How long does it take to become employable?

I am currently a law student who hates his life. I am thinking about changing over to development. I am currently studying Colt Steele’s course “web development bootcamp”. After I am done with this course, how long will it be before I am employable? I dont want to financially burden my parents anymore so I am thinking of moving back to my hometown, and working there as a remote/ freelance developer. How many years will it take me to learn ho to become a competent developer?

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i don’t know about freelancing or remote but you can gauge your competency by applying for jobs

Hii, I am right now became burdurn for my parent, I am unemployment and unable to earn die to exams, I feel bad and looks for somewhere for hope.
Whereas to and do?

Too many variables to say for sure. If you put in a lot of time most likely between 6 months and 1.5 years

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can you tell me your story about what you do and how you got to doing it?

Sure. I’m about 9 months in, studying about 6 hours a day. I am at the point where I’ve started applying places and have made two websites for friends.

The study materials I’ve been using are freeCodeCamp, FrontEndMasters courses, YouTube videos, a few free books/docs, and colts web dev bootcamp.

I did take a few intro to comp sci courses in college so it wasn’t my first time coding.

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Have you gotten any paid gigs yet? Also, what do you do for a living?

I got paid for both sites (although it was at a steep discount due to my limited experience). I was in finance full time before I realized I was more passionate about coding. Now I’m doing part time accounting work to pay the bills while I study/try to transition.

Do you plan to get a coding job (non remote) or free Lance or get a remote job? Also, what is your current hourly rate?

Hey! I’m still in the beginning processes of all of this though what I keep hearing people say is that it can be about a year if you work hard at it. There’s an excellent article on the FCC Medium publication from the guy who created 100DaysofCode called (something like): “How to get a web developer job in less than a year” that you may find useful. You’ve got this!

Planning to get a developer job (non-remote). From what I’ve read it seems like it would be very difficult to get a remote job with no professional coding experience (and might not be a great idea if you are looking for a mentor).

I don’t have an hourly rate and don’t really plan on freelancing for anything more than experience so I’m probably not the best person to ask about that.

I am a professional web developer for almost 3 years and I’ve never heard for “complete developer”. I am still learning new things, so if you want to be a ggod web developer, do not stop learning everyday.

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It varies for everyone, and not to discourage you but Colt Steele’s course is just the beginning if that’s the first online course you’re doing. It is a very good course, I’ve done it myself, but it’s largely a “baby step” towards getting employable.

A handful of other “foundational” MOOCs that I’d recommend doing would be: CS50X (on edX), Git a Web Developer Job (on Udemy), and either Andrew Mead’s course on React or Mosh Hamedani’s course on Angular (on Udemy), depending on which framework/library you want to learn.

“How long does it take to become employable?”

That’s the wrong question. What you should be asking is:

“What skills do I need to get a job doing {something-specific}?”

Obviously, the amount of time obtaining those skills is up to you.

Your chances of getting a job is a combination of your skills and luck. Obviously, you can’t control luck. So you should be focused on increasing your increasing your skills.

You can easily find a list of skills from job postings. You don’t need to meet all of them. But possessing a tech stack that matches or closely relates to what they’re asking for should be enough.

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There’s been many good answers to that question already, but I believe that this attitude will make you miserable. Don’t try to be employable in general cause if you will approach your learning from that angle, you will be in constant stress.

Job specs are scary, technology is always evolving and things change faster than you can adapt. Choose one thing you actually enjoy and progress with building things. Apply for jobs in that field and take tests, even if you fail and you will have a great understanding of what you need to know to do what you want to do.

Programming is a very wide spectrum and if you will chase requirements, you will never be free and confident.

Make something cool and show it to us. Be proud of it and other people will appreciate that.

Push something just cause it’s a good market move and you’ll appear as you’re not authentic.

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It really depends on where you live and how good you can sell yourself/stick out to an employer. It’s hard to get a job in web dev because of the over saturation of new bootcamp developers. In an employers perspective they try to weed out people who have a college degree so if you have that going for you use it. As far as that goes apply like crazy, study on what technologies they are using, create a LinkedIn and try to make as many connections as well as talking to people in the industry to get a foot in the door. I wish you luck and other developers who are trying this approach which I think maybe the only approach to make it into this field.

That’s interesting. I was in banking for 3 years before doing the same. I quit my job and signed up for a masters in busines information systems and learning to code on my free time. I’m also doing some business analysis to pay the bills while I fully transition as well. At least with BA I get to interact with the Oracle DB and data warehouse so it is closer to IT than my previous job (Financial Controller). Once I’m done with the masters, I will quit BA and try to move closer to real software development. I’ll be 34 then, but hopefully with some experience to at least get an offer beyond a jr. developer.

Right after I quit the bank though, I got hired as a junior front end developer with about 6 months experience with HTML, CSS and some JS (very basic knowledge. That meant accepting a pay cut of 50% with regards to my bank salary. It was tough, but a very valuable experience. It helped get me a junior Java Dev job that paid better. I quit that too, because management and working environment was kind of toxic. Not giving up though :smiley:

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