That viral "learn to code in 30 days" post is setting people up for failure

I saw this guy on Reddit bragging about how he went from zero to a job offer in 30 days using some bootcamp. The post got thousands of upvotes and everyone was cheering him on. But I've been messing around with Python for about 8 months now and I still struggle with debugging my own loops some days. That timeline is just not realistic for most of us who have jobs or kids or any kind of life outside of coding. Has anyone else felt pressured by these success stories but then burned out trying to match their pace?

2 comments

2 Comments

murphy.aaron5d ago

Yeah that "30 days to job ready" stuff is straight up toxic. I remember hitting 6 months of self study and still feeling like I couldnt build anything without copy pasting from stack overflow. The burnout hit me hard about a month in when I was trying to follow one of those "code every day for 3 hours" plans but I got stuck on a stupid bug for like 4 days straight with my while loop. What worked for me was just focusing on one small project like a command line todo app and taking breaks when I got frustrated. Nobody talks about how much of coding is just sitting there confused and thats totally normal.

quinna895d ago

My buddy tried that whole "learn to code in a month" thing and ended up quitting after three weeks. He spent two of those days trying to fix a simple typo in his CSS, then just sat on his couch watching Netflix for the rest of the week. He told me the only thing he actually learned was how to Google error messages better. I see where you're coming from with that todo app idea, that's way more real than those bootcamp promises.