My coding journey began a little over a year ago. I had dropped out of college (studying linguistics, a few languages, and literature) and I wasn’t really sure what I should do next. One of my friends was enrolled in a coding course and encouraged me to give it a try. I found fCC and worked through the HTML/CSS course and found I really enjoyed it. I also started trying some projects on the Odin Project and Codecademy. After a few months, I decided that I enjoyed the work enough to pursue it as a career. That’s when I signed up for a pricey bootcamp.
As a college dropout in my early 30’s, I was worried that I would need an “official” (read: paid-for) software engineering certification before any hiring managers or companies would take me seriously, especially since my background is in languages and literature and there is still a lot of gender bias in the tech industry. What I didn’t count on was this program being extremely frustrating. It is entirely video-based, which is actually not the worst part because the instructor is very good, it just makes it extra time consuming because he may stick on one point and give repeated examples of something I already understand. The part that makes me want to pull my hair out is the exercises and projects they give us.
The exercises are mostly just dumb and annoying and don’t contribute to my learning at all. The projects are infuriating. They give us starter code and step by step instructions. The starter code uses inexplicable syntax featuring stuff we either haven’t gone over yet or learned not to do. The steps in the instructions don’t always match up with the starter code and/or aren’t clear. We don’t get any feedback from projects about what we did right or wrong unless we bring it up during mentor calls (one every two weeks), in which case the mentor looks at your code for the first time and is supposed to be able to walk you through it… in 30 minutes.
At this point I have three months to finish the course and even if I could negotiate a longer extension, I’m not sure I have it in me to deal with all the frustrating bits. It feels bad to quit something again, especially something I spent so much money on (10k), but I learn so much more quickly through courses on fCC and TOP. On the other hand, I am still worried about being immediately dismissed by anyone who might hire me. Should I cut my losses or try to power through? Any advice is much appreciated!