surviving coding bootcamp: a guide from week 2
tldr: you gotta sleep.
It’s the 3rd day of the 2nd week of a 2.5-month-long bootcamp, and I’m now more of an expert than I’ve ever been on the tedium, the grind, and the bliss of bootcamps.
For my fellow bootcampers: this is what I know of surviving (and thriving) in a coding bootcamp.
Let’s start with an assumption: your goal is to get a job (maybe even a good one?) in programming or web development.
Your goal is not to: ‘just get through it’, have fun, impress the instructors, take a break from life, or get a certificate. If any of these are your goals, I invite you to write the sister essay to this one.
Now — the quick & easy steps:
1. Sleep
In my previous 8-year life as a teacher I found that the #1 contributor to the quality of classes wasn’t my own preparation, the subject material, students’ moods, the weather, or any of the obvious things. If I slept well the night before, the class would be good. If not, it wouldn’t be.
We all know that sleep is vital for memory and focus (and like, not dying). We all have heard the advice from parents and teachers and anyone else wise enough to tell us.
In short: sleep should be your #1 priority. Higher than turning in your homework. Higher than “relaxing after class” (read: nachos and Netflix).
That means, at least for the duration of camp — watch the caffeine, cut the booze, sleep at the same time every night, keep your room dark — essentially, follow good sleep hygiene above all else.
2. Coding vs. Job Search
The art of getting any job is twofold: first, it’s the skills & qualifications needed by the position — changing a carburetor (is that a thing?) or ability to perform open-heart surgery on a gorilla or, well, golang syntax and algorithm structures.
The second part is the art of the job search itself. Remember that these are two different things, and treat them accordingly. As you type pages of Python and endlessly adjust the padding on your flexboxes, don’t neglect the job-search part. Sending 5 emails a day isn’t that hard. And writing Linkedin articles (if that’s your thing) is pretty fun. If you’ve set aside time from day 1 to learn to code, set some aside for the job search as well.
3. Cultivating a Mindset
3 or 6 or even 12 months is a pretty damn short time to learn a technical skill like coding, much less to any proficiency. As my particular bootcamp said many times — yet, I’d argue didn’t drive home nearly hard enough — you need to be all-in on this choice of yours. Your life is 101% about one goal until it happens: landing that first job.
To that end, your ‘down’ time or ‘off’ time should change as well. You’re now listening to coding podcasts, not true crime. You’re now watching industry YouTube, not Squid Games. Talk to the coders that you know, meet some more on Clubhouse or (the new) Twitter Spaces. Drown your mind in the programming world. Anything less is less than 101%.
4. Responsibility
We all hope and pray that the coding bootcamp follows through on its 80% job placement rate and the hype of average starting 80k salaries, but the fact is, the responsibility for finding the job, and for learning the material, is on you.
Did you not ‘get’ the lecture? That’s on you. Did you project not turn out how you’d hoped? That’s on you. Are job offers not rolling in? Once again — that’s on you to fix — again, despite our hopes, the bootcamp is simply some rough-hewn stairs in the side of the mountain: it’s still on you to climb that bad boy.
5. Bail out!
We’ve all seen and heard of people who start on a path in life — it could be a relationship, a hobby, a belief, or, you know, it’s Linkedin, so let’s stick with a profession — and a year or five down the road end up in a miserable situation that they refuse to leave because they’ve been doing it so long.
Beware the sunk-cost fallacy: you’ve put 6 months and $10k into this new career, so you feel you must continue. Think about your future: will it be better or worse if you continue?
But also beware the ‘lost newbie’ fallacy: just because you’re bad, or don’t enjoy the work, doesn’t mean this will always be the case. You likely don’t have a passion for building fences. But if you went into the industry, 5 or 10 years down the line you just might have built the knowledge and skill you need to be deeply passionate and wildly skilled at fence erection. Can the same happen with coding? I’m only 10 days in but…I certainly think so.
The point stands: if coding is clearly not for you at the end of the course, chart your plan B as well as you can. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it might be easier than 30 years of misery in your future.
