I can speak from experience. TL/DR: Lessons from teaching a friend to code. I have a friend who was looking for a career change. I've spent somewhere between

I can speak from experience. TL/DR: Lessons from teaching a friend to code. I have a friend who was looking for a career change. I've spent somewhere between 75 and 150 hours helping him learn to code. (Web development.) Here's what I learned in the process: 1. I highly overestimated how quickly one could learn web development with no prior programming experience. I was too optimistic, and I told him if he put serious time in, he could have the skills to build a simple web app in 6 months. He put in a more realistic amount of time than I'd suggested, balancing other areas of life. It took him closer to 18 months, including enrolling in a coding camp, which he's now about to complete. 2. Charging money for a service helps people take it seriously. At first I didn't charge him, but then I took the advice of a friend who has that philosophy. This isn't definitive evidence, but I think charging for the training helped both him and myself to take it seriously and put effort into it. He's now about to graduate from a code camp, and I'm not sure if he would have done it if not for establishing that mindset that this training is valuable. (I recognize the value of code camps is debatable.) 3. Motivation is an important (and tricky) thing. There were times where he was spending more time on video games than programming. But I remember when I was learning, and programming felt very hard and mysterious for years before I began to feel comfortable making an entire project on my own. The difficulty level was demotivating at times.