Shortcuts To A Job In Software Engineering

Spoiler: There aren’t any. Stop reading now if you disagree.

Photo by Dipesh Shrestha on Unsplash

I often see articles advertising the software engineering equivalent ‘Learn to Drive in a Week!’, usually along the lines of,

• Learn JavaScript and get your first software engineering job in 30 days!
• How learning coding via a 48 hour hackathon online bootcamp bootstrap enabled me to earn 6 figures within a year!
• No degree required! No college required! No computer required!
  How to land your first software engineering job with just a few simple exercises and some hot water with lemon in it!
• How your GitHub repo is worth more than an education!

And the most outstanding of them all,

• Learn C++ in an hour!

Sorry, I did make one of those up. But you get the gist (pun intended).

Also, it’s takes me an hour just to set up my toolchain for C++ when I kick off a new project. Just saying. I’m slow, but methodical, as you might guess.

Fortunately working in software engineering is very unlike learning to drive — for one thing we don’t have to get a license and then instantly forget what we had to learn to get a license in the first place…