Working Full-time and Trying to Become a Developer is Almost Impossible

Working a full-time job and trying to become a developer is almost impossible. It's not just you. It is a REALLY difficult path... and maybe there's some solace in that. There's also something that's been lost in this new AI slop world that I truly believe holds a lot of aspiring developers back.

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Transcript

Don Hansen: 0:00

Hello. I want to address something that I don't think enough people are talking about. It's almost impossible to become a developer when you are working full-time and you are trying to learn to code outside of your work hours. This has been true even before this market. It is really difficult to juggle this consistently for a long period of time. I usually recommend people who are going at it full time, learning to code full time, and they're serious about it, they're resourceful. I usually recommend give it two years and three months minimum before you are getting serious interviews, or you are getting late-stage interviews and you are really starting to become competitive. Doing this part-time, like learning to code part-time while you're working full-time, man, that is rough. That is difficult. And I think there are two, there are a lot of things that are, there are a lot of challenges that come with that. But two in particular, one, you need to be consistent for a long period of time. It's very hard to be consistent for that long. But two, your knowledge starts fading. You can only do so much each week to learn new concepts, but also try to reinforce old concepts and try to be resourceful and clever enough to combine old concepts into new things that you're building while you're learning new stuff. You're not supposed to be perfect at that. No one is. And yet that's what you're supposed to do. Because being a developer is a use it or lose it situation, and even foundational concepts that you're learning can fade away. You don't use all foundational concepts once you start niching down into something specific that you're trying to build. Sometimes you go a month or two without using something, and because you didn't need to. Makes sense, but you are just spreading out the amount of time and increasing the chances that that knowledge is going to fade away. It's just hard. Does that mean you can never grow while learning to code part-time? No, it's just harder. It takes a lot longer, and you're having to refresh on concepts more often than people that went full force full time with it. So I say that because you need to give yourself a break in permission to not be getting competitive interviews right now, to not be making headway, to not be hitting your goals of finding a job this year. It's the goals are well, I would argue you should aim for goals where you can actually control the actions to that you can take to meet that goal, right? It shouldn't be outcomes-based because I think that can be very disappointing. But you need to give yourself a little bit of a break. You're going to forget a lot. And it's going to be very tempting to lean on AI slop to get you through. Holy shit, I cannot emphasize this enough. You are not at a stage where you should be listening to any content creator who's telling you to agentic or to lean on agentic coding to catch up, to be competitive. I cannot tell you how uncompetitive that makes you, how unmarketable that makes you. And you just you need to relax and give it time and you'll eventually blossom and become this amazing developer. Like we're just trying to fucking capture your emotion. That's how we get engagement on YouTube. God, I like I have a whole rant. But please stop putting influencers on pedestals. Most of the time, we don't know what the fuck we're talking about. So hopefully you don't just have a favorite influencer that you're listening to blindly. Hopefully, you're trying to aggregate some of this information. But even from people from my own community, I think I see a lot of people get very ambitious very quickly and they get that motivation, they get that fire under their butt, and then it dies because of course it dies. To have endless motivation is just unrealistic. It's not going to happen. And I think if you went into trying to become a developer because you were curious about it, you kind of just you stopped asking the question, what language should I learn first? And you just picked up something and you built something. You tried something out because your next step is to try something else out. That's one of the best ways to enter tech. To be curious and to not how do I want to say this? To not make every single action you take of trying to grow as a developer and learn to code be what is going to make me the most marketable, what is going to make me stand out, what is going to get me a job. Because the people that continue to follow that path and that as much of a linear path as possible, you are just a templated developer that is competing with so many other people, so many other templated developers who never really explored their curiosity, never really wanted to solve problems in tech. They just want to follow a templated path. Well, guess what? So does everyone else. How the fuck are you going to stand out by doing the same templated path every other developer does? Enjoy tech. Enjoy learning a new language. Enjoy getting more slowing down with your project because you want to explore Vim. Maybe I'm projecting there. Maybe I need to do that. But like just get lost in something stupid. All right, people in my community, um, they'll just finally ditch Windows, which I encourage everyone to consider doing. But they'll ditch Windows and just be debugging Linux for like a week straight. Yeah, they fell behind on their project work, but they learned a lot and they're having fun with it. And I need to, no, I don't need to, I want to see more people trying to break into tech having fun, getting curious, and like exploring something that they find fascinating so much that they dive deep into it. They really explore the documentation. If you're learning a new language, or even if it's like you want to learn 3.js or whatever, like just spending a few months on something to dive deep enough and learn that thing and build something with it, even if it's a shit product or shit app or project, you're still going to grow significantly from being obsessed with something like that. That obsession is what I find that a lot of experienced developers had at some point. They just kept diving deeper and deeper and deeper into something. I think there's a certain point, if it's not marketable, you might need to cut yourself off, but it doesn't mean you can't find significant growth in that type of exploration with tech. And not everyone needs to become a developer. I say this all the time. I don't know why. Fuck, the industry is so weird right now. I don't even I don't even know why. Like, if you don't really enjoy coding, I don't know why the fuck you're trying to become a developer. This is not a get rich, quick solution. It never was, and it's so we're so much further from that even being a possibility at this point. Like there's so many opportunities in tech that maybe you would enjoy. Enjoy enough to dive deep enough for long enough. And when you get home from 40 hours of work, you spend some time with your spouse, you spend some time with your kids, and then you love what you're doing so much that you get lost in it for a couple of hours. Every other day, three times a week. You find that path, you find that interest in tech. That's that's what a lot of people who have been in tech found a long time ago that I think we're losing in this new weird AI era. But that's for another video. It's a whole other conversation. Please give yourself permission for this to take a very long time.