I’ve followed and part-time mentored several people through their self-taught education. There are a lot of pitfalls and traps that can send people down the wrong path if they’re not careful.
One that I did not expect but that seems obvious in retrospect: It’s really easy to start reading Reddit or watching Twitch streams of developers ranting about the industry and think that actual skills don’t matter any more. There’s a temptation to think that you’re a fool to study and practice the job skills because what you really need to do is optimize for interview skills. So they drop everything and starting grinding LeetCode, putting unfinished “side projects” on their GitHub that have all the right things in the README.md (just hope nobody actually looks at the code) and memorizing S.T.A.R. format responses for the common behavioral interview questions.
This strategy actually worked reasonable well for a few years, but the game has changed and most companies are better at catching professional interviewers who don’t know how to do much else.
I should note that this mindset isn’t unique to self-taught people: There’s a parallel epidemic of cheating in college among students who see it as “just a piece of paper” and think they’d be foolish to actually learn the subject material. This also hits hard when they reach graduation and are faced with the current style of interviews which are not as easy as they expected to bluff your way through.
This is something I had to deal with as well. It also surprized me in terms of how limited their information sources are, esp with younger students. One thing I found helpful is to actually introduce them to engineers in person (like a take your kid to work day), which I think grounds them a bit. But this box-checking influence is everywhere, including in the K-12 curriculum. In some ways I understand their perspective. Most schools/teachers do have a box-checking mentality, and I think students intuitively understand that what these "educators" are after is a metric. They don't actually care about real skills. But to your point, the rest of the world actually values competency and it's something students should strive towards for the long-term.
> putting unfinished “side projects” on their GitHub that have all the right things in the README.md (just hope nobody actually looks at the code) and memorizing S.T.A.R. format responses for the common behavioral interview questions.
This perfectly describes my experience when reviewing resumes of grads from certain bootcamps.
The program held their hand as evidenced by every student have a similar setup: claiming the cookie cutter 3 month CRUD white labeled webapp as work experience. Everyone on the team is a “co-founder”. Apparently all 4 people "managed a remote team of 4 developers". When you dig into the code, it’s a toy project not intended for any real users. The bulk of their "webapp" is a "case study" page with sections including "the problem", "the solutions", "What is a build a process". It seems these sections were assigned as homework. Their resume includes what things they clicked on in the AWS UI.
In fact, it seems the whole group were instructed to post on HackerNews "who is hiring" with the exact same template. That is the extent of handholding occuring in these bootcamps.
One that I did not expect but that seems obvious in retrospect: It’s really easy to start reading Reddit or watching Twitch streams of developers ranting about the industry and think that actual skills don’t matter any more. There’s a temptation to think that you’re a fool to study and practice the job skills because what you really need to do is optimize for interview skills. So they drop everything and starting grinding LeetCode, putting unfinished “side projects” on their GitHub that have all the right things in the README.md (just hope nobody actually looks at the code) and memorizing S.T.A.R. format responses for the common behavioral interview questions.
This strategy actually worked reasonable well for a few years, but the game has changed and most companies are better at catching professional interviewers who don’t know how to do much else.
I should note that this mindset isn’t unique to self-taught people: There’s a parallel epidemic of cheating in college among students who see it as “just a piece of paper” and think they’d be foolish to actually learn the subject material. This also hits hard when they reach graduation and are faced with the current style of interviews which are not as easy as they expected to bluff your way through.