How intense must your work/study schedule be to make it?

[Anonymous No.17580613]

I'm a NEET trying to do web dev and get into a job this year. Focusing on projects and interview prep. How many hours a week / day should I strive to work to achieve this? I'm going to set a baseline of 40 hours and work my way up. Do you think like 90 hours a week would just fry your brain? What's the ceiling?

Also discuss workload and making it in other fields if you're not a tech guy

[Anonymous No.17580843]

lol
just sign maintenance contracts with multiple companies and outsource all your work to panpreets in mumbai over fiverr
easy 300k a year

[Anonymous No.17580937]

>>17580843
No I want a salaried no-risk position desu I take enough risk elsewhere

[Anonymous No.17581186]

>>17580613
Susan seems like a bit much

[Anonymous No.17582043]

>>17580613
>Do you think like 90 hours a week would just fry your brain? What's the ceiling?

That's highly dependent on the individual.

[Anonymous No.17582064]

>>17582043
How about for you?

[Anonymous No.17582397]

>>17580613
Your day
8am - 10am: completely answer and work to be able to whiteboard a random question from cracking the coding interview
10am - 12pm: 2 hours of uninterrupted coding on a personal project, structure tasks so that none of this is learning/research time
12pm - 1pm: Eat Lunch/go OUTSIDE
1pm - 3pm: work on some sort of course or self-guided learning, be realistic with the days goals; get comfy with supporting services early on (rabbitmq, redis, elasticsearch, database servers, apache, nginx, docker etc) too as appropriate
3pm - 5pm: choose question for next morning, plan out tomorrows tasks, review notes, have a spreadsheet for listing what you learned & accomplished; use remaining time for unguided research/reflection (start by learning git)
5-5:30pm: read someone else's code from a project that inspires you

Need more time for one of these? Good, fuck off and dont you dare take that extra time until 5:30pm hits. Get used to being spread thin and being up against seemingly senseless expectations now. Every so often treat yourself to some hyperfocused autismo time, but that's unfortunately an uncommon luxury in practice and you dont want to actually get too used to it. When you're ready for a major portfolio project, that week is likely the best use for the 90h of energy you think you have. Start applying for positions when you feel yourself getting better than H1-B/student tier at this, as you will have a few weeks or more before interviews start. Choose a cloud platform early on and use that, local dev for too long creates some bad habits & strategies. You can hop on freelancing sites much earlier than you'd think to build skills & pad the resume.

[Anonymous No.17582456]

>>17580843
Explain more, where do I find these contracts and od I have to lie about my credentials to get it?

[Anonymous No.17582539]

>>17582064
After getting laid off and then rejected from many jobs, I became very demotivated and my productivity dropped. I can only do 2-4 hours a day of productive work, but I'm working to fix that.

[Anonymous No.17582941]

>>17582397
>wasting time eating lunch/going outside

ngmi

[Anonymous No.17582952]

>>17580613
this is actually a based and redpilled desk

[Anonymous No.17582975]

>>17582941
Might make it 365 hours after you but at least I'll live past 30

[Anonymous No.17582987]

>>17580613
quality>quantity my friend, but quantity is still important

First make sure you are putting in quality work hours, and only increase hours once you reach good quality

[Anonymous No.17583007]

>>17582975
More like 4-5 years after. Most time spent working is reacclamating your mind to the task at hand, completely pointless to do that twice in one day (waking up, and then taking a needless break).

[Anonymous No.17583035]

>>17582397
>structure tasks so that none of this is learning/research time
Explain. Isn't it unavoidable that you'd have to research some things while project coding? I'm not going to remember every CSS trick for example

[Anonymous No.17583051]

>>17580613
Just buy LINK, you won't need a job once it moons

[Anonymous No.17583117]

>>17583035
To clarify this is an eventual goal and unlikely to happen 100% any time. You want to 'learn how to learn' sure but there still exists a need to also buckle down and slang out some code while your brain is all spongey. There's a muscle memory to coding that gets lost due to access to information. Also recommend old copies of the American Computer Science League exams if you want to supplement easy projects (common in webdev, esp when new) with more critical thinking.

[Anonymous No.17583327]

>>17583117
>American Computer Science League
Does that mathy stuff really come into play when you're a good dev or is it just correlation (high IQ people tend to both be good devs and like that stuff)?
On a similar note people have told me do competitive programming (like ICPC problems, Codeforces, etc) but it seems like overkill when you can practice interview problems directly instead of doing this crazy CP stuff or learning a lot of extra math hoping it'll be helpful cross training. Plus I'm not smart enough to actually achieve good scores, even if I learn all of the theory I'll still be too slow
Really what I'm hoping for is I get good enough at JS to get commits on a visible/famous Github project and build my resume that way, then the job stuff will probably work out soon after

[Anonymous No.17583530]

>>17583327
You need to try once to know where you stand. ACSL is overkill unless interested but most webdev stuff can be basic enough to warrant some further challenges. Dont make calls like this until you've turned your skills into some sort of income. Theres a pay/advancement wall youll hit as a webdev with no CS + Algorithm familiarity vs one who does, if you plan to work for someone else.

[Anonymous No.17583567]

Coding is for cuckolds. Learn to manage those nerds.

[Anonymous No.17583627]

>>17583530
>cs/algo's
This is the reason I will never be a dev my 29 y/o boomer brain is not going back to math

[Anonymous No.17583845]

>>17582397

i assume you would first have to go through something like freecodecamp completely before this schedule makes sense. no way i could start with a coding interview question since i have no idea how to answer them yet.

[Anonymous No.17583861]

>>17583530
I hear you, I guess what I mean is I'd be more excited to go all in on algo interviews if it was a likely path to being a super effective and well promoted backend engineer or something rather than just a way to hack a job interview. I probably need a job or two under my belt anyway to even pass the resume stage at a big company so I'm not pressed to do algorithms/leetcode over all other aspects of resume/skill building right now. I'm focusing more on JS/web gotcha questions/trivia because non-leetcoding companies tend to ask this stuff from what I've read, in addition to some algo stuff

Thanks for your schedule I don't even know what half of that stuff is yet but I'll learn. Is there any course or book you like for backend topics (you seem like a backend guy)?

[Anonymous No.17584072]

>>17583861
>I hear you, I guess what I mean is I'd be more excited to go all in on algo interviews if it was a likely path to being a super effective and well promoted backend engineer or something rather than just a way to hack a job interview.
Yes but nonessential if you are good at other stuff.
>I'm focusing more on JS/web gotcha questions/trivia because non-leetcoding companies tend to ask this stuff from what I've read, in addition to some algo stuff
This is fine. Being able to describe security best practices re frontend, plain JS will also go a long way for you as well.
>Thanks for your schedule I don't even know what half of that stuff is yet but I'll learn. Is there any course or book you like for backend topics (you seem like a backend guy)?
Depends on your target language & focus. If you haven't chosen, Two Scoops of Django after doing a python course on codeacademy + the offciial django tutorial is a nice rookie start and you'll have useful exp for learning other languages/libraries. Even if staying w frontend longterm, youll always have the big picture.
>>17583845
>i assume you would first have to go through something like freecodecamp completely before this schedule makes sense. no way i could start with a coding interview question since i have no idea how to answer them yet.
This is a schedule you can use as a goal for your initial learning. Dont know much about free code camp

[Anonymous No.17584120]

>>17583051

[Anonymous No.17584171]

>>17582941
>dont take time to clear your head, get fresh air, fuel your mind & stay refreshed before working for another further 6 hours
>this is sustainable in the long term
retard

[Anonymous No.17584182]

>>17580613
Coming from a guy who owns his own (successful) business and is also learning to be a web developer on the side

You need to grind 12+ hour days for at least 4 years to build a successful business/practice or really be successful in any field. That's what you have to do to make it in the US. Even if you suck at sales (which any business owner has to be able to do) if you work 1.5x-2x as much as anyone else you can make up for it in a big way.

Once you have put the work in though you can unironically coast and pursue other interests (such as I'm doing with coding, I've allocated now 6 hours of my day to my business which is self sufficient and 2-6 hours a day coding depending on if I feel like grinding).

If you want to MAKE IT make it, I anticipate youd have to grind 12+ hours for 20 years. Then you'll probably be a 10+ millionaire

[Anonymous No.17584195]

Honestly look at aws, or get coursera google IT tech certs. The amount of effort it takes to get a job as a web dev making 50k could be spent studying for anything else and you'd make double and have a normal life. Whip up a couple containers on AWS and you are good to go. Whereas, web dev, it never ends. Constantly learning new libraries or frameworks, dealing with dependency issues, having to work with people who in reality you would probably kill with your bare hands if given the chance. If I could do it again, I would get into collections (I currently work at RBC as web dev) and do call center and break all quotas and just climb the later. You get to dress well and interact with people and have lunch. As a dev you have so much fucking pressure to make things work with unrealistic expectations and something you literally make yourself sick. Every dev, after a year has cold sores and gained weight and styes just from stress. Seriously if you are young just do something else it is not worth it.

[Anonymous No.17584212]

>>17580613
>How many hours a week / day should I strive to work to achieve this
honestly as much as you can do that's sustainable.
start with a standard 40 hour week & eat well, take decent breaks, exercise regularly & get good sleep.
increase your work day by an hour or so each week, you'll be surprised at how much yo can do and still feel good. you'll also be able to tell when youre reaching your limit. dont push past this as you dont want to burn out.
From personal experience with doing this, i can work about 70 hours a week (11-12 hours a day, mon-sat with sundays off) and still feel great. push past that and my brain gets foggy and the quality of my work gets worse. everyones limit is different

[Anonymous No.17584318]

>>17584195
If you're able to break quotas at a call center you have to be a special kind of person, and I honestly wonder HOW THE FUCK that could be preferable to do that kind of work as opposed to just learning all the shit as webdev or hell, working harder at a McDonald's or something. I would sooner go back to McDonald's than ever work a shitty call center job again, unless I was guaranteed to get one of those shifts where all the managers and supervisors fuck off and you only take 10 calls all day and you can just play video games the rest of the time.

[Anonymous No.17584365]

>>17580613
is he blind? poor guy

[Anonymous No.17584429]

>>17583007
I skip lunch often, but i find emails/calls/client interaction/meetings to cause the level of distraction you describe moreso than when I do take lunch.

[Anonymous No.17584452]

>>17580613
100 hours a week

[Anonymous No.17585073]

>>17580613
>>17583327
>>17583861
>leetcode
>algos
>gotchas
>JS trivia
>"competitive programming"

Lol nope. OP listen, this is coming from me who spent several months straight in early 2019 immersing myself in coding (Python specifically) to git gud and fill in the gaps from my college knowledge (my degree is EE but I quickly realized after I graduated that I should've just done CS from the start), and successfully got my first web dev job at a super comfy medium-small sized company. It's fucking awesome, totally worth it, and you should definitely do it but you have to be smart about it.

Forget all the technical, game theory-aspect shit of interviews and resume-building yadayada bullshit. No one really cares about that, they care whether you can build something that mostly works from start to finish. That's it. You won't be applying at Google anyway with no experience so just forget the stupid leetcode. I did quite a lot of interviews at all kinds of different companies and ONE of them (big local bank for a super-technical, highly specialized genius dev role) actually gave me a whiteboard and technical exercises. Even if you do get some of that, it's unlikely you'll have practiced enough stupid arcane sorting algorithms or whatever to find yourself feeling comfortably able to do any random exercise they give you, which they know, so what they're really looking for is your process for solving it and how you think about the whole thing anyway.

For me, I did a personal project that I *actually* needed to use, myself, in real life. I was really into margin trading on Deribit around then and their web interface was kinda shit, didn't support reduce-only for their stop orders so I couldn't set stops and walk away without worrying about accidentally getting myself in the opposite position when they triggered, and then having the market reverse to my original bias and liquidate my ass all while I'm busy taking a shit lol (cont.)

[Anonymous No.17585216]

>>17585073
So, I'd always wanted to get into algo trading already which was way over my head, but now that I was missing a bunch of basic features I previously had on Bitmex I wondered if I could build myself a little API trading program in Python and implement that kind of functionality locally, myself. And even better I was jobless and figured I could simultaneously get serious about teaching myself some best practices coding and chalk up some actual experience at the same time

Having the need for it personally kept me from giving up early, because usually I'd start an attempt at a codecademy course or something and make a calculator app in javascript or some shit and then sit there with my dick in my hand like "great. What now, am I a coder yet?" not having a solid idea of what I should do next.

I always hated coding from my high school intro CS courses, and thought I wasn't good at it but I was so angsty back then I just decided fuck it I'm not really doing anything else productive with my time and I need this thing anyway, so let's see if I can just hack together a janky bot that does most of what I need even if shittily.

Literally 95% of the time was me googling "make python gui program" and "python how to know when i need classes" type stuff. I remember I ran into a wall when I realized that, if I wanted to set it up so that hitting one button would have the program start monitoring the price continuously, and do something automatically when it detected the price changed by X amount - I couldn't ALSO keep the GUI's loop process running at the same time, so it would freeze the whole UI whenever I did it. Looking into it I learned I would have to implement asyncio (python's async [concurrency] standard library) and man that took me fucking weeks to understand and build in to my program.

[Anonymous No.17585349]

>>17585216
Anyway it took a lot of hair-pulling and an absolutely disgusting amount of adderall, but I think I kept at it because I really wanted that fuckin trading bot for my own genuine use, and I didn't bog myself down learning the fundamentals in and out, I just focused on making it actually work. (and don't worry, you'll learn the fundamentals along the way, in those times when you know you have to because it's the only way you'll understand why you're getting some gay error or etc. This is the biggest redpill that I've heard senior engineers parrot to newbies all the time and it's sound and might be the "right" advice, if you had infinite time & energy, but the vast majority of newcodefags would do well to completely ignore it)

My advice is spend ALL your time on it, to whatever extent you can bear, don't bother trying to be "well-rounded" doing other shit like a day job or volunteering or some such bullshit, or "easing in" and "learning slowly & fully" or anything like that. Just swing your dick on the keyboard, get on google and rape that fucking ugly ass code till it suddenly does what you want, then move on)

https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/warren-buffett-says-doing-1-thing-separates-successful-people-from-everyone-else-and-it-stunned-bill-gates.html

But also, make some time for yourself to do normal shit, every Saturday go out clubbing or playing D&D with your nerd friends. Take 2 or 3 quick 15-minute walks throughout the day to clear your head, and then go back in and hop on the computer until the next walk. Don't skip meals etc. just make dedicated time where you don't let yourself do ANY coding-related shit at all, for a very short time. Take your time with it, enjoy it then when you're ready sit back down and go fucking ham on your project.

All this could be said for a fucklot of stuff in life actually

[Anonymous No.17585436]

>>17585349
Great story anon. Was that your only project? Did you release the code so companies could check it out?

What questions did you get if they weren't trivia or leetcode, just behaviorals/talk about your projects? That's odd I thought they'd ask web domain knowledge questions if not leetcode

That's a cool project idea I need to think of some shit like that with a real use, that's a problem I see with most guys learning web dev or CS underclassmen trying for internships, all their projects are like to-do lists, Twitter clones, nothing original or technical about them really

[Anonymous No.17585473]

>>17585073
this has been my experience as well. i have a github with a number of applications that more or less work that took me a month+ each to build. i can talk knowledgeably about how data moves through my applications. i also grind leetcode but in my last interview for my highest paid position they did not ask a single coding question. being able to handle leetcode questions is great for you confidence as a developer, however.

[Anonymous No.17585509]

>>17585349
also true in my experience. coding/building software is kind of like getting ripped. sure, maybe there's some guidelines or suggestions you can follow that might help, but basically you're just going to have to sit there and painfully grind through it hours and hours, days and days, weeks, months, years, until you're good at it. it fucking sucks ass and that's why developer positions pay so well. everyone says they want to learn it but its so painful to get up to speed. once you're decent at it though, it's pretty great. doesn't feel so taxing.

[Anonymous No.17585532]

the look on peoples faces when they say they want to be web developers and you suggest that they build something. it's like they'll do anything to avoid building something.

[Anonymous No.17585534]

90th percentile wage is 10% of median house price after tax

thinking waging can achieve anything on it's own is madness

[Anonymous No.17585635]

>>17585534
It's called a mortgage anon

[Anonymous No.17585644]

>>17585635
>debt is wealth

[Anonymous No.17585662]

>>17585644
i'm 30, i've been a developer since 22, and i can buy a house with cash today. all from waging.

[Anonymous No.17586192]

>>17585473
>>17585509
Agreed, spot on and
>>17585532
LMAO yeah fuck it's fucking infuriating, that's exactly how my boss is. I'm used to most devs preaching how to build a good "foundation" and not cut corners etc pretty wholesome stuff, and ESPECIALLY the older devs, they know what they're talking about - but somehow my boss (who's also the CTO of the company and the only real dev there until I got hired), I ask him about certain shit in JS or PHP, or even .NET which we switched to recently and I know is his "main" preferred language he's been using for years; and he basically fudges an ambiguous answer, sends me off suggesting to try <some generic thing that barely even gets me started on my problem>, and then turns back to whatever he's been doing! Most of the time that's when I notice he's been working on whatever same stupid problem he was several days ago and hasn't even exhausted multiple other top-level troubleshooting options yet.

Fkn insane. I never understood why "web dev" was in its own separate category but oh baby, now I do.

>>17585436
Yup I barely got started on a few other ventures before that, like I tried starting a Flutter app and got as far as ID'ing some similarities in its structure to like Javascript, but they ended as quick as they began and the python one was the only one I got anywhere with/was serious enough about it from the start to follow through. I did kind of know beforehand that python would probably be what I used to embark on the journey because it was the first one I ever played with for "programming" of any sort (in 6th grade lel) and everyone seems to agree it's the most beginner-friendly and overall usable.

Didn't release my final code (was using it still to trade and didn't want to lose my edge lollll), but still gave the link to my github which had my old shitty college assignments & stuff on it, and I put up a repo for as far as I got with the first iteration of the app before I largely refactored it from the ground-up.

[Anonymous No.17586235]

>>17585436
Oh and he did ask me the typical make-sure-you-can-fog-a-mirror stuff like have you heard of polymorphism? Ok explain how you used that in your trading app? And I'd do my best to tell him how at one point I decided to abstract-out some component of the program into a more generic to avoid cluttering the file & shit like that... and also gave him stuff to chew on like he wanted me to talk about that short experience with Flutter, and I mentioned how I noted that their "widget" constructors are similar to React's "component" constructors or some flaky bullshit, but seriously as long as you show you care about all of it on some significant level and can get your thinking across semi-effectively, that should be good enough for most interviewers. From there it's a matter of luck and a numbers game.

Use ziprecruiter to mass-apply to jobs. Don't even read them just hit apply and ignore anything requiring more manual input. That's how I got the interview for my current job kek

[Anonymous No.17587001]

>>17584182
>You need to grind 12+ hour days for at least 4 years to build a successful business/practice or really be successful in any field.

MFW I literally made over a years salary on an undisclosed coin and still have 100k.

>imagine not taking any risk at all

Here's a tip, get into CKB.

[Anonymous No.17587008]

>>17580613
Work? Intense? Desu, all you have to do is get into low caps like BDK (bidesk exchange) and wait a year and you will never have to work again.