I also agree about "precious little instruction available at the intermediate level". Though some is out there, if you're willing to spend a lot of money and sift through a lot of dross.
But I definitely disagree about needing to pick up some thick textbooks or go to college to get from Hello World to employable junior. What you need to do is work. Textbooks or college (or bootcamp) are certainly a possibility, but there's no shortage of free material, if one has the grit to do the work.
I mean, shit. Entry into an upper-middle-class white collar job used to be a project of at least 4 years of full-time effort, with a cost (on top of cost of living) at least equal to a year of salary of that upper-middle-class job. Modern educational opportunities in the area of software engineering drop that by a factor of 2 or 3 or 4. But some people (the "everyone" in your "everyone seemed to think...") figure it has dropped by a factor of 100. It's preposterous. Would-be programmers have got it pretty damn good... that doesn't mean it's miraculous!
I also agree about "precious little instruction available at the intermediate level". Though some is out there, if you're willing to spend a lot of money and sift through a lot of dross.
But I definitely disagree about needing to pick up some thick textbooks or go to college to get from Hello World to employable junior. What you need to do is work. Textbooks or college (or bootcamp) are certainly a possibility, but there's no shortage of free material, if one has the grit to do the work.
I mean, shit. Entry into an upper-middle-class white collar job used to be a project of at least 4 years of full-time effort, with a cost (on top of cost of living) at least equal to a year of salary of that upper-middle-class job. Modern educational opportunities in the area of software engineering drop that by a factor of 2 or 3 or 4. But some people (the "everyone" in your "everyone seemed to think...") figure it has dropped by a factor of 100. It's preposterous. Would-be programmers have got it pretty damn good... that doesn't mean it's miraculous!