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Comment by brandonmenc | Hacker News Reader

> 3 months: How long it takes a dedicated beginner to learn the skills to qualify for computing and web development jobs.

I'm genuinely curious as to how many people here, who either program or hire programmers, will say that the above is a true statement.

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3 months from beginner to job ready ready is, basically, bullshit. There are people who do it, but they're the exception. The jobs they're getting typically rely on their using other skill sets on day one so they can continue learning software engineering for months in order to gain a useful level of proficiency.

This doesn't make the "3 month" claim worthless, but it does make it hard to fit into a sound bite.

I should know: I'm the co-founder and CEO of the Thinkful, Codecademy's other online partner in ReskillUSA.

Our company has hired many of our own students and helped hundreds of others successfully make the transition to truly job-ready engineer.

I've also spent the last decade as a professional software engineer, and another five years before that writing software. I'm 33 years old. After coding for half my life I feel I know less than half the craft.

Just for historical context: Back in the early 80s, a relative of mine taught the intro programming course in an adult education program. Her students were getting hired. Now, they were adults -- mature and motivated. At the same time, I went through pretty much the same curriculum in a high school course in BASIC, that has been my only formal training in programming.

I don't know about three months, but people were getting programming jobs with what would seem like pretty minimal training. I got to see some programming getting done thanks to internships etc., and the work environment was pretty loose, where you could get away with a fair amount of learning on the job.

It didn't seem all that hard, and despite the fact that I enjoyed programming, I wasn't sure that I wanted to make a career of it, so I pursued other interests. Today I use programming extensively in my work, but am not employed as a programmer per se.

It took me 5 month to get my first Java job (every day 4hrs after work; 8 hours on weekends). And now I see how lucky I was to get that junior position. It took almost year to hone basic Java skills and learn necessary basic stack of technologies to do plain Java projects. It took another year till I got my enterprise stack skills to acceptable level. Every technology/framework is 1-1.5k pages book reading and hours of practice just to start doing something useful. And then you have to repeat that every year, because frameworks updating faster than you can learn, priorities shifting, you forget things.

Edit: However, I must say, ^ was done almost in vacuum: I had noone to ask and had limited access to the Internet (sorry, no Stackoverflow for you :). With good instructors, well-prepared programs and strict discipline in classromms, I would say it is possible to get into entry-level positions.

Not jobs. Maybe an internship. I self-educated starting at a young age, and started almost every job until recently with a very low paying trial period. If someone is showing interest and room for growth, they may qualify for that. It's more of an investment than a hire at first.

To qualify yes. You can teach a beginner enough in three (hardcore, dedicated) months to get on the ladder as a junior developer somewhere. To excel? No way. You need to be very prepared to offer that beginner a lot of support on the job.

Definitely not a true statement, unless you have some other background/experience that a company is willing to give you a shot in a junior role.

I attended a 3 month NYC bootcamp with only matlab and visual basic programming experience (from college). On finishing the program, I had four job offers, two for 115k, one for 105, and one for 100k.

You are viewing the world from a very tiny bubble.

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