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As a dev I've always suspected programming was easy, but never really thought it was this easy. Literally anyone can pick it up in a few weeks. That's surprisingly depressing.
Most of my cohort had some kind of experience in tech before, or had taken a community college class or a few CS classes in college or something. A few that didn't struggled a lot after - one just gave up and went back to his old career, one has been getting odd contracting jobs but nothing stable for the past two years. I'd say that it's definitely not the easy way to suddenly become and engineer, I would definitely recommend spending at least 6 months doing some self-study or taking courses before deciding to take the leap. Bootcamps are also much more expensive now than when I attended, so that's even more reason to make sure this is what you really want to do.
The rest of my cohort is still employed as software engineers, as far as I know. Some have been with the same company, others have switched around a lot. Everyone seems pretty happy when I see them at reunions. A few started their own companies.
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I've never done an AWS class or have any certs, so I can't say for sure if its worth doing. In my case, I've mainly learned on the job and have had some really fantastic mentors to work with who have trusted me to make decisions and let me run with them. I also read a ton of books on design patterns, architecture, deployment, ops, etc.
thank you. if you have any architecture/deployment/ops books to recommend I would love to hear it.
If you're totally new to deployment, I'd do something like this:
* Get comfortable with the basic Unix/Linux commands (basically, to the point where you can navigate the file system and mv/cp/rm files with ease, change chmod permissions, etc.)
* Create a simple webapp in the stack of your choice. Literally a webserver for a site that says 'hello world'.
* Deploy it on Heroku. With their CLI it's like a single command.
* Congrats! You deployed a site! Go on Heroku's management dashboard and take a look at the logs. They won't make much sense, but get a feel for what's going on.
* Go on digitalocean and make a droplet, which is a VM that's running on their servers. Pick the Ubuntu 16.04 droplet. (Note, you can pick 'One Click Apps' which are VMs that come preloaded with the stack of your choice, but don't do that now). Read about how SSH works. Now SSH into your droplet. Cool, now you're connected to your server!
* Learn how to install the dependencies for your webapp. I don't think the droplets even come with git, so you gotta install everything from scratch. Then get your app running!
* From here, keep playing with your webapp. Figure out how to make your server run your updated code. How to add a database. Do it until you're really comfortable with running your site.
* By now you've run into a ton of issues with the site breaking. It's hard to keep your dev env and the live server synced! Start learning about Docker. Dockerize your app and deploy your app to Digital Ocean as a Docker image.
* When you're comfortable with THAT, start learning AWS. Learn what a EC2 instance is, what RDS is, what you can do with S3, etc.
* Finally, deploy to AWS!
You can use the free account tier at Digital Ocean / AWS to accomplish all these tasks.
Good luck and have fun!
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bootcamps are pretty light on backend/devops type knowledge which turns out pretty critical for "real" jobs. Do you think this can generally be picked up later or should people in bootcamps do something like an AWS certification (just to pick an arbitrary skill proof point) to be sufficiently well-rounded?
Bootcamps don't teach you AWS because that would cost them money and eat into their profits if they showed anything useful. Plus they probably don't want to be on the hook for some student goofing up and running up a huge AWS bill. I get alumni surveys all the time asking what things they should teach and the one thing that is consistently never on the list is ops/cloud-related training.
As a dev I've always suspected programming was easy, but never really thought it was this easy. Literally anyone can pick it up in a few weeks. That's surprisingly depressing.
Anyone can pick up painting or playing guitar. Doesn't mean it's any good.
As a dev I've always suspected programming was easy, but never really thought it was this easy. Literally anyone can pick it up in a few weeks. That's surprisingly depressing.
With a basic understanding, some people can start contributing to existing projects, but it's likely that they're going to make a mess, and it's unlikely that they're going to be ready to start designing and building robust systems.
It's common for inexperienced developers to have a lot of enthusiasm and pour tons of time and effort into projects that are then hard to maintain. Management often doesn't understand the cost of this in terms of technical debt and maintenance (maybe even thinking they're saving money by paying a junior developer less for the "same" thing).
I'm not trying to diminish anyone's aptitude or enthusiasm and I don't think everyone on a team needs to be highly experienced, but I've seen this anyone-can-do-it attitude (from both developers and managers) lead to a lot of pain and unnecessary costs, including opportunity costs.
I remember interviewing a ton of bootcamp grads from a couple of schools in Austin, TX and being largely unimpressed. You know that feeling after you interview someone where you're just _not sure yet_? Maybe you liked talking to the person; Maybe they did great on the coding exercises, but you're just not sure. I've since learned that when I'm not sure, that means no.
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While thats generally true, it can take years for people to get the hang of developing software, which I would distinguish from just programming.
That distinction clearly doesn't matter to employers. As this thread demonstrates, anyone can make 6 figures after spending a few weeks learning to program. They have every bit as much market value as long time software developers do. It's only a matter of time (a year or two at most) before we're all paid slightly more than janitors - the field clearly (demonstrably) has no barrier to entry whatsoever. Literally any…
As a dev I've always suspected programming was easy, but never really thought it was this easy. Literally anyone can pick it up in a few weeks. That's surprisingly depressing.
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> There's another aspect to this though. Programmers have to be smart and get things done. In my experience of interviewing and hiring these qualities can entirely orthogonal. I've hired people who program enthusiastically on side projects and study advanced topics at the weekend but are pain in the workplace; overcomplicating tasks and working slowly while others deliver faster and with better quality. At the same t…
> someone who bounces across team members as they get stuck with something or another Helping them see what they've missed or otherwise get over the hurdles? Sounds like a senior dev to me.
That's what I'd call them.
I've always like troubleshooter, though: when there's trouble, they shoot it.