Are You Working Full-time AND Learning to Code?

Are you learning to code while working a full-time job, taking care of family, or other heavy responsibilities? We need to have an honest conversation. More importantly, I want to talk about the mindset that'll help you survive the journey.

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Transcript

Don Hansen: 0:00

For people that are trying to learn part-time as an aspiring developer while they work full-time at their job, or maybe a little less, maybe a little bit more, it's very difficult. I think we need to just like pause right here. And I I want you to recognize that it's really an uphill battle. And so give yourself permission to not go as quickly as other people. Give yourself permission to forget things more as it spreads out. Give yourself permission to not be able to do the most optimized path. It's going to take time, and just because it's taking you a lot of time does not mean that you are doing a lot of things wrong. So you have to just be kind to yourself. You have a lot of other responsibilities, and yeah, just be kind to yourself. Maybe of children, relationship, work. It's a lot. And one thing you have to recognize, and I think your strength, is you have to be smarter about your mental energy. And I think you're going to be more aware of it. Right? We all have days where we feel clarity, and when we feel like there's just this fog, and we can't quite grasp things as well. You are going to have many of those foggy days. And doing something during those days is better than nothing. Just because of the habit that you're building, and whenever you do try to focus, when you don't feel like focusing, you're improving your ability to focus. And you need to recognize that subconsciously, a lot of our brains have just been trained with what we consume for that focus to be completely destroyed. And so when you don't quite have that mental clarity and you're putting time into learning to code, you are building focus, you are building strength, you are building self-discipline that many other people don't build up because they have all the time in the world. And what they're doing, a lot of times when you have too much time, you take it for granted. And you kind of just don't really focus on those habits. And so I really want to emphasize to do this well, you have to have self-awareness. Like if you have a ton of other responsibilities, juggling, you have to have self-awareness to realize when you have the energy to do something and when you don't. You're going to do it anyways. But the next day, you are going to think about why didn't I have that energy? Do I need to talk to my partner to get more support from them so they can help me out? Maybe I need to spend more time with my kids. Maybe I need to take a little bit of a longer lunch during work, right? I think it's easier to think about these things if you actually care about yourself because you don't have time to waste. And so that is your strength. It's being aware of how little time you have and taking care of yourself so that when you do have that time, it's optimized. You feel clear, right? Get sleep, eat well. 10 minutes of guided like meditation just to focus on. I'm lacking the type of meditation. Not just guided meditation, but um just breathing. I can't think of the term for it right now, but just like breathing and focusing on your breath, right? Get, you know, let your thoughts occur, because we all have thoughts, they all appear in our mind, or we hear them, and we just don't, we kind of acknowledge it and we just let it go. That's the trick, right? And a lot of people will start with just like focusing on their breath. Even if you're stressed, like just take a minute, breathe in deep, focus on your breath. Might sound silly if you haven't done it, but if you have, you know this works over time when you're consistent with it. Um, a lot of times we start getting anxious and distracted and stuff just from our breathing alone. Taking a moment to just ground ourselves can bring that mental clarity. And so I also want you to look at yourself like a like you have a battery, right? You have a mental capacity that's a battery. And you need to understand that everything you do consumes a little bit of that juice. Everything that you consume, and here's a tip: when you are at work and you are listening to a developer podcast, you are at work and you are kind of like listening to a video talk of trying to teach you concepts with coding, all you're doing is splitting your attention and draining that battery significantly faster. A lot of people think that consuming developer course content because they don't have a lot of time outside work is what they need to do. But the reality is you need to carve out time outside of work and just do work at work and do coding at home. Or if you have a pocket, like you want to do it during lunch, fine, right? But don't multitask. Multitasking is the dumbest fucking thing that became so incredibly popular. You weren't multitasking, you are task switching simultaneously, like over and over and over and over. You're just task switching. That drains your battery. Multitasking is bullshit. I know a lot of you, I've talked to a lot of you, have been taught that. We got to multitask. No, a company wants you to multitask because they don't give a shit about your your mental. You just gotta have a certain amount of output and okay, but they don't really give a shit that it's training you to not be able to focus long term over time. They don't care about you long term. Of course they don't. By the way, if you are diving deep into Node and you've already built a few things with Express, it might be time to challenge yourself with a more scalable framework, NSJS. It's one of the most popular frameworks for Node, and I personally use it to build my projects. It's one of the reasons why I decided to build a course for it, to get people up to speed with the basics. Find that course at Scrimba.com. Oh, it's also free. If you use my link in the description to sign up for Scrimba and you decide to upgrade to the pro plan, which unlocks a ton of different courses, you actually get a discount. Again, I partner with them because they are actually really good at building up junior developers. Check it out. What do you have to lose? Now let's get back to the video. Multitasking is a lie. So another thing is you need to make sure that you carve out time. That means like just making sure that you're consistent with it, but you carve out time at least three days a week, at least three days a week, at least an hour, preferably two. I would even say like if you're not carving out two at least three days a week, that is rough. A lot of you are gonna truly struggle to eventually learn everything that you need to. So if you can't even carve out six hours a week to learn to code, uh the chances of you becoming a developer are just they go significantly down. I'm just gonna be blunt with you. Um, I remember this is just a separate thought, but I think one of the things that got me thinking about this and ways to make this part-time learning to code journey actually effective, because most people are doing it, right? You gotta pay the bills. Um, I talked to, I was gonna leak it. I don't think he cares at this point, but um CEO of Rhythm School, I asked him why he doesn't offer a part-time program. I don't remember if I asked him on the podcast or not, but I'm leaking it anyways. And he does that, he's like I don't remember his exact words, but I'm so I'm kind of just summarizing. But essentially, this is really hard, and it's really hard to make it work. A lot of people aren't gonna make it work. He's like, you know, when we have them full time, it's um it's a lot easier, but it's just it's so incredibly hard to make part-time programs work. It usually requires a lot more, like coding boot camps that did that. It usually required, they'd say, like, oh yeah, 10 hours a week, no big deal. Uh it requires a lot more. A lot, a lot of people got frustrated with that. But it's the truth. Um now you can spread it out over time. I'm talking about a coding bootcamp that's trying to condense it, but I think another thing I want to touch on is we're gonna assume that you're doing it at least six hours every single week. And the reason why I'm splitting it up into three days is because cramming, I find that cramming one day doesn't work as well with a lot of people in retaining things. Because, you know, in my previous video, um, I talked about how even with the full day, you are going to just limit learning to two hours, like actually going through coursework for two hours max. But even two days a week, it's rough. I find the sweet spot is three days, spread it out just a little bit of time for consistency. You need that consistency and doing it once a week, you just start forgetting too much. You start forgetting too much, you're not applying it enough. You need to apply it consistently, preferably every other day minimum. I'm saying three days a week because maybe you could fit it into your weeks, but uh what I'm really emphasizing is at least every other day. Every day if you can. But not everyone can. But you're gonna find that even if you do three days a week, but you're just kind of doing a little bit here and there, you're gonna forget stuff. You're gonna forget a lot of stuff. Um you will become frustrated with how much you forget. Coding is a use it or lose it situation. It always has been. And you have to accept that that is part of your path, that you are gonna forget some stuff. It doesn't mean you need to go study in a course to refresh it. It means that you might need to think about like if this is something that I'm seeing on a lot of job postings or an interviews they're testing me over, let me figure out a way to implement it into my project to reinforce that concept, right? So maybe I have to look at an article real quick to kind of just refresh, but then I apply it. What happens is when you actually apply it in a real project, you'll probably forget it again, just a little bit, but when you reapproach it, it just comes back faster. So it's just repetition that is purposeful and that is practical. You are applying it. You have that combination, you're eventually gonna remember that concept for longer periods of time. And that is the most that you can hope for. You have to expect yourself to forget a lot. You have to be learning and reinforcing things more than you're forgetting, but you're gonna forget a lot. And that's your reality doing this part-time. More of a reality than people that are like have eight hours a day to do this, right? And you have to be kind to yourself. It doesn't mean you're stupid, it doesn't mean you're not gonna become a developer, it means that you need patience. And your strategy is expanded into many years. And this is the part that people don't like. When I say, like if someone had um two years to become a developer full time, they were doing it full-time. Um it might take at least two years. Whether they're going for front-end or back end, I say at least two years. If you're doing it part-time, you gotta expand that. I'm not saying that you gotta expand it fourfold. I don't think learning to code, it just doesn't work out like that. And I'm also kind of going off of averages from what I see. But it it's gonna take you longer than two years. A lot longer. And you have to be okay with that. But most importantly, you have to understand that it's not a quick fix for your financial situation. Now, maybe the market will improve at some point. Great. My estimations are going to change. But right now, for the next year, from what I see, what I'm just estimating, just like any other developer YouTuber is estimating, I think it's gonna be about a year um where it we're gonna be experiencing a rough market. I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. But I, you know, I don't dive deep into economics. I just try to look at data and patterns as much as I possibly can. And right now, this video is about a mindset. And I think that's the most important part of doing part-time. You have to develop a very patient and consistent and self-disciplined mindset to do this over years. The types of people that make part-time work while they're juggling full-time. If I were hiring you, I would trust you on my team more than people that just had no other responsibilities and they were just learning to code and took two years to get a dev job. You are gonna build yourself up way past what you thought if you stay consistent with it. Like your character, your self-discipline, your work ethic is going to be, it's gonna set you up for life. Employers know this. They know how hard it is to juggle. A lot of people that get into higher positions based off of them just being really fucking good at what they do and try to build, you know, even just their personality up, the way they interact with others, they care about self-development. They know how hard it truly is. And when you've got to juggle a bunch of other things, a lot of the self-development stuff, there's just so much that it's easy to push away out of your life. But if you were someone that stays consistent with your responsibilities and learning the code, and you know, there are a ton of commits that showcase that you've been at this for a long time and now you're building up into something, right? It's not just building a bunch of variety of projects over the next five years, like you have an aim. You, you know, in the last video we talked about you kind of have you're a little bit more mission-driven, like you you want to solve specific problems, right? And a lot of your coding journey is kind of leading up to that, and this is kind of how you stand out. So it can't just be just putting in the hours, you also have to be wise about it, and you have to tailor your path towards what you start getting more curious about with coding and in tech. But if you're consistent with that, you are very hireable. I think that's it. That's all I want to talk about. I just want to go over the mindset, and I I think if you adopt this mindset, I I think a lot of people are gonna be better off. And I also just I I want to see people that are just, you know, supporting families, supporting children, have a lot of other responsibilities. I want to see you succeed. Like people that kind of just have a bunch of money to sit on, um, or they don't have bills to pay and stuff like that. That that's awesome. I want them to get out of that situation, but I truly do empathize with people that are just trying to live better their lives. That's that's really tough. So I hope this helped.