Exactly three months ago to the day, I began to learn how to code. Today I am one week into an intensive 60 hour-per-week bootcamp which presupposes a fair amount of technical knowledge. I am the only person in the cohort with zero pre-existing coding or at least industry experience, and of the few people who are also self-taught from scratch, I had been learning for the least amount of time. As such I’ve felt inadequate from the beginning of the program.
That I am here at all is a surprise to both me and Andrew, the founder of Fractal Bootcamp. It took me seven attempts before I could pass the technical to get into the program. My first attempt happened about a month into my coding journey, and came to an end after a grand total of three minutes.
After watching me haplessly fiddle with the terminal and fail to run a node command to execute my JavaScript function (I had been running all of my code on a sandbox with a submit button), Andrew could take it no longer. His pained expression turned into reproach.
Andrew was blunt: he felt that it was practically impossible for me to make it into the summer cohort barring an ungodly amount of effort. He even offered to refund my deposit. I felt embarrassed beyond belief, but I was also at a point in my life where I felt that there was nothing else for me to do. I would continue grinding in an attempt to beat the odds.
I was getting a little better with each successive attempt to pass the technical. Andrew was impressed with my pace, but he remained skeptical. He continued to tell me that he thought that it was unlikely as late as during my penultimate attempt. That I made it in my final attempt less than a week later was a genuine surprise to me.
I am here against all expectations.
On the first day of the program, Andrew approached me during lunch to ask me how it’s going. I spoke honestly, I was unsure of what I was doing and not asking for help nearly as much as I should, for fear of being annoying.
Stepping back for a moment, I had been fired from the job I worked before deciding to learn to code after less than a month. I didn’t care for the work, but the ultimate cause of my failure was exactly this fear.
Training was minimal with the expectation that I would learn everything on the job, but I was too anxious to ask my colleagues for help for fear of irritating them. That my coworker was visibly peeved when I asked her for guidance didn’t help. Intellectually I knew that there was no getting around inconveniencing people, but practically the hurdle was too high for me to jump.
Andrew was characteristically blunt with me: “Be annoying,” he said. This program is a slog for just about anybody, and I need the most help. As such it was imperative that I get what I need out of this bootcamp by any means necessary. Failure to do so would be doing an injustice to both myself and the program.
Just like that, I had permission to ask for what I need. I no longer felt tethered by the fear of how I would be perceived. Going forward, I would be annoying. If that was the bridge I had to cross on the winding road to proficiency, so be it. Feigning competence out of fear of burdening others had given me nothing worth having, so why should I persist?
So here we are, week one is in the rearview mirror, how has being annoying worked for me? Am I a coding god yet? Can I drop out of the program and go find a job? Or maybe I’m setting my sights too low, perhaps it’s time for me to have a seed round for my very own startup?
Well, no. Truth be told I think that I’m in the bottom half of my cohort and I am still struggling to make sense of it all. Yet here I am, slowly rolling my boulder uphill. Only now I’m not going it alone. Through the power of being annoying, I have recruited others to help me with my task. I still have my limitations, but I know better than to pretend otherwise.
At the very least I no longer have to worry about my boulder rolling downhill and having to begin a new career path from scratch. I’m built different now. Blessed are the annoying, for they will inherit the answers.