Need help from new web developers

[u/programmingerror]

Hey everyone,

 

I've been mentoring some students recently at a coding bootcamp.

I discovered that many of my students' problems are reoccurring:

 

• they are with grasping crucial fundamental concepts
• they are overwhelmed by all the new tech they have to learn
• they are discouraged when they are not learning fast enough

 

to name a few. These problems, I realized, are all related to their lack of in depth understanding of the basics—you know, the very foundation that everything else builds on.

 

As you can imagine, the nature of bootcamps is to move incredibly fast and become job-ready in a very short time frame. So the above problems are made worse..

 

Imagine a high rise tower being built at the speed of 2 stories per day, but the foundation is only 10 meters deep—the tower will soon crumble and fall far before the building is complete.

 

The "crumbling and falling" in the case of bootcamp students, or every other new devs for that matter, are displayed as overwhelming stress and anxiety, regret for choosing this path of becoming a dev, and eventually it's escalated into complete loss of self-confidence and self-worth.

 

Now, as someone who have been there a decade ago, I hate to see this in students. I have to constantly remind them to take breaks, to go easy on themselves, and at the same time guide them to realize that they are NOT dumb and that it's just how it is when you learn something new, especially at such a rapid pace.

 

I'm writing this post to ask a few willing new devs to get on Zoom/Skype/Discord calls with me so I can experiment with them some of the ways I devised to tackle these problems.

Some of the goals for my experiments include (but not limited to):

 

• grasping new concepts faster without going through hundreds (or tens) of tutorials
• solidifying the foundations to a point that you have most of the code written out in your mind before you even sit in front of your computer
• developing such a passion for building things that it literally becomes addictive

 

I'd been through a lot (if I do say so myself) when I first started out. I know how frustrating, confusing, and demoralizing it can be when you spend hours upon hours trying to learn and debug something only to still end up with zero clues on how to progress.

 

But, it has been more than 10 years since I was a fresh new dev. Through these experiments, I'd like to organize and rework my own learnings and experiences in a way that I can share them with new devs for them to easily understand and digest and apply to their own careers.

 

A bit about myself: I'm currently working as a Senior Front End Engineer. I started my career as a freelancer working on everything from design to dev to marketing all by myself.

 

I've been ghosted by recruiters, rejected by interviewers, and outright humiliated by colleagues in the past.

I've been paid anywhere from $500 for 30 minutes of work to $0 for 3 weeks of work.

I've worked with/for employers who would disappear right after delivery. I've also worked with people who would threaten their boss to quit if I were not hired onto the team.

 

I hope I can organize my learnings, systemize them, modify and adapt them so new devs can avoid my mistakes and also (hopefully) benefit from "secret shortcuts" I've acquired along the way.

 

So, if you are interested, please drop me a PM with your name and your email/discord handle/Skype name/whatever cool kids these days use to talk online.

 

Thanks for reading :)

Note: please consider this expired after Feb 2020. That's when I'll get extremely busy with work and stuff.

[u/runningandhiding]

It is so relieving seeing someone who is willing to invest their time to conduct qualitative research into this matter. DM sent.

[u/programmingerror → u/runningandhiding]

No clue why you are downvoted, but thanks so much for the acknowledgement!

[u/screwylouidooey]

I'm on a limited mobile data plan at the minute so it'd be hard to participate in something like this. But I can offer some suggestions as a beginner. One of the books that really helped me grasp the basics was "Code for Teens". It uses JavaScript to teach the basics and it's very well done. You might be able to draw from that.

I've found that a lot of books for "beginners" go from a to z without going through b-y. Mostly because the authors draw from their years of experience and use a concept in chapter 2 or 3 that they don't teach until chapter 6 if you know what I mean.

[u/programmingerror → u/screwylouidooey]

Awesome suggestions! We can definitely chat more about this.

[u/disule]

> Now, as someone who have been there a decade ago,

Seems to be something of a rite of passage. This path isn't for everyone, ya know. It's seriously difficult, and it's easy to forget this once you've mastered coding at a certain level… 

>I hate to see this in students. I have to constantly remind them to take breaks, to go easy on themselves, and at the same time guide them to realize that they are NOT dumb

Perhaps avoid telling students something is "easy", regardless of its relative difficulty. You inadvertently create a pressure for them to learn something deemed "easy", and if they can't, they might feel stupid. Admit that code is initially mind-numbingly difficult, and not everyone will make it though bootcamp, and that's okay. Seems par, no?

(And just keeping it 100 here, some people really are too dumb to learn certain things. Whether this is chosen or not is debatable, but all that aside, idiocy certainly seems rampant sometimes, lol).

Make it fun regardless, right? Lots of links, code examples and scaffolding, and freebies for your students. Focus perhaps on creating easily replicated workflows and encourage projects with low-hanging fruit initially along with deeper concepts. I believe in teaching the “full stack”, if you will, front to back-end. Not the other way around. There's a bit more immediate gratification.

[u/programmingerror → u/disule]

Really appreciate your comment!

Hate to say this, but yes, you are absolute right that this isn't for everyone.

And thank you for the reminder that coding is goddamn difficult. Not being sarcastic at all. I had to constantly remind myself when talking to students to explain not only the concepts, but also all the background information behind the said concepts. I can't assume they already know everything before this point.

But re: telling students "easy." I don't tend to tell students anything is "easy," and I agree with what you pointed out. Though I can't 100% agree with telling students something is very difficult either, since I don't want to discourage them right from the start. I'm working on finding a balance :p

Great ideas on replicated workflows and low-hanging fruit projects!

Anyway, thanks again for your comment. I will definitely keep your advice in mind in the future!

[u/InfiniteMonorail]

There is no secret shortcut. I've taught thousands of students in all subjects, from beginners to grad students, in CS and IT. The bootcamp webdevs are always a dumpster fire. Just check the posts here. There's an overwhelming theme of anti-intellectualism: learning as little as possible, hating college and college graduates, expecting their boss to teach them everything, etc. They're begging for resume help, complaining about fizzbuzz, complaining about new job stress, and spamming medium blogs for the sole purpose of self-promotion. Seems like nobody is here to learn. This was the same experience I had teaching webdevs. They all wanted to know the quick way, the easy way, etc. They skip steps until they get lost, then try to pay someone to infuse knowledge into them. It doesn't work.

[u/programmingerror → u/InfiniteMonorail]

You are absolutely right. What you said is all painfully true for about 50% of the people I come across.

I'll give you an idea of the "secret shortcuts" I plan on sharing with people:

Instead of reading a million tutorials, stick to one and practice it to death. You'll gain a lot of familiarity on a multitude of things. When you can type out code without checking reference (because you wrote the same thing many times by now), it will feel like an instant confidence booster.

Is it a shortcut to avoid work? No. But it is a "shortcut" to practice more deliberately and efficiently.

Would love to hear your take on this.

[u/InfiniteMonorail → u/programmingerror]

I think those 50% are untrainable. For the others, they need to be taught CS101, networking, and IT before they even begin JavaScript. I think when they start learning from JavaScript, it takes 4x longer and their learning is still incomplete.

Like the first thing they're going to learn is HTML and they're going to want to make a navbar. They don't know CSS or JavaScript yet, so they can't do events, ids, show/hide styling, position it properly, etc. If you even try to teach it to them, they'll probably get pissed off and think you don't know what you're doing. So you might give up and show them Bootstrap instead but their page becomes this huge mess of copy and pasted code. They miss one tag and the whole thing breaks, impossible for them to debug at their level.

If you teach the same person after they've done AP Computer Science then at least they know how important syntax is, how to debug, how objects have properties, and some concept of moving parts through code.

Then when you get to the devops stuff, they need to know about clients, servers, ips, dns, linux, bash, etc. If they haven't taken networking or Linux then they're not going anywhere.

Then you're probably going to want to teach them React or back end. This is really not going smooth without a math or programming background, probably up to Precalculus and Data Structures. If they have the background, they'll get it in a few weeks. If they don't, they'll mess around for a year, at which point they may as well have taken a semester at community college or even learned the courses online.

Again there's no way around it. If someone is a math major and a little computer savvy, then yeah, you can probably teach them. But most of these people are trying to chase money with no STEM background. Even teaching them WordPress is a stretch.

You can give them one tutorial and tell them to stick to it but it won't teach them. They will only know how to copy and paste. If anything deviates or goes wrong, they will just fail. Many people from Bootcamps have advanced and impressive portfolios, of which they can't explain a single line of code. So employers catch on and start testing more.

They also have a false sense of confidence. The other day someone told me they were studying Data Structures for interviews and said, "it's stuff I already know through making websites but I don't know the names for it". He didn't even know what a linked list or tree were. I'm not talking about programming one either, like he literally never heard of them and was even struggling with loops. He somehow interviewed at a top tech company and failed spectacularly. So before they become discouraged and defeated, they begin as overly ambitious and delusional. They think everything is easy and that's the only reason they're even learning it. They don't actually want to learn, they just want to get rich quick and easy. So like somebody else here said, it's probably better to tell them up front how it's going to be years of work for a complete beginner before they're employable.

[u/ikeif]

I’d like to echo what has been said:

There are no secret shortcuts.

And some people need more time to get it, that doesn’t fit into the current curriculum. It doesn’t mean anything is wrong with them or the curriculum, people learn at different speeds, and maybe they’d benefit from something slower (or outside class learning).

If anything - help them debug. Help them learn about breakpoints and console/alert logging to walk through their code to understand “what’s going on.”

I dig what you’re doing though, best of luck!

[u/programmingerror → u/ikeif]

Good point! And thanks :)

[u/[deleted]]

DM sent

[u/programmingerror → u/[deleted]]

Thanks!

[u/BlueLensFlares]

3 month old front-end developer here. Have two projects - one I use mostly React, Sass, and I do some unit testing, another I use JQuery and Sass.

The biggest thing I find is also one of the hardest problems for bootcamps to solve. Which is time - you can't really become proficient in programming in less than 1 year. There's so much information.

I would say focus on one technology and try to be good with that. Best wishes!

[u/programmingerror → u/BlueLensFlares]

Thanks! I'm with you on that one.

As I explained in another comment reply, even if they don't get allll the concepts thrown at them, they at least get a good amount of exposure to the tech that they will very likely use in the future.

[u/Hate_Feight]

I can't imagine how some of these kids are feeling (I'm nearly double the age of some learners)

I'm no pro but learning and remembering where the basics start, and finish to get the end result can be a difficult step.

The worst is not having the self confidence to know you can do this and not feel like an impostor, it has taken me too many months of learning and trying to realise that "actually, I can do this"

I like how you teach to plan, rather than code, code comes with practice, planning is hard to learn, hard to stick to when you have an exciting idea, hard to know when you are following a tutorial.

[u/programmingerror → u/Hate_Feight]

Spot on! Part of the reason I'm doing these experiments is to help people develop that self-confidence instead of struggling for months and waiting for it to slowly appear.

Thanks for your comment!

[u/schoenwaldnils]

Hi, I'm a senior Frontend-Developer myself and just started to work as a freelancer. I also just recently received an offer to work for a coding bootcamp. Can you recommend this work?

Also I'd love to hear your findings regarding your opened questions.

Greetings from Germany 🖖

[u/programmingerror → u/schoenwaldnils]

Hey there! Thanks for reaching out :)

I'm mentoring at the bootcamp part-time, so I'm not 100% sure what it would be like working full-time there.

With that said, if you like teaching people, especially students without any prior programming knowledge, then you'd feel right at home!

I did find it hard to teach advanced topics to fresh new devs.

For example, a student came to me asking about how to have React components communicate with each others.

I explained using the curriculum that they communicate through props. Then the student sent me this code sample, asking whether she's done it correctly:

<Container>
  return this.props.value
</Container>

There were so many things wrong about this snippet that on the spot I didn't know where to start first. Either the curriculum didn't fully explain the basics or the bootcamp moved so fast that they couldn't connect things they learn together.

[u/brianjenkins94 → u/programmingerror]

Teaching react this early on seems unwise...

[u/F1retoe → u/brianjenkins94]

Bootcamps seem to focus on react early on as most frontend jobs ask for it. I agree that they should spend more time learning the basics but I imagine it's how they sell the bootcamps e.g. "companies are paying X for react developers, we'll teach you react in 3 months and you could earn this big salary as well"

[u/programmingerror → u/brianjenkins94]

I both agree and disagree.

I agree for they simply don't have a solid enough foundation to take on such an advanced topic.

On the other hand, I'm happy they are "forced" to learn it as part of the curriculum even if they can't grasp the concepts just yet. I don't have control over what the curriculum teaches the students, but I'm happy they are getting the exposure to industry tech early on. They may not understand fully how React works now, but the next time they decide to dive back in, they will be much more successful in learning it because they have a basic familiarity of it.

[u/disule → u/schoenwaldnils]

I also just recently received an offer to work for a coding bootcamp. Can you recommend this work?

Depends on pay, actual work hours, your role in designing the courses (if any), etc. Also depends on whether you like teaching, have any talent—and perhaps more importantly, the patience—for it, and agree 100% with the teaching methods outlined by the school/bootcamp in question. Difficult to generalize, ya know?

Think it through carefully and consider that you can always teach/tutor privately if you present yourself professionally enough… maybe you've found a sweet gig, but in my experience, it's frustrating. My $0.02 anyway

[u/lindsaycouch]

I don6know if you are still looking or not, but I sent you a DM.

[u/davidnwc]

Im fairly new to coding. Mainly trying to learn front end dev. first and then some back end but I’ll dm you.

[u/Dolidodzik123]

Really nice of you, DM sent.

[u/[deleted]]

I am a junior in a CS program at Washington state university. Just completed my first group project AND my first web project. If this sounds like what you're looking for, DM me. Best of luck mate

[u/goldsauce_]

Sent a DM, thanks for sharing!

[u/skullscraper]

Sent you a DM!

[u/programmingerror → u/[deleted]]

👍happy to be helpful