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My home state has a coding boot camp, it's 15 weeks, apparently coding leads to really lucrative jobs.
I'm wondering what coding for money actually looks like. Is it stable work, is there part-time work? I honestly don't want to have to work more than 40 hours a week or do the whole "hustle" thing. I just want to make decent enough money to support my aging parents and myself comfortably.
I'm a creative person and I'm stressed about not having enough time/energy to focus on my artistic projects. But I'm also tired of always being stressed about money and worrying about my parents.
Everyone I know who works in STEM, especially people who work in computers, seem so healthy and stable. I think there is really something to be said for what financial security can do for one's mental and physical health. Just an observation.
I'm in STEM and coding is like 70% of my job. I work remotely and honestly, most of the time I work about 10-20 hours a week except for some short periods of time when the workload is havier and demands 30-40 hours a week. My friend who is an AI scientist works about 4 hours a day, if that, also remotely. I must add that we aren't slacking in any way, we are just very efficient and are very much respected and appreciated.
If you find an employer who let's you set your own schedule, doesn't micromanage and set realistic expectations about your workload, you'll have a great work-life balance.
Oh, for got to add. We didn't go through the boot camps. I have a bachelor's and my friend has PhD. I do, however, have a friend who has a degree in Political Science, went through the coding bootcamp and now working as a Data Scientist.
I am doing freecodecamp instead of a bootcamp.
Here is the link: https://www.freecodecamp.org/
Have you considered UI / UX design? Have a friend who did this after being a yoga teacher for a long time. She already landed a paid internship and she barely started the course
Spend a lot of time vetting your course esp. if you're spending any serious money on it.
There are a series of Boot Camp courses by the Trilogy group that are sanctioned by major universities and even promoted, somewhat deceptively, as being part of the university course options. They purport to cram two years of Computer Science into six months of bi-weekly meetings. Not true. Instructors are not credentialed educators albeit experienced programmers. Course curriculum advertised at time of sign up is altered considerably and may or may not reflect the skills that employers are looking to hire. You may get a great instructor or you may get a dud. While advertised as able to complete while working a full time job, this is false - unless you already have quite a bit of coding knowledge or work in an adjacent field. You should expect to spend a full 40+ hours per week with minimal assistance.
When I did one of these under the guise of part of the University of Texas at Austin, I got a skilled programmer for an instructor that was a lousy teacher.
To Trilogy's credit, their job placement assistance efforts were very good (although no course will guarantee a job).
That being said, now and into the future, everything will be programmed. Your car, your toothbrush, your fridge, as well as the more obvious medical, banking, finance, and tech needs.
Your place in the coding world would be secure but also commensurate with your skills, niche you choose to pursue, and how dedicated you are for the first five years or so of your career. If you wish to freelance you should make sure to choose an area that does not depend on a corporate environment.
You must be super detail oriented and of a technical bent and able to micro focus for long periods of time - good at picking up languages is a plus (computer programming is "speaking" in a foreign "language").
I decided to go into computer science a few years ago and it’s honestly one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I finished my associates in software development and got a developer job pretty soon after that near the end of 2021 while I was in the last year of finishing up my bachelors. My job is remote working for a small software consulting company. Everyone I’ve met at the company has been awesome and I can work whenever I want. We even do a yearly trip where we just do team building activities and host sessions to learn about stuff. I do have to work forty hours bc my time is billed to clients, but I never work overtime and if I want to take time off it’s never an issue. The work is decently rewarding and some of my coworkers did boot camps, so you can definitely get a job with a boot camp.
I've heard that bootcamp graduates are not going to have an easy time in the US job market. But I'm not from the US so I can't verify. In my country (in Europe) you can get junior positions after completing bootcamps. Those won't be the most glamorous jobs though, mostly building fairly mindless stuff and not paying that well. The benefits tend to be good otherwise though. Part time and working from home is common. It's a tradeoff like anything else. Are you willing to be in lots of meetings, deal with tech bros, and sometimes build stuff that nobody will use or that diverges significantly from the original well-crafted vision? I've had my frustrations with coding jobs so I'm personally looking to develop into a UX / concept role, but as someone who's new to the field, you can get a few good years out of it. There's some inherent satisfaction to getting the computer to work the way you want it to, or find the solution to a weird bug.