Comment by sublinear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sublinear | Hacker News Reader

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I find it strange that many people don't know that building a career is a lot of work. I do understand some people are in a situation where they're never given a chance to focus on it, but that can't be all, or even most of these cases. I grew up below the actual poverty line to a single mother with a low paying job, not just regular "poor". I still managed to screw up and lose financial aid for a couple of years.

My own experience was that getting into software development took up about half of my free time from around age 12 to 18 and after some fumbling around some friends and I were at an intermediate hobbyist level before graduating high school (probably at or just barely beyond the level of the best bootcamp students). We even ran a couple of clubs. I didn't do an internship, but just found part time work building simple CRUD apps for a few local small businesses (low stakes contracts of a few thousand bucks were awarded thanks to a friend who was playing with daddy's money while finishing his business degree). Then I got my first "real job" (salaried, benefits, etc.) a few months after finishing an accredited bachelor's degree in CS at my state school. The rest has been my actual career until now (I finished college about a decade ago).

I'm pretty sure this is the only "reliable" way and it wasn't easy. I had a couple of mental/ego breakdowns along the way because I found out I'm just kinda smart and not a genius, I didn't grow up to be a millionaire game designer like Carmack or Romero, and I became somewhat out of shape. I think this is... such a painfully average life story?

Thanks for sharing your story!

I mentored people at a coding bootcamp in Europe, there were some students with unrealistic expectations. Sharing real-life programmer careers help to stay grounded.

Coding is a job, like the other kinds of jobs. It is sometimes closer to craftsmanship than engineering. Maybe we won’t change the world, but arguably we might change it to the worse anyways :-)

Well... I'm flattered but I'm not going to mince words and I don't mean to blast you here, but...

The other part of the story is I have a failure of an older brother who doesn't work, has huge amounts of debt, and has told me a few times he's intrigued by the idea of a coding bootcamp and regularly blows me off when I try to teach him anything. Like I said I come from a trashy place, and I shouldn't have to explain how incredibly rude and dismissive of my entire life he's being by telling me something like that. I feel exactly the same way about bootcamps. They're entirely dismissive of a lifetime of effort I'm sure many others reading this have also put in. What makes you think it's possible to compress that when it's hard enough as it is even for those of us who had no other options? Are you saying you have something figured out that we didn't? You are certainly saying it can be done quicker and cheaper by running a bootcamp and I don't agree. Nobody will pick up your slack and train these people on the job and not even ChatGPT will make them more productive because they don't know what they don't know. They'll just be fired immediately and the further we go into the future, the hostility towards people who don't know what they're doing will only increase.

I guess I'm not really upset at you, but just deeply worried for anyone who takes a bootcamp and thinks that's a substitute for school when it's only the beginning of a much longer process I know few of them will ever complete. What about the rest who fail and are out that money? It's gotta be a worse success rate than just getting a real degree!

I think we have different understanding on: What a bootcamp is (length, scope, model) What traits a junior developer should have (lot of non-tech stuff) What a person can reasonable learn outside of a job (there is a limit)

What I think is reasonable to teach in a one year full-time coding program is the ability to learn programming. There are some “secret components” also to make the learning experience smoother/faster, but these are “just” constant optimizations.

> What I think is reasonable to teach in a one year full-time coding program is the ability to learn programming

"Learn programming" means different things to different people. To me and probably to many hopeful bootcamp students it means a much broader scope: the ability to successfully complete any coding work thrown their way to a professional degree. Much like knowing a natural language like a native. That can't be taught in a year. That misalignment of expectations is the concern I'm voicing.

> What a person can reasonable learn outside of a job

Not sure what's meant by "job". You can learn anything outside a job. It's just a matter of how much time you have. What's for sure is nobody wants to hire someone they need to hold by the hand. The places that do are the worst places to work because they want someone naive they can pay low wages (usually bad startups). A good candidate should ideally have some experience via internship, contract work, open source contributor, etc. The lines between volunteer, paid hobby work, and part time job can be blurry when starting out and that's the best place to learn when starting a career because the stakes are low. This too definitely takes more than a year.

I’m happy if a junior programmer knows when they should ask questions. In my experience a “senior” with ego problems can dig a year deep rabbit hole for the whole team in a matter of months.

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