How Many Hours Per Day Should I Spend Studying to Become a Self-Taught Software Developer?

hey guys what's up it's Andy here I'm a self-taught software developer and in today's video we're gonna talk about we're gonna answer the question how many hours a day should you be studying if you want to become a software developer and a lot of you guys out there are really busy at work right now doing tutorials doing the self-study thing maybe building our little applications and you're thinking to yourself how many hours a day should I be committing to this like what's the right number what's the right number to make sure that I'm gonna be successful in six months or a year or whatever and it's a it's a question I really thought a lot about myself and I will answer that based on my experience so let's just get right into it now before we even talk about number of hours let's just get one thing completely out of the way and that one of the most important no the most important thing for in terms of a time commitment is consistency so I recommend everyone that you do coding every single day like period I I don't I don't believe in people coming software developers doing it once a week I'm not sure how you could do coding once a week and suddenly in a year or six months or whatever something find yourself as developer right so the extreme to me is seven days but here's what I here's my recommendation it's more important to be consistent every day that is to pile on as much as you can in one or two days so I think the bare minimum any day of the week should be twenty minutes you should sit down for 20 minutes every single day and do one small thing whether it's watching a tutorial that you're currently on maybe reading a little bit from a book that you're currently reading maybe it's building a little bit of the application that you're working on learning about get whatever whatever it is minimum twenty minutes a day now I totally get where a lot of you guys are Nick oh my god twenty minutes not enough I have to commit hours I have to get eight hours every day even though work days you know do retired I don't care blah blah blah okay look slow down slow down first of all when I say minimum of 20 minutes a day my whole thing is to be consistent because if you try to get yourself to do two hours every single day and you realistically can only do it about 20 minutes on certain days you're gonna start what's gonna happen is this you're gonna start falling off it's more important to make sure that you're doing a little bit each day and on those days where some days you sit down you're like you know got 20 minutes do you sit down about 15 minutes in you're starting to enjoy the work and you're like I'm gonna do you know I'm gonna go to 45 minutes maybe I'm gonna go on an hour but that's more important to get that like long-term momentum of a habit going then it is to simply skip a study session because you think it's it's not enough it's not enough I use the same philosophy when going to the gym this sounds really crazy but people and people laugh at me when I say this but I'm pretty damn consistent when it comes to the gym when I when I'm in that mode of going to gym and working out my whole modus operandi wanted to go to the gym is that it is a successful trip to the gym if I show up if I walk to the door if I scan mine my little key tag to get in I walk in if I go to the locker I touch the locker I can then go home do you know why I set that criteria for myself it's not because I'm lazy and I can just go to the gym and walk home it's it's because when I go all the way to the gym I walk my my two legs all the way over there I scan my thing I should I'd now show up for the gym and I go well I'm here so I'll get the workout in right like I tell myself look a look if I want to leave if I'm sick I can go back home I can just stretch or something go back home but look I walk in and because I'm already there because I've made the effort to put on the clothes to grab my gym bag to go all the way over there which is like two blocks away now I'm gonna work out and once I start like getting on the treadmill that with my blood starts warming up I put my headphones and the music is going I'm like hey you know what I'm here and it works freakin wonders right and the thing is sometimes I just have a really crappy workout and just go home and that happens but I am really consistent and most of the time I actually do get a good workout in so I treat it the same way that I treat studying and that is do a little bit each day and the more important thing is to get your butt in the chair get yourself used to the habit of sitting down and doing code and don't make excuses for not showing up every day like there's no excuse why you can't get twenty minutes in before bed and of course that is not enough like just doing 20 mins a day is not enough in the long run but the the base of what your habits should be built in is consistency and doing at least 20 minutes a day now once we've gotten that all the way once we've all agree here that that it's important to sit down for that consistent all the time like how many hours should you spend per week study now it's really important to talk about what you should actually consider software development time now here's some things that are considered software development time or software development studying time reading tutorials or I'm sorry reading books right like the head first JavaScript book is a book I always recommend head first series is great if you read that book that's considered study time if you are writing an application so if you're taking the knowledge you've learned from the head for a series and now you're gonna write a little application that definitely counts if you're watching a tutorial online on YouTube specifically tailored to learning a concept like maybe you're learning get maybe you're learning how to build this application that you're building right now maybe you're learning a JavaScript framework or a programming paradigm like clean code or unit testing that is clearly study time right maybe you are corresponding with other developers maybe you're doing some networking of some sort that's considered I would consider that even sort of like time that you're investing and do and doing some sort of constructive work for your future career what is not considered software development time really important watching this YouTube video I'm sad to say like I'm so glad they're watching this YouTube video but watching YouTube videos about people who are sharing topics like this I would not really consider that to be productive time related directly to you becoming a software developer it's certainly something that you should do but don't watch a bunch of YouTube videos from software developers who are just talking about whatever maybe you like higher level concepts like this and think to yourself oh I know what I'm doing now I'm a software builder like no it's it doesn't quite work like that so you basically know what that is so now that we've got that out of the way I think the bare minimum recommendation for study time per week should range somewhere in the 15 hour or more range obviously I would say the bare minute will be 15 hours and the reason I pick 15 hours is because I would say if it a verge is out to about two hours per day that is probably the sweet spot for getting to be the the biggest reason you want to study consistently and for that No is that you want to immerse yourself in the the in code essentially so if you wanted to learn a actual language right look at why I know French a little bit one of the best ways to learn it is to immerse yourself so I when I was younger went to France and I lived with a French family and I did my best thoughts and speak English and it was really good for me because it immersed me in that language and it was what I was thinking about all the time I was trying to get better at it it helped my education and so the immersion aspect is so important so I think 15 hours a week consistently over the course of seven days will help to get you immersed will help to make you feel more and more like a programmer whereas if you're only in the you know ten hours or less range you I feel like you're not committing quite enough to get yourself to feel like you're immersed it's constantly be thinking about it and to constantly be committed to to that end goal of being a software developer but more than anything else I recommend that amount because that's basically what I that's basically what I use as a barometer for when I was studying by myself was but roughly about 15 hours now keep in mind when I was self studying most of the period of my self-study time for that year I spent working about like part time I want to say I was at about 25 hours per week I think that I maybe topped out at about 30 so I wasn't working full time so on the days where I worked I really only probably studied maybe a good half hour minimum I always stuck to the 20 minutes right but I would say it was anywhere from a half hour to an hour on days that I felt like working a little bit more now my days off I think I typically had about three days off my days off I was minimum probably probably would say about four hours and if I could do a whole day like eight hours worth of coding I would absolutely do it I would try to get about four hours in the morning take a two hour break and then four hours in the evening I was pretty serious so I was definitely pushing minimum fifteen hours but I'm the on the weeks that I could I probably had some weeks where I was working about thirty hours now again this is let's be completely realistic about these things like I wasn't I was pretty pretty damn good about being consistent but there were certainly weeks where I went a little trip with my friends and I was always mindful about if I was getting a little too stressed out to take a little bit step back and work on myself but always be working staying consistent coming back and making sure that I was doing the work so again I recommend this based on my experience I think 15 hours is a good baseline anything you can do over that is going to be great always always always think about consistency first make sure you're commuting that 20 minutes a day if you can't even commit to that 20 minutes a day I think there is a maybe a larger more systemic problem about you being able to hold yourself to commitments maybe you have to work about with motivation thinking about why you're doing this why is it so important to you maybe you need to just get get some sort of get some sort of motivation right like pay your friend $100 for every day that you don't do your 20 minutes of study I don't know it's beyond the scope of this video but my point is that consistency is highly important if you can't do that then then figure out a way to get that done just the consistently 20 minutes a day and then you can start thinking about bigger picture working up to those 15 or more hours per week so I hope you liked the video I thought a lot about this over the last couple weeks and figuring out exactly the amount of recommendation and how to explain how I came to it let me know what you think in the comments below if you liked the video go ahead and smash I like button other than that subscribe and hit the bell icon if you want notifications as soon as I put out a video other than that that's really all I got for the day so thank you so much for watching and have a good weekend

Channel: Andy Sterkowitz

Views: 243,078

Rating: 4.9609184 out of 5

Keywords: self-taught software developer, how many hours per day should i spend studying to become a self-taught software developer?, self-taught software developer study tips, self-taught programmer, programming learning, software development learning, software development

Id: hhm5L_JoVZc

Length: 10min 9sec (609 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 07 2018