Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtYW3IlJMUE
Transcript¶
Hey, good morning, I’m going to walk you through today how I am become programmer essentially I want to clue you in on why on Earth you would want to do what I have done that kind of day life and career path and the pros and cons and how you got here.
A brief overview of what I have become so far.
I have done a variety of internships throughout my academic career. I’ve worked at M&P IBM and currently I work at a little startup based out of San Francisco called wise assistant and that’s that’s been quite fun in addition to that I am active in quite a few clubs that you are. I am the lead programmer and… I mean I guess head of the web development team for UOE racing but primarily the motor controller developer I’m the webmaster and IEEE uottawa and I also participate in an open source project that that is going quite well as well. I’ve currently been. Giving a contract to your contract for a full-time position at IBM after after I finish my schooling so that’s. Awfully nice in his tumultuous time of you know job insecurity and… All that really the long and short of it is if you want stable stable employment that allows you to work anywhere in the world are you want or if you want to live if you want to live with family if you want to live on the beach you know it’s all down to you then you might want to consider when I consider being a computer programmer in some capacity.
Now there are definitely. They’re definitely tiers to programming, but it may surprise you just how much are how much how little programming you actually need to know to be a programmer quote on quote.
So how did I get here, you ask?
Well firstly you need to be a very honest person if you want to survive in any industry. People will really see your value if you can actually perform and… Use the Frameworks and tools that you say you are able to use. In this industry there are plenty of people who will say that they are one thing but. They got a job and they’re not actually able to do them and I’ve seen people like that get fired and as short as a leak and that was actually during my first person to trip so that was that was just a little bit scary but honesty is it is definitely number one on.
I think moving UPS running into straight but certainly certainly to remind it helps a lot point B is genuine interest and… Whatever you’re going to end up using. If you’re not of course you’re going to scream up you’re going to scream to the sky once in awhile saying oh dear God why have you created this abominable terrible thing but 90% of the time. You should be pretty happy with what you do. As a wise man once said you also need to be relatively monomaniacal if you choose this as a career like any career you need to be 100% committed and dedicated to doing just programming most of the day every day otherwise you’re never going to rise above you know the rest of the [people out] there and you’re never going to really make your mark on the world.
If you want a good job in programming you will need to work hard at it and if that’s… I mean we’ll get career paths later in the video. So another big question is. Do I need to go to school to get a good programming job, and I would say the answer is definitely no, but and this is a big but. School does provide an excellent method to. Tube to give you a framework in which you can grind for hours and hours on relatively meaningless projects and you learn you learn to grind at school essentially now there are definitely a few useful courses that will teach you how to sing. In a way that will really help you with programming computer architecture courses are fantastic for this programming courses obviously are helpful for helping you think like a programmer, and you’ll be forced to hopefully. Diner Attica. Academic tenure you’ll be forced to have an encounter with philosophy and literature and as much as people will dismiss it ethics and programming is ridiculously important considering we now have you no Google building the largest supercomputer ever based on you know they’re trying to build a hive mind with nodes as us people. Google’s basically nerve from Neon Genesis Genesis Evangelion. That aside. Ethics is pretty important. You definitely want to keep your book Emerald around when your programming to just keep in mind that you are making things poor people you’re not trying to make things to exploit people cuz it is very easy just to say okay let’s just collect everything.
But back to school school really only matters as a gauntlet of source it’ll teach you how to. Grind on work that you don’t necessarily want I can play for hours and hours at and that’s very useful in programming because once in awhile you’ll come up on a task that will take you. Don’t say okay this you take a few days but then. You digging a little more complexity grows exponentially and you end up having to grind for 2 weeks on this absolutely mind-numbingly complicated and convoluted tasks. Yeah that’ll happen sometimes so and school will teach you how to get through those and no. No employer will appreciate you more than the employer that you do something like that for like that is that is incredibly valuable skill the ability to sit down grind through problems I had to learn this the hard way during my internship at IBM. I was at that point in time I was a bit more of a theoretical programmer let’s say I’d like to design top down so I would want to have the final vision for the program completely kind of spect out and ready and then I would start building from the largest components down to the smallest components my other teammates. Well one other teammate in particular. He would. Just charge Full Speed Ahead on whatever tasks he was given he would build on the bottom-up and he would just try to get working part after working part after working part connected, and I would say that that and he was able to deliver far more than I did during that internship and because of that. I recognize the value of. Baja design over top-down design in time crunch obviously you don’t need obviously you can never use one or the other entirely. But. You need to be able to grind. In any career but it’s especially appreciated in programming. Alright so. What do you need to do to actually get some sort of a programming job. So I would say you need to first of all you need to start programming now and you need to practice for about a year before y’all know enough little things to be useful somewhere. That’s really only half the battle as long as you know. Web development I would say the easiest thing to get into as long as you know a good amount of JavaScript in HTML and CSS and you can program like simple back end and a simple front end and you can just prove that you can understand essentially how everything is working even if it’s a small set of things if you can demonstrate that you understand the mechanisms and how how that whole system works people will be glad to hire you but only if you learn by number to how to be articulate. Now programming. In and of itself the actual Act of programming is it’s really only half of your job or less the other half of your job is communicating what you know communicating what you’re going to do and collaborating with other people on your team to ensure that you’re at the end of the day able to form a cohesive whole of a product and you’re able to ship that to a client. The communication learning how to communicate is Numero Uno really, and how can you learn that well. Debate Club you learn a communication by communicating essentially so. You can work with your friends I’m done projects you can join a debate Club you can. I don’t know man just. …. Batak. In a situation where you are needing to convey something to someone else.
And I would say that if you really grind for a year and it’s okay if you’re working part time at Starbucks or something but if you really grind learning JavaScript in HTML and CSS for a year you can easily become a s***** web developer from there you can. You can climb the ladder you can continue to learn you can become more important and get there and better jobs, and eventually you will be a success. Help my baby ja what you up.
So. I suppose one final note would be something a very wise man once said. When you’re young and a bright-eyed young kiddo. You have the equivalent of a huge heaping pile of cash just like the Joker in The Dark Knight songs. You got this huge gigantic heaping pile of cash behind you and that cash is representative of time actually. When you’re young you have so much time to burn and learn and explore and your mind is just so valuable you can learn things really quick, and so when you’re young I do recommend. Learning as much as you possibly can in as many fields as you can, and then picking one. If that one thing is programming congratulations and welcome to the club and if it’s not good on you, and I hope you are success in whatever the man you choose, but it’s important that you it’s important that you actually do that it’s important you don’t spend your time as you age. Continuing to focus on a large variety of of little things because no one no one will pay you for being mediocre at something people pay you for being the best at something or at least good and to become good at something. You need to focus basically exclusively on that thing you can’t. You can’t be a jack-of-all-trades and expect to be important, and I suppose that’s my final bit of advice to you if you want to become a programmer you need to dedicate yourself to it and you need to grind on it basically 100% of the time and I’m not saying that have you know I’ll work like Harmony that’s probably one of the best things about programming is that you can have a work-life Harmony you can you know lock yourself in a room do this for 8 hours a day and then. After that you can don’t enjoy dinner with your family and watch movies and… You know once the world opens back up I’m sure you can enjoy The Nightlife and whatever City you’re in. How how long are you out here, but I balance is very valuable. I’m at work I’m at work. I think that’s all for this video.
Stay sharp and… Standby.
Ryan out.