Really?

I just got done taking a placement test for an external recruiting company, and I was pretty disappointed by the experience, overall. This company is highly connected nationwide, and touts quite a few job opportunities in almost every city I would be ok with living in. I met with someone from their team last week to discuss the details and how the company works, and it seemed like a decent operation. I still believe using an external recruiter is typically not a great idea, but I'm desperate at this point to find a workable solution. They start you off by giving you a placement exam that you are allotted about 2 and a half hours to complete. I expected the exam to be about JavaScript, but it turned out to be at least 50% about jQuery, which I am not that familiar with. I can understand giving someone this test 5 years ago, and I'm sure it was a very useful test 5 years ago. These days, only companies holding on to a very outdated system are using code that looks like this, and nobody is really teaching this material anymore. This test took me about an hour and a half, and most of the jQuery questions, I was just guessing at. Even the JavaScript questions were written in code that was pre-ES6, with vars all over the place, and used built-in methods that nobody uses anymore. I ended scoring a 65, which I'm told is fairly average for their junior developers, so I guess it wasn't a complete waste of time.

After completing this test, I moved on to working on Maximilian Schwarzmüeller's React Native - The Practical Guide on Udemy, which I now feel like I've been working on for years. This 30-hour course has dragged on much longer than most courses I've taken, and I know exactly why. He has packed in about 60 hours of content into this 30-hour course, and it's really difficult to take more than a couple hours at a time. Most courses I can sit and consume content for several hours at a time, and I never feel stressed or overwhelmed. After a much shorter period of time with this course, my blood pressure is at the max and I feel like my head is spinning. I've said it multiple times now: it sounds like I'm complaining, and I am to a certain extent, but I appreciate the volume of information we are being given. I just don't think this course should be treated as a beginner-level course. I believe this course should be taken after taking maybe Stephen Grider's course on React-Native or someone else's. It would have felt a lot more manageable if I wasn't coming into this course completely new to React Native, but then again, maybe I would have felt the same way anyways.

I just added up the time I have left on this course, and I'm within 5 hours of completing it, which is awesome and a huge relief. I would like to continue on with learning React Native while it's fresh in my mind, and will likely move on to Stephen Grider's course, but I've had thoughts of turning my attention elsewhere just to give myself a break from the tyranny I've just undergone. Andrew Mead has some great courses on Udemy, one specifically on using GraphQL, which is really of interest to me, and his teaching style is a stark contrast to Max's, and would be a welcome relief to what I've just witnessed. Stephen Grider's style is along the same lines, so I should probably stick to that, and really hammer in the concepts within React Native while I have it on my mind. In these last 5 hours, we are creating an app that will allow the user to store a collection of locations with images and maps. The primary purpose of creating this app is to explore some of the built-in features of React-Native like Camera, Maps, Location, and integrating SQLite into an app. As we have done with the last couple projects, he has completely flown through the setup of the app, not even stopping to catch his breath for a second. Within 45 minutes of lecture, we must have written almost 700 lines of code within 12 different files, which is just absolute madness. It's mostly boilerplate and is very similar to every other app we've done with this course, but the pace we go through the setup with these projects in mind-numbing.

Until tomorrow!