From Non-CS Major to Backend Developer: An 8-Month Retrospective
I came from a humanities background and was in my early 30s, so I was very anxious when I started. But in the end, I got an offer from one company in the first half of the year, and I've been working there for about 5 months now.
What I did:
- 6-month government-funded bootcamp (honestly, only half of it was helpful)
- 2 personal projects, including deployment
- Did one coding test problem a day, consistently
- Studied CS with the goal of understanding, not just for interviews
The biggest thing was writing down the "why I did it this way" for my projects. Almost every interviewer asked about that. More than the tech stack, it was the decision-making process.
3 answers
Agreed, especially the last paragraph. In my interviews too, the questions kept coming about why I chose a technology rather than what technology I used. But if you really don't prepare for this, you get tongue-tied and it messes with your head lol
Well, that's a bit... Isn't it hard to generalize landing one offer in 8 months into a retrospective? The current market is different from when the author was job hunting, and if a government-funded bootcamp was 'only half helpful,' then the other half was ultimately filled in by the person themselves. Then you can't rule out the possibility that they were already good at this to begin with. Of course, I think the advice to lay out the decision-making process behind your projects is valid in itself. But if it comes across as 'just do this and you'll be fine,' that seems a bit risky.
I really relate to studying with the goal of understanding CS. I memorized things for interviews and then immediately fell apart at two follow-up questionsㅠ Could you elaborate a bit more on how you organized the 'why' behind your projects? I'm curious whether you wrote it down in Notion or a GitHub README.