Codesmith: My experience

By building a jetpack so you can fly above them all. Joking aside, it's an analogy. You have to do something different, and there three approaches (I got this framework from a friend who was an amazon warehouse worker and an OpenAI Principal Engineer and many things in between and he shares this a lot privately): 1. Do something smarter than anyone else. If you are naturally smarter than 99% of people, you can find some way to show that. 2. Get luckier than anyone else. Maybe you can make your luck by being in a tech city and going to bars every night to "bump into" software engineers, but you can just sit there and hop to get luckier. 3. Work harder than anyone else. This is the only one in your control. But you actually have to do it. The person said he would sleep at the office in a hammock under his desk every day for a month at a time for example. Like you really just have to do the work of 4 people EVERY SINGLE DAY CONSISTENTLY to outwork anyone. So many bootcamp grads want jobs, so you won't stand out without standing out! Under this framework you can see how in this forum even when you see a success story, what bucket does it fall under. 1 and 2 aren't reproducible and their stories might be interesting to learn about, but if they are a 1 and you aren't, useless. If they are 2 and you are doing 2, then recommendations about "making your own luck" might help. And then if they are a 3 and they make it sound easy to do that much work, and you aren't a 3, again useless, you're going to start and stop for months and months and burn the rubber without going anywhere. If you aren't any of these, then find another field to go into.