Not A Good Coder But I Want To Make Lots Of Money

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

all right hello folks it is Friday um January 10th I got a topic from Reddit I'm going to try to read it quickly before I get on the road here um so this one I felt like I see this kind of thing come up all the time like in a million different formats uh and I kind of wanted to walk through it a little bit so it says Hi everyone firstly sorry if this sounds informal um final semester of College University I'm honestly not good at coding and can't think like how a coder thinks and codes okay interesting I've been using computer since a kid uh final semester project was using node okay talk about their GPA a little bit decent marks lack at coding which I really want to be serious about I've taken this field also because of the money it offers but

I know I won't get any good for my skills so I'd really appreciate if you could guide me on a road map on what and how I can improve myself and whether I should study more after this or not it's kind of interested a remote MCA been told that a BCA degree itself won't give you a good package okay uh I believe skills matter too regardless of your education so speaking of interests uh in coding like front end back end and the different types of roles I could do I know I shouldn't say this but I honestly want to make a lot of money and I'm ready to put my 100% in time I have left to make my parents feel like I can do something for them thanks you thank you and God bless okay so um first off I I did leave like

a I told this person on Reddit I actually I actually responded and said I'm going to go make a code commute episode for this uh to their respones I don't know what that is and I'm like okay yeah Fair Point like uh literally no one knows his channel so um maybe someday that'll make more sense but uh I just didn't want to go plug the channel and then have someone be like you can't self-promote and then I get banned from Reddit uh again um so I was banned for self-promotion before this time it would have been very much self-promotion so I'll send this person the link if they want to post it back to the thread I'll let them do that whatever but um it's okay it's like there's there's zero activity on that thread except my response anyway so friendly reminder if you want

stuff answered just leave it in the comments otherwise look for Dev leader on social media send me a message and I will answer you and the more detail you provide the better uh if you send me a message so I'm happy to keep it completely Anonymous right you don't got to worry about that uh but let's jump into this topic because I'm driving a CrossFit this one will be a shorter one so first of all what I said to this person uh in my written response was like there's literally nothing wrong with uh doing work for money uh this is for me even sort of something that's kind of been instilled in me since I was a kid which is like hey it's not all about the money it's not all about the money and uh I think that's you know my mother trying to

impart certain I don't know values upon me which is totally fair you know I I can certainly appreciate that but at the end of the day um you're working for your income and I'm not saying that you should just do things you hate doing so that's not the message but the message is also if you can be doing something you enjoy and making more money doing it then you maybe should consider that because ultimately for a lot of people uh this includes me right like are a lot of I've heard someone say this in a really good way it's uh money doesn't buy happiness but uh money can certainly make a a lot of miseries uh be reduced so not all of them but uh definitely a good deal of them so nothing wrong with doing work for money um now couple things the way

that this person has explained their situation they're in their final year of school um so you are very much a and I'm not saying this in a bad way this is just like a reminder you're very much like a beginner at this stuff right if this person so this person doesn't say but if all of their coding experience is just stuff that they were doing in school um they're probably going to have almost like zero coding experience um it's just the reality like a lot of the way that the classes are set up you'll get like they'll do lectures you'll have some projects and that's nice but like it's so minimal unless all of your classes in college or university are around programming and uh even so some of the stuff that you'll be learning is a lot more like theoretical uh nothing wrong with

that it's just that like that's not that's not a replacement for like Hands-On coding so the reason I'm saying this is not to tell this person like hey like you suck it's more to say if you feel like you're not good at coding yet it might be because you genuinely have not spent a lot of time programming so I don't want them to feel like oh no like I fell behind I'm not good at programming like that's it's okay um I would genuinely not expect someone going through college or university to come out being a good programmer if all they did was focus on their classes um for me like I went to University for computer engineering the number of programming classes I had in a five-year program was not many uh and the only reason like it the only reason the school element for

me would have helped a lot this person is going like 10 miles an hour um my God the only reason the school part would have helped for me was CU I had internships um but for me at least personally I spent a ton of time building stuff on the side just because I love to program so I I kind of said this on a recent code commute episode but I was talking about how a lot of people that are ing out about how to how to like improve their odds at um you know job applications and things like that and uh which projects they should build they're like I've been building this one that one um but I don't know what's a better portfolio on or I'm confused because I'm hearing you know conflicting ideas about what things to go build what I was saying

was like you might be shocked but I bet you you're already in the sort of minority of people trying to get ahead because I don't think that the average person I think they should but I don't think that the average person is going outside of like what they're learning in their uh in their boot camp in college or university and building stuff I think a lot of the time it's like hey well I I went to school or I went through this thing like that's supposed to be my supposed to be enough right but like you're you're almost behind if you're not doing other stuff because other people are so in this person's case I think kind of Switching gears to like what kind of advice to give uh first off uh try to learn this lesson early I wish I did um don't do

the negative selft talk uh it's not going to help you and actually uh will kind of shape how you become and for a long time this kind of St like I mean literally up until like recent years I always thought that that was kind of like a statement because it seems like a the way people describe it it's like oh you're going to manifest like it always seemed like someone's trying to tell me like magic is real and I'm like I don't want to like basically anything you're saying right now I want you to just kind of stop because I don't I don't I don't believe what you're saying but um this actually it actually kind of happened to me with uh public speaking right so um I think the way that I would change how people word that is like when you're saying that

you're bad at something a lot of the time it causes you to avoid doing it and um when you avoid doing something you don't get better at it so that's probably the easiest framing for me now so was I bad public speaking well I was unpracticed at it I was unskilled at it and I I would avoid it so my skill level was low to start with but it's not like I'm innately bad at doing it and the only reason I disliked it was because I was unskilled at it I was uncomfortable but then after forcing myself like I put up over 400 videos on YouTube at this point so like I tested this last year so in my second year of doing YouTube I I went and spoke at a I flew my s to Dallas to do like a mini uh talk right

and that was public speaking and it felt totally fine which is funny because for like I'm 36 this year and for almost my entire life I would as soon as I can remember having conversations about this I would say I hate public speaking so don't do the self-deprecating thing I would try literally just try changing the framing of it saying it's something that you're working on don't say m I'm bad at coding my coding skills are bad saying just saying I'm I'm trying to practice my coding skills I'm trying to improve them right describe it in a way that is you actively trying to get better and like I said I realize it kind of sounds like a little bit woo woo but um I think that when you describe it in a way that makes you avoid it you don't give yourself the opportunity

to improve so that's the the thing that I would try TR to caution against okay um now for this person like road map okay so couple things they're saying they want to make a lot of money they're saying they're kind of willing to put in all the effort but like now like now asking for a road map um here's here's why this kind of thing is really difficult to answer it's just extremely generic what what do you want a road mapap for like the the only thing that we know is that your skill level is low which is like I said that's expected that's fine I'm not making fun of someone so low skill level and I want to make a lot of money but also I'm willing to put in a lot of effort okay so the like these things are all ready kind

of not lining up for me um and that's okay because this is the beginning of your journey and this stuff and that's why I'm making this video um when you ask really generic things you unfortunately get very generic answers and I said this in my reply to this person on Reddit but when you do it it's going to feel frustrating because you get the generic answers and then people go well that's not that's not helpful and it's like yeah because your question's not helping you um so you want a road map for what right like I think what we need to do is figure out like what do you actually want to be doing because there's lots of ways to make money there's plenty of ways to make money and the other thing to consider is that like I think especially newer folks into the

industry there there's a lot of this focus on like well give me the road map so I can go pick the right language I can go pick the right Tech stack and that way I you know I'm set to go make money and it's like my friend you're going to likely be learning many programming languages and many text Stacks some of which might not even exist or maybe the languages exist but the text Stacks don't exist today so like what do you mean you want you know the perfect Road for this kind of stuff um the the reality is because you're going to be switching like and again people don't realize this when they're starting out there's so many transferable skills between programming languages just building stuff and going to the next tech stack that like the biggest mistake people are making in my opinion

is that they're sitting there waiting for a road map it's not like I I do don't get me wrong I understand that there's like this moment of like I need I want guidance because I don't want to waste my time doing the wrong thing here and I want reassurance that I'm moving in the right direction so let me tell you like just and I it's not factious this is very genuine if you pick a programming language to to start with whatever you want and you pick some type of text act to get started with and you start building things literally anything it doesn't have oh man hydroplaning here it's a lot of water on the highway um literally anything you don't have to go like trying to form a business to get users whatever go build stuff if you go do that you're heading in

the right direction the wrong direction is being idle w for like the shortcut to be explained this happens in a lot of other things too uh basically this is like analysis paralysis right I can't get started because I don't know the right direction to head in but what I'm trying to say is there are so many directions there's so many directions and essentially like nearly none of them are the wrong direction or a direction that you couldn't possibly pivot from sorry I'm trying to be very aware here because there is it's not raining like that hard but there's a lot of water on the highway um so basically not moving forward regardless of the direction you're in is sort of the sort of the Trap and this person's not like alone in doing this like I mean it genuinely when this is like one of

the most common things I see from beginners which is like hey look I'm I am very motivated I want to do the right thing but like I just don't know where to start and it's because there's so many places to start so I have other videos on like how to pick project ideas and stuff I always recommend you know try to think through your hobbies building something on the on the side for fun and trying to align it with a hobby I think is a great way to keep you uh more interested and that way when you're hitting challenges at least you're like interested in seeing progress because of the the fact it's Rel related to a hobby we got to move over a bunch of lanes here one more and one more and we're good um so that's like my recommendation is get start

get started building stuff um if you literally are like still feeling I don't know what direction to head in like the quickest and you can talk to an llm and do this exercise if you want because like I said the reality is it's not it's not going to be career ending to like you know go in the wrong direction at the beginning as long as you're taking steps forward um a little thought exercise that I recommend doing is like thinking about would I be interested in building and then we go through some different uh platforms right so would I like to be building mobile applications would I like to be building web applications what I like to be building the front end of the web applications what I like to be building web servers and like kind of going through what what I like to

do embedded development going through this exercise at a very high level and if you don't know I just gave you some options pick one right like this is what I'm trying to say if you don't know pick uh pick web development there you go I've made the decision for you okay um the point is pi like picking one of these to start with at the beginning is helpful because if you're like well I don't know what programming language to learn now at least you have something to Anchor to and now you can go to Google Now you can go to an llm and you can say hi I am a beginner developer and I would like to learn uh web development recommend three programming languages and text Stacks that I could explore uh as a beginner and there you go there's your road map um

the like I said the problem with me or anyone else trying to create a road map based on the original question is like I just don't know what you're trying to accomplish aside from making money so it's very difficult to to do a road map but if you start taking some of those steps I just recommended you're setting yourself up to now you could come back to this and say hi like let's review the the question right hi I'm a uh you know fresh graduate or about to graduate um would be really interested in hearing a little bit more about what's being built like anything outside of school um and then let's get into I would like to be building and then you you say so I'd like to be building web applications um I've considered looking at typescript JavaScript Python and uh some of

the the text Stacks I was looking at were you know X Y and Z and here's the next part um because if you leave it there what's going to happen was if you say like please like give me a recommendation um this is one of the first lessons I like to teach um beginner software developers and I've also made videos on this too but um do some homework first that's a little bit of homework but when you put options in front of people first first I do want to say like thank you for doing some homework okay people appreciate that but the next part is when you say just as an example I've seen typescript JavaScript and python like tell me and list the text Stacks you see with them and then you say to a group of people like tell me the best one

to go use you're just going to get opinions so like is that is that actually what you want just like someone's personal preference about what they like building in um because that's what's going to happen so my recommendation is and this is again if you're trying to be a software engineer one of the things that's extremely critical in software engineering you have problem solving and you also have analysis everything that you're doing is some type of analysis pros and cons tradeoff this is your opportunity to practice being a software engineer yes you did some of the research to go look at some of the languages and text Stacks step number two is the analysis collect the data right so you want to go see what you're comparing and contrasting and then go do some of that analysis right oh okay so I went looking and

it looks like uh JavaScript has the most Community Support it has the most um packages available uh has the most usage great okay cool um but it also has a lot of people uh complaining about the syntax and the language and and then you I don't know you pick some other things and you say oh and typescript seems like it's a good compromise it's a smaller footprint though maybe there's less support but it still seems pretty good um and then python like go do the analysis and then kind of present that to the group that you're asking the question to and it will be much better received so that's kind of my my next recommendation there is is to do that but um unfortunately road maps don't work um without any context so uh I hope that helps to start with I realize it's not

the answer you're looking for but if you go back do some of the homework and then ask a more pointed question I think you will get much more pointed answers and hopefully that is more helpful so thanks for watching I'll see you next time