Choosing a Full Time Programming Course as a Career Change
For those who aren’t familiar with the context of this quote here is a meme. The meaning is simple: why spend in the magnitude of $150,000 on professional knowledge that is available virtually for free thanks to the Internet?
That is especially true for people comparing software engineering industry to the other fields. A trivial sixth-grade-level math is jaw-dropping: self-taught programmers make around $100,000 per year on average in the USA vs. somebody with a degree in art, history, philosophy, social services, or education earning usually somewhere in the $30,000-$50,000 range. Let’s not forget that the cost of obtaining bachelor degree is anywhere from $15,000 to $40,000 per year.
However, what options are available for those who don’t have enough focus, determination, motivation or inspiration to pursue computer science education on their own by using free online course, blogs, MOOCs (e.g., Udacity, Coursera), screencasts and podcasts?
Thanks to savvy entrepreneurs during the past two years, the number of full-time intensive programming courses increased. Companies like HackReactor, Dev Bootcamp, HackBright, FlatIron and General Assembly pave the way for more schools to come. But most importantly they give people hope, new career, opportunity to take a stab at a new job and make new hacker friends for life.
What to know before applying for a coding bootcamp
To help you navigate and make the right choice on how to spend two to three months of time and $5K to $17K, David Kim and I wrote the Choosing a Full-Time Programming Course guide: What to know before applying for a coding bootcamp. In the book we cover why you should enter a program and then give some tips on how to hack sometimes competitive admission process (HackReactor admission to applications rate is 1/30). Also we provide readers with a list of the 13 best schools.
Don’t hesitate. Read the guide and apply now to change your life for better, embark on a life-changing experience/adventure and finally get the job you love.
PS: Traditional computer science education usually doesn’t teach how to build modern-day applications, therefore it’s more like a logical thinking training,and related to real software engineering as much as the physics, math and even law programs. Believe it or not, virtually none of us, programmers, perform binary algebra in our heads and we don’t invent new search algorithms every week.
I assert that traditional computer science education does, in fact, teach ‘real software engineering’. Yes, you don’t use the trendy tools that are being used by many working software developers but you do learn how to build teams, manage projects, develop architectures, solve problems, and communicate with team mates. This is accomplished by having students work together on semester-long projects, typically done in the senior year after you have developed knowledge about data structures, basic algorithm development, formal languages and expressions, logic, Big O and sorting algorithms. Programs at public universities cost nowhere near 15k per year which you listed as the bottom of the range and, now that computer science is an established field and not bleeding edge at the undergraduate level, the majority of programs conducted at universities will be well worth the time and money – especially for those with even small scholarships and internships (which are available to everyone who wants them in the field of computer science because demand is high). The trendy tools used by web application developers change all the time, but the languages and structures remain largely the same. By learning concepts instead of syntax, software engineers are more relevant to the entire industry and are not locked down to ‘Node developer’ or ‘Front-end Javascript developer’. It is valuable.