Ask HN: Career advice for someone attending a coding bootcamp

7 points by biznerd 10 years ago | 4 comments

I graduate in about a month. It's been intense, a ton of fun too.

I don't know how "good" I am. There seems to be a lot of people smarter than me. Completing assignments faster than me. Particularly with OOP. OTOH I am average or faster speed with other aspects.

I'm hoping this probably doesn't mean a lot, especially since we're all new coders. But this has really gotten to me. I've had a job before (non-tech) where I was deemed incompetent and let go, so I want to try to engineer a smooth transition to the working world as soon as possible.

The bootcamp teaches Rails and javascript. I'm wondering - would a job in drupal have an easier learning curve? How would it be different? Obviously I'd have to self learn but it seems like a solid career path too.

smt88 10 years ago |

Assorted thoughts, in no particular order:

1. The speed at which you initially write your code doesn't matter that much. The time cost of a program plays out over months or, if you're lucky, years. Oftentimes, being thoughtful when writing a program at the beginning will lead to massive time savings later on.

2. If you're honest about your skill level and work for a well-run company, you won't be considered incompetent again. You're going to have to do a lot of extracurricular work, though. You should be upfront with prospective employers that, while you may have gaps in your knowledge, you're happy to do homework.

3. Drupal is pretty complicated. If you want to find a niche, you're better off with WordPress, which will be slightly simpler and provide better job opportunities.

4. If you can't find a job coding, you may want to look into doing QA or project management. Having the boot camp under your belt might make you more attractive in one of those areas, and then you can work on your coding skills in your free time and hopefully transition to coding.

5. People are going to hate me for saying this, but go learn Java (start with a Spring project). It's a pretty easy language to learn, and there are tons of Java jobs. PHP and Node are also good things to learn. Ruby (with or without Rails) is an absolutely tiny job market by comparison.

6. If you have any interest in frontend stuff at all, go learn React. I'm not going to comment on whether it's a good library or not, but it's popular and fairly easy to learn, and it works in the browser as well as mobile devices.

percept 10 years ago |

"Perhaps I could best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of entering a dark mansion. One goes into the first room, and it's dark, completely dark. One stumbles around bumping into the furniture, and gradually, you learn where each piece of furniture is, and finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch. You turn it on, and suddenly, it's all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were."

- Andrew Wiles (https://vimeo.com/18216532)

If you're having problems with specific concepts, I recommend focusing on those through practice, and getting help as appropriate through the RoR mailing list, Stack Overflow, IRC, a local Ruby User and/or Meetup.com group, etc.

Almost any topic you can think of has been blogged about in RubyLand, and even ten-year-old posts (particularly about more general concepts like OOP) can be helpful and relevant.

Practice, practice: fire up irb or pry or write simple scripts and try different things. What happens if I do this, or change this to that? Call `.methods.sort` and see what behavior each object exposes.

Keep trying stuff, because that's essentially the job: messing around with computers all day.

Good luck.

lollipop25 10 years ago |

> I don't know how "good" I am. There seems to be a lot of people smarter than me.

  Everybody is a Genius. But If You Judge a Fish by Its Ability to Climb a Tree, It Will Live Its Whole Life Believing that It is Stupid
  - Einstein

In short, don't measure your skill by comparing it against others. You're an apple, that other guy's an orange. We're all different.

> Completing assignments faster than me.

They're either really ahead of you, or they just ask on StackOverflow faster (probably the latter, definitely the latter). Besides, if they were really good, why go to a bootcamp? That doesn't make sense. :P

While coding speed is good, in real life, it doesn't matter. There are other things that matter besides speed, like code quality, maintainability, architecture. In real work, management takes care of you in terms of time. You'll always be given a reasonable amount of time to finish things.

> I was deemed incompetent and let go

Past is past. Let go and move on. Past mistakes, present experience.

> The bootcamp teaches Rails and javascript. I'm wondering - would a job in drupal have an easier learning curve? How would it be different?

I can say working with Drupal is pretty nice. Most of your time, you'll be site-building - configuring sites via an admin panel, looking for modules that satisfy some requirement, download themes, maybe tweak some CSS. The only time you get to write code is when you need to tweak something not built-in, or when you need to alter default behavior. For the most part, it's in PHP which shouldn't be that far from JS in terms of syntax and quirks. jQuery is built-in to Drupal, so as long as you know jQuery, you're safe.

If you have a Drupal job offer, by all means go for it. You'll have to grind gears at first, Drupal's documentation is terrible (I'll give it some slack, terribly organized) and the forums replies gap months (but hey, it's open source. everyone's a volunteer). But once you get the hang of it, you'll never leave it.

crypticlizard 10 years ago |

By all means switch to drupal, if you think that will better reimburse you for attending the tech camp.