@quincy
About
Nothing here yet.
Available for
Nothing here yet.
Nothing here yet.
Nothing here yet.
Congratulations to Sandeep Panda , Syed Fazle Rahman , and the entire Hashnode community on this recent growth. You all have always had some of the best engineering chops, and it looks like you all are getting your growth chops too. I plan to continue sharing more of my personal articles here as well on my DevBlog.
Hi Bello, For tips on how to become a "world class developer" – I personally think tons of practice is the key. Solving all the Project Euler problems. Building your own operating system. Building your own compiler. Designing your own programming language. All the things computer science students dread, but some of them do put in the time to accomplish. But that is just to be a "world class developer" who might become the head of engineering at a Fortune 500 company, or a developer at an extremely selective company like Valve, or work at CERN or DARPA. A better path is to just take your time and actively steer your developer career in more and more technical direction as you progress. Over the course of 10 or 20 years, you can get exposed to a lot of problems and a lot of solutions. You can come out the other side a wisened sage who can solve problems on the whiteboard in a few hours that might take a team of less experienced developers weeks to figure out. You don't have to be a world class developer to have a successful career. But software is a deep, deep field and you can spend your entire life progressing if you want to.
It is all situational. If I really needed the money to provide for my family, I would do pretty much anything at any hourly rate. But if you're in a position where you can be a bit pickier, and are able to invest more time in exploring opportunities, you should. I recommend this article by Haseeb Qureshi. He is in the US (which I think still has the highest average pay for developers in the world) but much of his advice will still be relevant in the Philippines: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer-ee17cccbdab6/
My philosophy on this: I treat articles, podcasts, videos like water rushing past me. I assume that I will only get busier and busier, and if a resource isn't worth my time now, there will never be a time where it will be worth it. So I just let it flow right past, and I keep moving forward. I used to feel guilty about not keeping up with things, or seeing an article and thinking "gee I should really read that." But now I just say to myself: maybe I'll stumble upon it again in a Google search at some point if it's really that important. Don't feel bad about not being able to swallow the ocean. You are but one man with one belly to fill with water. It is just the nature of things.
First of all, I was a lot older when I started freeCodeCamp. I was 34, and I had already worked as a teacher (and eventually a school director) for about 10 years. I don't know how old you are, but I find there's this misconception that people in their 20s should be starting companies or nonprofits, and I think - sure if your parents are rich or if you went to Stanford / MIT and have lots of friends with money - go for it. But for most people, it's way too risky. You see the Mark Zuckerbergs or the world and you think: "Oh, a 22 year old college drop out can do it. It's possible. Maybe I can do it." Mark Zuckerberg was rich and his parents hired a private programming tutor for him while he was still in high school. Far more common is for people to exhaust their resources and have to move back in with their parents. It's much more effective to spend the first decade or two of your career working for other people, climbing into a management role, and learning on their dime. Life is long. Your confidence will grow with time. And that confidence will be well-founded. It won't be blind hope. It will be insight informed by experience. If you are feeling freaked out at the prospect of starting a project, you are trying to tell yourself something. Don't jump off the bridge if you don't yet know what's below the water. Instead take your time to do lots of small experiments where you can survive failure. With planning and preparation, your odds of success go up dramatically.
Hey Awais, Thanks for your kind words. I'm a fan of yours and your courses as well. There are no easy answers to your question. We are putting on a free 4-hour conference next week, where we will grapple with many of the implications of the pandemic and how they will affect developer opportunities. I encourage you to come: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/lockdownconf-free-developer-conference/
My advice is hang in there and finish college. This isn't just a sunk cost fallacy – if you leave college mid-way you might as well have never gone, statistically. Make the best of it, and supplement your instruction there with lots of practice projects, hackathons, and free online courses.
