How Not to Get Burned Out at a Coding Bootcamp: From a Bootcamp Teacher and Student
When I wrote my original blog post about getting burned out at a bootcamp, I wrote it as a student. I was in my second week as a student at Flatiron School and was already keenly aware of some of the bad habits that I and others in my cohort were starting to take on.
Now, seven months later I’ve graduated the program, been hired on as a Technical Coaching Fellow to assist both lead instructors and teachers, and am two weeks away from graduating my first class. I’ve gotten burned out, and I’ve seen others get burned out, and I’ve seen plenty of people avoid the situation altogether with a little bit of self care. While a lot of this advice may seem obvious, it’s easy to get caught up in code and forget it all.
Sleep
If you do nothing else to take care of yourself over the course of your coding bootcamp, please, please, please, get sleep. Get lots of it. Get it every night, even if you feel like you should stay up late studying. Get more sleep than you normally would, and scale back if you find you don’t need it.
Sleep is so crucial that even slight sleep deprivation or poor sleep can affect memory, judgment and mood. — American Psychological Association
If you normally sleep eight hours and you’re changing to six, that’s sleep deprivation. It doesn’t matter if “ah no worries brah, I can handle it” or not. Staying up too late coding, going to bed without getting some time to wind down, staring at a screen until you fall asleep — this is the stuff that’s going to add up over time and completely kick your ass in the long run.
Why? Because of the second part of that quote. Memory, judgement and mood. You need every one of these things at 100%. Your memory is essential for what should be obvious reasons. Your judgement should be keeping you from going down weird code routes, or mismanaging your time. And your mood needs to be as high as possible because you’re going to be running into error after error and that’s bound to bring you down.
Students that don’t get their sleep often have a hard time keeping up with work and staying awake in lecture. Fighting to stay awake is a task on its own, and not something that pairs well with learning. Worse yet, I’ve often seen students try and replace sleep with caffeine. This is ineffective for most students, and in others it creates an anxiety that’s difficult to combat.
If you take nothing else from reading this, please take away the fact that you want to get some sleep. Sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep. Please sleep.
Prioritize
In my last post on the subject, I unconsciously quoted productivity consultant Dave Allen when I wrote“You can do anything, but not everything.” Allen is the creator of the “Getting Things Done” method of time management, which I don’t personally subscribe to, but do find interesting. Whether you do or not, there’s a whole lot of wisdom in that one quote.
Yes, you are absolutely capable of tackling an intense three month long program that teaches you a variety of code languages. Yes, you can totally work 40 hours a week at a stressful job. You can learn Swahili, master the art of calligraphy, train to be a pro wrestler and play some serious defense in your kickball league. But you can’t do all of those things at once. When it comes to a coding bootcamp, I would advise against doing much else at all.
As a student, I had the mindset that I would only add on additional things after I got a few weeks in and felt like I had the whole ‘coding thing’ under control. I didn’t do as well as I think I could have, but I didn’t do badly.
I saw some of my fellow students try to maintain jobs and weekend gigs, or keep their ultra cool nightlife going. The result, from a performance perspective, was hugely negative. Remember that ‘sleep’ talk we had?
As a teacher I saw students that I know were trying to work on side projects while still in camp. The impulse makes sense. They want to do something that separates them from their classmates and learn a little more on the side. But learning two things at once inevitably ended them up with two things half learned.
Don’t Compare
Comparing your progress, your projects and your skill to that of others is just inviting yourself to feel miserable. Every single time. It doesn’t matter if you come away thinking you’re better than someone. That can be worse.
Upward comparisons are the obvious troublemakers. Looking at someone and saying to yourself “oh man, they’re so much better than me” is an upwards comparison. The same goes for something like “Oh man, I suck compared to that person!”
In addition to being damaging to your own self confidence, upward comparisons can lead to idolization and false expectations. People learn differently, and at different speeds. People can learn one topic very quickly but have a much more difficult time with others. Even if someone learns every single topic at twice your pace, that doesn’t mean much in the long run. If you’ve learned the same things, it doesn’t matter how long it took to learn them.
At Flatiron, we teach a five module course, with each module being three weeks long. If a student isn’t ready to move on to the next module, they can end up repeating one with a more customized and project-based approach. This can be disheartening of course, and they often go down rabbit holes of comparing themselves to others. “I can’t believe I’m a worse coder than [insert name here]”, they’ll say. And it’s not about that at all. They just need more time, and that’s okay.
The more sinister side of this coin is that of downward comparisons. “Oh man, I’m so much better than that guy,” or “can you believe she doesn’t know that?” There’s a great writeup on this Juliana Breines, Ph.D in Psychology Today that I’ll pull a quote from directly.
“ When we focus too narrowly on others’ negative attributes, we may miss the complete picture of their strengths and successes, which limits our ability to empathize and support them in good times and bad.”
Not only is it damaging to see a person as just one thing, it can also bring you down when they pull ahead in something. I’ve seen a fair share of students that are strong in one aspect of coding that then feel like they’re way behind because they don’t grasp another as quickly. They see students that had slower paces picking up steam and they worry that they’re now at the bottom of the pack.
Teddy Roosevelt said that “comparison is the thief of joy.” He wasn’t wrong.
Reach Out
I can’t speak for all bootcamps, but I can speak for mine. As instructors, we want to see every one of our students succeed. We want them to be happy, working hard, and learning subjects completely. We want them to land great jobs when they get out and have successful careers. And we want to know when something is preventing that.
We had a student recently that spoke English very well, but not as a primary language. They did incredibly well during group projects and individual tasks, but when completing a timed exercise, they got very little done. It didn’t make sense, until we reached out to the student to explore the issue. It turns out that under stressful situations, they struggled with English — their brain defaulted to their native language.
We had another student who was strong technically but failed code challenges that should have been simple for them, and again we couldn’t figure out why. With this student, it turned out that they hadn’t learned to touch-type and were simply slow typists.
Once we had this information, we were able to offer techniques to help overcome the obstacles, as well as some extra practice. In both cases, we caught the issues early and were able to adapt, but if the students had gone out of their way to bring their difficulties to our attention, we would have been able to act much more quickly.
It’s important also to remember that coding is a team sport, and that asking your fellow students for help is essential. There’s no point in being stuck on the same function for an hour straight, especially when there’s a great resource sitting right next to you. And if you’re both stuck, it’s a great time to pair up, or ask an instructor.
I go by the 10, 10, 10 rule. If I spend more than ten minutes getting something to work, I’ll take to Google/Stack Overflow. Ten minutes of that and I’ll ask someone around me. Ten more and it’s time to ask someone that knows better.
Take Care of Yourself
Learning to code is awesome, and going through a bootcamp is an awesome way to get a jump start on it. You have a limited amount of time in the program, and it can feel like taking a day off will destroy any progress you’ve made. It can feel like you should be staying up all night working, and learning code at the expense of everything else. But it isn’t.
Family comes first. Your mental and physical health come first. One hundred percent of the time. If you need a day off because you’re sick, take the day off. If you need a day off because your sister is getting married, take the day off. Let your instructors know well in advance, but take it off.
Don’t mistake that advice for not pushing yourself. You should be pushing yourself. Code can be hard to learn, and you’re learning a lot of it in a short amount of time. You should be working incredibly hard and devoting most of your time to it. But within reason.
And if you can’t devote 50+ hours a week to learning code, or the stress of the pace is too much for you, or you just don’t feel like you’ll survive it, that’s okay too. Reach out, talk to people. Maybe an immersive program isn’t for you, maybe you need an online program. Maybe you need to find a part-time camp. Maybe, just maybe, you need a way to learn that doesn’t fit in with the things that the industry currently offers.
You know yourself better than anyone. And you know what will work best for you.
The Takeaway
You may have noticed that in nearly 2,000 words of advice about coding bootcamps, I didn’t actually talk about much having to do with code. It’s because that’s the one thing everyone gets. What people forget is how important they are to their own success. How a rested mind makes everything clearer, or how nice it is to have someone stay home instead of coming in sick.
Take care of yourselves y’all!
