Going through an agency might be a good way to avoid dodgy companies like this.
1 Like
I think itâs great that youâre taking ownership of this. Let me give you a bit of old school wisdom, if I may.
When you get hired and they know you have limitations, theyâre hiring you because they saw potential there, and more than likely liked your personality and attitude â they thought youâd be a good fit in their culture. Thatâs all in your favor. When they said you didnât quite have the skill set needed, that meant that you needed to keep working hard on your skills. Being new to coding (or anything else), you need to put in some extra effort that you wonât get paid for. When you got the JQuery assignment, you could have gone home and learned that JQuery library, then got the work done the next day. The same with the WP content. There are many e-books that can be downloaded for free, or go to the WP Codex page to learn the additional skills that you need. The new boss will be impressed that youâd go the extra mile to get the job done.
FreeCodeCamp is like school. Theyâve taught you the skills to get a job, but you still need more skills to keep the job. If you liked working for those people, then do something they wonât expect. Call and see if you can get an appointment with the boss (If you canât then do this over the phone). Apologize for not realizing that there isnât any organized on the job training, and that you werenât being paid to be a trainee. Tell him that youâre grateful for the opportunity and wish that you hadnât blown it, but youâll be sure to use this experience to sharpen your skills. You donât expect to be given a second chance, but this will make you a better employee for your next job. Youâve already figured out that you need to continue to be schooled, and will continue sharpening your skills daily.
If youâre sincere â and lucky â he may offer you a second chance. If he does, it may be at a lower pay rate because he didnât feel you were performing at the one he hired you at. Swallow that pride, take the job, and live up to what you said youâd do. If he doesnât, then live up to what you said anyway, and make yourself better for the next chance.
Keep learning and donât give up. Coding is the best paying, easiest work Iâve done in my life.
8 Likes
Thanks for sharing this story with us. I think when we hear on FCC or on social media all the highlights, we tend to compare our selves to what most of the times doesnât happen. I hope that your story continues and it becomes something inspiring for others to hear from. Are you on social media? Iâd like to hear more of your story
3 Likes
This is a very good point 
1 Like
Donât take it personally, itâs the key. Itâs not a judgement of your abilities. One of the best advice i ever got was to practice mental detachment from those situations. Itâs not about you.
2 Likes
I remember a time in my life where I couldnât even get a job at a movie theater. I thought that there was no way that I could ever get a job working on the technology I loved. Doing something you love or doing something challenging gives you on a constantly shifting perspective with many highs and lows.
I turn 37 in a few months and have been working in technology for the last 6 years . Currently Iâm the head of quality assurance doing work as an automation engineer. Every day I struggle with the code base and everyday I retarget. What was difficult what was easy, tomorrow work on what was difficult.
If I could suggest something itâs to treat the time in between this job and the next as a job. Spend 2 hours searching and applying and another 6 learning JavaScript. Build a single app and solve complex problems, while boosting your portfolio. Show people that you have what it takes because you yourself believe based on the work youâve done. Employability is not only about the skills itâs about the character. In the tech world people are suppose to maintain a growth mindset where failures are successes because they actually tried. You are doing better than most people because you tried even if in the end it didnât work out how you had planned.
Plan some more, learn some more, reach beyond what you think youâre capable of and know itâs the journey thatâs setting you up for ultimate success
3 Likes
I met my first âclientâ a few months ago and offered to build him a static site for his barber shop.
He politely declined at our second meeting.
I learned a few things about freelancning.
- Wireframe/mock up 1st. I pretty much coded the whole thing then presented to him. I think that you should not do that when it comes to freelancing.
- I charged him too low. If you do that, they think that it is very easy to do what you do. So mind the price you are offering. If his business can generate 10000 bucks a month, donât charge him 1000. He will think that you donât have the skill.
- Donât get too technical when telling people how you build your site. I am not even talking about real technical stuff, just SEO and SEM, I think that the client kind of âgot lostâ
- He has reasons to not to build a website. Not every business needs a website, especially a local business who does not depend on getting customers online.
- Underestimated how much time I need , in order to finish the site.
I felt quite down for a moment, but I went back to continue studying @ freecodecamp, and these few months I have learned a lot of stuff. Many people I have never met in real life gave me suggestions and path I should take and many of them were kind enough to âreviewâ the path I am taking. And I have been spending times on solving algorithms and had make some really good progress. I thought the object oriented programming part of freecodecamp curriculum is gonna be tough, but now I have seen it it looks fairly straight forward.
And I do get the part that you feel guilty about not being able to perform, my family is really supportive too. But then again, if we really wanna do this, those feelings should not stop us. Keep going and learn stuff you did not learn before. Take a rest first, then start learning again, when you are ready, go fill up those job applications and when the time comes, just show up.
4 Likes
one of the technique we need to learn is to how to not blame ourselves while things got tough.
how to get back from obstacles and keep moving forward.
how to not let those difficult thoughts/ moments trap us.
2 Likes
Can I ask where you got this 9/10 self taught developers will never get hired?
1 Like
sigh⌠correlation does not mean cause. thereâs a multitude of factors that contribute to this. But if this is asking the question " Do companies hire self taught programmers?" This does not address that.
look at the reverse if you have if you have a PhD then only 2 out of 100 will be hired or 1 out of 50âŚreally? Or thatâs masters degrees get hired less than Bachelors? All this chart tells you is the formal education of people working in programming not to what extent it helped them get the job. Which according to this its better to never finish high school then to get a Phd. 
ALSO this is stack overflow and despite the very good points above, one must also consider the demographics that use stack overflow as well as the type of people that take the time to fill out surveys. Cleary its not employed people as they are to busy.
5 Likes
You are dead wrong man. 70% devs are self-taught in some countries. Your survey only shows education level. You can have a PHD in art and be self-taught. Seriously. Verify your facts. a 10 sec google search gave this https://qz.com/649409/two-out-of-three-developers-are-self-taught-and-other-trends-from-a-survey-of-56033-developers/
5 Likes
The blunt truth is that you were fired because your skill level wasnât what the company needed. If I can offer some friendly takes on the advice given above, itâs what I was taught about shame and guilt, things with which I struggle. Shame is feeling bad about who you are. Guilt is feeling bad about what you have done. You deserve to feel neither.
You are an awesome, self-driven, credible programmer. You got through a hiring process that is paved with rejection. No reason for shame.
You didnât hire you. You applied for a job. There is no guilt in that. You didnât lie about what you could do, the hiring authority at that company made an error and corrected it. I doubt they feel guilty, because they did the right thing, too. No reason for anyone to feel guilty.
Your skill set is a subset of what you, that same self-driven person I see, will be able to do with more time. The only thing that can stop that from being true is thinking that growth isnât possible. You have grown up to this point, and as long as you realize the control loop governing your empowerment program hasnât broken, you will continue to iterate through greater potential. Skills++.
8 Likes
I havenât been hired yet myself. So, I canât 100% know what you are going through.
However:
You canât let this stop you. keep going, keep learning. Someone had a reason for hiring you once, someone else will likely have reason to hire you again. Youâve achieved something a lot of people havenât. You got hired! thatâs something to feel good about.
As far as I can tell from your story. You are not at fault at all. You have no reason to be embarrassed.This will suck for a bit, but eventually you will come out of this stronger as long as you donât let the experience poison you.
Keep your chin up. You got this.
1 Like
Okay, hereâs an invaluable tip for everyone who gets frustrated because of not getting a job:
Please consider job finding as being as difficult and complex as programming. As a problem that has to be solved. How can you expect that solving dev problems is so difficult and really needs you to be highly creative and use a lot of brain power and trial and error until you make the app work? While at the same time you expect to just apply for a job and get it at once. Have you ever made an app and it worked at once?
The very same counts for self confidence btw. And for everything else which is part of being necessary to be able to work as a dev.
A problem is a problem. Itâs difficult to solve. If it wouldnât be like that, then it wouldnât be a problem.
Use all the powers that you possess to solve it!
And of course you can lose as well. But then live is going on somewhere else. And one day itâs going on in the grave anyhow 
1 Like
Hi armathor this is the only thing I have right now in my mind to cheer you up : âEVERY FAILED EXPERIEMENT IS ONE STEP CLOSER TO SUCCESSâ
Denzel Washington.
Please donât give up none was born a developer 
That seems to be a gross misinterpretation of a graphic.
For one thing, the fact that youâre self-taught doesnât mean you donât have a degree. Another thing is â1 out of 10 developers are self-taughtâ and â9 out of 10 self-taught developers are never hiredâ are very different statements, and honestly, this specific graphics doesnât address either statement
That same survey also had about 25% of professionals developers didnât major in computer related fields. 32% of professional developer consider formal education being less than important, and 90% of them consider themselves at least partially self-taught.
How representative is the survey sample? I believe this says it all.
So beyond interpreting the graphics more realistically, also take the survey results with a grain of salt. Simple survey results and actual statistic are very different things
3 Likes
@dk34
Please donât get down on yourself. 
This company had unrealistic expectations based on this alone:
5 days??!??
Thatâs insane, specifically because they said there would be on the job training for the first few months.
It sounds to me like there was a massive disconnect between what your coworker expected from a colleague in this job and what the recruiter hired for.
NONE of the above is your fault. These are all organizational failures at the company that hired you. 
Instead I think you should be remarkably proud of how you acquitted yourself in the two weeks you were there, I mean wow, look at this:
I think that you being able to take these on and complete them is a testament to your ability to learn and adapt to a changing job situation, both things which you should be proud of!
Iâve been where you are where Iâve been hired by companies with unrealistic job expectations. At least once I had to go crawling back to my previous job. Unfortunately, itâs par for the course in IT in general, and appears to be more frequent in the programming world.
Please stick in there and donât give up. Your plan (continuing learning, working on more projects/resume material) is the right course of action and while you may have the scars to remember this one, youâll know what to look for in the next role!
Hang in there!!
3 Likes
Donât be so hard on yourself. I have failed many interviews.The key thought that always keep me going is âThat company has lost a very hardworking and passionate employee(which no doubt I am) and itâs their lossâ. In this case, recall all the positive things you have done while you were on the job and be proud of yourself. Itâs the companyâs loss that they didnât see the passion and the hardworking beast, âgetting shit doneâ attitude in you. Good bosses donât just see the result but also how you achieved it. Each failure is one step closer to success.
1 Like
10 years ago, I got into this biz at 50 years old. That was in 2008, when the economy took the big dump. I was interviewing for jobs and only getting offered $12 an hour, and I was freelancing for $50 an hour. I stuck to freelancing for the next couple of years, because I could make as much in a day doing that, than I could in a week working at a J-O-B. I had enough in my portfolio after 2 years that I was called to fix a state agencyâs website. this turned into a full time gig at $40 an hour. I graciously said that, with the bennies, I was ahead of the $50 an hour, so thanks â Iâll take it. Also, when talking to clients, learn to explain what you do in such simple terms that you could explain it to your grandma.
keep coding everyday and keep track of the time you spend, so youâll be able to estimate jobs. I usually estimate 6 hours for the home page, because that includes creating the template and design for the rest of the site. Then I figure 1 hour to put content on each page. I also add 10-20% for a fudge factor, because clients always want something added. You give them the first change order for free, but if they start seriously adding to the scope of the project, then you need to tell them that it will cost extra. Always be firm â you are a pro!
6 Likes