faroutchris

I found some free courses/schools here:

http://www.npower.org/ "Non-profit Npower offers this free program to young adults ages 18 to 25. The program hosts two class cycles per year, beginning in January and July, with each running a total of 22 weeks, including 15 weeks of class-based training and _7 weeks of paid internship_. The courses are based at Npower’s HQ in Downtown Brooklyn and in Harlem."

https://flatironschool.com/programs/nyc-mobile-dev-corps "Mobile Dev Corps is a new, four month long course run by The Flatiron School and fully funded by the city. Starting in January students will learn to build iOS apps over a 16 week course. To be eligible you must be an NYC resident, earn less than $50,000 per annum and have no prior programming experience."

They also offer scholarships you can try to apply for if the above course doesn't meet your criteria. https://flatironschool.com/programs/online-web-developer-car...

https://www.c4q.nyc/accesscode/ "Over the course of 10-months, expect to spend over eighty hours each week learning to code. From collaborating in hackathons to launching products at Demo Day, Access Code is fully immersive, and designed to train industry ready developers."

Forgive my formatting, I'm new to HN....

And what will probably happen is that some scummy company will happily take his money and he will still be delegated the internship crap work. What you're describing is a school, but a school doesn't ship production code to clients and has teachers at the ready to mentor anyone who needs help. An internship is just a way to get the foot in the door with some light mentoring which usually consists of a senior pointing you in the right direction, not actually teaching you the stuff.

I think you're far better off taking the classes. I was basically in your position 4 years ago, I had some coding skills but not enough to get my foot in the door anywhere. I chose to take a 2 year course (with a 6 months guaranteed internship) and it was invaluable for my career. You'll make connections to people who will soon also be working in the industry, you'll have time to develop your skills and build projects. I don't know how it works in the US, I know you don't get paid to study but maybe there's some free colleges/courses. You could look at alternatives to keep costs down and live on the money you have for a few months while you're focused on studying and networking.

If you don't want to go to school, get an internship but you should definitely not be paying since you're going to do valuable work even while learning on the job. Because the reality is that no devs actually have time to hold your hand, you will get a task and have to figure it out. They'll be able to point you in the right direction but don't expect much more than that.