I’m a 23 yr old with a bachelor’s that gives me job opportunities to something I don’t really enjoy. Always wanted to get into IT but ultimately couldn’t get into it.
Right now i’m more motivated than ever to learning programming and getting my first job asap, though I know it can very widely in time.
My questions are:
To those who learned full-time through freecodecamp (or other venues) can you summarize your program and method? (as in how many hours per day, how many days per week and did you simply do the challenges or actually got a notebook and wrote plenty of stuff, that type of stuff)
-How long untill you thought you were job ready and untill you were actually job ready?
Any tips to someone that has always been involved with computers but doesn’t really have programming knowledge?
First of all, I’m concerned about the “getting my first job asap”. This is not a sprint, it is a marathon. Unless you are extremely lucky, “asap” isn’t an option. I started at 47 and now have a pretty cool job, so at 23 you have plenty of time.
There is no one “correct” program. FCC is a good one, but it is by no means the only one. I finished the FCC program in about 4 months working my ass off. Some have probably done it faster. Many take longer because they have less time to spend.
When are you ready? That is an impossible question to answer because everyone is different and there are a lot of different types of jobs. I would say that if you finish the FCC program and build some solo full stack projects, you’re about ready to start thinking of yourself as “ready”. But of course there are jobs that will take people with less skill than that. There aren’t a lot of jobs like that and there is a lot of competition for them, but they do exist.
My advice would be to not worry about that. Just learn and build. If you do that long enough, your skills and a little luck will intersect the needs of the market.
I’ve listed out some of my advice on getting a dev job here. If you search the forum, you will find a lot of other advice on the subject. But there is no magic formula. But it is a market with more jobs than devs and it is a specialized skill so if you work hard enough, long enough, the odds are that you will get a good job. But focus on the learning and the building.
I when to school for a CS degree, but learned a lot more of my current skill-set on my own time. My philosophy to learning is based around doing two main things.
Learning what you don’t know. This means having a list of blogs/feeds/news/articles to go over, just to see whats out there. You don’t need/want to try to learn everything you find, but knowing whats out there and at least getting some exposure is important to finding out how much there is to learn.
Learning what you want/need to know. This means taking things you found in the first step that you want to learn, or need to learn. Now I have a very specific method for learning a new technology/framework that is pretty simple to describe… you go out and build it. I don’t try to take shortcuts, I aim to learn by doing. For example, if I wanted to learn React, I’d go out and learn React by following their guides, and reading what I can do, and using it in a personal project. Breaking down the framework with these two steps will help you learn parts of the framework, and more basic concepts over time. You will run into issues, and have trouble, but thats when you learn the most. The key is being able to grind and find your way out of holes. Being able to figure out your issues is what gives you experience. I’m not saying “don’t ask for help”, but rather, try as hard as possible to solve issues yourself with the resources available to you. (google is your friend )
Schedule wise I spent most of my free time between my school schedule reading/programming and building things. I consider programming and learning my hobby so I end up doing it most of the time I had free time, I never set a schedule to learn, I just want to learn haha.
My main tips are what I mentioned above, just seek out knowledge, and you will learn. The approach of how you go about it is up to you, but the method and mindset is what I think is the most important.
IT not only consists of programmers, there are so many niches you can learn with: SEO, design, game design (the hard one I suppose, was my dream, but it seems I refused on it), advertising niche, internet marketing and many many others! So I advise you learn basics of the more interested niche you may find your place, talk with few specialists about their job, try hard to find one in the local town or near by city and ask him to tell you about this job, when you find the most interesting - find nearest agency and try tot apply for the job, tell them about this research you may done before and you probably get your first experience in the team as beginner/junior position - this experience allows you to move futher!
Indeed I was a bit vague on the questions, sorry about that.
I’ll try getting into more detail this time:
I’m a 23 yr old with a bachelor’s in Biotechnology and looking at the market, and my previous experience, I don’t enjoy working in a laboratory. Always wanted to get into IT but since I didn’t get in after high school, my 2nd option was this bachelor’s and as the idiot that I am I just went with it.
Have a few friends into IT that I lost connection with and when we re-gained that connection, it really sparked my interest and motivation to get into IT.
Right now I have three options and honestly I’m taking all 3:
A new bachelor’s in IT/CS
A master’s degree in Big data analytics and engineering
Self-taught and try and get into the market
Bought some courses on Udemy, have cs50x bookmarked and discovered this but like many beginners feel like, IT is a huge world and it’s overwhelming at first, so I decided to start here at FCC. I have a couple of ideas/projects that I will be working towards to that I intend on displaying as a skillset.
Regarding the questions asked:
I started and almost finished the html introduction set in the same day, however since it was done on the go and using the tips at the side, I can remember some but not all explanations for what does what. So I went out and bought a notebook to write down every little thing to make things easier. Did you do that too or you had a different approach?
-I’ve read stories about people who started FCC and gotten jobs after 3/4/5 months but it can’t be that easy. Unless people were studying full-time without jobs or any other studying involved. That’s why I wanted to ask the “method” as in how many times per day were you around programming.
Right now I’m searching for a job related to my bachelor’s degree because at the moment, money is only going out and not coming back and I can’t have that much longer, also need to help family with bills. Which is why I wanted to “sprint” into a job asap. I want to try and get into a junior dev position probably in front-end development since it’s “Easier”. Not easier but with the visual feedback it makes understanding things a lot easier, but will have to get into back-end someday in order to have a decent project built for show.
Hope I made myself clearer this time, thank you all!
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