Ask HN: Career in Web development | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Career in Web development

1 pointneedjob3 comments

I feel hopeless and stuck. I try learning a language get frustrated then move onto a new language over and over again getting tough and bored because it's hard and I can't build anything useful.

Ontop of all this I'm broke no money and I'm 25. I want to make something of myself I want a career in Web development but have no mentor or guidance on where to start. I tried applying for bootcamp but can't do the coding challenges.

What do I do? I'm tired of minimum wage jobs. I want decent money.

View on HN

Programming can be hard. You can sit on problems for hours shouting f*ck all along because something doesn't work. The documentation might be wrong, timing issues might show a bug only occasionally, hardware fails, network unstable, specifications from customers unusable and the new programming language or library not working as expected. I've spent days of my life debugging unicode character issues in databases.

Anyway, my point is be prepared that the job isn't smooth sailing and point&click. What you experience learning a new language or syntax and feeling about giving up is part of the job. Often programmers aren't just creators but complex problems solvers.

( The submitter's earlier question about oil rigs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914916 (never mind why the question is on a hacker forum) doesn't display confidence)

Everyone gets frustrated at some point. The key is not to give up, but overcome the issues making your frustrated :)

Pick one of the following, in no particular order and certainly not a complete list, and immerse yourself in it (Python, Ruby, Java). Then build your career.

unfortunately, being a programmer means having to actually know at least one programming language. pick a language, and learn it.

if you keep giving up, then maybe programming isn't for you. And thats okay, not everyone on earth is a programmer, and being a programmer doesn't mean all of your problems are magically solved.

think about it this way: if you are getting frustrated to the point of giving up on learning a programming language, what makes you think that a career in programming is for you?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com