This subforum can be a little depressing sometimes, so for a change of pace, I’m here with some good news. Today was the end of my third week as a frontend developer, I have no relevant education and no previous experience working in IT in any capacity.
I’ve started with FCC, of course watched a bunch of YouTube videos and read documentation on my own, but FCC is the only “structured” education I’ve had in this field. I like the job a lot, I work on an interesting project and it feels nice waking up to go to a job that I don’t completely hate.
I would like to thank this community for being very encouraging and helpful and especially @jwilkins.oboe who I’m pretty sure commented on every one of my posts asking for feedback on my projects.
If I can do this, co can you, I believe in you.
If people are interested, I can go into more details on how I got a job or anything else, but my situation is pretty weird and unique, so I don’t think it will be very helpful to a lot of people.
Edit:
Thanks you everyone for warm words, since people suggested I do so, I will tell you how I got my job. This is going to be a long one, so strap yourself in.
I was going through the FCC frontend libraries projects, since I was almost done with them, I began to monitor any local React developer positions, mainly to find out what the requirements are/what tools I should know how to use. I live in a pretty small city, but there is still a bit of an IT-industry here, but options for people with no experience are very limited.
So while I was surveying the local job market I stumbled upon a company that was looking for people for a frontend internship. To apply you needed to do a take-at-home assignment and I asked to look at it, fully expecting to not be able to do it. I looked at it, it was definitely way over my head, but I decided to try my hand at it, and I managed to complete it, there were a lot of firsts for me but I did it, and got into this “internship”. I put it in quotes, because it’s probably not what you expect from normal internships, it was more like a course or a bootcamp where people who work in this company taught us to use the technologies they use internally while making a small project (we learned TypeScript, React Native, Styled Components, React Query, Effector).
You can have your opinion on unpaid internships and TAH-assignments and I will probably agree with you, I was just weighing my options at the time and thought that, at worst, I could get some knowledge from people who work in the industry and have a shiny new project for my portfolio, and, at best, I would have a job. The internship was not full-time by the way, the lectures happened in the evening and we did assignments in our free time, so I was also working full time at my day job during that.
So, after the internship ended we all presented our projects, my presentation did not go that well, I didn’t hear from them for some time and thought I was done, but then I was invited for another coding interview which did go well, and later that day after the interview, I got my offer.
So here I am, I was used to reading stories from people who applied to 100+ jobs before getting an offer, and I was fully prepared for that, but my job searching chart looks like this: 1 internship - 1 interview - 1 offer. Here I would like to say that I’m not some kind of genius, it’s 50% being at the right place at the right time and 50% me being really stubborn.
If there is anything you could take away form this, it’s probably that you should start looking at jobs earlier than you think, check out what the job requirements are in the area that you want to work, maybe there are some opportunities that you can take advantage of with your current skillset, it doesn’t hurt to look. And learn hooks. I have no idea why the React section of FCC barely mentions hooks.
I guess now it’s my turn 
