Reverse Job Search: I will pay to work at your company

I agree with other people in this thread - this is an incredibly inefficient way to spend this time and money.

Spend these 7 months and $10k learning more and building a portfolio, you'll get much more out of it than you could from a job.

Go to udemy, pickup a few good node/react courses(google a coupon to get them for $10-$15), and you will have expert engineers, who are also expert teachers, spending hundreds of hours guiding you through the process of building projects for your portfolio.

What can you possibly get out of "real work experience" that would be more valuable than that?

Build a kickass portfolio, have a github account you can use to showoff your code. It will make you way more hireable than "work experience".

Here are my recommendations on where to start:

https://startuplab.io/post/fullstack-web-development-roadmap

Specifically, I highly recommend courses by Stephen Grider and Andrew Mead. They are absolutely incredible in quality, will teach you everything you need, and are based on real practical projects.

>> I can pay who is willing to let me learn on the job.

Nope, please do not do that, as other say.

You have 10K and 7 months.

- Find some part time gig (may be teach HTML, CSS) at local community college - 2, 3 hours: pays you something and you are not completely using up your funds. You have some knowledge and we always underestimate our knowledge to be poor and useless to the rest of all. Ironical in that, we go try and find a job with the same knowledge! So be confident that you can make some income with what knowledge you have right know.

- Write 6 apps in 6 months, extremely scoped, solving simple problems, I will offer one example:

   -- Write an app, that teaches 2000 most commonly used English words. There is a photo for that word, the spelling and sound. The user is shown the photo, he picks the correct word. If app shows the word, pick the right photo. The user starts a session, selects number of words to learn/review, show the words randomly. Next upgrade: you can talk about expanding this to use Retention algorithms in the interview.
   -- Rinse, lather, repeat 5 more apps

- Once your 1st app is ready, go to meet ups, local groups etc where you can do some self marketing with your portfolio, every month 1 more app is getting added to your portfolio. Upload your resume and portfolio on job boards, keep applying.

With some thoughtful planning of a part time gig, 6 portfolio apps, self marketing should keep you busy. Yes, don't forget to sleep, eat correct and exercise.

Hope this helps, this is just what I would probably do. Best.

I've helped a few friends learn web development while in their 20s, a few of whom were highly intelligent MIT grads. I agree that the discipline and motivation are the biggest roadblocks, followed by discovering an efficient lesson plan (lots of places online will teach you the specifics without giving you the greater picture).

The fact of the matter is that when you have a lot of free time, you will likely end up frittering much of it away. If you absolutely adore programming and working on projects, then sure, you may spend those months productively, but not everyone can count on that. So it very much helps to have some external pressure — in the form of a job or a mentor — to help you push beyond limits that you might not choose to cross on your own.

- Buy a ticket to Nigeria $1.5k

- Buy $5k worth of raspberry pi’s

- Spend a month there teaching everyone the basics of what you learned

- Blog and video blog about it.

Come back to NY and get hired right away.

Does anyone see a flaw in any of this?

ps - what’s your race got to do with anything?

I have perhaps a controversial opinion:

If you want a position where you will be working on real things and want lots of input from a senior person, then that probably means them spending at least 1 hour per day working with you directly. That’s about 140 hours over 7 months. At a company cost of $200/hour (minimum in NYC) for a senior developer, this translates to $28,000 of company cost.

Why would a company agree to $18000 out of pocket cost in your scenario vs $28000 in an unpaid intern position? I posit that, perhaps, the type of company that would cover $18k cost but not $28k may not be the type of company you want to intern with.

Personally I wouldn’t want to hire someone in this way. I’d rather real internship or no internship because I’d be concerned about mixed messages.

Have you considered a change of location and finding a real internship?

Also remember all this is free internet advice. You have no obligation to agree with any of it.