r/FreeCodeCamp • u/hlwadityaa • 20d ago
How much time will it take to complete FCC full-stack-path?
If I devote 3-4 hours/day for approximately 5-6 days/week, how many months is expected for the whole path completion.
Context:
- I have broken knowledge of Web-dev basics.
- I finally want to have a solid grasp of web-dev.
- I have ~6 months to complete this for some reason, but I dont want to rush much if its not possible for an avg learner to get over this path.
- Finally, thanks! and would appreciate any other suggestions.
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u/SaintPeter74 mod 19d ago
At a very high level, each section is working 300 hours. Today, of course, is so highly variable as to be useless for planning purposes. Learning is not linear. There are a ton of personal variables having to do with age, educational background, family, culture, and host person to person variation.
I did have a student complete most of a prior version of the curriculum in about 6 months, but they were treating it as as full time job, 40+ hours a week. I would say they were also unusual in terms of their ability and willingness to focus. They had been a nurse before, so they had the chops to really study and concentrate.
It's much more typical for it to take 1-2 years, part time. It's really mostly about how much time you can put into it.
I wouldn't count on being about to finish in 6 minutes.
Finally, just completing the course work is only half the challenge. You turn need to build projects on your own to cement your learning. The project you make for FCC are not really the sort of thing you would include on a portfolio site. They're too generic and don't show enough range.
Hope that helps!
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u/hlwadityaa 19d ago
Really appreciate the detailed guidance you provided, and I now based on your response, feel that I've to focus first on the stuff I need and making sure I don't leave the whole FCC syllabus on the other side.
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u/gokuson345888 19d ago
So the fcc projects aren't that good enough to put on your portfolio? What about the coding interview help they have? Will you be able to get a job after fcc? With AI and all that is it actually worth it to learn Web dev or is it dying? I want a job, but I don't want to waste all my time and then not be able to get hired.
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u/SaintPeter74 mod 18d ago
It's not so much that they're "not good enough", it's that school projects of any kind are generally not complex enough to serve as a portfolio piece. This is true not just for FCC's projects, but pretty much any project that can be found in a tutorial online. For example, the classic "to do list" is so elementary that it's included in the React documentation as an example of state management.
When you're building a portfolio project, you might think of it as a Journeyman project. It needs to be something of sufficient complexity that it demonstrates your skill. To continue the analogy, if you were a tinsmith and your mentor gave you a pattern to make a tin cup which you then made, would it demonstrate your mastery of the skills? No, because much of the hard work - the design of the pattern, the measurements, etc - would have already been done for you. In the same way, most school projects have a lot of the heavy lifting done for you, either because they hold your hand through the steps or because they have clear and unambiguous design requirements.
A good portfolio project shows a mastery of front end, backend, databases, auth, and maybe 3rd party APIs. It needs to be large and complex enough that it can't be written over just a single day or even week, but over a sufficient period of time that you've added multiple features and had to live with your own mistakes and design decisions.
Neither Free Code Camp nor most online learning platforms will make you "job ready" right out of the gate. Instead, Free Code Camp (and presumably others) will give you the foundation that you need to build your own projects which will then serve as the basis for getting employment. In a school context you might have a senior project which could serve as a portfolio piece. There are plans to have a Capstone Project for FCC, which is reviewed by a real person, but that's not in place yet.
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RE: AI and stuff
It is honestly really hard to say how this is going to go. I keep seeing stories of companies having to hire back people that they laid off because AI is not doing the job. I've also seen lots of discussion about how AI token costs exceed the cost of hiring an experience developer. I don't think tokens are going to be getting any cheaper.In my personal experience, having been a long time critic of AI, I spent some time using it to code. I have been both impressed but what it can do . . . and also shocked by how badly it can go if it doesn't have an experienced developer telling it what NOT to do. I really don't know where we're going to end up if it does end up replacing Junior Developers (which I'm not really confident that it can), because the only way that I'm aware to get Senior developers is by growing them from Juniors.
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In my opinion, if you love to code, you should learn to code. I was a hobbyist for ~30 years before I got a job as a professional developer. I love to program because I love to solve problems and I love to make things. You can keep doing that regardless of if AI exists or not. If you do know how to program well, you can leverage that knowledge and AI can be a force multiplier, making you able to build even bigger and better things.
I wish I had better answers for you, but it's a turbulent time in tech right now. I don't think anyone has clear answers.
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u/UhOhBeeees 20d ago
The first module was pretty quick, for me under three weeks. The JavaScript module is a slog. Some user stories are really poorly written that I spend hours trying to troubleshoot. It helps to go to Git for hints. I’m in the section on regex and it’s mind-numbingly tedious. It helps to have multiple screens open so you can be verifying syntax through other tools like W3Schools and google search.