How to get a dev job in 150 days?

5 months paid leave - how to make best of it?
Consider almost none experience.
Goal - get a developer job!
Only one rule - try to be realistic!

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My only answer involves a time machineā€¦

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I think you already broke your only rule.

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Soā€¦ itā€™s completely impossible to learn just enough coding in letā€™s say one thousand hours to just get any junior developer job?

Fcc front-end is a good start then if you have the basic with html css/bootstap and javascript you can jump to this guide if you want

Then in the last month or last 2 months you can join chingu-cohort voyage remote team dev project to get practical experience as a developer

Getting a developer job is not easy and donā€™t expect to get it after 5months.
Never give up.
Good luck!

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But seriously, in 150 days of hard work, you can get a great start. With a lot of luck, you might be able to find some internship after 150 days of extremely productive work. But that would take more than a little luck.

Let me put it this way: How many 6 figure jobs do you know that can be learned in 5 months? If it could be learned that quickly and with that much certainty of success, donā€™t you think that everyone would be doing it?

Donā€™t look for the easy shortcut - there is none. Just put in the time and work hard. I wish I had 150 days to devote to just coding. Consider yourself lucky. That combined with a few years of hard work and a little luck, and you might get somewhere.

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Iā€™m not saying impossible, just extremely improbable. Youā€™ll be competing against guys with 4 year or even 6 year degrees and a few years of experience on real world projects. Youā€™d have to have an amazing portfolio and nail the hell out of the interview to get their attention. I donā€™t see how you could do that in 1000 hours, especially starting from scratch.

Yeah cool, 6 figures would be nice but Iā€™d be completely satisfied with just slightly above minimum wage internship or junior-junior job, and learning opportunities.

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FCC certificate isnā€™t a magic certificate or golden ticket guarantee.

There have been a few threads here from people who went from zero to hired in 4-6 months. A search should turn up some of those. Although those are outliers rather than rules, so you shouldnā€™t expect the same results.

Impossible? No. Realistic? Also no.

You and me both, and a lot of other people here too. But Iā€™m finding (as many others do) that itā€™s not quite so simple. Most companies donā€™t want to pay to have someone come in and fumble around for a few months trying to figure out how to convert their online certificate into practical knowledge.

Most jobs involve a lot more knowledge than you can pick up in 5 months. That is something I keep realizing - every time I think I have a grasp on what I need to learn, there turns out to be a few more layers of technology I need to learn.

Take a look though want adds and see how many say, ā€œLooking for someone with beginner/intermediate knowledge of HMTL, CSS, and JS, and willing to learn 15 other technologies while getting paid.ā€

You might get lucky. If you find that job, let me know.

If I were doing this, knowing what little I know already Iā€™d do the following, with the huge caveat that this is based on the assumption you are able to commit full-time work-like hours to this (like, 40hrs a week).


Learning: Months 1-3

  • Start working through the beta curriculum - you wonā€™t earn points or certificates yet, since itā€™s not officially live, but you ainā€™t in this for the certs and points. The beta curriculum is significantly better.
  • Find your local freeCodeCamp meetup and start going to it right away, if one exists.
  • Be involved on the forum. Answer more questions than you ask - itā€™s the fastest way to learn!
  • Complete the ā€˜Responsive web designā€™ tutorials and all of the Applied Responsive Web Design Projects. The estimated time for completion for this is 180 hours - so thatā€™s your first month. Develop the projects locally, not on Codepen, and learn to use git, GitHub and GitHub-Pages.
  • In your down-time listen to the following podcasts: ShopTalkShow, Soft Skills Engineering, CodeNewbie, Base.cs, Codepen Radio. Dig through their archives and binge them. You want to live and breathe the industry right now.
  • Next, move on to the Javascript part of the beta curriculum. Estimated time: 130 hours - most of your second month.
  • Finally, work through the Front End Frameworks section of the beta curriculum. Againā€¦this is another 180 hours. Your third month.

Note: When I say finally, that is not really the end, but the beginning. You wonā€™t be super employable by this stage, but you will have enough projects under your belt that you could possibly hustle a decent position.


Hustle: Months 4 & 5 (although start all this from day one)

  • Polish your best pieces for your portfolio.
    • Make the designs excellent,
    • make the pages accessible (read the beta curriculum material on accessibility, and google around for a11y materials - a11y is a useful ā€˜codewordā€™ for finding current accessibility stuff)
    • make the pages FAST - minimise, uglify, and offload intensive assets to CDNs
    • refactor your code so that you follow a consitent coding style / naming conventions etc.
  • Polish your LinkedIn.
  • Be active on Twitter - Dev twitter is awesome. If you want some tips on who to follow, look at the people I follow and follow most of them :slight_smile: (my twitter handle is the same as my forum one).
  • Write about your learning experiences. Try to get featured on the freeCodeCamp Medium publication, but even if you canā€™t publish something pretty regularly. You want to build a web presence that gets you popping up in peopleā€™s searches. The golden rule for blog posts: If you overcome a frustrating problem, write the blog post you wished youā€™d found that would have helped you.
  • Participate in Hackathons.
  • Attend other meetups, not just fcc ones. Donā€™t aim to sell yourself as a potential hire, just meet people, hear about what makes them tick. Be a cool human who happens to be in the market for a job. Youā€™re building real connections, not just trying to leverage strangers to get a job.
  • Apply for all the jobs. Focus your applications on the things that interest you, but also apply for those that might not. All interview experience is good, and itā€™ll give you a sense of what the industry norms in your area are.

Notes

You could do all this and still end up without a job.

Thatā€™s probably what will happen, in fact.

Butā€¦if you want to give it your best shotā€¦this is pretty much what that looks like, given your short time frame.

Rule Number 1: no bikeshedding. Donā€™t keep switching languages and frameworks. These are good modern classics: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, React, Webpack, Sass. There are other options, but get good at one thing in each domain - donā€™t keep switching.

Good Luck!

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Yeah. Iā€™m the sameā€¦people seem to assume that built into the desire to get a developer job is this unrealistic expectation about money.

I actually think itā€™s laudable to you are trying to get a foot in the door, and subsequently, learn more on the job. Working nose-to-the-grindstone for 150 days and going to lots of meetups and events in your community should show your desire and coach-ability to potential employers.

Ok. This is an awesome post and I should have read this before posting my other reply. Great tip about the FCC Beta BTW. Iā€™ve been wondering about that.

I notice that you donā€™t include Node in your list of technologies to focus on. Is there a reason for that?

Adding to those podcasts recommendations: Javascript Jabber.

They have specialist podcasts on Javascript, React Native, Ruby, Angular and a few others.

Youā€™ll touch on Node and npm if you start messing with React in any real detail.

Personally, I did Node and backend stuff before React - but if I wanted to establish myself as a good front end developer in just 5 months, I wouldnā€™t touch the backend in any real detail.

But youā€™re right - Node, npm, express, MongoDBā€¦all that jazz is worth deep diving into if you have the time.

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Iā€™ve seen people do things similar to this but it really comes to how bad you want it. People keep saying it isnā€™t ā€œimpossibleā€ because itā€™s really not, but it comes down to you not really the resources. Do you think you can pick up programming concepts quickly? Are you not going to need a lot of special attention or will docs and tutorials be enough?

A lot of people get into coding because it can be absolutely life-changing, it helps that all the resources you need are online for free; however, no one gets into code because it is easy.

With your time constraint, you should go ahead and decide what developer position you want. Front End isnā€™t all programming, a good bit is markup which doesnā€™t require any logic, so it really just depends on where your strengths lie.

So, I guess the message is that you need to be a little more realistic. To expect to start a new, highly skilled, highly paid career in 1000 hours is overly optimistic.

But having those 1000 hours to get a great head start is very lucky.

I think you need a more realistic goal, maybe a 2 year plan. Even that will require some luck, but itā€™s in the realm of reason. And then if you get really lucky and land a job in 6 months, it will be a pleasant surprise, but if your still slogging along after a year, you arenā€™t going to want to hang yourself.

But as everyone else points out, itā€™s going to be a combination of your aptitude, your work, and some luck. Iā€™d also say it depends on the job market where you are.

But devoting 150 days fulltime is going to put you a lot closer to the goal than sitting on your couch eating Cheetohs and watching Xena reruns. (Man, I wish I had 150 days to work on this!) If you have an aptitude for coding, you might be able to complete the FCC program in that time. That wonā€™t guarantee you a job, but will lay a good foundation upon which to build as you make yourself job ready.

Set a goal and donā€™t give up until you get there. Your goal is a reasonable, itā€™s just that your timeline is a little overly optimistic.

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