The Problem with Coding and College

hey guys how you doing Steph here so what's wrong with College college as it relates to learning how to code how to become a developer is this something you should pursue today or maybe you shouldn't pursue it what's the problems that people are starting to identify about college well the problems with college go Way Beyond just coding now not all colleges are created equal and not all teachers or professors in the colleges are created equal as well some are good some are bad and it has nothing to do whether or not the school in question is IV League or not it really doesn't at the end of the day actually just comes down to the teacher so a few things you got to understand about the software development game it is a very much a boots on the ground rubber meets the road type of profession meaning employers will see immediately whether or not you are competent or capable there's no guessing work about it so whether you're from some ivv League or from some or from some other college for many many businesses out there I would say the vast majority your where you get your degree is less important than what you can demonstrate in terms of skills not just technical skills by the way what a lot of people don't understand about development you have to also have to have you also have to have very good communication skills because software development by its very nature is complex there's a lot of moving Parts there's a lot of people we got to speak to too you got to be be able to communicate with them in an in an agreeable Manner and in in a succinct clear manner so being able to speak clearly communicate clearly is very very important so having good communication skills is a big part of being a great developer believe it or not but anyway back to colleges so whether or not it's worth it depends on a few things a do you want to work for large organizations if you do then the need for college increases because although it is dropping quite a bit the need for a degree to get a job working for a large corporation it's still out there but it is dropping quite a bit depends where you happen to live in the world so number two if you want to work for a small or mediumsized business then the degree is worth less less and less and less and less any type of certification really whether it be a college degree or a boot camp certification or whatever and finally if you want to open up your own business or you want to freelance then the college education degree is pretty much worthless in terms of credentials you see we live in a golden age these days where we have access to unlimited information Top Flight teachers without having to go to a prestigious college or any college one of the big advantages of the universities back in the day were the libraries were their libraries a particular school would have a famous Library people would go to particular colleges just to access the library this is the tradition but with with the internet with Google Now Chachi Gro and other AI out there that is basically a thing in the past for many many programs the value that college brings is Aid a certification in the cases where they're valuable like you know medical doctor nurse a lawyer accountant in areas where uh government has intervened or trade unions have intervened and said well you got be accredited you got to be certified before you can actually uh practice the profession thank God software development doesn't have that and the reason it doesn't have that is because again it's very obvious very quickly whether or not you are competent as a developer accreditation uh that piece of paper is becoming less and less less and less valuable overall I would say 80 maybe even 90% of the programs in University they're they don't have much Financial value these days so for example anthropology I would highly advise against paying any money or any significant money to get an anthropology degree not that there's anything wrong with anthropology in fact I did an anthropology class as an elective and it was actually quite valuable in terms of My overall understanding of of reality in the world and I'm glad I took that class was it worth the uh the hundreds and hundreds of dollars that I had to pay to access that class I don't know would having an anthropology degree be worth it no no no listen if you're going to do any of those type of degrees the Arts and so on you take those if you're uh come from a very wealthy family you got time to burn and you just want to do it to expand your mind but you know you don't have to do it in college you could do it at home you know there's plenty of lectures online and great books you can get so you can learn everything you need to learn about anthropology joint anthropology uh Discord servers I'm sure they're out there uh Reddit uh subreddits on anthropology and you get everything you need you don't need to go to school because the piece of paper V degree the credentials that the university provides is worthless in anthropology pretty much um and the university is no longer have the Monopoly on all this information it's all out there so yeah anthropology I'm not picking on again I think it's a worthwhile subject to to poke into but it wouldn't be something I would uh spend four years pursuing and getting a degree unless I was you know I didn't need money you know so back to coding and development again if you're going to work for large organizations yes that credential could come in handy but on the other hand if you're highly skilled and you can demonstrate it you can get into uh even companies that demand credentials there's a lot of them will say oh you know what this person look what they've done look at her they don't have the the credential but look what they've done it's not just my opinion Google has said a few years ago said if you want to become a software developer do not go to university that's Google uh you can get up to speed and get into software development as a professional working part-time within six to uh 12 months working part-time I have a a mentoring program you work at your pace I have people who had gotten jobs from zero in 3 4 months uh some people take more than a year depends on how much time you put into if you put 20 minutes a day or three hours a day you know you'll get there more or less quickly depending but you can get the job there is a route to um getting a job as a developer without having a degree people in my program have gotten work working for big multinationals all they care about what they care about most rather is your skills That's it man the credential doesn't matter because the credential doesn't write the code it's your skills that wres the code so the other problem with college in the context of development software development is that there is a huge cost not just the financial cost in the states could be a huge financial cost tens of thousands a year but even if it's free there's a huge cost in terms of what they call opportunity cost meaning for whatever Reasons from for some magical reason have you noticed that many many University programs are all about four years for some reason they all take the same amount of time you're can have a anthropology you can have religious studies you can have computer science Computer Engineering for some reason all takes about the same amount of time to complete totally different fields that doesn't make any sense right from a point of view of knowledge doesn't make any sense but there maybe there's another reason why it takes four years but you can uh you can figure that out for yourself anyway the opportunity cost is that you're going to be spending three four years to get this degree to complete the degree when if you went with a an independent program self- page program like my own full disclosure I do offer a boot camp mentoring program so I am biased that said you know people in my program like I said some people have gotten a job within four or five months so what's the opportunity cost let's say we'll push it out takes you a year to get a job your first job entry level job as a developer uh through a program like mine whereas the other guy is gone or girl has gone to school and she and they're doing four years four years and their pay we'll say costing them $10,000 a year you know we keep it cheap four years passes you get your degree you're in the hole for 40 Grand just money out of pocket plus the three years vet the the other person remember they got their job after one year so they've been working for three years and the salaries jump up quite a bit within the first three years so what's going to happen I've done the math in other videos you having gone to college will be behind the non- col graduate uh maybe about $200,000 $250,000 in uh money and earnings you'll jump in and then you're going to be entry level and you you'll catch up but you may you probably never will catch up unless you're exceptional and the other person is not exceptional meaning they're already so ahead of you because they've been making all that money those three extra years and you've been spending that money you've been spending money it's going to be hard to recover uh that difference so I hope that makes sense so whether you go to college again I tell people if you're going to go into debt don't do it especially if you want to get into software if you're going to do freelance start your own business don't even think about it it's totally waste of time and money so the only reason to go to college for software development is because you want to work at some very large organizations where right now they will prefer candidates with a degree but I can tell you all the trend show are showing now that this is disappearing um could be within 10 years this is going to be totally gone I don't know it's hard to predict the future but you see that Trend when big players like Google says don't learn to to code just don't go to college to learn to code learn to code and program and get coding within 9 months get a job that tells you a lot there you have it I hope you found this video useful my name is Steph some people call me Uncle Steph I train people in software development and personal finance uh small business freelancing all these type of things everything I teach by the way is based at a personal experience personal experience I don't jump into subjects that are I only have an academic knowledge the significance of that is that you know that my teachings are real what I teach works all right if you have any questions or comments or disagreements about the contents of this video let me know comment below again not all colleges are bad and not all teachers are bad but there's a lot of them that are bad it's it's a lot of bad I would again argue for maybe 80% of of the programs out there uh there no point going to college you're just wasting your time and your money in terms of financial return I said again using anthropology as an example somebody be learn from anthropology are you going to make money with it no but is somebody be learn from it so if you're not going to make money with it why would you go into debt and spend years no especially since the knowledge is all out there one last thing about college that used to always rub my rhubarb the wrong way it would rub my rubar the wrong way in that they create all these artificial requirements and silly silly curriculum filler as I call it for no good reason well they want I guess they want to sell courses I don't know you would have to ask well actually I'll tell you why I know people were professors they tell me why in a lot of the programs they have ex this course and that course and then the other course well because you have a tenure Professor who's been teaching I don't know C to for 15 years or 20 years and he wants to teach it and that's it he's going to teach it no matter what whether or not the student's kneecap who is irrelevant teacher wants to teach it it's a requirement that's simple as that simple as that also they just they want you to have uh pay a certain amount of money to get your degree right it's interesting how the high-paying jobs like the medical doctor and the dentist those degrees cost a lot more than the uh less paying jobs if you can ever find them like the Philosophy degree and the anthropology degree and there's a reason for that because they know you're going to PID the extra money because you know dentists make a lot of money so there's a lot of filler content and a lot of you know filler you I can't tell you I've been in development for three decades for example all these programs they require that you have advanced math to get in the stupidest thing ever 99% of development has nothing to do with math I know I've been in it for three decades 9 not all but 99% I would say so why make math requirement for such a highly specialized need you know very few coding jobs require anything beyond basic basic math uh another thing they get into they get into abstraction of algorithms and data structures you should just know the very basics of it that's all but they go super deep that's academics for you they go off on these tangents but don't really reflect what's needed in the real world I can tell you I have many friends who are engineers and they've told me that they didn't learn anything about about what their real job was about in school one guy told me he was at one of their most prestigious universities in North America he said you know I just we just learned how to cheat we just learn how to cheat very well nothing in the program in the curriculum reflected anything in terms of his job and his career he's retired since now but you know yeah that's the way it is all right cheers

Channel: Stefan Mischook

Views: 7,520

Keywords: developervlogs, developermentoring

Id: JhjK5w5w14A

Length: 14min 36sec (876 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2024