Before I discovered coding, I was lost. When I graduated high school in 2006, my parents urged me to follow the formula that had worked for their generation: get a job with a pension, settle down, retire early. So almost at random, I enrolled in a police foundations program in Ontario, even though I had no interest in that line of work.

After I graduated, I bounced around various customer service gigs for nine years. Soon, I was nearing 30, and felt like the pressure was on to commit to a meaningful career. Then one day in 2019, a friend of mine who works in tech asked if I’d ever considered coding. She told me that companies were handing out high-wage positions to coders with only a few months of bootcamp training. As a teenager, I had borrowed a coding manual from my sister’s boyfriend and built fan sites for bands I liked. But I’d always thought that to code professionally, I’d need a computer science degree, which was out of reach for me financially.

That conversation convinced me that coding could be a great path for me. At the time, there was no shortage of evidence that it was a surefire path to a profitable future. The number of tech jobs had ballooned by more than one-fifth since 2016, outpacing growth in nearly every other industry. Venture capital fundraising for Canada’s tech sector had hit a record high of over $7.5 billion—a figure that, by 2021, was closing in on $11 billion. From 2018 to 2023, Toronto alone added over 95,000 tech jobs, making it North America’s fourth-biggest tech market behind San Francisco, Seattle and New York City. It felt like everyone and their pet rock knew tech was exploding.

Soon after, I found a coding bootcamp offering a deal: students could enrol for one dollar, then pay tuition if and when they landed a job in the field. It sounded too good to be true, but after reading independent reviews from thriving alumni I thought, what have I got to lose? So I wrote the enrolment exam and got started straight away.

The two-month program was intense—marked by eight-hour days, five days a week in a classroom on Queen Street West. But my classmates and I shared a sense of optimism. We were in the trenches together, crawling through complex JavaScript assignments and building an app every week. For one assignment, I built a Caesar cipher, which is the same encryption technique Julius Caesar reportedly used to send secret military correspondence. I was fascinated with how coding interacts with so many realms—in this case history, conceptual math and language. When I was coding, I was in the zone. It felt like something I could do forever. At the end of the program, the other students and I sat in a circle and shared our thoughts on our experience. Nearly everyone cried. We felt like our lives were........

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