eyes at the possibilities of what a Software Department could provide.

I was employee #1 in this new role and have since made a lot of really awesome things such as a company directory (mobile app), dashboards for our fabrication department, license management software for our IT folks, visitor check-in/out kiosks, interactive surgical simulators for our R&D/Sales teams, to name a few.

I hold a BS degree in Art. While in college, I took some web development courses and that is when I first started noticing my interest in programming. Despite having ~10 years of programming experience (~4 being as a professional software dev) I am not the most confident developer and the horror of software dev interviews scares me. Maybe it is time to go for it - worst they can say is no, right?

Just go for it. Interviewing is like any other scary thing in life: throw yourself into it enough times and it isn't. I used to be scared of jumping off a diving board, and scared of riding a bike until I did both of those things many times as well.

There's a huge salary penalty if you're not constantly looking for the best offers out there (do some Googling to convince yourself this is true). Don't worry about your imposter syndrome -- let others determine if you can get the job or not.

Elite software companies have ridiculous interviews, it's true, and you have to spend at least tens of hours practicing them. But everyone else is pretty reasonable, I've found. There are lots of enterprise shops that don't care about that nonsense.

The salary penalty is very true. I have noticed that Software Developers do tend to job-hop quite often taking better and better offers. Time to update my resume I believe!

I don't think you need to "go for it" as much as just be aware of what else is out there. It's also empowering to have your resume up to date so that if your feeling down and hating work, there's one less barrier in the way of changing your situation.

I appreciate your kind words. I'll look around some job boards and see if anything looks interesting!