Ready when you are..?

There's a question that seems to be commonly asked from self-taught programmers in the learning phase.

When should I start to apply for a job?

So when did you do enough learning, courses, bootcamps or tutorials to be ready for the real thing?

Well the answer in my opinion is, as quite often in this industry, 'it depends'.

1. Projects

Did you do anything with the learned Knowledge? Did you design a sample website with this HTML and CSS you learned beside what you had to do for that tutorial you were coding along?

If you can answer this question with yes, that's a pretty good sign that you're ready for the next step.

Doing (and finishing) a project without someone holding your hand is the most important skill you have to learn.

This job is not about memorizing every CSS-property that you will never need or every JavaScript syntax sugar. Every job in the software industry demands life-long learning anyway since technologies change much and very quickly.

If you have the basics and can use a search engine efficiently lack of knowledge that you can lookup won't be the problem. In fact that's part of the job. Or according to some memes the entire job.

To come up with an idea of what you need to do to achieve a set goal is the important part. The actual execution can be learned on the job.

2. Explaining others

To gain some confidence you could try to find people for example on social media, that are earlier in the journey than you are and try to help them along the way. That can help to show yourself that you in fact already gained much knowledge and boost your confidence enough to reassure you it's time for the next step.

Writing about your journey can have the same effect and benefit a broad audience.

Conclusion

Ultimately there's no concrete answer how much time you have to spend learning before you can start to look for a step into the professional world. It's very individual a depends highly on how well you can translate the knowledge from courses, books and videos into completely different environments and projects.

Doing your own projects as well as helping others tests that skill very well.

Besides that having some finished projects helps with building a portfolio which in turn helps getting hired.

So if you already did those things and are not in the so-called tutorial-hell: Stop hesitating and start applying.