Biggest Self-Taught Programmer Mistakes [RANT]

hey there what's going on I'm Andy I'm a self-taught software developer and in this video I'm gonna go in a bit of a rant here I'm gonna talk about some of the most common mistakes I see from people who are trying to teach them self programming and it's it's kind of crazy because I've seen a lot of people who are feel like they're spinning their wheels in the mud getting really frustrated at not figuring this out quickly enough maybe they're spending years trying to do this maybe they're even just struggling to show up every day and put in the work but I see a lot of people making common mistakes and I want to help you avoid it so that's what we're gonna dive into today now if you're new here I'm Andy and I mentor people who are looking to go down the path of a self-taught developer so people are looking to learn the skills to do that also who are looking to land a job without a computer science degree or any previous experience so consider subscribing below make sure to hit the bell icon to get notifications anytime I put out a new video all right so without any further ado let's just dive into this thing so the big mistake that I see people make right off the bat when they get into this is that they don't set a firm date for when they're gonna start applying for jobs or start looking for their first clients if they're going to freelance route and this is really important when you don't set a firm date in the future like say you're gonna start right now and you're gonna you're dedicating yourself to a software development becoming a software developer well if you don't set that date in the future whether that's six months or a year two problems arise number one the first problem arises is that you tend to not be as committed to the process right because if you think to yourself like look I'm just gonna start taking some tutorials I'm gonna start seeing how things go and we'll just see how things go well that tends to lead to people not fully engaging or not going all-in it leads to a lot of dabbling which is not really how you learn this right so I see a lot of people who don't have that firm commitment in the future that kind of date that scares them and so they kind of just take their time they mosey through they just kind of oh dilly-dally here and there and all sudden for a lot of people this is a wake up call because they'll send a year later or a year and a half later they haven't made any significant progress and they're feeling really bad about their prospects for the future but the real problem is they just never set that hard date that kind of scared them a little bit like you should set a date that makes you a little bit nervous so that way you get that fire in your belly to kind of move forward now the second thing that I see is the problem in terms of not setting a hard date is that you'll tend to want to wait until the last possible moment to start applying for jobs and instead of taking you know months this may drag out into years waiting until you're ready like I have that want to hand it air quotes I guess two-handed it is better but having that in air quotes because a lot of people will say I gotta wait until I'm ready when it's like it's kind of nebulous when is that what exactly are you gonna feel ready like what is the metric by where you're gonna measure yourself for me when I start applying for jobs I just got advice from a mentor like one mentor told me based on like a 20 minute we just kind of went over some code he's like you're ready to go and I trusted him but I was still pretty damn scared I was like I'm gonna look like a fool out there people are just not gonna like take me serious but I ended up getting a job because I just trusted in what he was gonna say and here's the thing if you set a hard date for applying for jobs and you're not quite ready and you go out and you apply nothing happens then you can go back to the drawing board it's not like you get one shot you get as many shots as you want this career is hot right now or it shows that this field is hot right now in terms of them the supply and demand so you want to get into this faster and you don't want to wait another couple years who knows how long this is gonna last so keep that in mind set a hard deadline if you don't make it it's not the end of the world but make sure you really commit to it the second thing that drives me nuts is that people don't have a clear game plan or roadmap about how their skills are gonna progress and how what applications they're gonna build so when I reach out to people and I ask like hey what are you doing right now how does that link to your bigger picture of how you're going to you learn to code a lot of times they just say I don't know they're just like oh well I saw somebody said to build this application so that's what I'm doing or you know I'm just watching this tutorial right now because I want to learn JavaScript when it's like you need to have a clear idea of how your skills are going to progress over time and also what projects are gonna build for your portfolio they're gonna help you to actually implement those things that you're learning in those tutorials right so here's the thing here's the key and people get really scared when I talk about creating your own game plan or creating your own roadmap you don't have to get this right okay like a lot of people had terrible roadmaps and did just fine the thing is you just want to create one like for it could be as simple as knowing what programming languages you want to work on then figure out you know anywhere from four to all the way up to ten projects if you really want that showcase those skills that progressively build in more more skills or more and more technologies that you can think of and that's really it and then you just want to follow the progression and and just basically follow it and execute on it right don't worry so much about getting it right the roadmap that you created day one will change over time you can iterate it so a month later after you've put in a lot of work after you've built a few things after you've learned quite a bit you'll have a better sense for how things can go or maybe you'll get a mentor at that time and they'll be able to guide you a little bit better or maybe you'll just have more research that you've done about your roadmap but don't worry so much about getting it right if anything just focus on what you're doing now execute on that and then you can worry about that later the next big mistake that I see a lot of people make is they're not tracking relevant data right so I'll always ask people when they're looking to do this I say how many hours per week did you study this week and a lot of people are just like hmm you know I'm not really sure probably 10 maybe 15 well was it 10 or was it 15 right because if it was 10 we need to get that up there if it was 15 how can we squeeze out a few more hours but not knowing exactly how many hours you're studying is a problem because you need here's the thing if you measure something and you measure accurately accurately I should say then you can potentially improve that but if you don't even know how many hours you're studying then it's hard to say like whether you should improve that or not so you want to start tracking irrelevant data right so I would actually recommend tracking your study time but I would break that down to active versus passive learning right because you want to have a nice ratio there so if somebody's struggling and I know that they're spending way too much time in passive learning like tutorials and that sort of thing or if they're spending a lot more time sort of in the active learning where they're doing hands-on stuff I can then sort of diagnose you need to spend more time in passive or you need to spend more time in active right if you wanted more information about that I have some learning strategies for self-taught programmers that highly recommend you watch up here even beyond that there is relevant data that you should track as well so are you tracking your sleep are you tracking how many hours you spent in bed the previous night that could lead to poor performance right so if you're not showing up for studying or you're studying quality is not that great maybe it's because your sleep quality isn't that great so I highly recommend tracking that do the best as you can and estimating it also track just your general mood on a day to day basis or your general study quality on a day to day basis right because all these factors are important if you're not able to show up in study say like last week you just had a crappy week and you put in three hours of studying well the next thing I would ask myself is what led me to do that let what led me to make that mistake and I would look at my sleep was my sweet sleep quality low or did I not get that many hours of sleep because that can definitely contribute to that if my general mood on a day-to-day basis was negative or was very bad then that could have led to that so I'm gonna then look at that and try to address those problems one by one if I'm not sleeping enough okay it's figure that out if my mood was crap then I'm gonna try to figure out like what were the things that were triggering me in my life that I need to avoid all this information is relevant and if you're not tracking it then you're just trying to figure it out on the fly which your brain is not that good at remembering so don't leave it to your brain to try to remember these things it's just not that accurate start tracking this relevant information so that way you can improve it if it needs to be improved the last mistake that I see a lot of people make is that they focus on the end goal to the detriment of what they should be focused on right now which is the work which is sitting in the chair putting code on paper or putting code in the ID if you want to say it that way I really compared this to somebody who's maybe running a marathon which is a long way to run 26 miles and constantly looking down their GPS watch trying to figure out how many miles they have left to go look imagine every five seconds you're looking down it would drive you nuts it takes your mind attention away from what you need to be doing which is running and puts it on something that you you know you could be four or five hours away from depending on how how much time you have left in the race so I see this a lot with people who are working on the state they started their first static website or something so they just need to learn HTML and CSS well maybe they're getting a little frustrating so what they do is they start to look up and go man I'm frustrated with HTML and CSS like how am I ever gonna learn c-sharp how am I ever gonna learn JavaScript and then they start being super critical about their roadmap or their idea of the roadmap in their head if they don't have one and then they start reading blog post and the blog post is like oh no I actually should be you should do Python or you should do Haskell or you should do whatever programming language and then they started really frustrated because they see that they're you know the finish line is so far away people are telling them eight different things meanwhile to actually figure out the thing in front of them like the HTML and CSS like whatever you're aligning the divs or you're centering a div or making a background color via CSS the energy that they would need to solve that problem is right in front of them they the energy but there's you're using it for something else right so what my recommendation here is is focus on the task at hand focus on your deadlines right so your projects should have deadlines there should be intermediate deadlines for your projects there should be deliverables that you're trying to meet when you finish a deliverable when you finish a project then lift your head up then look around then do that research of like okay is my path correct should I maybe have a mentor look at it to give me advice on how I should proceed is there more research that needs to be done either way that's an appropriate time when you can reevaluate an inappropriate time is in the middle of things you're trying to figure out a bug and one your applications and you're starting to get that stress and nervousness that comes with that sort of emotional state I've actually heard it like this and I kind of like this saying it's like think big and think big in terms of the picture of where you're going but act small right so the only thing you could really do on a day-to-day basis is just focus on the thing that you're trying to learn or the thing that you're trying to build so act in a small way but think big and I think that will help to alleviate that issue of always thinking about how much more you have left to go so I hope you enjoyed this rant I don't know if this was grantee but to me this is about as variety as I get so if you enjoyed the video go ahead and leave a like other than that guys if you are a fan of my content and want to get even more of it I highly recommend joining my Facebook group where I do a lot of live events I answer questions I cover other topics I don't necessarily cover on YouTube so if you want to join that go to a nice turquoise calm forward slash group and I'll see you there other than that thank you so much for watching guys and as always [Music]

Channel: Andy Sterkowitz

Views: 185,344

Rating: 4.8571992 out of 5

Keywords: self-taught programmer, self taught software engineer, self-taught software developer, learning to program, programming, learn to code, how to learn programming, learn to program, first time programming, programming for beginners, coding for beginners, learn programming, how to learn to code

Id: s4uS0n9uuwI

Length: 10min 42sec (642 seconds)

Published: Sun May 19 2019