What’s Next…
As I am approaching the end of my 5 months immersive software engineering program at the Flatiron School in NYC, I can’t stop wondering what my next steps are.
What type of companies would I like to work for? Do I want to focus more on the frontend, backend, or assume a full stack developer position? Am I willing to relocate if I get a job offer in another state? These are some of the questions that keep coming to me.
During the program at the Flatiron school, I’ve learned to work with ruby on rails, sqlite3 and postgresql database for my backend, javascript and react for the frontend. Check out my last post “Beginning My Journey In Tech” where I go a little more in details about the program.
When doing research about wether I should look for a bigger company or a smaller one as a bootcamp graduate, I came up with the answer that it’s really a personal decision. We must judge on our own what are the pros and cons, and also how prepared we really are. It’s not so much about the name of the company as many might think( Google, Facebook,…), but more about what type of company it is, and most importantly what we can bring to the table.
When I think about bigger companies, I think more workers, and I see opportunities to continue on my learning curve. Bigger companies often have more resources available for employees such as pair programing, mentorship, trainings and much more. Due to the large number of developers in the team, you really get to work with different people and practice more in what can be a less stressful environment in my opinion.
Smaller companies often have less developers in their team, which in my opinion can be very challenging for a bootcamp graduate since the next immediate step is to continue learning and practicing the newly acquired skillsets. Working in a smaller team might not be ideal due to the expectations some companies have. Meeting deadlines might be a little harder when under stress.
Another big thing I see people mentioning is starting their own business or working for a company first. I think about starting your own company as an ultimate goal, but not right after bootcamp. We are limited in resource right after school. You wouldn’t want to start a company and get stuck along the way for lack of experience or resources. In my opinion experience matters, and we get the experience through practicing. Coding bootcamp are very compact and relatively fast. We learn many concepts over a certain period of time but we do not master them. Mastery come from practice and time.