You’re right on about the time part, that was definitely a big part of what I meant. You can start anywhere, and coding boot camps are useful, just as followin

You’re right on about the time part, that was definitely a big part of what I meant. You can start anywhere, and coding boot camps are useful, just as following YouTube tutorials. But until you learn to identify, quantify, and characterise the problem and data space you aren’t really doing the job of software engineering. My experience is that many people are deceived into thinking that language fluency is the core skill of software engineering, and coding bootcamps tend to foster that misrepresentation. That doesn’t make them bad. It just means that often, thrashing around with no real knowledge of the tools and solving a problem with the tiny set of syntax you can get to work is much, much more educational towards the goal of becoming a software engineer than getting a good grasp of the language as it pertains to solving toy problems that require little effort to characterise. Anyone that is willing to hack around a problem long enough that the solution emerges is doing the real job. It doesn’t matter where they start, or how much they “know” about “coding”. The real task is to fully characterise the problem and data structures, and sometimes that emerges from the horrific beast that rises from the tangled mess of a hacking session, a malformed but complete caricature of the actual solution. Then, all you have left to do is to code the actual solution, the structure of the algorithm and data has been laid bare for you to see by your efforts. That, I believe, is the essence of software engineering.