So you decided to dive headfirst into a career change and learn to code... Congratulations! It's scary just to commit to such a big life change, so you really have accomplished more than most already.
If you're like me, you decided to make this transition via bootcamp. I did this, in part, because I had no idea what to learn in the vast sea of tech terms. JavaScript, okay I've heard of that. Java, is that the same thing? What the heck is Kubernetes?! React, Angular, Python, .NET, TypeScript, SQL, NoSQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, GraphQL (why so many?!?), Ruby, Rails, Ruby on Rails... How is a newbie to decide?
I'll be honest with you, I guessed. I found a camp with good ratings that worked with my schedule and gave them most of my savings. I looked at Course Report and Switch Up, made some pro/con lists and BOOM I was off.
But there are some other good resources to help you decide which way you want to go. The Stack Overflow Developer Survey is a great resource for this. But it's vast, so I'm gonna highlight some key points I wish I would have seen.
Popular Technologies
What are people actually using? You can see here why a lot of bootcamps focus on JavaScript as a base language.
Wanted Technologies
Of course you want to learn the technologies that employers are looking for! Here you see Python hop to the top of the charts.
Top Paying Technologies
This is the US view (there is a global view also available in the study) of what these technologies pay. A lot of what you could learn in a bootcamp falls in the bottom half of this list, but 110k is still nothing to sniff at.
How Technologies are Connected
This chart is kind of a lot. But, I wish I would have seen it because I was very confused as to what was a language vs framework vs database. This chart breaks that down by color, and also shows the relationships. JavaScript is a language, and Angular is a framework based on that language. Whatever bootcamp you pick is likely going to include some basic HTML and CSS along with a main language, a few frameworks, and a database.
Time to Pick!
You've seen some data, read some reviews, and now it's time to make your decision. You may be afraid of choosing poorly, but the stakes aren't as high as you'd think. You are going to gain valuable skills no matter what you pick, learning the logic and flow of development. Seasoned developers are hired all the time for jobs in technologies they don't know yet because, surprise, technology changes all the time! So don't put too much pressure on yourself, this is just the first step in a long journey.
Top comments (8)
Thanks for the read, Caitlyn!
Have been poking around with Python (happy to see it's in high demand).
Finally got around to installing pyCharm from snapcraft.io/pycharm-community on my laptop. Now I need some fun starter projects 😉
Thanks for this! I'm currently at Flatiron School in Brooklyn. I gotta say, as a father with 2 kids(one of which is an infant), it's a very tough "row to sow". I wish I had considered other programs that were less time intensive, or spread out over a longer period.
That sounds really difficult, I know school was hard enough without little ones running around. It's hard to know in advance what kind of time commitment it will really be, I definitely put in more time each week than I expected. Take care of yourself, but keep at it! It'll be worth it!!
Hey John, Flatiron Online myself. Reach out if you need anything.
Caitlyn, great to see you on here.
That relationship chart is super handy, thanks!
Awesome article Caitlyn!
For people in Belgium looking to upskill themselves in 7 months for free, check out becode.org !
Awesome article! Thanks!
Nice article.