Re:Career advice for young system programmers
by tomjakubowski on Friday August 18, 2023 @05:14PM
(#37182205)
> For one, self-learning just damn hard. Staying motivated to put in self-guided 8+hours everyday without natural peers, external structure and good external evaluation is just hard. You can sustain it for spurts, like 1 summer or in my case 1 whole year, but it erodes your mental health.
Learning for learning's sake, or because you want to get a job as a dev: that I can see being a grind, with motivation being difficult to find.
But if you have a idea for a product, and you want to make it concrete - the motivation is easy. I think most of the self-taught developers I know (myself included) started that way: they wanted to make something, and so they learned how to make software on the fly, while building their thing.
Re:Career advice for young system programmers
by mcguire on Friday August 18, 2023 @05:56PM
(#37182685)
That is how you get depth with no breadth.
For one, self-learning just damn hard. Staying motivated to put in self-guided 8+hours everyday without natural peers, external structure and good external evaluation is just hard. You can sustain it for spurts, like 1 summer or in my case 1 whole year, but it erodes your mental health.
It is never clear when a topic is especially important. I can't go to office hours to clarify certain doubts. I can't take on especially daunting tasks that I could with a group of peers together. Worst is that env setups themselves lead to you getting stuck doing accessory work, instead of focusing on the main topic you do want to learn. Honestly, finding top quality coursework (MIT OCW is gold), assignments and notes was trivial. It was everything else that was really hard.
My self-learning tendencies didn't magically go away when I started my masters. I still leveraged all of them and I still do. But, it did solve a lot of my the challenges that came with being self-guided.