Almost two years ago, before the birth of my first son, I formed an ambitious plan to break into the tech world. I had been working in education up to that point for a decade, but had maintained a lively hobbyist interest in programming and messing around with computers since my teens. Both my wife and I wanted to give her a bit more flexibility in how much she had to work, or whether she needed to work at all — and so I began to seek out a more high-paying field than education.

Almost two years later, I’m still in education. While I wish I could share with you a success story — here’s how I did it, and how you can too — I can at least tell you the things I’ve tried that haven’t worked, and perhaps save you some time and money if you have similar ambitions.

Don’t do a web development boot camp

Perhaps you, dear reader, are savvier than the man I once was. After all, we’ve had a steady drum beat in the news about the layoffs in FAANG for some time now. But just in case you had any doubts, let me tell you that hiring for web devs is still an absolute dumpster fire right now. I came within a hair’s breadth of spending an enormous chunk of change on a web development boot camp before a lot of those layoffs were announced, and can only thank my dumb luck that I didn’t.

Even back then, though, I should have looked closely at the fine print. Many bootcamps were still touting their pandemic-era placement rates, when firms were gobbling up devs in response to the huge numbers of people at home on their computers. That boom town atmosphere hasn’t lasted, and since these bootcamps are often legally required to post their placement rates year by year (they usually stash the data in an obscure back alley of their website), you can see how placements have cratered since then.

By the way, after completing the bootcamp, every ad you see will either look like this:

Job Opening for Entry Level Web Developer — must have 3-5 years of professional experience. (750 applicants.)

Or this:

Job Opening for Web Developer — must have 7-8 years of professional experience, and be familiar with the following tech stack:

  • SMObol databases
  • Smirnoff chains
  • DjiboutiJS
  • Marco Polo Cards
  • Flavor-Enhanced TypeScript (preferably Spicy)
  • Must be registered breeder of Standard (not Toy) Poodles
  • Must make an excellent AWS party dip
  • AMSCray methodology (1,456 applicants)

Needless to say, you won’t be remotely qualified for either. For the former you’ll be competing with the fresh-faced graduate who dutifully completed a few internships — maybe at the very company with the opening — for the latter you’ll be competing with the grizzled veteran just let go from a FAANG with a Northern California mortgage to pay.

Now, mobile development bootcamps might be more worth your time, as that field seems a bit healthier, and it may even be worth it to do a web development bootcamp with considerable prestige where there could be people on the faculty with connections in the industry. I don’t get the impression this is true for many bootcamps, however. Most of them seem to be staffed by the people who were enrolled in them not too long previously — an ouroboric diet that never bodes well.

What’s more, there are many good alternatives to bootcamps for gaining the know-how. Udemy has great and affordable courses, and edX has online versions of the courses MIT CS students take, for example. I highly recommend the latter, by the way — my Udemy course on web development taught me a lot of handy practical skills, but the conceptual framework that a good fundamentals of CS course gives you is really irreplaceable.

Don’t go it alone

I have not, as I’ve said, managed to break into the field; but I’ve had some close calls. All of them have come from knowing a guy, or knowing a guy who knows a guy. Don’t underestimate the importance of these kinds of leads. See if there are networking events in your area. I live in a place which is far from being a tech hub, but there is nevertheless a local meetup of folks who have been super friendly and welcoming to me. It might even be to your advantage to be on the periphery geographically: if there is an organization in your area, it’s probably volunteer-led and happy to recruit help. I haven’t tried hitting any big conferences but I imagine the same wisdom applies.

Don’t let your skills get rusty

Your search might take a while. If you successfully learn anything along the way, keep practicing it. Keep building stuff. It’ll be good for your portfolio, but it will also keep you from losing ground, which can happen with surprising speed. Last month for my wife’s birthday, I decided one of her gifts would be a custom website. I hadn’t been practicing my web development skills for a bit, and I was surprised how it took me a good minute or two to get back in my workflow. Remember that memory undergoes exponential rates of decay. Plus, it’s fun to build, right? That’s why you want to do this, right?

Don’t forget who you are

Of all my admonitions, this probably sounds the most woo-woo. Or perhaps even counter-intuitive — maybe you have thought of breaking into the tech field as the perfect opportunity to reinvent yourself. To some extent, that might be true; consider also the possibility that the freak you are might just be the freak someone needs. In my case, there is a lot of my skillset that I can bring with me — being in education obviously has given me a lot of practice in boiling down and explaining complicated ideas. Also, having taught language for so long, I am obviously a bit obsessed with languages and how they work. Find ways to parley what you’re already obsessed with into something tech-related, and it’s a win-win.

Learn tools, but don’t make tools your master

There are a lot of tools out there. Some of them will be useful for solving some particular problem you have; many more are just trendy, shiny, or interesting but without any eminent utility to you. It’s important to distinguish that difference, lest you become a toy-chaser instead of an engineer in search of interesting problems.

Conclusion

Well friends, I hope, as I said, that this post saves you time, money, or both. Please reach out on Github or Twitter if we can collaborate on anything of mutual interest.