Design vs Development?

Hi Ryan,

First let me say, there is no wrong path to take. I know the art scenes you are facing. Regionally, I am about 3.5 hours south east of you, in Kennewick, WA...so I've experienced and traveled to Seattle and Portland most of my life.

I'm also a bit like you, I'm 29, with a BA, my concentration was industrial/product design. It still is by the way. But like you, I struggled to find my creative outlet, and it was increasingly difficult to produce prototypes without the space, and tens of thousands of dollars in equipment and tools I used in the model studio. I hadn't wrote a single line of code in college.

It was the first year after college, the place I was working for asked I could try to put together a simple website. I said sure. That's when I started to learn. After that, I just kept at it. That was 5 years ago now.

For awhile I struggled, because I felt coding was my mistress, and I wasn't being true to myself. But I figured out it provided many of the same qualities that product design did - problem solving, prototyping, troubleshooting, design iterations, etc. It was just in a different medium, digital instead of physical. The difference was, I already had a laptop, and all the software I needed to code. Because the bar was much lower, I moved forward with it, self taught, and am where I am at today, which is getting ready to take my own shot at launching a production, premium web app as a service. Because I don't have much money, I've had to learn to do everything myself, front and back, design, database, server configuration...everything. My passion definitely is in the creating the user interface and user experience, but today I have to do it all.

I didnt' have the connections to get much attention from any product design studios I liked. Much like you, it's a narrow job market and difficult to make money in. It seems you're either broke, or your very wealthy and well known. There is very little inbetween.

I'd be lying if I didn't say that my hopeful intention is to make a bunch of money building web products, that I can actually go back to my roots and open my own product design studio, and live out my life growing that. This might be a similar route for you. Consider putting 10 years in, make as much as you can, and see if it doesn't give you the freedom to create your art when you want, for what you want.

I don't have any intention to freelance, or work for some big company right now. My intention is as I stated, work for myself, so later I can work for myself. In the meantime, like you, I'm employed elsewhere. It's a great job by normal standards, but it's not where my heart lies.

Confusing job titles are confusing. They're basically made up. In general, UX means User experience. This is the all encompassing experience of the site. Is the user interface (UI) easy to navigate, the site site load fast, etc. UI is the user interface, things like color theory, contrast, white space, etc. Most UI guys know a bit about designing for UX, and most UX guys know quite a bit about UI, since UI is probably one of the biggest, or most noticeable factors of a good UX. Digital designer is just a generic term, web developer is just a generic term, front end web developer usually means you don't know to know much about creative or art related things, but should be excellent at front end languages, like html, css, javascript, sass, react, etc. Back end developer is similar, except you're knowledgeable about back end technologies like like php, ruby, python, node, frameworks like Rails, or Slim, test libraries, etc. Full stack developer usually means you can basically be a one man show, more of a jack of all trades, king of none, and same with the full stack designer, you know how to put a design together, top to bottom.

Does that answer all of your questions?

As a person with a masters degree in a totally unrelated field to coding (but not in art or design). I can share my story, since it is similar. Despite investing tens of thousands of dollars and years of my life into a 'prestigious' bachelor's and then masters degree, my career was at a total dead end. I had applied to over 600 jobs with not even a single interview. I lived in a state of being 'overeducated and underemployed' for years. I wanted to do something different, but I didn't know what. I spent years reading about different careers, going to career coaches, filling 'aspiration worksheets' and the like. Until finally I stumbled upon Treehouse. I tried the 14 day trial and really enjoyed what I was doing, so I kept doing it. I ended up spending well over a month researching the best options for me to transition into a coding career. I decided on an in-person bootcamp. For the following reasons:

1. I like being around people when I learn.
2. I like learning in a classroom.
3. I like the way bootcamps teach coding (I took a weekend course: coding for non-programmers and I liked it)
4. My greatest weakness and career mistake has been lack of networking. Nearly all bootcamps had a job outcomes/networking portion built in. Which I felt was critical for me.
5. I was unemployed with no prospects of any work any time soon and talked to my unemployment manager and she helped me extend my unemployment benefits if I enrolled in a bootcamp.

I was torn between data science and full-stack web development. And for that I went to open houses, started a bunch of tracks on Treehouse, took a few more workshops, went to some meet ups via meetup.com and tried to figure out which was the right one for me. Additionally, I tried to do this with different bootcamps (I am in the NYC area, no shortage of bootcamps here).

I ended up choosing a bootcamp because from the open houses and workshops and experience that I got, I felt that it was the right decision for me. I graduated a month ago and the job hunt is very very rough. All the bootcamps seem to market themselves as employers are knocking down their doors to hire their grads, this does not seem to be the case for me or most people in my class.

I would say, keep trying different tracks on Treehouse, go to meet ups, go to more open houses. Learn as much as you can and remember that whatever you choose, it is something you will be doing 40+ hours a week. So try to immerse yourself in it now and get a sense of what it will be before investing time and money into something you may not like or enjoy.

I would say that I would be 100% happy with my choices if the job thing worked out. If it doesn't work out, I would say I still love coding and hope to continue doing it in my spare time, but feel that I, again, fell into the promises of school and that paying a lot of money would guarantee that I would get quality.

Thank you for your responses guys. You did answer a lot of my questions and concerns.

Also, Karolin I too have been going to meetups and trying to get as much in person real life experience/knowledge about code, various bootcamps, various resources, and so forth. I hope to also successfully reach some active professionals and get some on the job insight into a web developer career.

In regards to your pending satisfaction with your bootcamp, I'm not yet convinced treehouse alone will be enough to prepare me for a career in web development (which still remains my focal point at this time). And I remain suspicious of the bootcamp intent and loyalty to their customers/students. Perhaps the only benefit of bootcamps I agree with for sure is your exposure to people/friends/classmates/network is more beneficial than no exposure through learning alone at home. But I'm not ready to shortcut and buy off a network and friends for thousands of dollars. Treehouse techdegree program seems just as expensive and longer considering you have to spend at least 6 months in each program before completion and you need to complete multiple programs to review the same amount of content provided in a bootcamp. So the techdegree remains my least favorite and most suspicious option, in that it costs as much and provides less (less contact with the instructor, no in person contact with anyone, no local network, etc.) But perhaps I misunderstand the benefits of the techdegree? Can one really only complete one 6 month tech degree program and be competent enough and competitive enough to be hired/do the job they were hired for?

Out of curiosity, Is there anyone (completely new to code when they started, 0 prior knowledge) that can say they successfully learned to be a high quality web developing professional (earned job placement and everything) on their own at home with just the assistance of google and various low cost (sub 50.00) subscription coding tutorials/classes (no work assistance, no friends in code to assist you, no bootcamps, no cs background/degree)? Otherwise, without being in the know (having some unique advantageous network/support) or a place of current employment that supports your learning of code, to me it seems that coding bootcamps and/or universities remain the only consistent methods in which people learn code and earn job placement. No?

Likewise, does anyone know of the credibility and value of these bootcamps (Seattle campuses): Codefellows Galvanize General Assembly Coding Dojo Code Builders Seattle University (Web developer 12month cert.) University of Washington (various part time certs.) or resources I have not mentioned?

I went to General Assembly (in NYC). It exceeded all of my expectations, except they over-promised how easy it would be to get a job. If I could do it all again, I would. The only thing is that I would have started to apply for jobs before I graduated (I don't know where I would have found the time, but I would have started then, and not 11 days after I graduated(I needed to sleep/rest/decompress- the program was intense and all my classmates were taking at least a week off to do the same)). They still continue to offer outcomes support, which means that I have a coach that I check in with weekly and we go over my resume, cover letters, linkedin profile, and discuss what my next steps should be. So I don't feel like I they just dumped me once the program was over. It's just that they made it sound like employers would be lining up to hire us and that landing a job would be super easy.

I never could have learned as much as I learned as fast as I had learned it. I think if I had tried to learn on my own, it would have taken me at least 2 years to get the knowledge and skills I got from being at GA. As a total newbie, one of my biggest struggles was not knowing what to ask and not knowing what to learn. Treehouse does have tracks, but everyone you talk to has a totally different opinion on what order to learn things and what should take priority and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I should be learning and doubting myself, rather than just trying to learn stuff.

I would consider GA a way to accelerate your learning (I can't speak for other bootcamps)- you will learn more and faster than you would on your own. I don't think there is anything they teach that you couldn't find a way to learn on your own, but given the structure and support of the program, you will learn a lot and very fast. For example, our program was broken down into 4 three-week units, we had been learning all js/node.js for the first three units, and then we did 1.5 days of Ruby and 1 day of Ruby on Rails and then most of us built our final project in Ruby on Rails. There is no way I could have built a full app in Ruby on Rails, on my own, in 8 days, previous to GA. Nor would I have had the confidence to try. GA was also a very supportive, positive, women-friendly environment that was very healing for me, especially from the toxic environment I came from, and I know that creating that positive environment is a big part of their program.

They really do teach you 'how to learn'- my classmate's final projects were whatever they wanted, so some people made iOS apps using React Native, and previous classes had taught themselves enough Swift to make an iOS app. A bunch of people taught themselves D3, other people taught themselves socket.io, most people used 3rd party APIs as part of their final projects, it was really impressive. One other caveat: of a class of 26 people, only 4 of us were totally new to coding. Most people had 1+ year of coding and/or a cs degree. So, I struggled a lot and I was unable to do as impressive things as most of my classmates because I started looking into coding in September of last year and didn't really get serious about trying to learn until mid-November, and then I spent a lot of time applying for jobs, dealing with the holidays, and researching bootcamps. So I went in with very little experience compared to the majority of my classmates.

Also, about 1/4-1/3 of people in my class had CS degrees. I even met some other people (they had us mingle with other classes a few times) who had masters degrees in computer science and they did not know how to code, at all (and hence they were at GA). I would say of all the things to be the most suspicious of is traditional academia. (Although, a lot of interviews for coding jobs are geared towards people with CS degrees- and hence my current studies are kind of mostly focused the book Cracking the Code).

The online learning model with a mentor is a really popular model- I see more and more coding schools offering it. It must be successful because so many schools are doing it. If I had found a job previous to starting at GA (and I was applying to many jobs a week for more than 6 months with no leads whatsoever), I would have 100% chosen to do this type of learning. But because I was hopelessly unemployed and wanted to accelerate my learning and I got to use some of my unemployment benefits towards bootcamp, I went the bootcamp way.

The most important thing is to know how you learn. Everyone learns differently- I saw this in my classes. There are different styles that work well for different people. There is no universal best way to learn coding (at least it doesn't seem like anyone has stumbled upon it yet). So the most important thing is to know how you learn best and choose accordingly. I too envy the people who learn all on their own, but knowing myself, I know I need some amount of structure and support when I learn new things. Lastly, the UX/UI students that I met, they did not seem to learn any coding- at all. So if you are interested in GA's UX/UI program, definitely ask for a syllabus and make sure it is going to cover what you want to learn.