Youtube could be ruining your software engineering career

yes i'm a youtuber yes i make software engineering content and yes i'm telling you that youtube may be ruining your career even at the risk of sounding like a massive hypocrite i still think i have a strong point so let me explain why i think youtube may be ruining your career [Music] if you follow me on instagram you know that i do a lot of amas there and i also do my best to respond to all the messages you sent me over there if there's one thing i can take away from the thousands of messages i've gotten so far is that engineering talent today both inexperienced and experienced is very confused because the competition is so fierce software engineers feel the pressure to make a lot of decisions very early in their career picking the best school learning the best programming languages picking up the right stack working on the most meaningful projects so on and so forth and when you resort to youtube to find the answers it may not be helping you at all consider the topic of best programming language to learn or the best stack to pick up you can do a quick youtube search and you will find that there's a video literally for every language or stack claiming that that one is the best see predicting the next great programming language is a fool's errand by the time you're pretty decent at it something else would be the next big thing the answer to your programming language confusion is simple as this if you are starting out just pick something mature that feels good and run with it i will promise you that you will not be stuck with it for the rest of your life i'm not saying don't try out new things it's okay to try out new things once in a while no harm in that but if you keep switching your stack in hopes of being adept at the newest coolest things your skills as a software engineer aren't going to progress in my 13 years of working professionally as a software engineer from big projects to small top tech companies to obscure startups i've never had the programming language the framework or the stack come up as the main reason for success or failure of a product yes there can be some performance implications and you can make changes to your stack for optimizations however this is a continual process as your project matures in the real world you almost rarely get to start from scratch where you evaluate a bunch of stacks and pick the best and the reality is that the projects you will work on will almost always be a combination of programming languages frameworks runtimes and platforms it's not just the programming languages though because of how convenient it is to make youtube videos a lot of people these days are opting to do so on literally every topic all you really need is a decent phone camera a computer simple editing software and access to the internet and you're off making videos for the entire world and the algorithm is driven by the thumbnail and is heavily influenced by mass activity rather than pure quality there is in fact no real verification on youtube for content quality as a result you've got a lot of misleading software engineering advice given by people who aren't really qualified to give that advice heck people that have taken four months of boot camp and barely started their own career are some of the top videos on youtube giving career advice on software engineering this is downright dangerous and to add to that due to the rise of tick-tock and stories and reels it's all about short-form content so we have an entire generation growing up with an attention span of a goldfish combine these two and you've got people with barely any experience in the field giving career advice in less than 10 minutes so their audience with a very short attention span can remain engaged but even worse than being given misguided information is the sense of false competence it can give you say you're a young and aspiring software engineering student you've learned the basics of client server architecture and you can build some simple apps which gets you curious on something like how instagram works of course you hit up youtube and search building instagram and then you come across a lot of these videos that claim to build instagram or an instagram clone in two hours four hours 24 hours whatever that is so you think let's take a look at how these folks are building an instagram clone you watch the video however long that is let's say this one we are going to be building an instagram clone with react so we come to you with another banger this is also gonna have firebase and user authentication and it's going to be deployed online and uh it has all the functionality the bells and whistles of instagram here is actually instagram right and here is our app that we're gonna be building and at the end it does look and work like instagram so you follow the tutorial and build your own version of instagram the next day you go attend your data structures and algorithms class and your old professor is teaching you boring data structures like linked lists and some cryptic algorithms that are putting you to sleep and that too in some ancient language like c plus plus and you sit there wondering why you are putting up with this nonsense when you've just built instagram without having to deal with any of this this is where you lose interest get disconnected and start building your own cool clones of various applications in many different awesome languages and frameworks well congratulations you've just entered the world of tutorial hell and the amazing sense of false competence it provides look i've got nothing against these channels or videos these guys have actually done a great job of showing you how react or swift works in conjunction with something like firebase which will abstract out all the individual components like storage messaging etc and makes life easy on you that's great if you're looking for mostly ux design or trying to figure out a functional mock-up of an app but this is by far from being a production-ready application let alone being as complex as instagram the problem isn't the video itself but the impression it can leave to the uninitiated if you're walking away watching these videos thinking that you've learned how to build instagram you're in a world of pain if you really want to understand what goes in to making something as complex and massive as instagram you have to choose the right content if you're mostly interested in app or front-end development watch videos like this photoshop some wouldn't be able if you could just design the state of replication or entire application as a tree and if you're not shaking your head um that's exactly the same thing that we did um we issued this idea of because applications multiplications are inherently integrated you've got you know awesome views that one animate um where you need a state machine on the previous slide if you're interested in full stack development watch videos like this one few critical things it's not incode it has to be language control uh here you see this example we use json second we define resources everything is resource first flow and that's right here you see a definition of user user id email name status and then by convention to create a user use an object that is the resource name underscore form so in our language forms used to create instances resources or if you're into infrastructure engineering watch videos like this of course you want to be able to test it no matter how you call that service when you call it directly when you call it indirectly you want to make sure that your requests are decorated with the right context so that you can fail universally just as if the service was really down in production without actually taking it down so this is all great this is from a point-to-point perspective but imagine now that you've got 100 microservices and each one of those might have dependence on other services or multiple other services it's a big challenge i know some of these are older videos and the numbers have probably quadrupled by now but hopefully this gives you an idea of the scale you're dealing with step back and think for a second if one event took one second to happen one billion events would take 32 years to happen and some of these largest applications in the world the likes of instagram facebook netflix are processing over a billion events every minute this is what you need to think about when you really want to build an instagram clone those are the problems you'll be solving when your app goes into production and needs to handle real fast growing user base if you look at the topic some of these architecture videos talk about it's all about things like storage computing load balancing caching partitioning hashing consistency leasing and so much more the foundation for all of these is a solid understanding of data structures and algorithms i've said it a million times and i'll say it again javascript python c sharp rust go c plus plus node.js react flutter flask whatever that is these are just tools to help you solve the problem not the solution itself so think twice before you dismiss your old professor in your data structures and algorithm class to follow the next great trend on youtube there is a reason why every school teaches this stuff and there is a reason why you should be paying attention so does that mean that you should totally avoid youtube of course not you should instead be smarter about how you spend your time on youtube look no content is inherently good or bad even the most useless content can have merits on the grounds of entertainment as the audience it is your responsibility to understand your context before spending hours of your time let's take the instagram clone videos again for example if you are looking to get started with building ux in react that's a great video for you because unlike other usual boring tutorials they actually build something functional it is also useful if you have never built an app or are just trying to build one however it's not a good video if you're planning to learn how instagram works so think about your own context and quickly evaluate videos based on what you are trying to achieve before you spend time watching them end to end look at the topics they cover see if they make sense and research about them when you're spending your money you cross shop you make sure it's a reputable brand and do your due diligence right why not do the same with your time remember time is money and in addition to that evaluate the author's credentials in the field of their work just because someone completed a boot camp doesn't automatically qualify them to give you advice on how you should go about boot camps just because someone has interviewed at a fan company does not give them credibility to give you advice on how you should prepare for technical interviews career advice on youtube is technically mass mentorship and mentoring someone requires years and years of training and experience and this evaluation needs to be made not only for the channel as a whole but on a per video basis because not all videos are made the same i personally do my best to make videos that generally help my audience and most of my videos are driven by questions that you guys ask on instagram that's why i don't always have the most popular videos but then if i do want to help more people i need to grow my channel as well so occasionally i'll make videos that would appeal a general audience so judge my videos with the same scrutiny you judge any other videos if you're a young software engineering student don't spend your time watching a desk setup video your focus should be on improving your skills not the largest screen or the fastest laptop or the best mechanical keyboard these don't make you a better engineer and these also shouldn't be the reason why you try to become a software engineer i didn't even know what a mechanical keyboard was until 2015. so use your own context to filter out the noise and find the videos that will genuinely help you i know videos like the best programming language to learn right now learn programming in one week or build instagram in 24 hours or the dream desk setup for software engineers is all great sounding but they're only useful if the context is right for you if not then cut it out including my videos and focus on the fundamentals first and finally learn to compile your own content like i mentioned before in this video the trend in 2021 is all about short form content so you watch and watch and watch all these 10 minute videos and you still feel lost it's because you're not cataloging what you're watching take notes while you watch organize them into categories review them later and come up with your own learning plan let's pick the instagram architecture videos for example take notes as you watch all the videos relating to the architecture behind how instagram is built you'll come across a lot of things you probably don't understand jot them down for example you come across optimistic concurrency and you have no clue what that is just start by searching what it means you likely come across pessimistic concurrency data contention concurrency control and why that is needed and ways to mitigate that at the very least the next time you have an idea to build a cool clone of something you'll at least ask yourself what about concurrency issues here's another example say you come across the term circuit breaker you kind of know what that means in the context of electrical engineering but what does that mean in software engineering you start researching it and you come across things like retries exponential back off rate limiters thundering herd and so on and so forth and as you dig deeper about each of these you will learn a bit more about something else and since you are taking notes and categorizing them just based on these two examples you will end up having a good amount of information on concurrency and retries in distributed web applications that's how you truly learn by watching things that seem complicated and possibly far above your level then you divide them into smaller topics and dive deeper topic by topic as if you're peeling the layers of an onion to build your own catalog of information this kind of learning will never happen if you blindly follow tutorials after tutorials so prioritize learning over anything else well unless you're watching content not related to software engineering in your spare time but even then i would still encourage you to spend time on things that promote growth and overall well-being like taking some useful classes on skillshare who have also kindly sponsored this video skillshare is an online learning community for creative and curious people where millions come together to take the next step in their creative journey they offer thousands of inspiring classes for lifelong learners on a variety of topics including web development design freelancing music and communication to name a few there are classes for every skill level whether you're a beginner or a pro and one of the best things about classes on skillshare is that they have no ads and they're just under 60 minutes in length so it's easy to fit them into your schedule even if you're a busy person speaking of being productive and focused on personal growth i highly recommend the class create your ideal work week by michael who is also the founder and ceo of skillshare in his class michael shares his rules for maximizing productivity creating an ideal work week and building short-term systems for long-term success some of the lessons in his class include building a plan do review strategy exercises for prioritizing tasks and an ideal weak calendar demo and since i also mentioned cutting out distractions like fast computers and fancy desk setups to promote a simple learning mindset another class i recommend is everyday minimalism find calm and creativity in living simply by erin boyle in her class erin focuses on being inventive and resourceful in any space shifting your habits to eliminate daily stress cherishing what's beautiful and meaningful and let go of what's not and getting purposeful with your time energy and money so if you are interested in developing your curiosity and growth mindset head over to skillshare the first 1000 of my subscribers to click the link below will get a free one month trial of the premium membership so that you can start your own learning journey look here's the summary of my whole point if you want to be a strong software engineer stop bouncing around 10 different stacks and focus on building strong foundations on just a few stop blindly following tutorials and instead prioritize growing your skill set by being selective about the content you spend time on youtube is an amazing place with amazing content but not all content is made the same as a consumer it is your responsibility to evaluate what's right for your own goals make youtube be something that helps your career not something that causes you more stress confusion and insecurity all right that's all i have for today i hope this video is useful if it was like the video and subscribe to the channel for more software engineering and tech content feel free to leave a comment below i usually read them all if you want to reach out to me personally hit me up on instagram at engineering with utsaf i'll see you in the next one cheers [Music] you

Channel: Engineering with Utsav

Views: 96,845

Keywords: software engineer, computer science, software developer, software engineering, software development, learn to code, beginner software engineering, computer science student, computer programming

Id: PTqQkNCxYy4

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 25 2021