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Thousands of Veterans Want to Learn to Code – But Can’t
- MrZongle2 9y agoFTA: "“I could not use my GI Bill to go to code school. That was the number one roadblock,” Molina says." As a veteran who learned to code in my spare time, landed a tech job without a degree and had the older, pre-9/11 GI Bill to help pay for an education, I'm rather skeptical. In fact, I'd say that the core problem isn't the GI Bill, but rather this passage, later in the article: "But after he left the army in 2013, Molina and his family moved back to his native Oregon. As he weighed his options, he decided that a code school was his best bet to keep learning. He needed an immersive program, but on a faster timeline than college could offer — he had a wife and three daughters to support." If you have dependents to support, why did you get out of the military without a contingency plan? Unless the discharge is unexpected (for medical or disciplinary reasons), one's enlistment period is pretty well-defined. I got out when I was 24. Within a year I had secured a full-time, well-paying field tech support job based upon what I had learned while in the Army. If you're 39 and haven't taken advantage of the myriad of educational opportunities in the U.S. military to ensure that you're hire-able in the private sector, that's nobody's fault but yours. If there are additional circumstances that prevented Mr. Molina from making that happen, the article failed to cover them.