Don’t Get a Negative Education, Get a Rewarding One

Ensure you read this article, especially Part 1. You don’t want a negative education, which can cause you much misery for many years, as many people do suffer. I have first-hand experience with students at Bov Academy who “graduated” from other programs and are still completely unprepared for a proper programming job and lack both confidence and competence in there career path. By the end of this article, you will find the path to a rewarding education, your path to prosperity.

Part 1: Choosing a Coding School—What to Look For, When to Choose One School Over Another, What Matters More than Everything Else in a Coding School, How to Get a Rewarding Education and Avoid a Negative One, and More

You have decided to become—and have fully committed to becoming—a professional software developer or software engineer or to improve your programming skills for the pursuit of mastery in your career path to earn a bigger salary and secure a more exciting programming job. To realize any of these rewarding goals, you need a proper programming education, accessible via self-education or one of these five formal coding school options: coding boot camp, accelerated coding academy, MOOC/course platform, for-profit college, or private or public university.

In the previous article in the series, we focused exclusively on becoming a programmer via self-education; in this article, we focus on getting a proper programming education via a coding school.

You can train to become an employable programmer at a coding school such as a MOOC, a programming boot camp, a course platform, an accelerated coding academy, or a two- or four-year college. Or, you can train entirely on your own—better known as self-taught or self-educated, an option that has always been popular for years, especially before web programming became as complex as computer science is and required dedicated study.

You Need More than Just A Bit of JavaScript and HTML and CSS

Gone are the days when anyone can study a bit of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and call themself a frontend developer and get a high-paying programming job. Nowadays, tens of thousands around the globe are pursuing proficiency in their programming career paths at coding schools and universities. As a result, the impressive candidates get hired by the best companies and receive the most rewarding salaries.

Since a self-educated programmer has access to the same kinds of high-quality programming courses as students attending expensive coding schools and universities do, a self-educated programmer can become just as qualified, skilled, and knowledgeable as any graduate from the best coding school or university. Still, too many people try to read a few blog posts and build a todos app and believe they are ready for a professional programming job.

Although inexpensive and even free, liberating and even self-empowering, and accessible to all and highly rewarding,

Don’t Skip This

The details in this article will save you much time, stress, possibly your career, and definitely your hard-earned money and invaluable time. It may even save you your marriage and home and much misery. I wish I had the details in the article on many occasions over the last 14 years.

Because changing your career to become a programmer will impact your (and your family’s) entire livelihood now and in the future, because more people quit their programming education than complete it, and because you may not know which programming career path best aligns with your capacity for the job, you need to learn the essential factors for success in your programming education and programming career before you invest your money and the prodigious time and stupendous effort required to become a programmer.

Furthermore, since you may or may not enjoy programming, might not possess the cognitive adeptness to take on one of the challenging programming careers, or may lack the sense of design or the mathematical inclination necessary for some programming careers, you would be wise to pick the programming career that best fits your interest and capacity.

Article’s Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

In this article, we set out to accomplish the following objectives, all of which you will realize when you read the article and complete the exercises at the end:

• Understand the four crucial factors for success in programming and why they are essential.

You are likely to spend as much as 30–40 hours a week in front of your computer as you train to become a competent and hirable programmer. And even after you complete your training, you will spend more than 60% of your waking hours there, typing and clicking as you write for loops and HTML tags and CSS rules and functions and algorithms, in a seemingly infinite loop of work-work-get-paid-work-work on a lifelong journey of economic stability and quest for mastery.

Programming will demand much of your time during the first five years of your programming career.

When you learn to code, you may have to (perhaps you should) quit your full-time job or significantly reduce the number of hours you work or even work part-time, so that you can find enough time to focus on your programming education. You need ample time to study; this is the most important factor for success in programming education. And you will take longer to complete your programming training and find a job than you planned.

For these reasons, you will need the support and cooperation of your family while you train to become a programmer—and you will need them to understand why you are spending most of your free time coding and not with them. This is a sacrifice you have to make and your family will have to agree to,

Article’s Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

In every article in this series, we set out to accomplish one or more objectives (the “O” in OKRs), and the success of these objectives will be measured by or determined by some key results (the “KRs” in OKRs). The key results are the specific concepts or ideas you will learn and the steps you will take to accomplish the objective(s).

In this article, we set out to accomplish the following objectives, all of which you will realize when you read the article and complete the exercises at the end:

• Understand why you need a goal and a purpose before you make any plans and commitments for a career in programming.
• Understand how your goal and purpose will help you succeed in your programming education and your career.
• Find your goal and purpose, and use them to make definitive plans for your programming career, including your selection of the ideal career path, courses, and coding school.

We discuss the key results at the end of the article.

Your goal—that is, why you want to become a programmer—determines which specific programming career path you should choose, which type of coding school you should attend, and which courses you should take. And your purpose (whether a desire for a reliable and handsome salary, wealth,

Today, software engineer is the most sought-after career for college graduates (most-applied-for job title for recent graduates) and the most highly paid one, as well. Indeed, “software engineers make over $92,300 within the first few years of their careers … You can expect this role to be among the most sought-after job titles for years to come, especially since the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] predicts that employment in this job is projected to grow 24 percent from 2016 to 2026.”1 (CNBC.com)

Although in most cases such statistics focus on software engineering (that is, the popular programming jobs that require a programmer to write code to build software), programming, as a profession and as a hobby and as a mechanism for transmogrification, exists in so many industries and encompasses such a wide variety of programming and nonprogramming activities and careers that nearly every discussion about programming careers fails to convey the breathtaking awe and at once the terrifying and reassuring God-like presence of coding in our world and our life.

The rest of this article continues after the series’ table of contents below.

Articles in this Series

1. Why Now Is the Best Time Ever to Become a Programmer, What You Can Do With Your Programming Skills, and Why Programming Is One of the Best Career Paths
2. Your Goal and Purpose for Learning Programming Will Determine Which Programming Career Path to Pursue and Whether You Will Succeed
3. A Significant Number of Students Quit their Programming Education,

Are you thinking about changing your career to become a programmer or software engineer? Are you already a developer and want to modernize and upgrade your programming skills and earn a bigger salary and a more exciting programming job?

If you do, I have written this comprehensive roadmap for you; it comprises a series of 20 articles, and they cover everything from the different kinds of programming careers and what each entails and the average salary for each, to the advantages and disadvantages of the different programming educational institutions (boot camps, accelerated programming academies, MOOCs, etc.), to interviewing and getting a programming job. Indeed, I cover everything, yes, everything, you want to know and should know about becoming a programmer or improving your programming skills for a better programming career.

I am hopeful these articles—all listed in the table of contents below—will allow you to make a fully informed decision before you make the monumental commitment to start your training for a programming career.

Articles in this Series

1. Why Now Is the Best Time Ever to Become a Programmer, What You Can Do With Your Programming Skills, and Why Programming Is One of the Best Career Paths
2. Your Goal and Purpose for Learning Programming Will Determine Which Programming Career Path to Pursue and Whether You Will Succeed
3. A Significant Number of Students Quit their Programming Education,