⚠️ WARNING: I won’t be giving you answers to determine your choice of occupation, just presenting observations and what I’ve spoken with people while in the field about and presenting it as more a “This is how things are” sort of thing
Intros and prerequisites
For the number of years that I have been doing this, I can say programming is not for everyone. Before I can elaborate on what I mean, first we must come to a shared description of what is programming which will be used across the whole article.
What is programming? In its simplest abstraction, you are giving input something (i.e. Computer) and that computation will then send output.
Input -> Computation -> Output
With that you can scale what these definitions mean based on whatever you end up doing, like if you’re trying to make a website, you’re writing with a list of text files that gets sent to the browser then the browser takes that and gives you the webpage with all the styling, interactions, and whatever it needs to function.
HTML,CSS,JavaScript (Input) -> Browser (Computation) -> What you see on the browser (Output)
Where do I start?
With the advent of the internet, the information is out there. But with like a couple of things, for the first couple of months I hope you have the patience to “soldier through” as it were, cause you’re gonna be hitting your head on the table a lot to get something to work!
Best thing to try first is finding something you wanna program, or create with the tools that are available, depending on your age, I guess look through a programming Reddit or dedicated discord server for some inspiration or need something for yourself in your day-to-day.
Do you need to go to college for programming?
Based on having been to college myself, it is not all bad, you do get some benefits from taking a 2-3 year course, especially if you’re less the self-motivating type like I was before college. But what I’ve started learning later on is, especially if you keep going with this, the content that you learn from the course becomes less and less relevant by the time you go off to the workforce and start learning more things you never learned in the classroom that you can take anywhere else. Plus some might give you lessons that might end up being not the most effective way of doing things.
What is it all for?
How you’re gonna go about things in the programming space is highly gonna depend on what you wanna get into. If you wanna go into working on Systems Architecture, Robotics, AI, or OS development, you’ll have jobs for a while, if you wanna build Funnel sites, CRUD web/mobile applications, or Data Science tooling, depending on how far & fast the AI singularity ends up going, those peoples jobs are gonna be numbered, or at least majority reduced the number of people needed for that kinda work.
For a person being in that line of work, it is kinda scary to think about, but that’s progress I guess. The majority of the work is sort of being a translator that takes Insert Language of the Day here implement business logic and create a front-end dashboard widget to interact with it. Why they are a lot of people needed for these kinds of jobs during the time I’m writing is cause, the current tooling is not great for dealing with the years of weird decisions that every browser vendor, and other developers have made which makes creating an app more convoluted. Which why you see a trend of tho the tooling has become more abstract and “simpler” to deal with, the productivity of development hasn’t really gone up.
If you wanna get into it as a tinkering hobby that’s cool too, but depending on what you’re going into there’s going to be a decent amount of time and effort dedicated to even a fraction of the iceberg which is software development. So unless you’re a young kid just trying to figure stuff out, or a curious person that just wants to play around with stuff or troubleshoot something, the return on investment is not there to make it a hobby, even through donations you have to become a cult of personality to have people throw money at you, at least from what I’ve observed.
Try to keep at it / Conclusions
If what I’m saying it starting to detract you from taking on the skill set, don’t, at least not the first couple of months on it, like with many things in life it is gonna take some time and practice to develop the skill and get better at what you’re looking for. Programming is a useful skill and a better understanding of your machinery will be a net-benefit to your everyday life and technology is more and more in our everyday lives kinda like driving.
The main thing I wanna get across is, with anything in life you gotta make a conscious effort and intent to what you wanna do/learn. I’m just giving a general overview of what you might have to discover and go through once you start following the path and I try go give it from a couple of stages in peoples lives, other than procreation nothing is ever too late to do something.