Hey there fellow coders!
In an attempt to clear any misconceptions and bias I may have, I want to know from all your experiences, what have been (or still are) some of the biggest challenges you faced when decided to learn to code and enter the tech industry.
It would more helpful if it's something beyond the obvious of learning X language/framework is difficult. Maybe it's something personal, maybe it's your environment, maybe it's something you were not aware of or something you saw other person experienced as well and it made sense to you too.
Wanting to know your experience with that matter so I can work on building better solutions for those problems. Whether is writing a comment here or sending a private message, I'd very much appreciate knowing your point of view about this.
Thanks for reading!
Top comments (8)
A turning point for me was when I "learned to read other people's code". I'm using quotes because it's a very broad/abstract thing to learn to do.
As a newbie I saw most of Open Source projects as magic black boxes that I only imported into my projects, but once I learned to dive into their codebase I started to learn so much from them! Things like how to better organize your classes, new operators (for that specific language) that I never used before, cool/fancy design patterns (like singletons, delegation, etc) and many others. It's all out there and it came from some of the most experienced developers in the industry :)
I'm sharing the Open Source example because not everyone is part of a team where a more Senior developer is able to share their knowledge with others. I just wanted to clarify that learning how to dive into a new codebase and start making sense of things isn't exclusive to Open Source, but it's one of the toughest things I've dealt with when entering tech.
Thanks for the reply Fernando.
I can relate to that feeling and not only on OSS projects. Sometimes going back to projects I did with other teammates, I look at my code and be like "did I really wrote that or was someone else helping me?"
But yeah I agree, for developers working on their own having a guide to improve their own skills is very hard to find and diving into OSS is quite intimidating at first.
Thanks for shedding some light into this!
I'm not new to tech but thinking back, one of the toughest things for me was finally acknowledging that I shouldn't be afraid to ask for help. I started with the mindset that it doesn't look good if you appear not to know something. As a result I could spend way too much time trying to figure out something myself when I should have just asked for help. It took a while for me to realise that all devs, no matter how experienced, needs support from other devs.
Appreciate your answer. I've had the same struggle as well for more than a year. I'm curious, what was it that made you realize it? What do you think would've helped to realize that sooner?
Thanks for your input!
It was a realisation when I learnt developers openly admit to relying on stackoverflow all the time 😆 I remember when I started out working as a dev being afraid someone would catch me browsing stackoverflow which is ridiculous now that I think about it!
I know it's easier said than done, but just remember the process of development is very collaborative and we all need support. Just take a look at open source and how it relies on sometimes hundreds of devs working together! The point is we all need help and it's good to accept that mindset at the start. We all joke about needing stackoverflow because we can all relate to that feeling of needing support maybe a bit too often.
Hope that helps :)
From the non-newbie side of things, I think experienced developers should try to be more patient and helpful to those entering the field. There is a LOT to learn that is not taught in any code camp or university, and a little kindness and guidance can go a long way.
I think one of the biggest challenges is "tutorial hell". If you can't go beyond the course content then you won't grow as a developer.
Ahhh yeah that's a common theme as well. So common in fact that I already wrote about it before