[00:00:00] Zubin: Hey guys and welcome to the new episode of easier said than done on how to do it
[00:00:04] the first thing that I want to talk to you guys about today is tutorial hell and what is it right and my goal For you today is to make sure that you know everything you need to know so that you no longer fall into that pit of Despair that hellish place known as tutorial hell and you can actually make progress And you're coding and learning to code and getting the skills journey.
[00:00:23] and if you stick around to the end, I'm going to give you a little bit of an insider's insight, something that is not new, but maybe new to all of you about why coding and learning to code and being a professional coder are all very different things.
[00:00:36] But that's going to be towards the end, because I have to set up this entire conversation about tutorial hell and why so many of you fall into that hole before you can actually connect the dots of what I'm about to tell you.
[00:00:47] 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.
[00:01:07] Zubin: So let's jump into the episode.
[00:01:09] Let's First start with
[00:01:10] what the heck is tutorial hell?
[00:01:12] Well, it happens when we use google or blogs or anything like that to direct our learning right
[00:01:18] when it's self directed learning And it happens because we
[00:01:21] get stuck in this endless loop of following written guides and youtube tutorials That is often suggested to us by various algorithms like the youtube algorithm Or suggested to us by friends or just by some other blog or some random unstructured way of learning Okay, so that's what you total hell is when you bounce from one to the other without a clear plan but it happens because of the way the algorithms work because of the way social media influencers tell you stuff or because of the Way people who are trying to be helpful, but don't know anything about what they're talking about Are trying to tell you do this do that do this do that
[00:01:54] Or you just fall down this rabbit hole of youtube algorithms instagram algorithms tiktok algorithms and just the good old google search or google feed algorithms, right
[00:02:03] So that's what it is now, let's talk about something really important And like I promised i'm going to connect the dots for you guys at the end of this Hopefully brief 10 to 15 minute podcast episode But really important to remember learning to code is not enough to get a job and this is not new Right, but ai has made it more true than ever, but i'll talk about this more a little bit later towards the end So let's first analyze
[00:02:24] why tutorial hell even happens, right?
[00:02:28] Hi, if you want a no BS insight into how to change your career, whether to code or something else and how to actually get job opportunities in tech, then please subscribe and like.
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[00:03:11] Zubin: It happens for the following reasons.
[00:03:12] One is There's no plan that you're following and you're guessing each step So naturally when you're guessing a lot of things are random because guessing is not a plan Number two, it's hard to have a plan or even make a plan intelligently when you're not a hundred percent clear on goals And now this is not your fault Okay Between all the social media rubbish that's going on and all the influencer nonsense that they're talking about and I've talked about this extensively on my channel I've had other recruiters and technical recruiters on the channel on the podcast Telling you just how the social media stuff is dangerous for your actual goals ,
[00:03:47] but before you can even have the goals you need to have clarity on what you want to try and achieve now unfortunately There's so much information being spewed into the sewer of the internet at the moment That it's really hard to make goals because everything starts to look the same or it's hard to know on the outside What is actually a valid goal or what is a relevant goal?
[00:04:06] Like some people struggle to know, do I want to be a software engineers? Do I want to be a data scientist? Do I want to be a data engineer? A lot of people think that data engineering and data science and ML are all the same thing. They're not. Data engineering is very different from data analytics and data science.
[00:04:21] So when you don't have clarity and goals, you're going to get stuck in tutorial hell because again, going back to point one, you're kind of guessing and stumbling along. All right. Number three reason why tutorial hell happens is that you have no clarity on what's important to learn.
[00:04:35] And again, it's not your fault.
[00:04:37] If you don't have goals, you can't have a plan. If you don't have a plan, you don't know what is the right thing to focus on, right? You don't know what's important to learn and what's safe to ignore now.
[00:04:49] This is made worse by number four, which is seo and clickbait, right? Search engine optimization and clickbait and again on this podcast i've gone into great detail About how this stuff is being used against you.
[00:05:02] Search engine optimization is absolutely something that is tricking you guys into clicking on all kinds of things And that's what clickbaity headlines will make you do So
[00:05:10] Anytime you see something like, is this language dead? Five best languages for programmers.
[00:05:16] That's clickbait. It's SEO. It's not meant to help you. It's meant to get you to click and go on their site.
[00:05:20] Remember guys. Just common sense. If it's free information, it's not really free. It's coming at the cost of your time and your attention, which means someone's showing you some advertising, nothing wrong with it.
[00:05:31] Advertising is part of the world and nothing we can do about that. And that's okay. There's the, there's a role for commerce.
[00:05:37] You end up being the product. So don't think it's free because what's actually happening is someone else is monetizing your time and you're paying in time, which is your most valuable resource.
[00:05:46] Now number five reason why tutorial hell happens is people underestimate or misunderstand What coding actually is as a profession not as a hobby as a profession people don't understand What it is that software engineers or data scientists or etc do okay? Now, there's a huge hint. I want to give you here guys Coding is not about writing code.
[00:06:08] That is a small part of the job The more senior you get it becomes less and less The main part but even if you're a junior developer, it's very likely you're going to join a company And i've talked about this extensively on linkedin where you'll join a company where there's literally hundreds of thousands of lines of code already written And your main job is to read the code understand what's going on Write some tests and try and debug stuff that's breaking and not working No one's clear why okay
[00:06:33] Now if you listen to any experienced engineer on their podcast or my podcast or whatever it is, you will hear the same message Coding is not about writing the code.
[00:06:41] That's the most obvious part that you get to see plus let's be honest It looks cool, right? So everybody shows that side of their job because that looks cool. He's banging out some code He knows how to write all this code. He's building this product in a weekend Looks great. That's kind of not how life is.
[00:06:56] Just like, I don't know whether you guys have watched any medical drama or legal drama like Suits. Now, I used to be a lawyer for over 15 years. So let me tell you, real life law is not like what they showed in Suits. And I don't know a single doctor, and I have quite a few in my family, who tell me that their life is anything like one of those medical dramas.
[00:07:14] Okay, that's not the way it is. Coding is not what you see on TV. Coding is a lot of Analysis and research and writing code is a big part of it But also so is reading code and thinking and solving problems and handling an enormous amount of uncertainty and ambiguity Because sometimes quite often actually you're going to not know how to do what it is that you're supposed to do Okay, which now brings me to the next point, which is how do you solve tutorial hell?
[00:07:40] The reason why everyone falls into this tutorial hell thing is they haven't understood that there are two stages when it comes to developing coding skills first And this is especially true of coding but first is the research stage and then is the development stage So R& D right now this happens in science.
[00:07:59] It happens in many other professions There are two stages first you learn through research and then you build which is the development stage Okay R& D So how do you do these things? Well tutorials and documentation and blogs are for learning the tools Okay, so you use these things these things that are trapping you in tutorial hell They're good for learning the tools the approach the syntax the design aspects and that's about it They're not good for actually building Or rather they'll help you build small things, but they're not good to let you Develop the skill of building.
[00:08:34] Why is that? Well, a lot of what happens in a tutorial is the instructor or the blog author whatever it is has done all the thinking for you Right. They've pretty much given you the step by step solution and you finish it and think I think I understand everything. I know how this works, but I can't build anything on my own.
[00:08:56] Why is that? It's because you did not build it on your own. They did all the thinking, they did all the hard parts, and you never got to see the hours of research, and thinking, and analysis they did. You saw the final product okay. It's like thinking a human being comes out fully grown. It doesn't, you didn't see the software in the baby stage.
[00:09:17] You only saw it in the maturity stage.
[00:09:19] Okay. Building is applying all the stuff you learned in your research phase independently through unguided problem solving. And I cannot emphasize this enough. When people say that software engineers are problem solvers, they're not talking about them knowing how to do some data structures and algorithms.
[00:09:37] That's not it. It's about taking an ambiguous situation with no immediate and apparent solution and thinking through how you would design and evolve a solution Assuming there's not a lot of help around that's quite common. Okay, so that is what building is all about development Okay research is using the tutorials and blogs and documents to understand the concept Building is applying that concept without proper guidance so that you independently Develop the muscle of problem solving now.
[00:10:11] It's really important. Remember this That to build, you must know how to research, but the converse, the inverse iteration is not true just because you know how to research well does not mean that you know how to build. Again, this is a problem that a lot of you face
[00:10:26] because you've understood the syntax.
[00:10:28] You've done the languages over and over and over again. You've done a dozen tutorials, which is why you're stuck in tutorial hell. So, you know, the theory of it, but when it comes to building something on your own. You have no skill and that's very frustrating and terrifying partly it's because you have the wrong expectations.
[00:10:45] That's actually fairly normal But you need to be able to get good At getting out of that rut because in the real world workplace when people are paying you good money to write code You will get stuck and you expect it to get unblocked fairly autonomously. It's an important skill It's an important thing that they look for when they're hiring.
[00:11:03] Okay So just because you understand the syntax and you've done some research and read a bunch of blogs does not mean that you can actually build anything independently. And that's the part that you absolutely absolutely must practice.
[00:11:15] So I'm going to give you some suggestions on how you do that.
[00:11:18] Okay.
[00:11:18] So let me just quickly switch
[00:11:20] over to Excalidraw. Okay. So what I'm trying to explain to you here is that this is how you combine R& D research and development. Okay. Let's say you come up with an idea and yes, you do need to come up with an idea on your own.
[00:11:31] If you're going to be spoon fed on even that, then you're probably going to struggle as an engineer, but it doesn't have to be a fancy idea. Guys, no one is asking you to build Instagram. Again, okay You know one's asking you to build youtube even though there are lots of tutorials about building a youtube clone They've done all the hard parts for you instead start with a small little problem.
[00:11:50] Okay Start with well, I want a landing page or I want to show a picture something Okay, start with the idea, and do a minimal amount of research needed to start being able to build that thing. Once it's built, and yes, \ you'll be switching back and forth between the research and the typing, the research and the typing, okay?
[00:12:10] You do that, you build the smallest basic thing, okay? So you've done your research, you've done your development, and your basic idea is starting to take shape. All right, the first step. Then you say now how do I enhance this idea with the next step, right? So let's call that the enhancement idea. Well, you come up with an enhancement idea and then you start to research that enhancement idea.
[00:12:32] Now for all the research stages, try to find a recent tutorial.
[00:12:36] What I recommend you do is you try and research it using little filters in Google search, like after 2023, right? That means anything that happened after 2023, 2024 onwards is all that the search results will show you.
[00:12:51] Now, I often use filters like this, And I teach my students in my private coaching program on how to train change career to become a coder I teach them how to use filters how to learn get really good at research how to get really good at researching and understanding things How to read documentation how to read code all of that stuff, right?
[00:13:06] Because that's really what a soft engineer has to do is get really good at this stuff So use these kind of filters in your google search to find the latest material you can whether it's on youtube or some blog All right Now it's really important that you do not jump You must continue with that tutorial you found.
[00:13:25] The more recent it is, the more You know fresh it is the more accurate it's likely to be but even then things change in the software world
[00:13:33] We're always finding what's known as breaking changes like code will work for a blog or it'll work in a video But then it doesn't work when you do it because things have changed between the time The video was made and you because things change really fast in engineering and hey, that's why it's exciting
[00:13:47] But when things change, if you don't learn to handle that change, research and understand what changed and learn how to fix changes, you will not develop the instinct of being able to handle that in the real world.
[00:13:58] And believe me, in the real world, things are always breaking in the background . That's why there are so many engineers constantly working. That's why they're paying good money to do it. It's not the easiest skill. It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun, but it's not the easiest skill in the world.
[00:14:12] And we wouldn't expect to be paid a lot of money for an easy skill anyway. So you already know that. So do not skip the tutorial just because it's hard. Just because you're stuck, just because you're frustrated, not a reason to skip. Okay. Stick to the tutorial. Make sure you complete whatever that tutorial is meant to do.
[00:14:28] Come hell or high water. That is part of developing it. Okay. And then you move into the deeper development phase, which is you keep adding the next level of functionality. So you come up with an enhancement idea, you research it, which is part of finding the tutorial. You follow along with the tutorial, which is part of the development process and you stick with it until it's done.
[00:14:48] Then you've got your next layer of the lasagna, the cake ready. Then you start again, right? You basically do this all over again. Now that you've developed, you come up with a new enhancement idea. Okay. And so on and so forth, right? So this is how You have a project where you keep adding new layers to it Okay, and each layer is a research and development stage and then you get the next idea and that's all you've got to do. Do not follow one big tutorial for a huge giant e commerce app or some rubbish like that and then expect to know how to build things Okay, it's not going to work. You have to come up with your own ideas. When I work with my students in the inner circle coaching program very early in about three or four weeks I get them to design the basics of the app I give them feedback on it and then by the time i've trained them up on all the coding stuff It's about six to ten months at that point in time and then They get to build that app if they want right and they themselves will revise their designs completely Because they've learned so much in that time that they realize their own original ideas and the original design wasn't going to work that well. That's proof of progress But this is the process of constantly repeating constantly iterating over the research and develop research and develop research and develop cycle and let me tell you guys This is the only way to get out of tutorial hell.
[00:16:00] Because tutorial hell is one of those things where you get learned helplessness forced on you Okay, you just follow something along and you don't do the thinking yourself Of course, you're going to be very soon very lost and not feel like you can build anything Okay, so you keep adding to stuff without guidance and you come up with that loop You Of the research and development research and development then new small idea Then you research that and develop it research it and develop it then the next small idea and so on Okay.
[00:16:30] Zubin: Now as promised I want to tell you about something that I wrote in 2019 guys. It's 2024 now Okay halfway through 2024. This was half a decade ago five years ago, right? I wrote this five years ago for free code camp. There's even a small video included in the article But it's more true than ever before guys learning to code is not enough to get a job and I I swear to you I wrote this in 2019.
[00:16:55] You'll even see it here, right? Uh, where is it? Here we go. So I wrote this in 2019, June 26, 2019. So exactly five years ago. Okay. And I can promise you this holds true till today.
[00:17:09] And the reason I know about this is because it held true back then for multiple professions. Okay. Learning the basic skills is not enough to get a job.
[00:17:18] Now I've talked about why extensively here, and I've linked to it in the show notes, so take a look at it, but it's really, really important. Really really important that you understand this. It's never been enough. This is not something that's new Okay, somebody says oh it used to be enough. No, it was never enough Learning to code was never enough.
[00:17:35] The ones that actually got jobs had professional grade skills not literacy professional grade skills Just like learning how to play the guitar is not enough to make you a rock star Or knowing how to play soccer or basketball doesn't make you in the FIFA or the NBA. Okay big big difference So learning to go has never been enough. If you want, check out this article and check out this little video.
[00:17:55] That's me. When I got my first dev job, giving a public talk at a meetup about why learning to code is not equal to the job. And here's why. Okay. Because I found that too many people made this mistake of thinking, Oh, I'll do a couple of tutorials. I learned how to write a bit of code. I'll try and memorize the syntax.
[00:18:10] Don't do that by the way, but I'll try to memorize the syntax and that's going to be enough. That's what coding is. It's really not.
[00:18:16] If you cannot build independently, you will not make it as a coder. All right, so hope that helps you guys Um, I think that's all i've got for you today Please like and subscribe and if you have any questions or you want to consider working with me as part of the inner circle program I I don't accept a huge number of students very few about 10 12 maybe in a year But I work with them for pretty much 12 months, right?
[00:18:37] so because it takes time to get really good and I want my students to be really good because that's the only way you can beat the experienced computer science and Software programming graduates out there. Okay, that's the only way to do it Especially people like me who you don't want to do it in the 30s.
[00:18:50] I was in my late 30s Look, it's not easy Don't let the marketing fool you into believing it is. It's not easy. It's totally possible. Everything's possible with the right plan, right? Everything becomes easy when you know how. But you need to learn to know how okay And if you can't do it on your own then and you want to work with me I'm, very happy to have the conversation with you.
[00:19:08] I'll link to everything in the description But I hope this really helps remember you can get out of tutorial hell Just got to remember to do it independently The trick is to figure out what little piece you can do and then teach yourself to find out how to do it
[00:19:21] Oh one last thing before I go do not rely on AI to Do things for you Okay.
[00:19:28] This is my big tip for you. Do not use AI to solve a problem when you do not understand the solution. Because very often the AI gets it wrong. Use AI when you know what to do and you just want to delegate the actual doing of it. Okay.
[00:19:42] Even people are going on and on about how great Cursor is. And let me, Be very clear. Cursor is a huge time saver.
[00:19:47] But It gets a ton of things wrong. Cursor Compose has got a ton of things wrong.
[00:19:52] Anything more than three or four files and it really can make a bit of a pig's breakfast out of it. Okay.
[00:19:57] So AI, when you're starting out and you do not know how to evaluate the code
[00:20:01] don't, don't trust it. Don't be, don't learn using that. Okay.
[00:20:06] Think of it this way. You probably don't know what a code review is. A code review is when one engineer reviews the code submitted by another in a pull request on GitHub or one of their version control systems. When you're using AI tools, it's like a pull request.
[00:20:18] You need to know your stuff to be able to review the code the AI has written.
[00:20:23] If you do not understand it, that means you're not learning anything.
[00:20:27] It's much better that you struggle for three days than to accept the AI that did something for you in 30 minutes. And you have no idea. Cause you will not learn that way because when you go to the interview, you're not really going to be allowed to use that AI unless you're a very experienced engineer.
[00:20:40] Okay. And you know what you're doing.
[00:20:41] So hope that helps, like, and subscribe. I'll see you next time.
[00:20:44] Just subscribe, you know you gotta do it.
