2 Years of Coding - Everything I Got Wrong (UK)

hey so my name's tom and recently i just hit my two year anniversary as a professional software developer and although this has gone pretty well for me like i'm no longer a junior developer i've managed to almost double my salary honestly i've made some really cringe-worthy mistakes along the way and in this video i'm not going to tell you whether to learn javascript or php or react what i'm going to do is just share with you the errors that i've made in the hopes that you won't have to make those errors as well and honestly if you have any questions about this at all please leave them in the comment section down below and i will do my best to get back to you and if there are questions that can't really be asked in like a youtube comment format i'm more than happy to share my linkedin with you and we can have a chat about it lastly i just want to say a massive thank you to everyone who contributes to this channel at all in any way in any small way because i just hit 10 000 subscribers and honestly it is the best feeling thank you so much anyway it's 2019 and i absolutely hate my job i'm a guitar teacher with a philosophy degree and i have no business learning how to program anything or at least so i think my brother tells me that there's this awesome website called team treehouse where you can load to code for free and learning to code is easy it turns out that both of those things are entirely false but i take a few basic courses that are free and i'm absolutely hooked when i discover that i could not only build my own web pages but i can edit existing pages like google and change the background color and stuff by just clicking right click inspect and messing around with the dev tools after doing some very very basic html and css i discovered javascript and this is where i make my first massive error i decided that learning the syntax of javascript is like fundamentally important to programming now being the absolute noob that i was at the time i didn't realize that visual studio code does things like this yeah that's right you can just type a tiny fragment and then press tab and you can have a 4-h loop but i didn't know that and i wasted literally hours just learning syntax of a language and honestly i made this mistake pretty consistently for the first maybe like year of my career before i came to realize that learning concepts is insanely more valuable than learning syntax so armed with the very basic knowledge of html css and javascript i make my second major mistake i assume that in order to be a professional programmer you have to make websites of a professional standard on your own from scratch and this might seem kind of logical to you but really if you look at the industry you're almost always working as part of a team especially if you're junior with more senior developers who are going to help you out along the way and also you're drawing on the collective knowledge of the programming community by using frameworks and libraries in order to help you build those projects but at this point i really didn't understand that at all and i set about building this horrible monolithic code base from scratch that took me about two months and was the buggiest nastiest website you have ever seen and spoiler alert that was a huge waste of time seriously don't do that like pick projects that are achievable for your level that is my number one piece of advice and secondly use frameworks and use like the support structure that exists within the programming community in order to help you and it's around this time with my super buggy website that i discovered my friend sam is a hotshot programmer who works in security and i decide that i am going to pick his brave any knowledge that he is willing to give and luckily sam was an incredibly generous person with his time and he helped me out a bunch and while debugging my terrible css he mentioned that there were these things called libraries where you maybe don't have to write all the css yourself and you can just like use classes that other people have been writing and this was an absolute light bulb moment for me armed with this knowledge i went on the internet and i googled front-end frameworks and i discovered materialize and honestly within like a week i was building websites that looked like this as opposed to websites that looked like this so anyway at this point i have what i think is a fantastic portfolio and what is in fact a terrible portfolio and honestly i do a bunch of portfolio reviews on this channel and it's hilarious to me how much better like the average portfolio is than my original portfolio it's so bad i honestly wish i had the code to show you guys because i think it would give you a lot of confidence confidence is what carried me through those first interviews and what ultimately got me my first job so fast forward to september 2019 which is when i started my first job and i was absolutely hyped for it i thought this was gonna be the job i stayed in forever and it turns out it wasn't and i'm not going to say the learning curve wasn't massive for me it absolutely was those first few months i learned a hell of a lot but what i found was that in this particular job and i was working for a very small agency with a kind of dated tech stack so this may not apply for you um i found that i plateaued really quickly i actually ended up staying in this job for about a year and during the course of this job i was applying for react positions and i was learning react and contrary to the theme of this video that's something i think i actually did quite well um i specialized really heavily in learning just this front-end framework react and i think this is a problem with a lot of junior jobs especially ones in agencies you work on a like large variance of projects and they might not always have the same tech stack and it's really easy to get overwhelmed and think you have to learn all these different languages and if you're in that place honestly my best advice to you is specialize in something get really good at it and again try and learn concepts don't learn the syntax of the language so this brings me to about the year mark in my development journey like i've just been working in industry for about a year and covid hits and this is actually a really good thing for me because i get placed on furlough and during this time i'm applying to a bunch of jobs and i come up against this massive brick wall and it's probably something that you'll come up against as well especially if you're a self-taught junior developer in your initial round of interviews in order to get your first job you won't be asked anything like particularly difficult in my experience you'll get like questions just about the languages kind of pop quiz stuff but once you get to that next stage of interview once you want to take the step up honestly the questions just become like so so much harder and the conceptual questions around your answers become a lot more difficult as well so what do i mean by this essentially you'll start getting what are called toy problems or at least i did and you'll have to solve problems like twosome and this absolutely baffled me the first time i saw it and not only is it a difficult question to answer especially if you've not prepped for this kind of thing but the questions you'll get asked about the answer to your question about like you know how you optimize for time efficiency space efficiency this kind of thing they're really difficult if you don't have any background in computer science at all and what i found was that in order to get like the next level job up i had to be able to solve toy problems and i had to be able to understand the concepts around them so my advice to you is if you're in your first job don't only dedicate all of your time to learning their tech stack yes learn their tech stack to the extent that like you're proficient on it for sure and try and specialize in one part of it and get really good at it but also at this point if you know you're not going to stay in that job forever i would be practicing toy problems because honestly they are the gatekeeper to the good programming jobs or at least that is my experience and if you are not good at them you will just be projected out of hand for a bunch of really good jobs and getting good at them isn't that difficult so anyway during that second lockdown i learned a bunch about toy problems and i learned a little bit more about react's meta frameworks and that lands me my second job which honestly was my second major mistake and it wasn't anything to do with programming it was about the type of job i was going for and i think this is a mistake that a lot of juniors make so essentially there were three problems with this job and i think they're really common problems that you'll probably encounter in your job so number one was that i was a one-man team or close enough to a one-man team that it created a bunch of problems and i think in some of the more entry-level jobs they're pretty under-resourced in my experience and this is something that you might come up against and it's definitely a major red flag number two was the as you can imagine air one man team there was little to no mentorship so if i had a problem it was pretty much down to me to solve it and number three was that there was a bunch of unpaid overtime in this job which by itself is not necessarily a bad thing like i like to work hard and if i'm going to progress at the company i'm willing to put the hours in but often unpaid overtime is just indicative of like an under-resourced department who are looking for solutions that aren't really a good fit because they're kind of desperate it's not usually something that like indicates that they have good workflow practices or good planning in generally as a company but anyway to give you a bit more window dressing about this massive mistake that i made essentially i just went for a job with like the most prestigious local company that i could get because i thought that working there would like be a leg up for future jobs although i might even stay there for a long time and i was pretty much willing to do basically anything to get this job and that was my mistake so even at the interview stage they were talking about unpaid overtime they were talking about like how i might work in an unsupported environment as like a one-man team and if you get these kind of comments in an interview honestly as a junior i would run a mile if you are choosing your first company or in particular your second company because if you're just trying to break into the industry you might not have these choices so in my first job i also worked a bunch of like over time which was paid which was a little bit better and i was also part of a one-man team there was a lot less stress in that first company for sure but it was definitely part of it but moving to the second company i just kind of thought that that was like what the development industry is and there is definitely a portion of it that is like that but you should try your absolute best to avoid that because you will burn out like there is just no two ways about it if you're working like five or six hours over time every single week and i was working a lot more than that i was working maybe like six to 15 hours work of overtime a week you just won't like programming anymore and i got into this industry because i actually enjoy doing it and this job almost killed that for me like honestly i was i was on the brink of quitting at one point i'd been working 12-hour days for the last three months and while i've been learning a lot doing it and the developers i'm getting to work with when i occasionally get to interact with them are really smart i'm learning a lot about unix i'm learning about the importance of testing i'm learning about a bunch of different testing libraries and um workflow practices like git flow and i'm we're i'm learning fundamental conceptual knowledge that is really going to help me progress in my career i'm also at a point where i just don't want to do the job anymore and i honestly don't want to code anymore and i've got to the point where i'm just like is is development really for me like is this what the entire industry is like and it really doesn't have to be if you're a junior who's going for your second job you're going for your first job place a higher value on your skills and don't just accept like the first thing that comes along that looks good really prioritize your mental health and try and get something where the employee actually treats you with enough respect not to ask you to work overtime or their organizational structure is such that they don't allow their developers to work overtime because they know it's bad so anyway at this point i'm applying for a bunch of jobs with a bunch of different companies and two fundamental things really changed that helped me secure my next job the first is that kovid has made remote working just the norm and i'm able to cast my net a lot wider and the second is that i start using job platforms instead of local recruitment and these really are two of the biggest mistakes i've made over the course of my career in terms of recruitment now the first was sort of unavoidable because when i was initially applying for jobs remote work wasn't the thing it is now and it wasn't as widely available but for people like you who are either just getting into the industry who are junior developers in their first year in industry seriously consider applying for like remote jobs in london bristol or manchester because in my experience the local jobs in terms of like pay infrastructure tech stack everything will just be lackluster compared with the ones that have salaries benchmarked against london at the bigger companies and if your primary way of applying for jobs is through recruiters through linkedin through like smaller local recruiters i highly recommend you try the bigger job platforms especially if you're in a position to pass some of their exams because you'll get a much higher quality company approach you than you would through recruitment and i'm not being paid to say this by these guys that's just my experience my last round of applying for jobs honestly the salaries were pretty much double on the job board what they were with local recruitment and the companies were a lot more recognizable the tech stack was a lot more interesting like every conceivable metric for how good a job is it was much better on the job board but anyway like i said i'm super burned out but i'm being hyper cautious and selective about my next move and my next choice of company and the job i eventually settled on after about a month of interviews and a bunch of different offers was the one that i think i will stay in for a long time essentially my salary increased massively my pension was all of a sudden not a joke which is a real problem in the industry especially if you're working for a startup i now get fridays off for research and development and the general organization within the software engineering department that i work in is absolutely a million times better than any company i've ever worked for and this really highlighted to me the sad reality of the development market in the uk and it essentially boils down to this the smaller companies that don't have the infrastructure to support their developers end up working their developers harder out of necessity than the larger companies that have that infrastructure so if you're kind of star struck by those fang videos where they have michelin star food in the cafe and they've got their crazy salary in the thumbnail i just warn you that the bottom end jobs in the uk the kind of entry-level web development jobs in the uk your experience isn't really going to be comparable but once you start getting to a point where you can apply for jobs that have their salary benchmarked against london in the bigger tech cities that's when you're going to start to see that sort of quality of life jump but anyway thank you so much for watching the video i really hope you got something out of it and if you're new to this if you're a new junior developer or you're just looking to get into the industry and you have questions seriously ask them down below i will do my best to get back to you and once again thank you for watching the video

Channel: Code Creative

Views: 4,531

Rating: 4.9670329 out of 5

Keywords: Junior Developer UK, Junior Front end developer UK, Junior software engineer UK, How to Learn Web Development in 6 Months in 2020 (UK), How to learn web development 2020, how to learn web development UK, how to learn web development, how to learn web development in 6 months, How I Would Become a Web Developer in 6 Months, react tutorial for beginners, react tutorial for beginners react js

Id: zGpemk4OXvE

Length: 14min 52sec (892 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 26 2021