[00:00:00]
[00:00:00] it's going to be super hard to get recruiters and hiring managers to even look at you.
[00:00:04] And it's kind of understandable, guys. They don't need to look at you. No matter how serious you are, no matter how motivated you are,
[00:00:09] they can't give Give you the chance because it's a risk for them.
[00:00:13] This is one of the reasons, by the way, I quit the bootcamp that I went to
[00:00:16] I told them, I said, you guys will teach me how to learn to code, but you guys won't teach me how to become a programmer
[00:00:20] When I work with students in my Inner Circle program
[00:00:22] I don't want them to do another youtube clone. I don't want them to do another e commerce app.
[00:00:27] That's not a project That's copying somebody else's code Okay, I get them to come up with their own projects and the reason for that is they need to understand how to design Software
[00:00:36] Welcome to Easier Said Than Done with me, Zubin Pratap, where I share with you the tens of thousands of dollars worth of self development that I did on my journey from 37 year old lawyer to professional software engineer. The goal of this podcast is to show you how to actually do those things that are easier said than done.
[00:00:55] hey guys, welcome back to the easier said than done and how to do it [00:01:00] podcast.
[00:01:00] So the purpose of today's podcast, and this one, I promise you is going to be shorter than my usual ones, is to talk through the top 10 reasons that I found, are problems for aspiring coders when they're learning to code, right?
[00:01:12] Especially the last three to five years. This is especially true the last three to five years.
[00:01:16] As it so happens in that time, I've done, you know, almost a thousand coaching calls and conversations with people who then, you know, some of them ended up being, long term students and some of them didn't, but I've had long conversations at least an hour long with almost a thousand people in the last, four to five years in this.
[00:01:33] And I got the AI to analyze those conversations and my notes on all of that and tell me what the top 10 reasons are. And here's the thing. It pulled out exactly these 10 reasons, which are the 10 things I also cover in my INNER CIRCLE PROGRAM for this, for this reason, because these are actually pretty much universal problems.
[00:01:49] For this particular episode, I'm actually just going to show you a LinkedIn post and, and walk through the 10 list items, right?
[00:01:56] Now for those of you who are watching, well, you get to watch what I'm sharing on the [00:02:00] screen for, but for those of you who are listening, you can check out the YouTube video if you want to see what's sharing on the screen.
[00:02:05] And I hope that you guys get a lot of value out of this, because I really want you to understand that there's nothing particularly unique and, and, uh, special about your circumstance. It's just that everyone has different circumstances
[00:02:16] But the experience they end up having because of the circumstances ends up being boiled down to Fairly non unique kinds of thing.
[00:02:23] So these 10 things are fairly universal regardless of the hundreds of different countries Uh context age groups backgrounds family situations all of that There are hundreds and hundreds of combinations of that but the actual Impact of that on your learning to code journey comes down to about these 10.
[00:02:38] So let's talk about it I'm going to share my screen here and here are the top 10 now This is just as a bit of context this came from this post that I put on LinkedIn Um, let me see if I can zoom in a bit. This is about two days ago. , and I said look , it's analyzed, um, you know, more than 1700 coaching sessions that I've had, with folks wanting to change their career in the last five years.
[00:02:57] And here are the top 10 problems that I've also talked about them in [00:03:00] this podcast, right. And here are the 10. And, and it did okay. This podcast , it's only a 1600. There, there are some, some other, posts, like the one I think I did yesterday, maybe, there you go.
[00:03:09] One day ago, you know, has had 64, 000 , in a day, 633 people interacting. Anyway, I'm going to share this, this document as well as I always do, in the show notes.
[00:03:17] So let's talk about the top 10 most common problems that aspiring coders have And like I said, this is based on my own research and my own direct experience But also based on the AI extracting all the information from my notes over the last five years, based on real conversations.
[00:03:31] What i'm going to do is i'm going to go through each of these 10 with you and i'm going to give you a little Bit of context to each so let's start with number one
[00:03:37] number one is people are absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of information and the lack of structure out there. There's just too much information in the internet now. It's all confusing, pulling people in different directions. There are people saying this and people saying that. And it's, it's really quite hard for people to deal with emotionally and mentally.
[00:03:53] And also when you don't have a lot of time, it's really, really hard.
[00:03:55] So. This is a major problem because it blocks learning. It prevents you from actually [00:04:00] making any progress and worse It makes people jump around a bit. We'll talk more about that in a moment.
[00:04:04] Now i've done another episode I think it was episode number 15 If i'm not mistaken that talks about why people get stuck in tutorial hell another sort of nuance to a point that will come later And i've also just finished recording an episode About the real reason why this happens, which is SEO search engine optimization
[00:04:19]
[00:04:39] [00:05:00]
[00:05:03] If you don't check out any other episode in my podcast, Check that one out when it comes out about the SEO , because I think it'll it'll Pull the curtain back on what's really going on in the internet and how marketers are hacking your brain, right?
[00:05:15] But you know, i've got an entire blog episode, where I even show you how the information on the internet is wrong. Even AI is getting it terribly wrong and speaking with total confidence and sending you links saying that that's what the links say But if you look at the links It doesn't actually say that so you can understand how dangerous that is from a learning point of view and from actually making progress.
[00:05:32] There's just too much junk in the world.
[00:05:33] Okay, so that's reason number one. People are overwhelmed. There's just too much information.
[00:05:36] Number two is even if you do choose to go down a certain path or invest in a certain type of education, or if you're doing it for free or whatever it is, people are having a lot of trouble.
[00:05:45] Understanding and applying the coding logic.
[00:05:47] Now coding has always been very hard Okay I the people i've spoken have been coders since the 80s before the internet was a thing Who explained how they learned to code back then it's it took days or weeks,
[00:05:57] to learn simple basic things Or what they'd consider [00:06:00] simple or basic now It's obviously not simple or basic if it takes that long to learn But the difficulty in understanding coding coding language is part of the game.
[00:06:06] It's part of the territory. Okay the reason why people are Thrown by this is because they're being made to believe that you can learn complex skills in in a weekend or worse You know in 90 days, you can become a professional coder. That's total BS, right? and the the way this shows up for a lot of people is this bit This bit is really important.
[00:06:22] A lot of people are saying that they've learned a lot But they don't know how to build anything. They've spent weeks and months Learning, you know, doing courses, doing tutorials, doing this, doing that, doing Codecademy, or whatever it is. These resources can teach you the ABCD, the alphabet, the basic, syntax and literacy.
[00:06:37] But that doesn't make you a poet, okay? And what you're trying to do as a software engineer is being a poet. You're not just learning the ABCD, the alphabet. You're being You're trying to you're trying to craft poetry. You're trying to build something, right? And so a lot of people have learned a lot but can't build anything And they don't understand how to solve real world problems with their coding literacy So that's number two.
[00:06:54] Number three and this is the big one and i've talked about this extensively on linkedin and you know Podcast that i've [00:07:00] been on is people especially junior engineers Do not know how to read code.
[00:07:04] They cannot understand code that is written by others. They can only write a little bit of code and create a component or click a button. Okay, guys, that's not what engineering is about. When you walk into your first job, all the code has been written already. Your job is not to write more code. Your job is to understand the code that's been written, find the bugs, fix them, add to them.
[00:07:23] You cannot add to code that's been written for years and years and years before you even got there. You cannot add to that code unless you understand how to read code, okay? So reading code is a huge problem and this is actually one of the big differences that separate the , amateur hobbyist from a professional.
[00:07:39] Okay, fourth problem is people don't have a clear roadmap and therefore they need personalized guidance, right? Typically, it takes people six months to one year of struggling before they come to this conclusion Because there's so much BS on the internet about yeah, you can just do this Here's a roadmap and it's you know It's longer than toilet paper like it's just a huge roadmap and people try and they bounce around and they go to the next [00:08:00] shiny object and then they realize actually I have no idea what I'm doing.
[00:08:04] I'm kind of guessing my way here. I have no road map. I have no plan It's really frustrating. I'm not making any progress. It's a year later. My husband my wife whoever is is starting to lose faith like it's it's a problem Okay, so without a clear road map you are going to be flying blind.
[00:08:17] Would you ever get on an airplane when the pilot wasn't entirely sure where they were going?
[00:08:21] No, you wouldn't
[00:08:23] Don't do that with your career Okay, take it seriously .
[00:08:25] Number five in the top 10 reasons is lack of confidence and practical coding experience Lots of people spend a lot of time doing the easy thing. What is the easy thing? Learning to code and writing code. It's quick wins You get a lot of sugary hits a lot of the platforms are designed to make you feel like a hacker Like a really cool coder person But then you can't actually do anything in real life.
[00:08:42] And so the first time you try to build a project in your own, maybe it's just a simple little, you know, toy app that you're doing for your portfolio and you get badly stuck and you can't solve anything. And you don't even know the questions to ask. It completely destroys people's confidence. And they realize it's because I actually don't have any practical coding experience.
[00:08:58] Everything I learned. [00:09:00] Was making it ridiculously easy or making it very superficial and it wasn't real learning.
[00:09:04] Again, i've talked about why this happens in that other episode on SEO and and tutorial hell So definitely check those out.
[00:09:10] Okay, so that's number five Number six is people have actually managed to learn enough code to actually get an interview which in itself is quite an achievement Okay, it's quite an achievement because lots of people the vast majority of people will learn to code You will learn the ABCD you will learn how to code. String together words and make a sentence and then a paragraph.
[00:09:28] Absolutely. That's not hard The hard part is writing a book and then getting published, right? Similarly, the hard part with coding is not learning to code is even getting the market that doesn't know you Doesn't see you as having any track record because you don't even getting them to give you one interview is a huge achievement now This happens quite often.
[00:09:45] So people do manage to learn to code but don't get any interviews That's why a lot of the people who come to me to join the inner circle program for mentorship Are actually ex bootcamp graduates, right? I think in the last 12 months, almost 40 percent were ex bootcamp folks.
[00:09:56] So that's because they know how to code.
[00:09:58] They know the literacy. They don't know how to be a coder.
[00:09:59] They [00:10:00] don't know how to be an engineer and they're not going to get a single interview. So number six is the challenge of getting job interviews and actually getting a job in the field. And this is, It's unfortunate, but it's especially harder for people who are there on a visa, who are immigrants, and don't have local job experience.
[00:10:14] It's really hard. This is not just specific to code, by the way I've moved countries, I've lived and worked in four different countries now, and I can tell you, it's always harder for the person who's coming in than it is for the person with local work experience. But even if you're a local, if you've never done the job before, it's going to be super hard to get recruiters and hiring managers to even look at you.
[00:10:31] And it's kind of understandable, guys. They don't need to. They don't need to look at you. No matter how serious you are, no matter how earnest you are, no matter how motivated you are,
[00:10:38] no matter how much you know, you just need one chance. You can prove it to them. They don't need to give you that chance.
[00:10:43] They don't. Even if they like you, they may love you, they may respect you, they may think, gosh, I wish I could give this person a chance. But they can't give Give you the chance
[00:10:51] because it's a risk for them. They could get fired for doing the wrong decision. And as you've seen from other episodes with recruiters that we talk about quite openly [00:11:00] here,
[00:11:00] recruiting is very risky and extremely expensive for companies and hiring managers, extremely expensive and risky.
[00:11:05] So for them to get it wrong is a huge problem. It's a huge problem. So they're not, no matter how much they like you, They're not, statistically, very few of them are going to be willing to take the chance.
[00:11:15] Okay, you have to make it risk free for them to even consider you.
[00:11:19] That's way harder than learning to code.
[00:11:21] So that's problem number six.
[00:11:23] Problem number seven is a very common problem for my students until they come to me, is they're typically in their 30s or 40s,
[00:11:29] and they're really struggling to find the time to balance it with other grown up commitments. They've got mortgages, they've got houses, they've got kids, they've got jobs, they've got full time jobs,
[00:11:36] they've got long commutes, um, you know, and they try to do They're stealing an hour here or there.
[00:11:42] They're not managing their time properly. And even if they did have enough time, they don't know how to fill that time with the right content, right? Meanwhile, they're struggling to do 10, 20 hours a week, and their competition is doing 40, 50 hours a week. Why? Because their competition are full time coders, not other people like them.
[00:11:56] You're not competing with other career changers. Career changers are very rare. [00:12:00] So, if you're learning to code to try and compete in the job market,
[00:12:03] Your competition is not people like you. It's people who already have experience and who are already in the job market
[00:12:08] that you're trying to enter. Okay. So with all of that, when you're trying to balance your busy life and your lifestyle, it's kind of hard.
[00:12:14] You're not going to be able to manage to do much at all or make any progress. And if what little time you have to spent guessing, well, you can imagine how much that, that problem compounds.
[00:12:22] Okay number eight most difficult thing and by the way, this is not prioritized or ordered in any way These are just the top most common problems not in any particular order So number eight is people have a difficulty understanding the basics of coding and really need to work on them to be fluid.
[00:12:36] Now, this is kind of relevant to the previous thing about inability to understand code, difficulty understanding, applying coding logic. Now, the different, the difference here, and I haven't really expressed this correctly, it's not so much the basics of coding, but it's actually the basics of programming.
[00:12:50] Right? And that's the difference. Coding, I would think of coding as, you're writing code. Programming is a lot of thinking, design, analysis, and reading. A lot of it, okay? And the [00:13:00] actual writing of the code is a small part. Now, when I was at Google, for example, there's a book called Software Engineering at Google, where it tried to explain the difference between, Being a developer and engineering.
[00:13:10] It's kind of the similar difference between coding and programming. As a developer, you're writing a lot of the code, you're in development mode, you're writing code to make it work, right? It's, it's incremental, and it's not in any way a polished thing, but as an engineer, you're thinking about very different things.
[00:13:25] As an engineer, thinking about things like the long term maintainability, the scalability, the architecture, the longevity, how the system will perform or degrade over time. That's engineering coding is I need to add this little feature. I need to get this button on the screen. I need to have the server respond in this way, whatever, that's the development phase, right?
[00:13:44] So you write code to develop and then you think and design and architect to engineer. Different skill That's really what number eight is where people really understand the basics of the syntax. They know a couple of for loops and they learn some of the cool syntax and they can get a hello world app running or they can get a basic website going, [00:14:00] but they have no idea how to be fluent in these skills, how to use all the tools, how to actually architect a system, right?
[00:14:06] Number nine. Is people who are established engineers a lot of them reach out to me because they have dead end jobs Now guys, let me let me be really clear about this I don't care what your influencer your favorite influence on social media says The vast majority of people in software engineering around the world don't earn six figures In in dollars. Okay, that is a very US thing. If you've seen the interview I did with John Crickett on his podcast, he talks about that, right? Even in England, the top Google engineers and stuff like that don't really earn what the U. S. counterparts do in dollars.
[00:14:36] But that's because, hey! The price of a banana in one country is different from the price of a banana in another country It's the same fruit, but it's a different price because local markets matter. You are a kind of fruit You're a kind of product in the labor marketplace Your price in the labor marketplace is going to be different depending on which country you're in which country you're based in and which country You know you're working in etc So finding better paying jobs is a very common problem for established engineers because they [00:15:00] end up getting stuck in dead end coding work. This happens a lot with bootcamp graduates Because the bootcamps are incentivized to You know, because you guys asked for this, give me a job guarantee.
[00:15:08] And they're like, okay, we'll give you a job guarantee, but you have to accept any sort of IT job that does this. Right. And it may not even be a coding role. It could be a job in it, but that's not coding. And a lot of people who are bootcamp graduates get stuck in dead end it jobs with minimal coding.
[00:15:21] They're not engineering jobs. Or they get hired by the bootcamp to fill up the statistics. And so kind of want to look for the next job after that, right? This is one of the reasons, by the way, I quit the bootcamp that I went to back in 2019 after one week I quit. And I, I told them, I said, you guys will teach me how to learn to code, no doubt about it, but you guys won't teach me how to become a programmer and you guys will definitely not help me shift career because.
[00:15:43] All my instructors are ex bootcamp graduates waiting to find their first job and that's not going to work for me. So the important thing here is to find better jobs You need to know how the labor marketplace works and you need to know how to manage your career
[00:15:54] not find your next job That's a different skill.
[00:15:56] That's more about interviewing building a career is about having market [00:16:00] insight knowing your goals your drivers
[00:16:01] What your long term goals are and how do you assemble a plan for that? Okay, so the difference is If you want to travel, you have to, and let's say you're flying from A to B, well, you have to get to the airport to get to the plane.
[00:16:13] Okay, that's a necessary step. That's what the job is. It's like getting to the plane. Okay, but actually building a career is more like knowing the destination you want to get to, understanding what transport logistics look like on the other end, booking your hotel. That's what it is. Okay. So your your entire holiday the entire journey and trip planning is your career boarding The flight is the first job.
[00:16:32] Okay, so you have to think about it in these long term ways
[00:16:35] Now the next problem the last problem that i'm going to talk about today Number 10 is people struggling to learn specific frameworks and when to apply them and when not You know how to actually use them in projects and this is because there is so much SEO generated social media generated rubbish about Learn this cool new framework learn that cool new language, right?
[00:16:54] Again, if you watch or you listen to the episode of mine About SEO and how you guys are being hacked for this [00:17:00] you will see why those content pieces are even being produced They're being produced so that you just go and watch the episode. Okay guys I'll i'll get into another 45 minute rant over here So the reason why all of you guys are struggling with specific frameworks and applying them is because you're learning The wrong, you're learning the wrong thing.
[00:17:18] You're not learning how to be a programmer. You're learning the framework completely different thing Just because I know how to play the guitar doesn't mean I know how to compose music Doesn't mean I know how to run a rock band doesn't mean I know how to do music videos Okay as a musician as a professional rock star, you need to know all these things Similarly, with programming, you have to learn the fundamentals of programming, of architecture, of system design, of scaling systems, and all the tooling that teams use, and you have to learn how to learn really fast.
[00:17:45] When I work with students in my Inner Circle program, I have two modules on the neuroscience of learning and the neuroscience of designing your environment for learning.
[00:17:54] Those are two different skills. I have entire modules on that. Okay, and then we talk about how do you design your own little project?
[00:17:59] [00:18:00] I get people to start designing their project before they even start learning to code I get them to think about how would they architect a little project that they do for their portfolio, right? Because I don't want them to do another youtube clone. I don't want them to do another e commerce app.
[00:18:12] That's not a project That's copying somebody else's code Okay, I get them to come up with their own projects and the reason for that is they need to understand how to design Software and if they don't know how to write software, obviously they can't design software But that's part of the learning is show them that since you don't know what you don't know Your design is not gonna work .
[00:18:29] You haven't thought about all the things that are gonna matter and Every time they do that, we do a new iteration of their, of their coding project, right? We say, okay, let's revise your, design. Okay, now that you've done, you know, a month and a half of this programming fundamentals and these concepts in programming, how would your design change, right?
[00:18:46] That's how I do it, because it has to be a process of apprenticeship, constant evolution, and it's a feedback loop. You learn something new,
[00:18:53] your plan needs to change, your design needs to change, your goals need to change, and it's a loop. You have to keep doing that.
[00:18:58] So guys, these [00:19:00] are the top 10 reasons why people struggle to learn to go to, even if they learn to code, what I really mean is they struggle to actually become professional coders.
[00:19:06] A lot of people learn to code and just never get a single interview. That's just like, I'm not kidding. In my estimation, it's more than 85%, maybe even more than 90 percent of people learn to code, but never get a single interview, right? If you include all those people who sign up for courses, all the people who, you know, go to Codecademy or hang around the blogs of the world and start building things and they learn a bit and six months later, most of them have given up.
[00:19:25] I count them in the statistics of they never even got an interview. Because they get stuck in these 10 problems. Okay, so don't get stuck in these 10 problems And if you do then maybe you need a bit of help either with me or somebody else
[00:19:35] reach out Let's see, you know how we can help you who you need to help But if you're seeing these problems and you're probably seeing at least three or four at a time
[00:19:43] Then you know that you're stuck in a path where you may not actually have the solution And especially in this day and age with the internet I would be very skeptical of most things I saw on the internet and
[00:19:51] that's why I talk so openly about this is because I'm Hoping to earn your trust by being really really open and radically transparent about all this stuff Because there's so much bs on the internet and it's not working.
[00:19:59] [00:20:00] It screwed me up five years half a decade of my life I lost to the bs on the internet. Now i'm rabidly against that, right? So i'm trying to explain to you what's actually going on and telling you guys You're probably better off getting some sort of help if not me somebody else
[00:20:13] Okay, but get help because these problems cannot be solved by somebody who's never solved them before Okay, that's that's a key point.
[00:20:22] You cannot be expected to know what you don't know If you don't know what you don't know, how do you solve these problems if you've never been to siberia? How are you going to navigate navigate in siberia? Right? That's the problem You cannot navigate in siberia when you've never been there. That's why you need help That's all i'm trying to say.
[00:20:38] Hope this helps keep 10. Follow me on on linkedin Here you go. This is my profile. Go ahead. Follow me and I will see you on the next episode. All right. Cheers
[00:20:49] Just subscribe, you know you gotta do it.
