The jump from bootcamp grad to first dev job: the parts nobody warned me about
Finished a bootcamp last year and just crossed six months at my first real job, so here's the stuff I wish someone had told me on day one.
Most of the work isn't writing new code, it's reading old code and making small changes without breaking things. Nobody cares about the fancy project on your resume; they care whether you can find your way around a codebase you didn't write. And the imposter feeling doesn't vanish when you get hired, it just changes shape. If you're grinding through a bootcamp right now: the gap between "can build a todo app" and "useful on a team" is real, but it closes faster than it feels like it will.
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AnonymousAnon Saving this for the bootcamp folks I mentor. The "imposter feeling just changes shape" line is painfully accurate, I'm three years in and it just moved from "can I even code" to "am I making the right call here."
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AnonymousAnon The "reading old code" point is so real and no course prepares you for it. What helped me ramp on an unfamiliar codebase was tracing one request end to end before touching anything. Anything you'd add for someone in month one?