3 Days Before Hack Reactor Technical Assessment

Cole Bienek — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 14:50:10 +0000

And all my friends -- especially the friends who are Hack Reactor grads -- are telling me to relax.

Easy for them to say, they don't currently have a six-hour juggernaut of a test impatiently waiting to smash their fragile programmer egos.

The Technical Assessment (TA) is the midpoint, high-stakes exam that all Hack Reactor students must survive in order to move on into the Senior portion of the 13-week software engineering immersive program. One either passes and takes another step toward a high-reward career as a programmer, or instead is forced to reevaluate life decisions and consider stepping off the software engineering path.

At fifty-three years old, I am not possessing of a wealth of chances to try out this whole midlife-crisis-change-careers-and-hope-for-the-best thing -- it's pretty much this works out now, or I will go back to doing what I was doing before.

The 'before' refers to my previous life as a Substance Use Counselor. As someone in recovery from substance use, I found the work personally and professionally rewarding -- unfortunately, it is alarmingly difficult to survive in a city (San Francisco at the time) on a counselor's salary. The lack of financial security coupled with significant burnout after working in a large metropolitan hospital emergency room for the bulk of the pandemic, I needed a change.

I had several friends who took the software engineering path and they all encouraged me to give it a go. So, I started with some Udemy, some FreeCodeCamp, some CodeWars, and a lot of misunderstanding regarding what programmers actually do. A year and a half later I quit my job, moved to a new city with my partner, and -- relying on her for financial and emotional support -- applied to Hack Reactor.

I passed the entrance assessments and began my 13-week immersive in September 2022. Since then, my understanding has grown exponentially -- and Dunning-Kruger has been banished.

All joking aside, Hack Reactor has done their best to prepare me to take this exam -- I am neither over- or under-confident; I am prepared to tackle this juggernaut (of my imagining) and move on to whatever lies ahead.

DEV Community: Cole Bienek

3 Days Before Hack Reactor Technical Assessment