What I Wish I Knew Before Becoming A Software Developer

yo welcome back to the channel my name is jeremiah peoples and i've been doing this software engineering thing for about three years now and before i got started there's a ton of things that i wish i would have known before hopping and trying to dive into this career field so this video is all of the things i wish i would have known before starting to dive into software engineering condensed into one video that is in a rectangular shape but before diving into all the things that i wish i would have known before starting my career in software engineering i wanted to give a huge shout out to codingdojo which is the sponsor of this video coding dojo is a coding bootcamp with a ton of course offerings and a lot of provided flexibility they offer courses in cyber security ui ux design data science and my favorite software development i'm actually really excited to sit in on a software development coding bootcamp the next coding bootcamp starts november 8th so coding dojo does something really cool with their software development curriculum they teach you how to program in three coding stacks instead of just one and that's because at coding dojo they're not just interested in teaching their students how to write code but how to problem solve and how to recognize the similarities between different languages when you graduate the software development track you're not just going to be a programmer but you're going to be a full stack software developer when you get your first job in tech you're most likely going to be required to learn a lot of different new frameworks and libraries and languages and that's why i really like that coding dojo gives you the practice of picking up new languages while you're in a coding bootcamp so when you get to industry you're already familiar with how to pick up and learn different technologies that are coming at you and for the cherry on the top coding dojo has really amazing instructors and that's why 89 of students found a relevant job 180 days after graduation and 95 of students found a relevant job one year after graduation if you're looking to learn how to code via an amazing coding bootcamp then check out the link in the description to learn more information about how to get started with codingdojo thanks again codingdojo for sponsoring this video on the topic of coding bootcamps i had no idea all the different ways a person could learn how to code so obviously going to a four-year institution and studying computer science is one of the most uh typical ways to become a software developer or software engineer for me that's what i try to do i try to go to college and learn computer science stuff but i i dropped out because that environment wasn't really for me and it wasn't really how i liked learning how to code so when going to college for computer science didn't really work out for me i thought oh well that's it i guess i'm not gonna be a software engineer and then three or four years after i dropped out i was pleasantly surprised to figure out that you don't necessarily have to go to a four-year university study computer science to be a software engineer who who would have thunk so three or four years after i dropped out of school for my computer science degree i stumbled on upon a video of this guy named chris shawn who is now my friend about how he became a software developer in three months without a college degree and i was intrigued to say the least so in that video that chris shawn posted three or four years ago he talked about how he was a self-taught software developer he didn't go to college and that was that was um that was interesting to me because he was doing the job i wanted to do and he circumvented the going to college thing which was pretty impressive so i am incredibly fortunate i stumbled upon that video or the youtube algorithm pushed it in front of my face because i am now currently a self-taught software developer just like my friend chris so moral of the story what i wish i would have known on my first day of programming was all the different types of pathways that you can do to get into the software development career field so obviously i talked about the basic one which is getting your four-year bachelor's degree in computer science and then there's the self-teaching way which me and chris did to where you just go online and look up all the things that you need to learn to become a software developer and there's the coding bootcamp like i mentioned earlier coding dojo you can go to a program for three or four months and learn to code from them but when i first heard about self teaching and coding boot camp so i was like there's no way you're at the same level of these people with degrees i was pleasantly wrong about that in my almost three years of experience as a software developer i've worked with a ton of different people some from coding boot camps some from degree programs from prestigious colleges and some that were self-taught like your boy so that's another fun thing that i wish i would have known was hey does it matter where you went to college or where you learned to code you're going to be treated as an equal to every one of your peers and speaking of getting paid the absolute same for doing the same job regardless of your background astric i am very upset that my brother who is also in tech was keeping the pay a secret so this brings me to my next what i wish i would have known before starting programming that the pay goes absolutely stupid straight dummy straight thick maybe they'd be paying money to do this coding thing my brothers don't know it but i'm in a unconscious race with them to become a millionaire before any of them become millionaires but i feel like they're not telling me tips and tricks about life they're all my older brothers so i feel like my eldest brother josiah who's also in tech not telling me that the pay and software development go stupid um he's trying he's trying to get a head start on me which is not fair i don't respect it josiah i'm coming for your head you know how when some people are just sitting on the couch bored as can be they hop on zillow and they just look at houses that they can't afford but they just like to house shop for no reason because it feels good i started doing the same thing on this really cool site called levels.fyi it has a bunch of different like reported income salaries so for example i would hop onto levels.fyi and look at look at look at this for a slack to start off as an entry-level software developer at slack it's 176. hop over to doordash entry level is 196. hop over to facebook entry level it's like 185. it's ridiculous and it was so weird to see that people were paying this much much this much for people who know how to code whenever i was struggling learning a new concept i was going through it i was like is this really worth all this headache that i'm having to go through i'll hop my happy little butt on levels.fyi scroll through a couple of the job payments and i'm like yep this is definitely worth the headache so very rarely though if you're starting to hop into this career field you're going to hear these internet trolls say well you shouldn't be doing this for the money back in my day i did it for the love of binary just realize that those people that are grumpy and frumpy that you don't love binary and pointers and that's your only driving factor to become a developer those people are trolls they're not very common in the developer community i don't think i've met any in person there is absolutely nothing wrong for wanting to hop into this career field because it has a very promising and exciting salary like it's so weird that people are online saying well you shouldn't be doing it for the money when the money has the chance to like change your life like change your whole entire path of your life and your family's life so to look over that fact and to just like well i'd actually love ones and zeroes and that's it that's uh that's kind of silly so and what i didn't realize until very recently is that the internet has a lot of nice folks on it and if you ask them to like your video and subscribe if they enjoy your content they actually might do that so all right no but for real the next up is this job this developing code and writing software it's it's not easy and software development as an industry is always constantly changing which comes with a lot of pros and a lot of cons which i wish i would have known so that's why it's in the video and that's what i'm going to say it to you so if you spent more than five minutes thinking about hopping into the world that is software development you know that this career field isn't um what's the word it's not easy it requires a lot of work and a lot to wrap your mind around and i'm not saying that in a gatekeepery way like well it's super hard but i mean i i do it but it's super hard you probably won't be able to do it but but i do it i'm not saying it like that at all i'm saying it more to prep you because if you have the right mindset before trying to get in this you're more likely to conquer the lines of code that are mysterious to you at this point and if you've never seen a wall of code before it's it's gonna be pretty pretty terrifying and pretty hard to get your mind around but nothing good comes easy so if it's hard that means it's great right that's the that's the logic there okay cool we get it coding is hard that's that's nothing new you probably knew that before watching this video but what i didn't know was how frequently the community the languages the technologies surrounding software development changes the whole world do i have a globe in here no i'll just have to use my hands the whole world is constantly evolving and it's constantly evolving because it's being driven by tech and if since it's being driven by tech in a world that's constantly evolving that means the tech is changing so often like you can spend five months learning a library or new fancy language and in the next six months that language or library could be obsolete no one ever uses it and now you have to learn another language or library just to stay relevant so that right there i was very unprepared for of how fast things can get deprecated how fast things can fall out of being the hot new thing i didn't know that before hopping into this career field but having a career field that is rapidly evolving has its pros and cons which i'm going to share with you so what i'm about to say next depending how you look on it can either be a pro or a con but here are the words nonetheless when you're in this type of environment you're in a very unique situation to just learn new things so i mean if you like learning that's gonna be really fun because you're gonna be a lifelong learner is what they call us so there's that since starting my career i picked up javascript as my first language and since then i've had to pick up for work kotlin and my sequel and graphql and a bunch of different frameworks like react i've created a framework like called codemandos but yeah i've learned and had to learn a ton and i actually like doing that before i was a software developer i used to sit in a chair for 12 and a half hours and stare at screens that just had maps on them and i would go crazy because it was just so boring to me so i could talk bad about being a software developer all i want but i could never say that i've been bored at work i've always had to go to work and solve an interesting and new problem and it's been that way for the last three years that's three years of never once having boring work to do well sometimes i have to write really boring tests but typically 99.9.9 nine point a lot of the time i'm really having a good time at work and i'm mentally engaged you know when you're like you're solving a puzzle and then you finish that puzzle when you get that that boost of like serotonin or whatever chemicals make you happy and excited you get that as a software developer and that's something that will keep me in this industry because it's so fun solving problems and creating things and putting them out into the world another thing that i wish i would have known is the super secret cheat code to becoming a software developer and that is networking everyone's just networking no networking like there's millions and millions of people hundreds thousands not millions there's thousands of wannabe developers who are looking to get their first jobs and there's nothing different about them but what could be different about them was who they know i never would have been in the situation i am now if i had not started this youtube channel if i've not gone to twitter spaces and just started talking in the tech environment i like to talk about when i was at 98 subscribers way long time ago well like a year ago and my dream company from fang like the first four letters of fang reached out to me and they said hey we saw your channel we'd love that you're a self-taught developer would you have a second to talk about setting up an interview which is wild to me and that was only possible because of the networking thing that i didn't know youtube was technically a networking thing and not everyone needs to start their own youtube channel or have their own blog i don't like when people say that but try to take advantage of things that interest you so if you like making mobile applications go to a mobile application meetup if you're looking to build a project and you need some help ask some people for help there's a ton of developers who want to get connected in this community so moral of that story is don't just network to network rather network because there's something interesting to you out there that needs other people or you want other people to check out because it's cool or they could help you out somehow and speaking of networking i do have my own little developer discord channel where we chat about code stuff and tech stuff and tech news and articles like that so you're welcome to join that in the description as well and the last thing that i wish i would have known that made my little top five video is that being a software developer or learning how to be a software developer is not the only means to get into the tech industry which is super weird to me because whenever i think of tech or the tech industry and the people in the tech industry i think of software engineers software developers people who can code tech but apparently there's a good handful of other careers that are almost like software developers they're almost techy and they are really important to creating a whole technical product so if you tried out coding because that's how you wanted to get into tech and that didn't quite work out with you because you didn't like coding you're not out of luck there's a lot of other different career paths that can still point you into creating technology so the most common career fields that are in tech but not coding are ui ux designer and product manager ui ux design is actually a really cool pathway to get started in tech i actually have a fourth brother who's just starting his career in ui ux and essentially you're just all swagged out when you come into work with your gucci belt on and ui ux designers are incredibly important when it comes to creating a beautiful application that people actually like to use so me as a software engineer i could write the most beautiful code it works so efficiently but if it looks like i made the application with two cinder blocks for hands and i have no design at all in it no one no one's gonna use my application that's why ui ux designers come in clutch because they really understand the users they understand what the users want and they can display that and communicate to that to the development team and to the product managers and speaking of product managers product managers are people who like managing but the project that they're typically managing is a technical project a technical project has a ton of spinning wheels that they need to manage the biggest spinning wheels are managing the software developers and managing the designers so product manager type people are incredibly important to make sure that you're hitting deadlines the tasks are getting completed in the correct order and that the application is meeting the needs of the stakeholders and the people who are actually funding this project so whether it be software development ui ux designer or product manager all these career fields are super important in creating nice applications so those are all the things that i wish i would have known before starting my career becoming a software engineer i'm really glad that you watched the video i hopefully you gained a lot of value from all of the things that i picked up over these three years thank you so much for watching i will see you on the next one and i think that's all the words i have to say see

Channel: Jeremiah Peoples

Views: 41,520

Keywords: Jeremiah peoples, 5 things i wish i knew before becoming a software developer, coding dojo, software engineering, black in tech, coding dojo review, 5 reasons to become a developer, self taught software developer, tips for developers, i wish I knew this before getting started coding, computer science, software developer career, software development, software engineering salary, computer science degree, what I Wish I Knew Before Becomming A Software Developer

Id: opD-rJVAPig

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 15 2021