weepingbelle

As someone who went through a certification they're really great but mine certainly didn't prepare me for writing software in a corporate environment either BUT it did give me the kind of networking skills and opportunities to get a good internship where I did learn those skills. My personal recommendation is to see if you can find an internship for a software company and if they're any good they'll show you the ropes.

On the subject of bootcamps.... my dad works as a lead developer and his experience w new hires that went through bootcamps is that they usually have no idea what they're doing either lmao. Worst thing about this field is trying to get the practical experience when the practical experience is a prerequisite lmaooo.

For clarification, I don't think either of these things are bad options but you'll get the most out of (and spend the least money on) an internship.

I hope this helps a little bit!! Sorry for the lengthy reply lmaooo

so i have some advice, as another person with a cs degree who waited until they graduated to look for jobs, but i'd take it with a grain of salt because the field i ended up in doesn't require developing software (though that was my original goal). that said:

+1 to internships. you might have to do a lot of digging over a period of time to find one for recent grads (rather than current students), but they do exist.

in the meantime, it probably wouldn't hurt you to get a cert or do a bootcamp (except possibly financially), but alternatively you could:

1. join a community focused on programming/cs-related fields. it can be on discord or a forum or anything like that. what's important from this is that you get mentors, peers, and experience
2. on github, look for issues tagged "good first issue". you don't have to submit anything if you don't want to, but it's good to at least try out some real-world problems. you can look at closed "good first issue"s, too, if you want to be able to have a real "solution" to check yourself against.
3. work on a personal project, just something small and/or manageable in your favorite programming language, or whichever one you're most comfortable with. if you're not sure what to make, codecademy has a list of common first projects. freecodecamp has a list that's python-focused (but i'm sure they could be adapted to anything).

(also with #3, i recommend using source control, particularly git and github. it's a few minutes of setup if you don't already have git installed or a github account, but it's worth it. both because you'll need to know source control in whatever job you end up in, and because it's just generally helpful. if you mess something up but you've already saved over it and you've closed out the program etc etc, you can still go back to a previous version where it worked (assuming you've been committing your changes).)

AFAIK this is totally normal! I just wrote an info dump here but am moving it into a rechost