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I see your experience and I'm going to be honest with you about a couple things, because I went the same route in many ways, I'm completely self-taught on everything, worked as a web developer through school to help pay my non-CS degree and then got a job in web development after graduation. You don't say it explicitly but you seem to imply your not a CS major so thats what I'm assuming. First and most important "most projects don't get completed because only one thing which i couldn't figure out, & could be explained to me by 9 min in person help." This is the worst thing you can say as a self-taught dev. You have to be able to just "figure things out". You have to get projects finished and have a portfolio to get a job, If you can't do this you might seriously want to reconsider a career in webdev because regardless you will always be in the situation where you have to solve a problem and nobody is there to help you. Maybe if you have a CS degree things are different but this is not the case when you're self-taught. As a self-taught guy its all about what you've done and can SHOW that you can do. So remember your Portfolio is everything, work on it, make sure its good but remember it doesn't have to be chalk full of tons of stuff, actually just one very good example that makes people say WOW is more than enough to get a good Job. I know its hard to force yourself through to getting the projects completed, especially when you don't know how to do something, but the internet is full of tutorials and guides and tons of source code, of which you should be reading a lot and trying to understand it. Reading source code was my number one way to educate myself, and I still recommend this and do it when I need to understand something new. If you don't understand something, take the DOM for instance, read the jQuery source, write your own functions and libraries and then you will know how it works and about its quirks. In college you still have time to do a lot of this. "in ads i see salaries from 30k to 190k .. where do i fit?" Right now from what you say, you'll be lucky to get a 30k Job - thats my honest opinion. So my advice on how to get the 80k job is this: Write code and finish your projects, forget about learning node/express/mongoose etc. If you need to know it to build a project then learn it. Nobody cares if all you know is CSS/HTML and JS if you show them some amazing site you designed and built a frontend for, they will hire you. At the end of the day, tech-stacks don't matter because its assumed you can learn/are willing to learn anything. So do whatever it takes to get some completed projects under your belt and you'll be good to go. |