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Comment by InfinityX0 | Hacker News Reader

Great to see that. There's plenty of "you should learn how to code" posts, Codecademy, Treehouse etc, but there are very few case studies of people who seemingly A) used these tools and/or B) actually ended up being able to wing it learning to code mid-to-late-stage in their career. Not sure if this post really qualifies as either of those, as well. If there's more examples of this that I'm missing, please let me know.

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I had a different trajectory, but a similar end point (biology -> freelancing -> full-time web dev).

The biggest similarity I noticed between myself and the OP is that you have to put yourself in the way of opportunity. For me it was building side projects and hosting Startup Frontier. For the OP it was ruby meetups and send out an email to the list.

It takes a lot of guts to cold-email people like that, I have a lot of respect for the OP. Good work!

Not really a case study but my sister went from never having coded, middle-school math teacher to junior consultant at ThoughtWorks in 5 months via DevBootCamp. TW may be a bit unusual though in that they are willing to train you for a year before actually making money on you.

Our industry needs a lot more of this. Many industries expect that new hires are in apprenticeship mode and will be learning on the job. In our industry people are expected to walk in and know exactly what and how to do things.

I don't think that's true at all - every organization I've worked with has planned for a 1-2 month ramp-up program. Generally you start off doing trivial bugfixes until the codebase makes sense and move on from there. Hell, learning on the job extends past this phase and is essentially neverending.

You just need to have enough background to make it through the ramp-up phase and start teaching yourself. That holds true whether you went to college or are self-taught.

1-2 months is still nothing compared to other skilled professions.

(Former ThoughtWorker) TW does have a very solid training program. Before the program ends, the trainees are often contributing bug fixes and features to production codebases, pairing quite a bit with experienced devs and so on (at least in the version in place when I used to work there).

TW is a great company to work for (if you are working on enterprise software, and you don't mind some agile/oo rah rah ism) but for someone with no experience, it is an absolute no brainer. Its training program is the most effective I've seen in my career.

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