How I landed a full stack developer job without a tech degree or work experience

MattWalter

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Articles like these make me irrationally irritated. It wrongly teaches people that you can become an adequate developer by putting in only a few weeks of effort.

You can complete a bootcamp of a few weeks, but you'll end up at a below average level, with a fundamental lack of understanding of the tools/languages you're using.

You'll have learned one or two things, and it COULD open a few doors, but you will not have learned a job/trade/profession, especially not to any point where you can start delivering value to your employer.

There are enough negative reviews out there if you're looking for a read.

And to use the term "full stack" so loosely...

Sébastien Vercammen

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8 years ago
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  I agree, mostly. The term "full stack" is meaningless now—I agree, and usually that means the person has been writing JS for less than a year (or at least gives off that vibe).
  
  But I disagree that you can't start delivering value to your employer with only 6-months–1 year of experience. I started in this industry without a degree or "formal" teaching (I used Codecademy), with less than a year of experience and was able to immediately provide value to my employer at the time (not a startup or tech company by any means but did a lot of web development).
  
  denvercoder9
  
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  8 years ago
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    I think we're agreeing but using different words. And because writing is hard and easily influenced by bias of the moment, I misused some terms. To clarify:
    
    "Full stack" in itself isn't meaningless, but if you don't have years of experience and/or a portfolio of released successful products where you combined your knowledge of the full stack (at least for MVP/v1), it's meaningless. (In my experience, time spent doesn't always translate well to results, so the shipped products are more important to me.)
    
    Yes, you can start delivering value instantly. In fact you could theoretically even start delivering value while you're still learning (learn step -> apply step -> repeat), but the average person doesn't have the experience to leverage this kind of learning process, or apply "accelerated learning" (absorb information quickly and be mentally very flexible, to then apply it in practice asap).
    
    I wrongly generalized a little in my original post, sorry for that.
    
    Sébastien Vercammen
    
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    8 years ago
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