Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Programming

there's a lot of things that i wish i knew before i started programming so in this video i wanted to talk about them to let you guys know what you're going to be getting yourself into if you take this journey and there's other youtubers that have made this exact video however they kind of say generic things like burnout imposter syndrome and i kind of want to come at this from a life perspective and how this is going to impact your life over a long duration of time because programming is a long-term thing and yeah before i start getting into it i just want to thank the sponsor of this video aura what is the state of your family's digital security because if that's not something you've thought about you need to if you're a victim of identity theft it can lead to brutal consequences not only for you but also your family this can include having to borrow money or take out a payday loan or selling your possessions to pay for these identity theft related expenses and this will hurt your 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not just something where you could expect to breeze through it effortlessly because you are good at math as a kid that's not how it works the next thing i wish i knew was not to get ahead of myself every programmer reaches that point in their career when they realize that everybody around them has built a bunch of impressive projects or accomplished so much more and you start to feel insecure this realization might push you to try and catch up by doing a whole bunch of things at once but in programming that's something you need to be careful of taking on too many things at once is actually a pretty common problem in programming and when you take on too much at once you actually end up doing nothing the best way to learn and develop new skills is by focusing on one thing at a time and also by not getting ahead of yourself learn the fundamentals get those down and then build on top of that the next thing i wish i knew is that there's more to life it's easy to become engulfed in the world of tech especially when you have aspirations to be successful you could essentially spend all of your time becoming better and better as a programmer there's really no ceiling as far as how high you can go in tech so if you're a competitive person it's easy to develop an unhealthy obsession with getting better and better and at a certain point it might be draining all of your time where before you started programming that's not what you wanted so you should evaluate what your goals are before you start coding the second thing i wish i knew before i started programming is not to waste time when you're learning how to code if you get the feeling that you're stuck and you're not understanding the material that's probably because you're not as you learn to code each day you should be making noticeable progress and you need to be comprehending the material that you're learning otherwise you're wasting time so if you're not understanding something it's either because the resource isn't good or you don't understand the prerequisite material but personally i've wasted a ton of time just rereading things over and over trying to understand things when realistically i needed to take a different approach i needed to go back and learn things that i didn't understand that led up to that point or i need to find a different resource because the resource i was using wasn't teaching properly another thing i wish i knew before i started coding is that you don't need a college degree to become a software engineer and make the big bucks like the six figures 100k 200k 300k when i was finishing high school going to college seemed absolutely necessary but over the past few years the public perception of college has completely changed and in the tech industry specifically they're not going to require degrees at most places now and this simply just has to do with the fact that you can be 16 years old and be a much better programmer than somebody that's 40 years old so what's nice about tech is in most cases you're going to be hired based on your knowledge and skill level rather than like credentials or seniority so what i'd say is if you just want to be a software engineer or a web developer and make over a hundred thousand dollars you certainly do not have to go to college to do that now some people want to go to college and that makes sense but mainly the point is just don't go to one that's going to put you in a large amount of debt when you actually don't have to go at all to get one of these jobs you know if you could afford it that's fine or get scholarships or figure out some way to go to college for free you know go for it but yeah don't put yourself into a large amount of debt when it's totally not required to get one of these jobs and if you don't want to go to college there's alternatives like boot camps and tech companies actually take those pretty seriously but even without boot camps you can do it all on your own just online and you can get jobs i have plenty of friends that have done this just take some hard work and determination the next thing i wish i knew is how important networking is not only will networking help you in your career but it will help you learn new things and in addition to that i do kind of believe the notion that you surround yourself with people that you want to become like so it should be a top priority to try and meet people as you learn to code the very last thing i wish i knew before i started programming was you should make your own path a lot of people come to me every day asking what programming language should they learn should they go to college which job should they choose but the thing is no single person should be the deciding factor for these major life decisions that is your job to figure out and a lot of people struggle with understanding this your goal shouldn't be to become exactly like somebody that you look up to and follow their path exactly it should be to become the best possible version of yourself and so if you want to build a path for yourself you need to sit down and decide exactly what kind of person that you want to become and then from there there's millions of people online sharing their career stories and career trajectories spend some time talking to people or just listening to podcasts on youtube or youtube videos and understanding how people became successful if you just do a little bit of research on your own you could aggregate data look at people's career paths from how they became successful and then you could form your own from what seems appealing to you but basically what i'm saying is don't just listen to what someone tells you to do with your life because you respect them because no single person on earth can predict the future and no single person on earth can tell you what you want to do you're an individual decide for yourself anyways those are most of the important things that i wish i knew before i started programming so have you learned from this video found something interesting or enjoyed it please leave a like and subscribe to the channel because it really helps out see you in the next one peace

Channel: Nick White

Views: 208,397

Keywords: nick white

Id: GyMF-jkLY2I

Length: 7min 43sec (463 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 08 2022