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Comment by kcole16 | Hacker News Reader

For me, by far the hardest part was finding the time. Learning to code on nights and weekends, when you've spent your most productive and focused hours at your job, is a nightmare. It wasn't until I was actually hired as a dev that I started to hit a steep learning curve, and I attribute much of that to spending 50 of my best hours/week coding, rather than maybe 20 of my worst.

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I have the same issue. I've set aside 10pm-2am every weekday to learn how to code, plus entire Saturdays and Sunday mornings. I can, at most, manage 20-25 hours, usually when I'm already bogged down.

I've been toying with the idea of quitting everything and going all-in for 3-6 months.

Would that be 100% retarded or just about 70% retarded?

I can live with 70%.

If you are in a position to quit, I'd put it at 0%.

You'd be an excellent candidate to get a lot out of a coding bootcamp. If you have like $10k in savings or money you can borrow, you'd be in an excellent position to try something like that.

PM me if you'd like to talk about my experience with one.

I had the option to quit to work on learning to code for 3-6 months and I chose to bite the bullet and stay employed. I woke up at 4am to get in a few hours of coding before work and kept my working hours to a minimum so I could have a few hours after work to code. Weekends were 12+ hours of coding both days. It doesn't leave a lot of room for social life or other activities, but the job search was a lot less stressful knowing I still had a paycheck coming in instead of burning through my savings. YMMV!

It depends. What are your goals, what is it you want to do with coding? i.e. Why are you teaching yourself to code?

You'll want to account for this all-in time on your resume. (Unemployment gaps are a red flag to companies.) You could put together a company of your own, for example, and frame all your study time as product/service development.

Go to Latin America or SE Asia if you do. Your money will go a lot further.

>Would that be 100% retarded or just about 70% retarded?

I'll go with "less than 70%". Or at least I hope, because that's what I did.

Coming from a Economics background (with a minor in Statistics), I took a job as a "data analyst" at a software company out of University. It was fun, but I relied on working with a programmer to get even basic things done.

Then came the "Data Science" wave. I thought, this is right up my alley! Except I needed to learn to program. I tried doing the tutorials and academies online, but was continuously stuck in the hand-holding stage. So I did the opposite of what is often recommended around here: I quit my job and enrolled in a 2 year Computer Programming course at a college. I'll be finishing up this spring. The enforced, formal structure and discipline has been a boon.

I feel great about having done it. I still feel pretty green, but I'm probably somewhere in the middle of the "desert" now. I credit school with having got me that far.

From the sounds of it, you weren't at Erik Trautman's "Job Ready" point when you were hired (and weren't going to get there without being hired). How did you write your resume and handle interviews?

Very true, I had probably just entered the "Upswing of Awesome".

I had quite a bit of experience with relational databases from my previous job, which I leveraged pretty heavily on my resume. As far as interviews, I was very honest about what I did and didn't know, and passed a coding test by pulling an all-nighter (and taking a vacation day) to learn a tiny bit about Django.

The offer came from a company I had initially reached out to about an unpaid internship, which eventually manifested into a full-time job. We agreed to a three month trial period, and they kept me on afterwards.

There was no doubt plenty of luck involved in the whole process. I sent dozens of cold emails, and offered to work for free several times (thankfully never had to).

Yes, end of the day learning is hard as heck. YMMV, but I find if I have a solid hour in the morning I can gear up pretty quickly.

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