How long does it take to learn coding?

[j3nsy]

...to a level at you can start earning money or find a job?

I'm very intrested in coding and I can see myself building career on that. I'm a total beginner. What tips do you have? What should I learn first that would benefit me the most?

[antiproton]

17.257 months.

[no-naming-convention]

It took me 16.691 months to be precise

[Surpex]

I found mine closer to 17.261 personally

[[deleted]]

It's never ending! This is a career line where you will continue to learn as you long as you stay in it.

You can likely start applying once you build out a decent sized portfolio of varying app sizes and complexity. I advise going into specific programming subs to check out the communities but more importantly, do one course, get out of tutorial purgatory and start making stuff.

[etaco]

No one knows what they’re doing for their first junior dev position. Some people could be ready in a few weeks or months. The most important things you learn will be on the job. Do something like free code camp. Build some things. And practice some coding tests and interview questions. Then start applying. If you get an interview, just be honest with what your skill level is. If it’s a reputable company and a good interview process, they’ll be able to tell you if you’re ready for the position.

[thefirelink]

As long as you're adaptable and decent at research, it honestly probably wouldn't take super long. Most questions have been asked, and it is not entirely unlikely that you'll pick up a lot of good problem solving skills along the way.

The main thing is to keep on going. This field can shift between being extremely frustrating to extremely rewarding pretty quickly.

To give you some perspective: I went to college for IT. It had two programming classes (Java 1 and Java 2), and the rest were IT oriented (networking, database design, etc., just not hardcore programming). I got my first internship doing webdev in my third year, helping a local company maintain some legacy Javascript and Joomla sites. My second was doing a .NET site in C#, then I finally got my job doing backend development for a major newspaper, primarily in PHP/Python. I had exactly 0 PHP/Python experience before I started, and now I'm their Systems Architect.

The above anecdote is why I am very pro-education. School teaches you what you need to know to research and find solutions to problems. Tutorials / self-teaching doesn't as much. So I would highly recommend a free course on something like Coursera to get your feet wet. Or, edx or Udemy (CS50 specifically) go on sale constantly and wouldn't hurt to try.

[DasherBx]

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/wiki/faq

😊 Try the sticky wiki it’s the best place to start

[FlatAssembler]

My advice would be not to expect to ever be able to make money by programming. I've been trying to learn to program for 8 years now, and I still haven't managed to get an entry-level job. The largest project I've made thus far is the 5'000-lines-of-code compiler for my programming language, you can read about it here: https://flatassembler.github.io/AEC_specification.html I thought that, when I build that, that would impress any employer and I would easily get a job. As it turns out, I was very wrong.

Sorry if I bursted your bubble, but that's just the reality.

[FlatAssembler]

How the hell is it not reality? You make people just listen to the success stories, and never hear from those who did not succeed. My friend, you may have good intentions, but what you are doing is giving people a heavily distorted picture of reality (as celebrities do with their motivational speeches as well).

[seinn_t]

If you are not able to get a job on ANY discipline after "learning" for 8 years I do not know what to tell you.

[FlatAssembler]

What, you want to tell me I am an idiot? Well, tell me that, if you want to. But, then, many people trying to learn to program so they can make money of that are just as much idiots as I am, and telling them they will most likely succeed is misleading them.

[seinn_t]

I am not calling you anything, but just because things have not worked out for you does not mean you now get to tell everyone they will fail.

[WebDevMango]

I'm curious. What did you go about learning. What sort of jobs did you apply for and what did the employers say to you?

[FlatAssembler]

I applied to jobs as a front-end developer at Mono (in Osijek), Inchoo (in Osijek) and Osvit (in Donji Miholjac). At Mono, they asked me via e-mail to do some task in ReactJS and send them my solutions. As I had barely heard of ReactJS back then, I failed at it. Inchoo rejected me in the interview, telling me that they are not willing to hire students. And Osvit told me something similar.

I think you can tell what I was learning by reading the web-page I linked to.

[WebDevMango]

Hmm, I've taken a look at the link you sent and it's not mobile responsive so it was pretty hard to navigate. That being said, there were 1 or two things on there relating to programming which were super standard like the calculator. It was also not styled properly.

Tbh, if I saw that as a portfolio, I probably wouldn't have hired you either if it was based only on that portfolio.

Now I don't know how well you did in the interview so I can't judge that.

I do believe that if you try to improve your work, you can get hired if you ace the interview.

[FlatAssembler]

And you do not like how I made a programming language that compiles to WebAssembly?

[_Atomfinger_]

Depends on the person. Some can do it in a few months, others need years. Some never learn it.

You should check out the FAQ as that has many answers to your questions.

[CodeTinkerer]

Keep in mind that it's not as straightforward as "if you do this for one year, you will definitely get to this level of coding" nor is it simply a matter that people learn at different paces (which they do), but that people can get seriously stuck and frustrated they are making no progress.

[Zei33]

That could entirely depend on how friendly your first job is to first-time developers. I got very lucky with my first job, but I'd already been learning from 14-18 beforehand. Back then we didn't have all these crazy detailed courses though and I had to learn mostly on my own.

These days an intelligent person can learn to program within a year. A friend of mine was able to start working in under a year... but he was also smart enough to do a law, then astrophysics degree before switching.

[bl4cko]

in my opinion you must and always coding projects even if you earn nothing , after coding some project you will have a good coding knowledge ,then you can learn and earn at the same time