Hi there!
This article is a lot less "5 Facts You Need To Know About Boot Camps!" and a lot more "Now this is a story all about how my life and career got flipped, turned upside down". My intention is to share out where I was in life a year ago, where I am today, and the experiences that helped me during that time to go from working in customer service to working full-time as a web developer. I hope it's useful for anyone who is considering a career in coding, considering a career change, considering a boot camp, or any of the above.
The day I'm posting this, April 15 2020, marks exactly 12 months since I quit my customer service job and started at a programming boot camp with the goal of making a career change, and finding work in the coding / programming industry.
Part 1 will focus on the boot camp; how and why I ended up there, and my experience with it. Part 2 will focus on taking my newly acquired skills to a job market in a new country, and Part 3 will look back on what it felt like to start a brand new job in a challenging new industry.
Part 1: The Boot Camp
Unmoored
In the Spring of 2019 I found myself working at a call centre in Barcelona after having moved there from Canada. It wasn't a terrible job by any means, but it was enough for me to wake up one morning feeling very much like I needed a change. That day I arrived early to work and quite literally Googled "Best Careers 2019". The top results were all in the healthcare industry which I felt ill-suited for, but everything after that was about software development, web development, coding, and programming. Many of the articles I found elaborated that programmers and developers were not only in very high demand now, but they expect them to continue to be high in demand years later. I'd always been very comfortable with computers and technology but never had any formal training, so I started digging deeper.
I searched up "Programming Training Barcelona" hoping to maybe find a school that offered training in English. Much to my surprise, I happened to be in a city with dozens of what I now know are called coding boot camps, or programming academies. Boot camps like this were a new concept to me, but seemed attractive. I never felt like a 2 or 3 year post secondary degree was a good fit for me; I didn't see an easy way for me to go back to school for several years, and many of these boot camps advertised complete training in as little as 9 weeks. That seemed like it was too good to be true. I felt skeptical that I could really learn what I needed to land a job in that time frame, which is why I was very attracted to a boot camp that I found offering a 5 month course around web development. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Vue (I know), Java and Spring Boot.
While the course looked great and reviews seemed solid, I was still very apprehensive about committing such a large amount of time and resources; if you're not already aware, coding boot camps are not known for being inexpensive. I had many questions and concerns: What if I'm not good at it? Am I too old for this? What if the course is a scam? What if I can't get a job? Those and many other questions troubled me. To find some resolution and clarity I did what would become very useful for me as a developer: I asked for help. I spoke with people I knew in the industry about my concerns.
Fear & Doubt
I'll pause here to address some of those concerns more plainly, using a combination of what I learned from them and what I've now learned for myself:
What if I'm not good at it?
You won't know until you try - and the good news is that it's extremely easy to try your hand at coding for no money at all. Websites like Codecademy, Udemy, Udacity and Pluralsight all offer a wide range of courses, and many offer free trials. It costs nothing to learn the basics of any of the most popular programming languages. If you try some introductory / beginner content and enjoy what you're learning or at least find it interesting or engaging, that's a good sign that you're on the right track. I strongly believe that you don't have to love coding like many hobbyists do in order to make a career out of it.
Secondly, I also believe that even if you were to learn the foundations of some programming language and then later decide that coding is not for you, that would not be time wasted. Learning something new is never a waste of time, and the attention to detail, the analytical frame of mind and the fundamentals you'd learn from even the basics are all highly transferable and applicable to a wide variety of work beyond coding.
Am I too old for this?
In short, no. From what I've seen at the boot camp, at my current company and at within online communities around the developer industry, that industry is progressing in a direction that cares far more about your attitude, your work and your attitude about your work than it cares about how old you are.
What if I can't get a job?
Many boot camps will advertise that they guarantee a job - However I would take that with a grain of salt. My boot camp advertised a very attractive success rate but I was never under any illusions that it would come down to anything but my own grit and persistence in order to get hired. Getting a job at the end is never guaranteed, but if you can put a good foot forward armed with a variety of projects that showcase what you've learned, it's absolutely possible. More on this later.
How do I know which language / field of programming is right to start with?
"Programming" covers a wide variety of roles, similar to working in "healthcare" there are many different disciplines and it can be difficult to identify which you'd be best suited for. Personally I started with looking at what boot camps were available to me and which I liked best. Of those I liked best, I looked at what they offered in terms of course curriculum. As I already said I chose my course because I was attracted to the long timeline (5 months) and there were two courses that ran concurrently - Web Development and Data Science. I did some digging into both and while both appealed, Web Development felt like a slightly better fit. Try new things, find out what clicks well with you and compare it to what's available locally if you want to also go the boot camp route.
Finally, and honestly this was my primary concern - What if this boot camp was a scam?
I tend to be very sceptical of marketing. Most boot camps seem to promise the world, and that was a big red flag for me - Especially when it comes to putting down a sizeable deposit to even get registered. Furthermore, there are many articles and posts about people having negative experiences at boot camps. These are for-profit businesses that need to advertise to stay in the black, yet they'd also not survive long if they had a bad reputation. To put my mind at ease about this specific program, I searched up graduates of it on social media and asked about their experience. I found a handful of people and cold-messaged each of them, and all of them had positive things to say about the academy.
With those testimonials and the research I'd done, I took the plunge. I should stress again that while I did what I could to feel at ease about my decision, I never felt absolutely 100% certain that I was doing the right thing. I still don't, but so far so good.
The Plunge
The next 5 months for me were some of the most difficult, exciting and most fun of my life. The boot camp was, after my extensive investigation, mostly what I expected:
The boot camp I attended focused its learners on living the life of a developer from Day 1. Each day was started with a stand-up meeting to discuss 'what are you working on, what are your goals for the day, what are your blockers', etc. From then we had an online portal that accessed the curriculum, which was broken down into various tasks. Many of the tasks were things we didn't know how to do, but links and documentation were provided and we were encouraged to find our own answers. When we got really stuck with something and couldn't find answers, we'd book time with a mentor in order to get unstuck. We had excellent mentors who would endeavour to not tell us the answer, but instead help us get ourselves to the answer.
It's worth noting here that any experienced developer will tell you how important it is to be able to find your own answers and be self-sufficient. I believe that the boot camp having almost zero "classroom" time and nobody guiding us through every step was an extremely valuable introduction to working in this field. I also believe that this sort of learning environment is not for everyone. Some people became frustrated - "Why did I spend all this time and money if nobody's going to teach me?" And it's a very fair concern. This has been and will continue to be a point of debate, but I believe that the most valuable thing I took away from the boot camp wasn't how to be a developer, but how to learn how to be a developer. The end goal is never to be the person who has all the answers, but to be the person who can get all the answers. Or at least most of them.
"Fine", you might say, "I know how to Google things. I'll save my money and just teach myself at home."
That's an absolutely reasonable path, and for many people that will be the best one. Between a Computer Science degree, a boot camp or being self-taught, all three paths have significant pros and cons that will weigh out differently for each person.
For me personally, I needed the structure. Teaching myself at home would never work because I distract myself too easily. I needed, and still do need, a dedicated work space; one that I can go to and leave every day - I need a team of people working alongside me, and I need a clearly laid out curriculum of projects or work objectives that other people expect me to accomplish. These are some of the reasons that the boot camp path was the right fit for me. These are also some of the reasons that I think I would do poorly working as a freelance web developer - More on that later.
I progressed fairly well through the 5 months at the boot camp. I had very little experience with web development since writing some basic HTML websites on GeoCities for my Quake II clan in the 90's, so everything past that was brand new to me. Nonetheless, I managed to put together the various projects I was tasked with. It certainly wasn't easy though. I learned that coding can be incredibly frustrating. I learned that it feels amazing when you finally get a tiny thing to work correctly. I learned how important it is to be able to ask for help. I learned to be humble and to be comfortable with admitting I didn't know something. I learned to be patient, especially with myself, and I learned that for every step I take on this road, the end of it becomes two steps further away. Most important of all, I'm still learning those things every day.
Looking Back
I didn't come out of the boot camp looking like a superstar. By the time the 5 months were over I had several projects under my belt, but none of them were particularly amazing or attractive looking. My Vue project was missing a lot of core functionality. My Java / Spring Boot project, the work I struggled with the most by far, still sits unfinished. Even the first project, the HTML/CSS website, looks a bit like it was inspired by my old work on GeoCities.
While I look back on some projects and wish that they could've gone better, wish that they looked better or even just wish they got finished - I don't see them as failures. Sure they still sit there in the back of my mind as well as the back of my git repository - But I still learned how to work with data transfer objects in Spring Boot, and I learned how to manage state in Vue. I was in this boot camp to develop my skills and learn new concepts - Spending time making something perfect while not learning anything would've been the only failure.
I look back on those 5 months now and often say the same thing I did every week I was struggling there: The decision to do this was one of the best I've ever made. Make no mistake though, the boot camp wasn't perfect. There were small aspects of it I didn't like, and there were many good days just as there were many bad days; bad days or bad weeks where I felt as though I wasn't getting anywhere. Boot camps also aren't known for being easy. I believe that a good one will push you not to the brink or over the edge, but push you enough to get beyond how far you think you can go, to how far you actually can go. More often than not, that line is much further than you realise.
Furthermore
While the boot camp worked well for me and may for you too, that path won't be the right one for everyone. I hope that if it's something you're considering, this might give you some insight and ideas on what to look for.
A significant aspect of my 5 months that I haven't touched on was how after 4 months in, I slowed down my progress on learning and development, and put most of my time and attention on the final goal: Getting hired. I now supposedly had the skills needed to land a job in the industry. It was time to make that happen.
More on that to come in Part 2, which I'll post next week on April 22nd 2020.
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