DonTheDeveloper Podcast
DonTheDeveloper Podcast
Not Sure What to Learn as an Aspiring Developer? Try this.
Why are so many aspiring developers burning out or giving up? In this, I explore how a lack of curiosity is holding back the new generation of junior devs. We’ll dig into why blindly following “popular” paths can kill your motivation, and how embracing exploration, passion, and genuine excitement for tech can reignite your learning journey. If you’re feeling stuck or unmotivated, this might be the wake-up call you need.
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If you are only going for a developer position because you think it's the easiest to land to basically break into the industry, I think you're only hurting yourself. From what I've seen, a ton of people that end up falling off and they don't actually land developer positions are those who kind of just don't enjoy it that much and they don't really pursue it long enough. They don't get the depth of knowledge and they're kind of just pursuing. Maybe it's or they think it's the easiest to get into the industry if they become a front-end developer, for example. So everyone tries to become a front-end developer, but I find that a lot of people would eventually break in if they started pursuing what they truly enjoyed, because it's a very long path. You're going to lose motivation along the way many, many, many, many, many times. But the problems that you're solving are going to be very different in different depositions. They're going to be different with different technology stacks that you're working with different types of apps that you're trying to build and you need to explore and be curious enough to try different things to finally settle on something that you actually do enjoy. So many developers are just trying to pursue a path that they aren't excited to wake up and learn more about. They're not excited to wake up and work on the projects that they got to build to be hireable for that type of deposition. A ton of people are just giving up because they don't. They're not allowing themselves to just become a better programmer, a better software engineer who is curious, who tries different things, who tries different languages, who builds different things and just wants to solve things with technology.
Don Hansen:A lot of us back in the day would just kind of be fascinated with technology in general and we, you know, even when you built your first PC and just figuring out how to do that and get it set up properly, and it was just like it was yours. You built that and you chose all the different parts and you chose a software that you're going to install on that PC. That's supposed to be, hopefully pick the right hardware to be optimal for what you're trying to do with it and it was exciting. It's just something custom thing you built. Some people would build different things with Raspberry Pis. Some people would build really silly command line scripts. Some people would just have fun building things on GeoCities and bringing their ideas to life on the web so other people can interact with it that there are so many different opportunities, even outside of web development, because I talk about that a lot but there are a lot of opportunities to just play with technology and have fun and be curious about it.
Don Hansen:And I feel like that's what's lost in a lot of junior developers, where they kind of just were unhappy with their previous career and they transitioned but they're not really finding the love for technology that a lot of good developers found a long time ago. And it's sad, because technology, it is our future. It enhances people's lives. It is incredibly rewarding to solve problems with it, it, it. It gives a lot of uh developers just aha moments and it keeps us coming back to it over and over and over.
Don Hansen:But you know a lot of us just we got curious and we allowed that curiosity to take us into different avenues in tech where maybe it's not the most efficient path to get a job, but it did bring our motivation up, it did excite us to learn something new again and that learning even if we took a little bit of a detour, that learning then reignited us when we went back on the path. Like, for example, if you are trying to become a front-end developer to then learn front-end stuff. I think just learning, having fun with technology, being curious about it, and just learning how to be a better software engineer and working with different languages and building different stuff and just pursuing software engineering in general can be exciting again when you don't create this tunnel vision for yourself to just learn one single stack and pray that you get a job building shit that you really don't want to build because you really love backing it. Fuck front end. But I got to learn front end because that's the only way I'm going to get a job, which is a huge misconception. I've talked about this already in my last video. But so many people need to allow themselves to be curious and I find those are the personalities, those are the types of people who will eventually break into the industry and build a meaningful and rewarding career for themselves. That pays a lot more money and that comes with time. But you gotta you have to let that curiosity just you gotta reignite that curiosity, and I think a lot of people just need to be reminded of that sometimes. So if I was starting all over again, I'm going to talk about a few ways where I would try to figure out like what the hell I wanted to do right.
Don Hansen:Tech is a big, big sphere. It's a big career path that has a lot of different little career paths within it, and I would even be careful about putting software engineering on a pedestal. Software engineering is a very, very stressful job. You can get paid quite a bit of money with a less stressful job and maybe you want to know how you figure out what those less stressful jobs are. Look on YouTube, look at day-in-the-life videos of a ton of different tech positions. You could have chat to be t or whatever LLM you use. Just build a giant list of tech career paths that you can kind of look down and have it describe like what they're like and you know who are the types of people who would enjoy it, who are the types of people who would hate it, who would excel in it, who wouldn't.
Don Hansen:Right, like you can prompt an LLM to give you kind of just a rundown of all this. That'll give you a starting point to then look up different content creators and different developers that are talking about their career and what they do day-to-day at their work and what kind of things they're building, what kind of things they're working on, what they hate about the job right, but it's a ton of research. Don't, please, don't just and maybe I'm just seeing this because I'm in the web dev space and, like you know, I'm helping a lot of aspiring developers but I feel like so many people are coming into web dev thinking this is like their access into, like a high ticket job and it's the easiest type of work to get into as a software engineer, which just isn't true. Remember, a lot of people have this misconception, but then you have a lot of competition as well. So I would honestly get that rundown.
Don Hansen:You could ask friends, you can ask family. If you know anyone in the industry, you could talk to them about it and, you know, challenge them not to just give you a watered down version or kind of just like a happy path version of their job, like what are the shitty parts of it? What do they hate? What do they wish were different in their position? Like if they were going for a new position, what would they want to aim for? And does that exist in that type of position? Or are they thinking about moving? Why are they thinking about moving? Just having conversations with people that you meet at different tech meetups, you meet online, different discords, online hackathon events, just like. Having these conversations with a ton of people online is a really easy and accessible way to start getting some insight into what you might enjoy as you're listening to all of these people.
Don Hansen:A lot of people would really benefit from just having a huge playlist of these videos of different people in different positions talking about, like, what it even took to become this or like, wherever they are, what it took to actually get to where they are, but day in the life videos, and not cheesy latte on the rooftop videos. But I'm talking about, like people breaking it down and being real with you. What is it really like to work this position? And I'd be careful about the overly optimistic people and the overly pessimistic people, or get a balance of both, but try to find people who are going to be grounded enough to be able to give you the pros and cons. That's what I find the most insight with. But it's watching a ton of these videos. It's doing a bunch of research into what it might take to get this type of position and the types of things that you're going to be building and working on. Do any of these appeal to you?
Don Hansen:Like you know, a lot of people want to become developers? Why? When I asked that question, why? It's like there are a lot of really bad answers to that question. A good answer isn't I want to make more money. A good answer isn't well, that's the main bad answer that I hear a lot, and those people usually end up failing. They don't break into the industry because it requires so much time investment that that reason of I just want to make more money isn't motivating enough.
Don Hansen:You have to enjoy what you're going with. You can make a lot more money in different tech positions, but you have to find what you truly enjoy and that happens over time and you can pivot over time years even into your career. You can slowly start transitioning as well, but you can start trying to get a little bit of an inkling of what just the types of things that you kind of enjoy, that you don't feel like you're forcing yourself to learn and that you never feel motivation with like. If you never feel motivation, you're not inspired to learn what you're learning. Why are you learning it? That's crazy to me. Like, and I would even argue a lot of people need to get off the linear path of like. Okay, when I get this like giant tutorial or this giant udemy course that's telling me to do this step by step, by step by step.
Don Hansen:If you're just getting bored with it, man, like it's okay to go off the beaten path, it's okay to pivot a little bit and try different stuff, it'll reignite that passion in you. But again, you have to be curious enough to just go out of bounds a bit and try different libraries and different languages that might not be the most marketable in your area. That's okay. A lot of other people look at a ton of different positions of like there are a ton of Java positions in my area and so I got to learn Java. No, no, no, no. I think the research initially is good and we so like building a spreadsheet of a ton of open positions and their tech stacks and what their requirements are like for 100 or 250 positions in kind of like your local big cities or something like that. But building a spreadsheet just to be aware of what companies are hiring for is valuable. But you shouldn't necessarily go for the most popular job posting. You might hate Java. I think it's completely okay to try it and build something with it. But if you are the type of person that just forces yourself to go through learning a language that you don't like because you think it's the most marketable. You are the type of person I see give up.
Don Hansen:Oh, by the way, if you're trying to become a front-end developer, I highly recommend you check out Scrimpa. I'm specifically talking about their front-end developer career path. They have a fun, interactive way to learn how to code and become a web developer, and while that's true, that's not the main reason that I want to promote them, honestly. The main reason is their curriculum is solid. There are a lot of curriculums that do not prepare people to actually be competitive in the market, and I've reviewed a ton of programs and to this day, it is still one of my favorites and one of the best front endend curriculums out there for self-taught developers, and they're backed by MDN, a leading and well-respected resource in the developer community, and I actually personally run my own mentees through the program to prepare them for front-end developer jobs. And if you choose to sign up via my affiliate link below in the description, you actually get 30% off if you sign up for a paid plan, but you have to sign up by the end of February to take advantage of that, because it expires after that.
Don Hansen:Anyways, check it out for yourself. What do you have to lose? Let's get back to the topic. Give up, because they are seeking just more money and going for the what they perceive to be the most marketable position, without forgetting that so many good software engineers are good software engineers because they're fucking curious and they explored a ton. They didn't go down a super linear path. They tried a bunch of different things until they settled on something and then they fucking doubled down with it. You can make a lot of different money with most marketable technologies. You have choices. You don't have to go for the most popular one and then you can.
Don Hansen:When you do a little bit of market research of like what is popular too, you can look at what types of companies are hiring. Maybe a ton of like old school kind of like non-tech companies are hiring for a specific language, even though there's a lot of positions open with that. Maybe you want to be in a more progressive tech culture, that where you're not working on, you know, 10 to 15 to 15 year old legacy codeases stuck in a very old version that you are going to hate working with. There are a lot of very, very, very old PHP codebases out there that you might not be so happy with. But you can look at these companies and do I want to work for these types of companies? Look at the developers that work on these teams. Research them on LinkedIn. What do they like? Are they likable or are they just miserable? You'll discover there are a lot of miserable people in the software engineering field. Do I want to end up like them? Do I want to be miserable like them? Do I want to hate my job like them? Maybe you don't. Maybe you actually want to enjoy what you're doing. It's okay to do that research. It's okay to build that spreadsheet. I think that's helpful and you could start digging in and looking up the teams and looking up the developers that are working with these languages, with these types of companies. But this is what I'm talking about, like over time.
Don Hansen:Don't just expect yourself to know what you are going to get into right away. Expect this research to happen many, many, many months, um, and even well into your career, but many, many months initially of just figuring out like different avenues that you can take. And in the meantime, it's okay to start with a language, start with Python, do a Python course while you're continuing to do research. Or maybe you want to just take a chance at freelancing. You want to learn WordPress initially and go the PHP route, but you're like I probably won't stay with it. Continue doing that research and expand your horizons, but you will probably change your path before you land that first position. That's okay. I'm not saying you need to spend three to six months with WordPress. But what if there's a course that your buddy recommended that you know he wants to go with? He wants to do that program with you at the same time and that would be fun. Okay, cool, let's do like a two week course and let's learn this together. Let's build something, and then we'll decide what we want to do afterwards. It's okay to just pick up a language and start learning and building with it. It doesn't have to be the language that you apply for jobs with. It just doesn't.
Don Hansen:And here's the thing that still people hate me for. It triggers so many people. You should be planning on spending years trying to become a developer Years and that's the problem. So many people are trying to get a job within a year rushing. And if I just did everything right and everything perfect, I could be an exception and I could stand out and get that dev job within a year. I could break into the industry before most other people. I know I can.
Don Hansen:I've heard this so many times that motivational wane and when you don't enjoy what you're doing, you're going to be that statistic, even though you tell yourself you're not going to be. You are going to be that statistic that just gives up. And that's what I'm trying to get people to realize and avoid. And I think how you avoid giving up, which is the only way you will never become a software engineer, the way you avoid that, is you allow your curiosity to take over at times. You allow yourself to try different stuff that looks interesting. You allow yourself to be open-minded to what other people are saying about their day in the life and what they think the industry is kind of turning into For better or worse.
Don Hansen:You keep watching videos and listening to developer stories. You meet other developers along the way you you have these meaningful conversations where you teach each other about, like what you've gone through and your opinions that you've formed, even if it's with other aspiring developers. What have they discovered? What content creators have they looked up and like really respect and why, why? Why do they respect that content creator's opinions and who is this content creator? What was their position? Are they still in the industry? What's that like?
Don Hansen:But it's about keeping your mind open that software engineering is a huge field and so becoming a good software engineer is about learning a lot of different things, a lot of different paradigms, ways of doing things, and with different languages, different ecosystems. There are going to be different conventions. You're going to have different cultures, different opinions, and you might have different dev cultures that are more appealing to you, right? You might have a more meme-y culture, you might have a more sensitive-y culture or you might have a more sensitive and soft culture, with different languages. What appeals more to you? That takes time to flush out and discover. But if you want to speed that up, as you are continuing to learn something, always learning something, and moving forward and getting good in that ecosystem, and you can always carry that into another language, another ecosystem, but always doing something where you continue to do research, meet other people and have conversations this is how you start paving your way in tech.
Don Hansen:Highly encourage you. Highly encourage you, if you haven't already, expand the amount of time that it's going to take to become a developer to, I wouldn't say well, over two years, but to over two years. If you're not even willing to do that, this is where I see people get frustrated. So I wrote a bunch of notes that I didn't go over. So I'm going to just check to see if I have anything else to add. Bunch of notes that I didn't go over, so I'm going to just check to see if I have anything else to add. One thing I would okay, I do think I have a few things.
Don Hansen:One thing I would encourage you to do is, when you are learning a language, I think it really helps to build kind of a small, even just a small personal project outside of your tutorial based projects, but just a small project, personal project, outside of your tutorial-based projects, but just a small project, building something that you want to build to reinforce the concepts that you need to reinforce. You know you just came out of a course how do I reinforce these concepts? And you could again have an LLM come up with a bunch of different ideas, a variety of ideas. If you're just looking to build like a small personal project to try this new language out, like that's what you can do. But build a personal project, because I think when you start flushing out a personal project without getting your hand held, it kind of that's when you start discovering if, like I, really like working with this, build a personal project. I think it's going to help quite a bit.
Don Hansen:Quite a bit, um, you might even find that, like you don't really like front end or back end, you don't really like coding, but you like server setup. You might be fascinated with hardening your linux server and you just go that route. You might want to build a bunch of scripts and automated tools. You might go into building a bunch of developer tools. Devops is an awesome position that is well-respected in tech teams and it comes from people just diving deeper in that area and wanting to automate and make it easier for a lot of developers on the team to be able to do their work. And they like the server setup, they like setting up pipelines, they like setting up automations. You might just want to build a mobile app. You're like you know what? I kind of like front end, but I don't want to deal with all these different browsers and different screen resolutions. Like, let's just build something for a mobile device. It's really to the point, it's minimal. That's my style, um, that, like you might have a passion for analyzing and manipulating data. You might go the data science route. Machine learning is becoming a little bit more popular. You might enjoy that route.
Don Hansen:But I also want to stress, like a lot of people want to become a software engineer and I'm gonna ask this, like why, why there are so many different avenues in tech, so many different areas in tech that you can go down. Why why fall, like, why blindly follow the same path that many, many people have followed that are not going to get that job, because most people won't land that that uh deposition, they do end up giving up. Um, why blindly follow it just because everyone else is doing it? I think that's kind of part of the problem. You think it's just this like quick access to like a high ticket position and you're going to be respected and you're going to feel good about yourself for becoming a developer. But there's a reason why so many people are failing at it and it's because they don't really enjoy it.
Don Hansen:I think a lot of people just want to better themselves. I think you probably want a better career, maybe for yourself, for your family. You want more money, you want, um, you want to get involved in technology because you feel like your old industry might get taken over soon and you're starting to already see that, with positions kind of going away and the market's getting a bit rough. I think those are fine reasons to start with. But software engineering is a really long path and if you're not going with a CS degree, the alternative path is really hard. The self-taught path is really hard. Do you just want a better life? You don't have to become a software engineer. There are a ton of different tech positions and there are giant lists online. Llms can create these lists for you. We've talked about that in the beginning. But I really want a lot of people to question why they're becoming a software engineer, because it's a very high-stress position. You paid a lot of money for a reason. It's a very high-stress position.
Don Hansen:Just explore. I think that's my message. Please just get curious and explore, because tech has a place for everyone. You're not too dumb for tech. Some people think it's like an intelligence thing. Tech rewards people who care about getting good at their craft. Tech rewards people who care about getting good at their craft. Tech rewards people who are curious enough to keep diving deeper and exploring new things in tech. Tech rewards people who are curious enough and enjoyed enough to keep up with new technologies and what's happening in their specific position and their specific career path and also being open-minded to what's happening outside of their specific position as well and how it all kind of interconnects together. Tech rewards people who are, who love technology, who are hungry for it, who are curious about it, who love constantly learning about it. And, if that sounds appealing to you, there are a ton of different opportunities in tech. Please keep an open mind with that.