i was split across 3 different cohorts due to covid, and i see a lot of people losing focus on their ability to not get a job. maybe this is the school's fault, but you can't just graduate anything and expect a job. you have to continue with learning new things. i chose

i chose to ignore, initially, the idea that you need to suddenly spread yourself thin by learning a million different technologies. i took time to try to get good at understanding rails (even if i focused on rails api). i kept working on projects.

i kept refactoring projects or starting over. there's so much to learn that it's overwhelming, but you need to focus on something. doing a million basic starter tutorials isn't going to get you a job. what did you make with that knowledge

so it's frustrating to see multiple people from my cohorts get lost and just keep watching tutorial videos or success story vids. i see people getting jobs at big name brand companies a month out of #bootcamp and that's not an accident.

people immediately are like 'well are their projects intense?', and that's not really the point either! but if your projects during school didn't follow the guidelines (because we know they don't really care to check) then you're only hurting yourself. coding, to me, is very much

a representation of the work you put in. doing the bare minimum will not get you a job. making repos just so you have green squares and studying algos will not get you a job. blaming the testing system is not going to get you a job. at some point you have to look at the time and

money you've put into yourself to xsfr to a coding journey and realize you need to demand results from yourself. i'll be the first to tell you that i completely lucked out in getting a job. but you can't ignore that i've had 4 interviews with companies where they looked at my

github and reached out. i'm not the best, i'm not the smartest, i'm not even the quickest. but i spread out my luck by continuously pushing myself in each project and trying something i've not tried before. it costs so little to deploy projects and have something work

anyways, i feel for people looking for jobs and there are people who are putting in a lot of work but wasting effort by focusing on just applying to every single posting. that's just pouring all of your luck into 1 spot that's not guaranteed to give results.

it's just frustrating to me to hear 'well your way isn't the norm'. i started #flatironschool and in week 1 i was asking my cohortmates what projects they had in mind for each mod, since leaving the school with good projects was a goal of mine (i didn't really succeed lol), but

i throughout my time at school tried to explain how i got work as a designer, before coding. you build projects. you give yourself dumb projects to make and then you put it up on your portfolio and mix in real projects you get along the way. but you need to be constantly

working on new projects and new techniques. a million CRUD apps that all do similar things will not get you a job. i genuinely want to help others succeed and have been very willing to give my time for daily standups, offer up apps to collab on (even some deployed ones), and i've

spent countless hours helping my friends thru bugs or issues in their apps or studies. at a certain point you have to get tough with yourself and actually do the work. there's no easy success path, it's only hard work and routine. you can't complain to me about not getting

interviews and then have 0 projects on your github. no shit, why should an employer take a stab on you? what have you shown them? some videos of your school projects? we graduated forever ago now and the kids i see coming out now have acclimated better to the covid life than

we did. you just can't give up and get down about it, and i realize tough love doesn't help everyone but that's kinda the truth. if you want help, i will do all i can to help. but i can't help you if you won't help yourself.

i see a lot of hate on bootcamp grads as the schools are getting heat during this pandemic time and i hate to say you need to want it more, but you kinda do. i look at every app/site i use and think 'how did they make that? could i make that?' and if it's a sucky product (which

happens a lot), i put it down in a long list of apps i want to remake. if you don't want to learn how to make stuff, why get into coding? you can't just expect a 6 figure salary from a bootcamp if you're not genuinely interested in improving. a sr dev at a job will not make you

better unless you're taking the steps to try and fail and get better on your own.

ANYWAYS, long thread rant but i just get annoyed when people waste my time and discount my own method that i've used for 2 separate career changes now. get out of tutorial hell.