Becoming a programmer.. The REALITY no one tells 🤐

learning how to code and becoming a programmer is by far the hardest thing i've ever had to do in my life it's hard when you're starting out it's hard after you've been learning for a little while and you start to actually think you know what you're doing it's hard when you realize that you don't know anything and you have so much more to learn it's hard when you get your first job it's hard after you've had your first job for a while and you're still getting stuck and you're still constantly learning stuff and you're still struggling all the time it's even hard for me now after four and a half years of working as a programmer professionally i don't get as stuck as i did when i was a junior developer and just started my first job i'm definitely more capable i know my area of expertise i know what i do and i'm willing to learn things that i don't know and i do pretty well when i learn new things just kind of keep building upon the tools that i have and i keep learning more and i keep growing as a developer and i get better and better and now when i get stuck it's on harder tasks but it still happens and it's still a difficult job i don't know if if i understood how difficult this job was going to be going into it i knew i had a really hard time when i was learning how to code and i thought that eventually things would just get easy and even after all this time it's still not an easy job because even when you don't get stuck on the problems it's mentally draining if you're in a position where you code all day long like i am it gets to you after a while when you're just sitting at a computer staring at a screen all day writing code looking at code reading code reviewing code you just sit there all day staring at a text editor six months into your learning it doesn't feel that bad but when you're five years into it after doing it for eight plus hours a day every day of the week it definitely wears on you so just in general being a programmer is just hard in so many different ways but still a good job but with that said it's a grind to get that first job most people watching my videos i would say are interested in getting a job as a programmer i know that there's some of you out there that want to freelance but me personally when i got into this i wanted a job that was my big goal or i wanted to write javascript and i wanted to build web apps and i wanted to you know be one of the cool kids and it was a grind it was me spending every waking moment of my free time that i had learning how to code i was on my laptop all day long from sun up to sun down that's not healthy it's not normal and i'm sure that a lot of you out there don't have that kind of time to learn that's more of a luxury that younger people have if you're an older person and you have a family and you've got responsibilities and you already have a full-time job and you've got things going on that require you to be somewhere for most of your day and your time is limited when you get home then you can't learn like that i was lucky enough to have a job where i can watch videos and scroll on my phone so i spent a lot of time at work trying to consume as much programming content as i could i remember i would bring my laptop sometimes to work and i would sit in my truck towards the end of the shift when i got real slow and i just kind of had to wait around for everyone to leave i would be on my laptop trying to write code every minute that i wasn't preoccupied with something that was really important with work or my family i was on my computer and it was rough there was days that i wanted to quit there was days that i just really felt like it wasn't ever going to happen there was a lot of self-doubt i didn't have any education i was a high school dropout i was an older person trying to get into like tech which is supposed to be like a younger person kind of job i really struggled through that grind at times and then you get the job and the rest of your career is kind of like a treadmill and it's weird because your job kind of changes and you might change employers and you might you know move into different positions and you might become a lead which will give you more responsibilities and eventually you might become a manager and then you would write less code but for me particularly i don't like all that extra responsibility i'd rather just be a code monkey i'd rather write code all day and not have to deal with meetings and not have to deal with people and hurting cats and trying to babysit everyone that's not something i want to do i got into this because i just wanted to be able to write code and be left alone but what happens there is that it really is like a treadmill you just write code all the time it does get boring after a while and writing code all day isn't the most exciting thing to do when you're learning you have a lot of fun when you're learning because you're building whatever you want to build and you're doing whatever you want to do and as a self-taught developer you kind of follow your own path and you live by your own rules and that's not the case when you work a job then you don't get to build whatever you want to build then you have to build whatever the business wants you to build and that gets boring you know writing code for other people isn't the most exciting thing it's a lot more fun to write code for yourself and i think that's why i personally really enjoyed learning how to code and after a few years of being a developer i don't enjoy it as much as i did and i kind of you know call it what it is it's a job and it's okay it's a good job it's a job that pays very well but remember that at the end of the day it's still just a job we on social media tend to really really glamorize this job one of my subscribers that has actually been subscribed to my channel mentioned this eddier he said that this industry has really become very glamorized in a comment you know a couple months back and i've gotta agree with them it's awful how glamorized this job is because at the end of the day you know all of this stuff that i have here to make my office look like really cool i i love it obviously because i have a super cool office and i can afford it because i have this career that allows me to buy all this junk to make me look cool on youtube and to make me look cool on social media but the reality of it is is that it's not this super glamorous job like yeah sure you make more money you can buy nicer things but that's with any job i have friends that work as plumbers i have friends that are electricians i have friends who work in hvac and i have friends who are mechanics who all make really good money many of those friends probably make just as much or if not more than what i make right now as a software developer when you're sitting at a desk all day and even though it's a nice desk and it's a pretty desk it's it's still just sitting at a desk all day so if you come from a job where you're already sitting at a desk all day and you don't mind it well that might not be too bad but if you're coming from a background where you don't really like being at a desk all day and you like being more outdoors or you like being more active and working with your hands or doing other things consider that when you're thinking about becoming a programmer and doing this stuff i personally have been a degenerate gamer my whole life i have played video games for the last 20 plus years i have sat at computers and in front of tvs way more time than i would even want to try to calculate i'm one of those people who close their work laptop and then open up their personal laptop in that sense it wasn't bad for me it that doesn't bother me but it's just something to think about that you know this it's not it's not what it looks like on social media and it's not as glamorous as it is at the end of the day it's kind of a stressful job and it's you know sitting at a computer writing code here's another thing and this is just a number i'm gonna throw out there but i would say that like 80 of developer jobs are crud apps because that's that's what it is most websites are crud apps most mobile applications are crud apps and that's what most businesses need from applications they just need to be able to take in information save it delete it update it and present it to the user so that's what most jobs are and the truth is is that working on a crud application becomes painfully boring after a while after you've learned the stack and you've worked in it for a while even if you're implementing a lot of new features you kind of go on autopilot mode because you know how everything works you know how to set everything up i work on a j hipster type stack we use java sql spring boot and angular and that's what i work in that's what i do all the time and when i first started that job i had a little bit of experience with java i didn't write much sql and i was mostly working in react and i didn't know a lot of angular i was able to pick up angular pretty quickly i started learning about spring boot and i started learning about a little bit more of java and how how spring works and you know a little bit more about sql and then i implemented some features on our application and i got the hang of it so while i still have a little bit of fun building some of the crud functionality on our applications it does get boring because that autopilot kicks in and then you pretty much just end up doing the same thing every day and yeah crud apps are boring and that's what most jobs are going to be so be prepared for that also you know learn crud learn how to implement crud in a stack and that's probably you know enough to really build a good portfolio off of which can potentially get you hired in whatever stack you decide to learn so think about that and make sure that you learn how to implement crud functionality which again is create read update delete it takes most people a while to learn this stuff and that's another thing that i feel that i just need to be very real about you'll see people who did it in three or six months you'll see that there's a lot of courses and boot camps that claim that they can get you ready within just a few weeks within 9 weeks 12 weeks they'll have you ready and getting a job as a software developer that's such a bold statement and it's such a hard thing to do i know that people have done it i know that there's quite a few people out there on youtube that that did it in a short amount of time people who do this in three months are the exception they're not the norm remember that when you're going into this because if you've been doing it for three months and you feel like well like i haven't got a job yet um i'm not cut out for this this is this isn't for me i shouldn't have done this i you know that guy did in three months and i i'm just a loser it's not the case if any boot camp or course or person is telling you that they can get you a job and hired as a software developer in you know three months or in some ridiculously short amount of time it's probably too good to be true and they're probably trying to sell you something another thing that drives me crazy is that everybody's looking for like an easy mode on this everybody wants to learn as fast as they can they want to get a job as fast as they can and most of them don't want to put in any work i'm talking to you guys you know and i'm sorry but it's the truth when you come into something and you think that you're just going to press play on one video and you're going to get a job it's ridiculous to set those kind of expectations and this bugs me a lot because everybody wants it fast and easy and they don't want to work for it and i remember how much work i put into this i remember how hard it was for me so when i get those messages where people are like oh hey you know i heard that this was an easy way in or that was an easy way in or if i see people saying that you know web development is easy or front end development is easy or html and css is an easy way to get a job there's no easy way for any of that stuff i spent so much time learning html and css and i still don't feel like i'm not good at css you want to get good at any of those things if you want to get good at javascript if you want to get good at any particular programming language if you want to learn about any of this stuff it's going to be hard it's going to take a long time if you're asking for what's the easiest fastest way to do this you're probably not gonna make it because the minute it gets a little bit hard for you the minute it feels like you've done this for a little longer than you wanted to you know commit to you're gonna drop it and when you do that to yourself you're just you're pretty much setting yourself up for failure from the get go so don't ask for the easy path figure out what it is you want to learn figure out what area of software development you want to get into if it's game dev if it's web dev mobile development ai whatever it is you want to learn google it research it figure out your road map and start learning and don't ask for the easy path just follow the path and eventually you'll get to where you want to be so when i was filming this i ran out of memory on my memory card and i decided that i'll just do the outro separately because it was kind of going into a rant and i think i've said enough of what i wanted to say so with all that said just think about some of the things i mentioned in this video because it's a lot of stuff that people tend to overlook because they just see dollar signs when you tell them that you can become a developer and start making 100 grand a year and a lot of people that go into this end up failing or giving up or getting a job and then eventually not liking it because a lot of the things that i mentioned in this video but i'm just some dude on youtube don't let me sway you one way or the other just have it be some food for thought as you're learning with all that said thank you for watching if you enjoyed this video and you found it helpful make sure you hit that like button if you want to see more content about learning how to code and becoming a self-taught programmer make sure you subscribe to my channel alright thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Dorian Develops

Views: 236,492

Keywords: self taught programmer, self taught web developer, self taught developer, self taught software engineer, programmer, web developer, developer, software engineer, programming, web development, development, software engineering, learn to code, how to code, code, coding, web dev, self taught, web, engineer, engineering, self-taught programmer, software development, software developer

Id: 7CocCxCPUtE

Length: 13min 16sec (796 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021