Waste Of Time For Developers?! Is College Or University Worth It?

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all right folks I'm just headed to the office I'm going to go to Instagram for a question that came in uh I just got into University to study computer science which I have a passion for started to write in Python self-taught a year ago before starting University this year and seems to be and seem to be getting the hang of it and want to learn a low-level language okay and now the problem is I don't know how to manage myself in terms of splitting time for school personal life still practice writing code building projects for my resume um I've heard so many people saying that 85% of what you'll be taught in school will not be used in the real world and I don't want to waste time learning things that won't be applicable to the real world I'm so overwhelmed and frustrated no longer

making progress and learning to code my education has started declining I'm losing grip on both please I need advice uh I seem to be getting depressed and frustrated so uh first of all just want to say thanks so much for sending this in I think it's probably uh something that a lot of people can relate to um I know especially these days I think there's a lot of lot of difficulty with people getting into the industry um all the talk and media and stuff about how things are going uh in terms of the job search and like how Ai and the economy like everything just seems stacked up against people oh it's pretty cold in here I don't know if you can see that on the camera um so I I want to talk through this uh and I'm just going to going to kind

of pull it back up for a second before I start driving in terms of okay so time balance talk about languages a little bit and what we learn in school um so yeah let's let's get into it so I want to start by saying and this is I don't know probably not like I don't know if it's reassuring my intention is for it to be reassuring I don't know if it's going to come across that way um but like this type of thing that this person's describing I would my god when it gets cold this car doesn't stop beeping and everything um this kind of thing we we're being overwhelmed with like how to balance this stuff like this is not new and I'm not saying this to like um to minimize how people are feeling about this I'm only saying it because right now

I feel like there's so much fear and we have things like the economy we have things like AI we have the the job search like all of these things are they seem to be what people are an anchoring to in terms of uh like the root of all of these problems and why people are fearful and it's like this vicious cycle perpetuating and I just wanted to kind of mention this because um like even what when I was in school when I was when did I I graduated in 2012 so I started in 2007 like it felt this way for me too this is before AI was a big thing this is when uh searching for jobs uh you know didn't seem as crazy but I was going through the same type of thing okay so uh I I want to say that again not

to minimize but to number one try to like de anchor this if that's a word or a phrase I can use from things like AI and and stuff like that and just kind of highlight that this is this is pretty common for people to feel this way and it has been for a long time so I wanted to start by saying that now um awesome stuff in terms of being like selftaught trying to pick up a language something like python right um I think a lot of people start with with python a lot of people start with JavaScript and stuff like that as well for fun and development but um I know python is uh often talked about being you know more beginner friendly you know simpler syntax uh just overall like readability is great so awesome in getting started with that uh I know

like for me personally I don't love building stuff in Python in terms of like fullon applications but I know that lots of people do um so there's it's not like if you wanted to stick with python and just continue going down that path that like you're going to be totally screwed or something like that um so I wanted to mention that but but the other thing too is if you want to learn a lower level language or just a different language nothing wrong with that either right this is going to be something that happens in your career eventually um even for me like I I program like C is the language I picked and anchored to and I love to use it uh I know people that uh don't watch my main Channel Dev leader which is where I put out all my my C

and programming tutorials like that's like that's what I do um but even with that said like I've had to I've had to work with Java I've had to work with Objective C I've had to work with C++ uh like there's you end up and I have to work with python like you have to touch all this stuff um at various points in your career so um even though if I were to pick up something new like a new project to work on I would probably try to build it in C but um that doesn't mean that I'm going to like purposefully avoid and like never encounter other languages and stuff so I think it's a great opportunity uh if you have capacity for it to go pick up another language and that's a key point because as we talk through this it's going to be

about balance right um I know because I I was a student at one point um I know what it's like to be going through like college and university having your course load um you're also at this point in your life where like you know from High School like when you're a teenager in high school like this is a key part in your life for building like social interactions this is one of the things I'm not again I'm not like an expert on this stuff I'm just a computer nerd but um this is like one of the key phases of your life for building social interactions and understanding how a lot of this stuff works and I think that as you're transitioning out of your teenage years for a lot of people including me it was still super important to make sure that I had like

when I say relationships I don't mean necessar like uh like romantic I mean like relationships friendships things like that um it was still really important and something that I wanted to prioritize like and I don't think there's anything wrong with that but when we get into this kind of stuff we have to start thinking about like what what is a priority for us and this becomes a very interesting challenge to balance things out you're going to have things like Hobbies you're going to have things like school there's a lot of people that have to take on work at the same time as going to school so they have a part-time job they're balancing um software developers have this extra homework which is essentially like like like actually practicing building software building projects on the side so I I don't I'm not saying there aren't other

professions and stuff where you don't have any type of thing like this but I think it's very common in software development um I would say at this point if you're not doing stuff on the side in terms of building projects and exploring and just I don't know like actively coding you're you're going to be at a disadvantage and that's not to say that you can't be a better programmer or that you won't ever get a job or something my point is that the people that you're competing against for jobs and the competition is pretty high the people you're competing against are doing that so that's why I'm saying like if you're not it's kind of just automatically putting you at a bit of a disadvantage so I think the reality is we have to go into this stuff thinking we're going to need to spend

extra time building things um or spend extra time learning things and again I'm not here to say there is no other way to do this but I do think that it's going to come out of your own personal time um now with that said uh I can talk a little bit about how I tried to balance things in University for me um because as this person was saying like I don't know like they said 85% I don't think there's necessarily like a published stat on it or something but uh in terms of like the usefulness of what we learn in school my my take on like how much I directly use from University in the real world is like um I don't know probably like less than 10% I feel in terms of what I spent time doing but I want to add a bit

of a um disclaimer to that I guess and that's why I wanted to use the word like directly learned in school because I think a lot of what I learned in school in terms of the specific courses and things like that so much of it was irrelevant uh I would say like the first four years of my uni my first four years of my 5-year degree program I feel like what the course is specifically touched on I don't use at all and I like haven't used at all in my career which is so far after internships 12 plus years now that makes it sound like I'm very much saying well then University or college is a waste of time don't do it but that's not the case it's just that like in hindsight I think that there was a a different level of like like

I don't know like knowledge and experience that I can reflect on that I did gain so just to give you an example like I had chemistry classes I had physics classes I had calculus classes I had to take math throughout mostos of University uh so and I don't like math um so there is a lot of stuff like including like when I say chemistry it's like what does that have to do with programming and like not a whole lot directly but um when I was thinking through these courses as I was taking them I was like this is such a waste of time this is so useless I don't want to do this it's just extra stress and like I just got to get it done to get the piece of paper at the end like so hang in there so that you can have

the degree at the end but what I actually learned in hindsight was like number one going to University actually taught me how I learn which sounds kind of meta and kind of weird but I didn't really know this and that's because when I was younger like in high school and stuff I didn't really have to try very hard the concepts seemed to click automatically um you know I didn't really unless I had to hand in homework to get grades I wouldn't do homework because like I just didn't need to practice and I I had never really understood like how I learn effectively and if you think about it understanding how you learn is like a ridiculous ously powerful skill and I you know kind of lived the first whatever 18 years of my life not actually having any concept of this I keep spinning as

I'm talking so I had no concept of how I learn and it's because it seemed to just happen and I seem to be very fortunate that way until I got to University and it was a bit of an O moment because I'm like I'm not doing very well I could do well in program progamming because that was just something that really seemed to stick with me but even though I was really good at math in high school I was almost like failing math in University and it was for the first time I was like I have to start doing something different so for me one of the meta things I learned in University was how I learn I do need to practice I do need to be Hands-On I am very much a Hands-On learner and I had no idea about uh about that for

myself I kind of assumed that I could just read things and learn because that's kind of what was happening in high school and when I was younger or like to to listen to someone explaining things and just learn and understand but like the answer is no because I was just learning uh just listening or just uh reading things in University for things like math and absolutely not I was not uh not actually retaining anything so I think number one I wanted to call out that University taught me how to learn beyond that though I think that there's like the the like more I'm stuttering there's more a general skills that I also took away from from University and like in particular you'll hear me talk about this a bunch but uh when we talk about Engineering in general right um we can talk about just

programming so just like writing programs but I know as software developers we slap the word engineer onto our oh man a guy with a trailer just like swung out into the fast lane um and if you're not familiar with driving generally if you have a trailer on the back of your truck and you swerve over into another Lane number one you got the trailer doing whatever it wants to do behind you number two you got a trailer on the back of your truck you're probably not going as fast as the rest of us if you're doing that so that was a fun experience um what was I saying this is the problem with driving meta principles something I was learning oh engineering there we go see comes back when I talk about engineering um I know like I this is what I was saying software

developers we slap the engineer label onto our role um but like engineering is not just you know coding it's not just writing code or having a program put together that's not that has nothing specifically to do with engineering when I talk about engineering there's a lot of analysis so like do going through pros and cons so so data analysis pros and cons you're weighing things out based on constraints right we have in real life when we're dealing with this stuff we have constraints things like time resources we have to think about performance tradeoffs we have to think about there's so much that we have to balance and for me one of the things going to school and I'm not saying that everyone gets this necessarily when they go to school but because I I went to uh I went for computer engineering and they layered

on these other we had to do like um what do you call it I can't even remember what it was called like our fourthe design project was like a big um a big project we had to deliver and it involved doing an analysis um but there was this kind of stuff was layered throughout our education I found like again in hindsight and it reinforced for me that like doing analysis is a core part of engineering to the point and I I joked about this the other day on one of the videos like um I will do an like almost instinctively I overanalyze like everything and I'm not saying that like a a weird bragging statement like it's because I'm so good at engineering no like it's it's like a problem where uh I always do like worst case scenario analysis on things um and it

be not it's not like a a real problem but my wife doesn't like it because I always look at things and I'm doing an analysis and in my head I'm like okay well this is the worst case scenario so like I mean looks pretty good to me and she's like well why are you so negative and I'm like I'm not negative I'm just making sure that in the worst case scenario we're still good like I don't know that seems I'm just doing analysis on it but again University taught me skills around analyzing things and reinforce why that's so important so like did that have anything to do specifically with physics and chemist or some of the other courses I took like not at all but if I wouldn't have gone through that I wouldn't have been practicing doing analysis so that was a really big

thing that benefited me um and I'll kind of stop on that just so we can move on but my point with the you know 85% isn't used yeah like the specific topics were like complete like almost completely irrelevant to what I do in the field your schooling may be very different so so again I'm not saying this to dissuade you from school if I had to repeat and I've said this before and I'll say it again if I had to repeat my journey I would absolutely do what I did again I went to University because I wanted to go to an accredited engineering uh program so that I could become a professional engineer I'm still not by the way by Canadian law um I'm not in Canada anymore but I wanted to do that I wanted a internship program and I would absolutely do that

again I would not go to to College University without an internship program for me personally um and like I would do the whole thing again even though even though the program I picked didn't seem to have a lot of specific courses that align to what I need now if you could do that plus have courses that truly translated into like what felt like practical knowledge for you know time in your career like even better like that's a slam dunk in my opinion so I'm not trying to dissuade people from going to school um I would absolutely do it again okay now I'm about I think roughly halfway to work uh I wanted to talk unless this traffic clears up uh I wanted to talk a bit bit about time management a little bit more um and what's valuable so for me when I was going

through school um and feeling like you know exactly as this person said like I don't want to waste my time like on stuff where I'm like I don't see value in this and it's not translating into like what I'm going to need in my career like I I totally resonate with that I don't want to waste time doing that so it's either I'm going to waste time having fun which is that's not the productive thing to do but uh we're also you know at this point in our lives we're basically kids still young adults kids you got you got to mix in some of that or else you'll go nuts but um I do think in terms of prioritizing being productive and learning and getting better Skilling up that should be part of what you're thinking through guy with the trailer finally moved now we

can drive um so for me it was like like and I've said this on videos before I love to program so I would in my spare time one of my hobbies to this day is still programming I love to build things so I didn't struggle so much with like how do I find time for it that was like that is a hobby of mine already now if that's not a hobby of yours and I realize that's not the case for everyone like it's kind of kind of weird it's kind of nerdy I get it um but that kind of worked for me if it's not the case for you I think that you need to start looking at how you're spending time I've said this in previous videos when it comes to trying to skill up at something in my opinion you may need to

make like a sacrifice in the shorter term but that doesn't mean that that's how you have to spend the rest of your life I've talked about this for uh you know practicing for your interviews or practicing like trying to learn a new technology or something you may have to go evaluate how you're spending time and say like hey for the next period of time like maybe I'm not going to be going to two volleyball games a week or maybe I'm not going to uh make my my Tuesday Wednesday Thursday my Netflix binging nights like I know it sucks but like if you seriously go through how you're spending your time I bet you you can carve out some extra time uh and it might be a bit of a sacrifice from some of the hobbies and stuff you have but you can consider that potentially

just a short-term investment for you to skill up there's nothing in my opinion there's nothing wrong with that if you were like okay well Nick saying the rest of my life is going to be like I don't know the uh just making sure that cop's not pulling out or good um you know the rest of my life I have to spend like 10 hours a week like building stuff on the side like I'm not saying that at all I like to do that because that's that's fun for me but I totally get people are going to have other Hobbies other interests they're going to have relationships they're going to have kids they might have other businesses and stuff they're running like whatever not everyone has that but in the short term if you want to skill up I highly suggest you look at like like

literally draw a calendar out and then document like how you're spending your time in the week and have a serious conversation with yourself now if you are a student and you're like I'm in classes I have all this homework I have to work a part-time job Nick like it's there is literally no other time I can make okay this is where I would start to say how do we get creative in terms of where our strengths and weaknesses are in school I'll give you a little bit of an example um for me in school and I'm not saying that this is I'm just telling you what I did I'm not necessarily encouraging this I'm trying to get you to be creative and how you approach things I've talked about before how when I was in school it seemed like a lot of people were really

good at math or really good at programming I happened to not be good at math anymore but I was really good at programming so when in my friend groups from class what we were able to do was we could divvy up the work a little bit so I could go focus on making sure we could make it through the programming assignments and my friends could actually focus on some of the math assignments we would still do our own work but it meant that as soon as we were stuck we knew that the other person had already like made it through that work so it was like hey man I just got to question three but I'm stuck on this like how do you how do I interpret like how what to do with these variables and someone could be like no problem here you go

boom unblocked keep moving so a huge timesaver when it came to homework and the same thing would work the other way someone would say hey Nick like I'm tried to it said we had to go make a function to do this but I don't know how to make this data structure work with this function and it's like no problem I already have it coded up I can walk you through it like very fast um so we looked for optimizations like this and that meant we could save a lot of time that meant with more free time you can replace it with other things like either going out and having fun with your friends or in this case what you should probably do is if you're trying to scill up at something how do you start incorporating that uh another thing to consider is like um

you may have classes and stuff that you're just super strong at and you don't have to spend as much time on them again I'm not encouraging you to necessarily just like give up on school and say well this class doesn't matter I can just like not do the work because Nick said so but what I'm saying is like if you have classes where you're not doing well like prioritize those right if you're like hey my computer classes my programming classes I'm losing engagement and my marks are declining prioritize those you might have some other elective or something that's um I don't know maybe a little bit easier maybe you can uh look at the grading scheme and you're like yeah I can you know I can I don't know uh cram this exam and actually like make up my mark and feel pretty good about

it like you just might have to get creative I'm not I realize these aren't like awesome options I'm just saying if you are literally telling me you don't have time which I find it very hard to believe you can't find any time to switch out um these are some creative ways that you can look at it um trying to think what else in terms of like you know do you have to go learn uh like in this person's case they said they want to go learn uh like a lowlevel language do they need to I don't necessarily think so is it helpful sure but this is why I said at the beginning of this talk like only if it's not going to overwhelm you because if you're going to go learn a different language at the expense of being completely overwhelmed and everything else starts

to fall apart like is that really a good tradeoff I don't like I don't necessarily think so um maybe maybe if you're thinking like the type of work that I would like to do like I know you're still early sort of in University but if you're like looking you're like looking at job description and stuff like hey what is a what is a game developer like generally programing and you're like oh it's not Python and I some do um but like it's not Python and like I really want to be a game developer yeah maybe like you use that and you can kind of fuel the direction you want to go in but um I would say like honestly you're going to have so much time to go learning other languages other Frameworks and stuff so my recommendation is like don't Focus so much on

on like you know how many how many languages can I list on my resume how many Frameworks can I list I would just make sure that you're spending time building things and I realize that's still a time commitment I'm not trying to minimize that uh still a time commitment but let's get over Lanes here um but you might be able to like I don't know streamline what you're doing a little bit better if we think about it um trying to think a good way to explain this it's not going to be a perfectly like quantitative comparison here but I just want to give you an idea uh high level if we had someone like say a a new programmer right so they they've learned a language that they're comfortable working with at least at a as a you know beginner level if they jump between

you know two three four languages the reality is they're Pro likely only getting so far into some of the interesting parts of the languages so yeah they might have some working knowledge high level across these and that could be great for a beginner but they're also kind of only operating at a beginner level in all of them and you may have success in a similar way or a better way if you just happen to stick to one language and get to learn it a little bit better at Le at least in the beginning because you will find this is why I'm trying to stress this you're going to find that in your career you're going to be learning other languages like I've said this many times on this channel on my main Channel um you know even at Microsoft we hire in people like we

use C but we hire in people that don't know C at all because they'll learning it it's fine um have you used an objectoriented language before yes okay let's go um you'll be okay so it's because there's this understanding that like people can learn these things and you'll do it and at larger companies generally there's a little bit more call it luxury for uh letting people ramp up and learn languages come on someone put on their signal trying to move into the lane as I was already passing so they would have literally just cut me off very hard and it almost happened twice in a row okay um I'm just watching because I was trying to see if they thought that I was like Road raging at them but I had to accelerate saw they wanted to move over so I actually stopped I mean

not physically stopped but slowed down and then they were like too awkward to continue merging so I sped back up um yeah in terms of balancing time like my opinion on if you're in school the way that I would prioritize things is that make sure you are in a comfortable spot for meeting this is just my opinion on this meeting the at least the minimum grades you need to continue for me I think I had to have a an average of 70% across everything uh I couldn't have something like I could only have one course for one semester below a 50 or something and then I would have to recover it I can't remember the details but my average had to be above 70 it's not like a passing average for me was 50% had to be 70 um and I would say beyond that

like if you're comfortably doing that then I would spend more time on on projects as much as possible because I think that's going to be the best uh hands-on experience that you're ever going to have in terms of school subjects I would not worry so much about um like hey this doesn't really feel applicable cuz that's why I was trying to indicate that I think I think that there's some like meta principles and like learning that even if you're like hey these subjects kind of suck um you can still learn a lot and I think that's about it um I'm not sure I'm not sure if I have any more to add to that to be honest sorry I was just trying to watch cuz the it's a bit of a weird spot for merging uh to get off the highway um I think yeah

my priorities would be if you're struggling to even meet the grades and stuff like you got to focus on that part first or else like why are you in school right it's a waste of time and money but get get yourself covered on that front and I think that a lot of people like I watched a lot of people personally put so much time and effort into school and University to get super high marks but the reality is it doesn't matter um the only time it matters is if you're like doing that and you're applying for scholarships and stuff like that um by all means like that can be a great strategy too uh for me like that's not the case so some people you know hyperfocus on that because they're like if I get my average up to whatever I know of these scholarships

I'm going to apply for them I'm going to have my school covered like that could be great that's not really what I'm focused on here but worth mentioning because that might be a that might be very valuable to you based on your financial situation but otherwise for me it was you know I don't want to be at a spot where I'm like oh man like if I go to write this exam and I I don't get like a 95 on this exam then like then I might fail this whole semester um like I don't want to be in a spot like that I want to be like hey if I do what I've been doing on this exam I should be totally fine um might not have like a 95 I might have a mid 70s low 80s or something and like that's cool um

because I think there's like diminishing returns for how much effort you put into that stuff personally and um if you are trying to prioritize learning other things by building projects and stuff like that uh that's my take is like get some of that time back by not going like you know 100% into everything academic uh especially if your marks are already good get some of that time back that's my take personally um now it's hard to give advice on this kind of stuff because like I was hinting at your your school and the subjects you have they actually might be very aligned to like things that are helpful for me it didn't really feel that way and like in hindsight looking at the courses I took I still don't think the courses were specifically helpful but yours might be so I'm not trying to like

say hey like you don't got to do your courses and everything's fine like it's not what I'm saying so please don't take it that way but uh you know if your marks are good already and you're looking for extra time like you might not have to invest as much time studying on things that you're already getting like 98% in like maybe cut back on the studying for that course again this is mostly for people that are claiming I do not have any time because if you have time then you don't have to cut back on anything then I don't even know why we're having this conversation um and finally as I park here I just want to have like a closing comment to say um you know I I've been trying to put out content on this channel and I guess on my main Channel

I do it for beginners as well but I've been trying to put out content on this channel to remind people like I see how much Doom Gloom and fear there is because I see the comments coming in I see the messages coming in this is not my only social media I have my main Dev leader Channel I post on social media every single day multiple times a day about software engineering I see how much there is out there that's getting people scared and like I'm still hellbent on trying to help people get into the industry and trying to make sure that people are you know having a smoother Journey um and when I see how much fear there is I am very motivated to try and remind people like I see that it's challenging but I think that the fear is like like way way

way blown out of proportion so uh I'm doing as much as I can to remind people please like you know stick with it um things are going to keep changing and evolving so I'm not saying like it's not evolving or changing I'm just trying to say that um instead of just giving up because you're afraid this why I started the video this way it was hard for me when I had to do it and this is before Ai and and everything else um it was hard it is hard and I think that the the reality is like we have to put in hard work