|
I need some advice. For the most part, I've been a general systems administrator and never managed to distance myself from helpdesk all that much. I realized not too long ago that I was just spinning my wheels and going nowhere and that I'd lost any sort of passion I'd had for IT support work. I also worked in the beer business, so when Covid showed up I ended up laid off. Getting laid off sucks, but it is less bad when you're ready and want to leave your job. After pondering (and reading blogs about) what comes next, I came to the conclusion that the part of IT I liked most was the problem solving. So I decided to give coding a try. I've been teaching myself C# for about 6 weeks now and have been really really enjoying it. I bought myself a subscription to Pluralsight and the Yellow Book and got cracking. At this point, I have the basic syntax down. I can get on LeetCode or HackerRack and do the basic exercises (the medium ones still break my brain). I've written one awful spaghetti code app that uses WPF and does some simple stuff like grabbing a json from the web and some basic user interaction. Now here is my question. What do you all think about coding bootcamps? I've mostly done all the C# low hanging fruit I think. I suspect that what I need to focus on now is coding practice/repetition, OOP, and design patterns and things like algorithms. And then some of the other stack technologies. I know HTML/CSS but JavaScript is a mystery. I can write a basic query in SQL, but that's it. Something like a bootcamp is enticing because will always point me in the right direction for the next step. But it's a lot of money to pay for what is basically just an online series of videos with access to tutors. I think that right now I could either commit to remaining unemployed for a while longer and do the bootcamp. I'd rack up a bit of debt paying for the schooling, but I have enough in savings to pay for the cost of living while doing that. Or keep up my self-teaching while job searching, and then get a job to hold me over until I can get a portfolio together. I would expect this to take like a year and a bit as I'd slow down once I was working again.
|
#
¿
Aug 17, 2020 17:32
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 02:24 |
|
|
I posted a few months ago about maybe doing one. I ended up going for it and it's been pretty good (I think I could have gone for a tougher program). But this school likes me and I've done well. Covid time was perfect for this. I got laid off mid-quarantine and my state lets you enroll in a program where you can keep claiming unemployment but go to school/get retrained and not have to look for work. It honestly didn't really feel like a huge burden. Even so, I get up at 9am and code until the evening. I break for dinner and girlfriend time and sometimes gaming with a buddy until about 9pm, and then I sit back down & code and watch youtube lessons until midnight or 1am. Everything I read or watched about boot camps ahead of time had the same message that you get out of it what you put in. So I have been putting in a lot. It also helps that I really enjoy coding and endless learning, it sounds like long hours but it has actually been pretty enjoyable.
Fender fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Nov 5, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 21:30
|
|
|
Should I (a fresh boot camp grad) do a job interview (working for my State) that is asking for 8 years of experience? I applied just because the boot camp employment assistant folks kept hammering home to ignore job requirements and apply for everything. Well, now the chickens have come home to roost and I think I'm in for an embarrassing video chat. Do it anyway just for practice?
Fender fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Jan 22, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2021 22:14
|
|
|
I attended a bootcamp a bit over a year ago, and have been doing my time at my first (arguably bad) coding job for the last year. I'm now out searching for a new gig and have found a lot of success targeting companies that don't have traditional recruiting strategies. One place has never seen my resume and actively advised against sending it in. I answered a few essay questions, passed a screening with an engineer, and was given an untimed coding challenge. Once that passed I got more interviews with an engineer and I've scheduled the final interview in two weeks. Another place glanced at my resume and fired off a coding challenge that wasn't too hard. I had 5 days and easily completed it in time. Once that was done, I had to pass some pretty chill interviews with engineers and next week I'll do the final round of chats with some execs. Resume has been discussed zero times. Your mileage may vary, and maybe I've gotten really lucky. But places that just want to see you write some code and follow directions and then check to make sure you're not a goober are making this job search feel easy so far. That said, I also have zero offers at the moment; but I am at least making it pretty far into the process at the first couple of places I've talked to.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2022 21:41
|
|
|
Crosby B. Alfred posted:Which boot camp did you attend? The Tech Academy in Portland. It's very much an average bootcamp. The curriculum is average and the only thing that might set it apart is how solid & available the instructors are. But there is nothing in their formula that produces exceptional developers. If you succeed there, you'd succeed anywhere. My thoughts on bootcamps is that I think that unless you choose one of the top tier you can basically draw names out of a hat and have a similar experience. You get out of a bootcamp what you put in, so it's more on you than on them.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2022 19:38
|
|
|
I posted a few pages ago about looking specifically for companies that didn't want to do a resume based recruitment. It worked out well for me, I probably sent out like 10 applications and got 3 responses. Made it pretty deep into the interview process at all 3, got 2 offers and accepted the second one. So now I'm starting my first 'real' dev job. I'm joining a well funded startup doing Python stuff. I'm getting six-figures, equity, WFH, full benefits, etc. It seems silly, but doing that first year at a crummy job really does open a lot of doors. That, and constantly coding my rear end off for the last year.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 31, 2022 22:54
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 02:24 |
|
|
Erwin posted:If you do that, then congrats - you know way more about how CI/CD actually works than a large portion of professional developers at many organizations. Fact. I know ours does this, and more. But I couldn't tell you poo poo about it other than green icons in Github are good for a merge, and occasionally looking in CircleCI to see when the deploy finally went through. And all I know about CircleCI is how to look at the status of a merge/deploy cycle to see where my PR is and if it's live. Blissfully ignorant of the crazy amount of work that goes into that mess.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2023 00:44
|
|