Developer’s state of mind — Intensive learning “from zero to hero”
My girlfriend was curious about my programming work. I always say that anyone can learn to code and make a living out of it. It’s all on the internet and you don’t need to attend a college to learn it. It’s just about how much effort you invest in it. I’m not going to lie to you. It can be easy for some but for most of us its hard. It’s not extremely hard though, but it requires to learn an extremely lot of things. This article is going to be about my girlfriend's rough start and it describes everything important we learned on the way.
How hard could it be? What will you have to do? Where can you learn from? How much time do you need to spend learning before you land the first job?
We were discussing how long it would take from having no technical background to landing a first programming job. I estimated it would take her anywhere between 3 months (12 hours per day) and up to 2 years (1–2 hours every evening after her work shift) depending on her effort. The idea was to leave her part-time job for the time being and fully concentrate on learning. Her biggest motivation was that one day, we could be colleagues and she also wouldn’t need to struggle to find a job while earning decent money at the same time (so she can buy another motorcycle). It was a tough challenge for both of us in terms of the time we planned to spend (me teaching, she learning) and having less money each month until she lands a job.
How much time should you spend on learning weekly? What if you feel tired and demotivated all the time? What should your motivation be? What would you achieve in exchange for months of hard work and learning?
She decided to do a “from zero to hero” course — learn everything needed to land the job in the shortest possible time period. We started with the basics: bash, git, picking an IDE (for us it always was and always will be Jetbrain’s Intellij tools). As I’m a long-time PHP developer, she started to learn algorithms and did very basic tasks (like printing asterisk tree using loops) in PHP. It turned out, I was going too fast! Everything mentioned, in just a couple of days period. It scared and demotivated her so much she hasn’t touched anything for a few months.
“The beginning of programming and the way Tomas was teaching me was hardcore. Mainly because I didn’t have any previous experience, I didn’t know the technical terminology and I also struggled with English as it is my second language. Imagine reading technical documentation or watching videos about a specific part of technology you are learning while not knowing the language good enough at the same time,” Alexandra Baladova
Do you have anyone who could help you through it? Do you think it is easier to learn in pairs or a group? Can you discuss all the technologies and paths available with someone and then pick what you like and start learning afterward? Could you plan the time you will learn beforehand?
Back to the start — Attempt #2: Let’s do everything on teamtreehouse.com first and do any made-up exercises second. It was a good decision, she spent hours every day going from one course to another on her own, leaving notepads full of little sticky notes everywhere. She often stayed up late and sacrificed every moment until her brain started to hurt from thinking and butt from sitting too long. She kept asking questions every day while I was at work after I got home from work or even when I was falling asleep. Questions about things she learned, solutions and even made up real-world situations kept coming weeks after weeks. The more she worked on herself, the more certain she was she wants to do a frontend web development.
After around 3 months from the beginning of the second attempt, I asked Touch4IT, the company I work with, if she could create any pure HTML + CSS + Bootstrap landing page for any of our clients for free, just to get some experience, get involved in a real-world project, get the feel of the making process and also have something to put on her Linkedin profile. She did that and then we started looking for any frontend web development internship or an entry-level job around. She applied and luckily was selected with around ~20 other women to be part of Accenture’s 2-month “Summer in IT” course which was primarily about learning and creating an app using React (frontend) and Java (backend). In the middle of the course, she was asked to be part of Touch4IT’s 1-month React course, which she also happily joined. Doing 2 courses at the same time… oof!
Could you repeat the process in any way? Could you challenge yourself to do the same over the next 6 to 12 months? Feeling like it’s not possible? Could you go for it anyway? Could you find motivation and leave all the negative feelings about learning programming behind? Could you go on even when you feel frustrated? Could you find someone to support you emotionally?
“Now, when both courses are over, I shouldn’t have such issues with intensive learning. It gets better over time. I kind of got used to it since I have some beginner experience and I learned how to look up official documentation for everything… or use google, haha… As a bonus I also got better in English and gained new friends along the way,” Alexandra Baladova
Long story short, she made it. She received a full-time job offer from the Accenture as a software engineer, mainly working on React frontend apps, at the end of the 2-month course. In total, it took tough roughly 6 months starting with zero experience or knowledge (counting from the second attempt) to get hired. We went through multiple arguments, almost broke up a few times and were tired most of the time. However, I can’t say it will get any easier from this point on. She will have to make every day count, work on her personality and get better and better as I proposed in my previous article from this series: Developer’s state of mind — Job interview & First days after landing a job
She will be tackling difficult tasks and learning many new things daily. But she will also develop her personality and soft skills. We are both eager to see what happens next and how it goes. I hope it won’t be as hard for you as it was/is for us. Fingers crossed… Anyway… Could you remind me to work on my work-life balance, please? I’m not kidding.
Do you have your own interesting story from the time you started coding? Do you have any tips for us? For others? Are you starting to learn just now? Do you have anything to ask? Do you need help? Please leave a comment below. I will be grateful if you do so. These articles are meant to help software engineers like you and me. Can we help each other? Stay tuned for the next story about developer’s state of mind coming out :-)
Continue reading the next story of this series: Developer’s state of mind — From junior to medior developer
