When Failure is Normal - Happy Bootcamp Story 53 of 100

No rescue. The group just failed. Twice in a row.

TL;DR: When to let a group of students fail, even knowing they will be discouraged? When it's important to learn that it's normal.

Here, Fix This Code

Before we learn to code, we start with a wonderful picture of creating elegant apps from thin air. Oh, the glory! This acts as a driver, and keeps students motivated.

Then, we get to a job and learn that the glory might not be so grand. Instead, we're asked to fix something that someone else half-started months ago, and nobody even knows why it's broken.

An instructor has to be careful, because a bootcamp student might just quit, if things become too discouraging. It's a thing.

Ball of Mud

Often, what we get to fix really does look like a giant ball of mud. Think word salad, only these words are code, and every misplaced comma might keep the whole thing from working.

But it's worse. The coding session might only be half an hour. And everyone is trying to be courteous, so there's not a lot of blurting and volunteering.

We get to the end when we check in our code, and there's nothing to check in.

Back End Coders, Doing Front End

Then there's our emphasis on realism, which makes most of our bootcamp back-end focused. Think data and servers - not pretty pictures and buttons on a user's screen. And this is a front end problem.

I've been careful to allow this to continue long enough for everyone to feel how normal it is to fail. And to review the failure at the end of each session, so the students can get a fix on how normal this is, in real life.

Expectations is the Happy Story

How is coding different than your profession? Maybe, not so much.

No matter what your profession is, there are parts that you expect to fail at, just as a normal course of business. It seems odd to the newbie, but the seasoned pro knows that you just calibrate and set your expectations to that, as your normal rhythm.