Salary Boost
The essence of making a decision is to consider your opportunity cost of doing the alternatives, which is basically the core idea of prioritization. The same goes to deciding whether joining a programming boot camp in Hong Kong is the right option for you.
Perhaps this does not hold true to those who’ve been whiplashed by the reality for years but does to those who are still wearing sweatpants while drinking their Starbucks out of a plastic mug.
Assuming that you did not graduate from the majors that would make typical Indian parents proud, where your career options are broader than Brittney’s thigh gap, you don’t have any other options other than signing your life away at a local, small company with a future brighter than Blackhole.
While , slaving away one of the most eventful years of yours from 9–6, listening to your boss bragging about his weekend cruise trip with his CEO friends, strolling on Facebook or Instagram just because you ran out of things to poke at, roughly around thirteen thousand hong kong dollars crawling into your bank account every month for you to complain about how little are you getting for all your hard work.
Here is the million-dollar question for everyone that asks every time they do something: “What’s in it for me.” The answer is not simple, but obvious. Money.
The big money question here is, what’s the difference between a go and a no-go? A simple line of math can tell you, in general, is about 46% of the increase, with the assumption of a fresh grad starting salary $11000 ~$13000 vs. a starting junior developer salary $16000~18000. Not to mention, if you are planning to stay at the office for another 4 months, would you be getting this amount of raise is a better question to ask yourself.
Of course, this is only a ballpark of what the market is offering, it’s highly advisable to do your own due diligence and to take your own background and working experience into consideration.
Connection, Network, and Exposure
I’m in my 30s, and starting everything from scratch without leveraging any of my other skills is not something I can afford to do as much as I want to compare to when I was younger.
After years of working as a digital mercenary, I came to a late realization where I wished I was able to react to it earlier; everything is relative to each other. Even when it comes to quality and experience.
In the world of business, nothing is “bad” or “good,” but it’s either a “good fit” or a “bad fit.” To visualize the scenario better, imagine you are a fresh startup where after 3 years of working with Gordon Ramsay, you’ve decided to start your own restaurant. Now, the food that you cook is great, but Gordon always beat the crap out of you because it wasn’t up to his standard, he despises your foods. However, countries with fewer resources might find the food the best that they ever had, because it’s such a rare thing to be able to eat such good food around the neighborhood.
Now, the level of performance is most certainly the same, but the result is relatively differenced from one and another. It’s not because the taste of the food was altered, but the target audiences whom the food was feeding to was different from one and other.
That made me realize that no matter what kind of professional services that I provide, one of the major growth factors is to connect with those who needed your help, who consider what you offer is a “good fit” for them.
There is no express ticket to success, and you will never know where they are, but you can expose yourself to better opportunities and options by networking with the right bunch. The Bootcamp was like a concentration camp for those who wanted to learn to programme. You work for 4 months straight, day and night with projects after assignments. What you build is not just experiences, but also bonding between those who went through the same struggle as you did. Although everyone has a different pace of learning, throughout thick and thin, what people show in them is not just what they learn, but their real character. Can you trust them when it comes to trouble, do they pick up the slack when things are not going as well, how do they tackle the problem when issues arise. These are the things that are costly for companies to find out. By going through Bootcamp, you will know who you can work with, and perhaps collaborate in the coming future on more significant projects once you get out of the Bootcamp.
Also, it’s entirely pointless to build buildings inside a cave, where no one can see what you are actually building. I understand the pressure of being judged, but comparing those who potentially needed my effort does not know my existence by not having the chance of being judged, I’d die for being decided by the crowded rather than missing out any opportunities that might lead me to where I want to be.
Instructor
There is no surprise programming Bootcamp is also a school; the quality of the school is dictated by the quality of the instructors and teachers since the most significant contact point between the school and the students are the instructors and teachers.
4-months. Tough titties. You won’t be able to learn everything at once. The good thing about their teaching curriculum is that the instructor makes sure that what they teach is what how the more prominent companies implement their project in real scenarios. They don’t focus on teaching you on how to make a subscription button floats like Newton fluid but throw you with standard industrial practice. It’s like chucking down bricks while smoothing the swallow with cement; tough af.
I was lucky enough to have 3 programming maniac, Gordon, Alex and Michael who could programme with their eyes closed, holding my chubby hands while walking me through the materials. They are generous, and passionate about their work. They talk about programming like New Yorkers talk about Yankees, not only that, we haunted them for all sorts of bug fixes and stupid mistakes around the clock. I’m glad that I wasn’t being hung dry after I coughed up the deal. Not to mention, one of our instructors is even referring clients to us because we did well at what we were doing. Not to mention, our newly setup digital studio got quite a bit of referral as a sign of trusting our craft.
Working Convention and instant feedback
Imaging Hodor is trying to communicate with Lasse; that’s how I felt when trying to bridge the connection between what I am learning and how I can apply to my job when I’m only watching Youtube tutorials and Udemy always-on-discount courses. Don’t get me wrong, the ones that are on Youtube ain’t bad, but being able to blend into the crowd and copy and paste your job as a real programmer is beyond slamming the replay button.
Also, to quote Toastmaster’s motto, “practice with feedback makes perfect.” When learning about a new craft, the only way one can improve is through refinement, a.k.a failing and getting back up. However, the process can be quite discouraging without any external help. Determination does not come that easily, especially in Hong Kong where most people are surrounded by the glamours night dazzling lights and social life that are fanciers than Lady Gaga’s meat dress. It’s difficult to spare time to learn something utter new without getting distracted, comparing to the States or Canada where the only thing that can distract you from concentrating is an hour and a half away drive away from where you live.
Having a professional programmer with a track record to hold your hands while telling you what you should avoid doing when your code only works on your computer, is more helpful than you think.
Market Demand
There were times where people who would feel that they aren’t pulling their weight at helping us learn, but here is what I genuinely think about learning. Learning isn’t a one-way road, but a two-way highway; you as the learner are also required to provide explicit instruction on what would help you learn better. Not to mention one of the golden rules of survival is that the hungrier you are, the better you learn.
One should never sit on their behind and wishfully think that the answers shall come to them like that low hanging biscuit on the neck.
The Internet is always your friend, where there are professionals somewhere out there just desperately waiting to teach you something new and useful in a meaningful way. Use them as a supplement to help you navigate through materials that do not make sense to you at the very first place (which it was most of the time for most of us, not even joking).
Also worth mentioning about the course materials, is that they are doing a brilliant job in informing me what I should be expecting in a real programming environment. The materials they developed go beyond building blocks that is obvious to everyone, such as unit testing and database maintenance. You don’t get those over the internet because of how taxing and intimidating they are.
If you are looking for the reality where you are hoping to get a good grip on what is going on in the industry, the materials will point you the right direction.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, it really boil downs to what you are really passionate. It’s ok if you still don’t know what you are excited about, life is nothing but an experiment. The faster that you adopt from your lessons, the better you will do in life.
And it doesn't really matter which path you go, it’s all about how you do it.
I have a philosophy in general for life, where I genuinely believe that a person’s character makes up a good deal of their own fate. You could have a billion dollar sitting in the gold vault that’s guarded by the elves and a dragon, but you could still lose them all by being an idiot. Or you could have just been a poor boy from a poor family with nobody loves you, but give birth to some of the most magnificent work in the history of music that is beyond this tiny world. As such, the result of the opportunity does vary on how you make your dues.
No path is accessible, it’s not what you do, but how you do them.
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And for you…
If you managed to plow through this article without being scared off, leave me a comment describing how this writing made a difference for you : )
I am a Product / Marketing geek in tech, running a digital studio focuses on web technologies.
I believe in building intelligent products, creating memorable user experiences and working effectively. Just come say hi to me on LinkedIn, Github, visit me on my personal portfolio page, or even shoot me a message on your interesting project ideas!
