4 Red Flags That Tell You To Immediately Stop Learning To Code
Coding might not be your profound career choice
To succeed as a software developer comes at a cost of a certain personality — and the crucial qualities of willpower and enthusiasm.
Your learning path won’t comprise studying only. It has to be plastered with building projects. Since this is your learning path it will be filled with failure, resignation, and hopefully willpower to overcome all obstacles.
As an employed developer, you can’t just say to your chef “I can’t do it.” You have to make it somehow work, your skill and enthusiasm are crucial to how good the solution will be.
To get even this skill and enthusiasm it needs to be constantly proven during the learning process. Decide for yourself whether this journey is worth it or not. I can help you make a decision.
1. You Have No Goals Or Even A “Why”
The dream before you take the leap to become a full-time software developer is to have “ a strong why.”
I remember back when I was digging into the world of software development in 2015. I wanted to build a simple game in Unity. On some days I couldn’t grasp anything the YouTube tutorial was trying to teach. I couldn’t even get my program running because of errors. I ditched my head against the monitor and tried it for several painful hours.
In the end, I always somehow managed to get my program error-free and therefore running.
Becoming a Software-Developer, I thought, was all about building enjoyable games and apps, but you have to earn it.
2. You Take Gaps and Skip Learning Days
Life is all about perspective.
The exact statement can be perceived in very different ways by two different people talking about software development. One might see loss, the other, opportunity. One might feel incited by a bug — the other wants to throw the towel. This means, as far as “absolute” truths are concerned, the first step to enjoying programming is the fact of knowing what you truly want. Life means accepting how you see the world might not be the whole picture.
So if your experience with programming is based upon excuses and you wish to stop it immediately after opening the dev environment, this seems to be your nature.
Evidently, you don’t like it enough to keep programming.
3. You Stick To Theory And Avoid Practice
Nobody learns the hard lessons of coding without some element of failure.
When you face the unexpected you need to solve it and learn the why. When you fall short of your expectations, you become aware of your growth. When you try to build something on your own you become attuned to your weaknesses. There is a “lesson” inside each and every project you realize — and those who ultimately finish their projects see these moments as valuable opportunities, not punishments.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen to you if you still keep learning theory without making your hands dirty. There are some lessons in coding you just can’t read about. You need to fall down, scraping both knees, and get back up again.
4. You Force Yourself but Simply Don’t Enjoy It
You find it dull, boring, and endless.
This is a widely shared mentality with today’s aspiring developers, and I don’t understand it.
Why force yourself to do something boring or not fun? I got into programming around the age of 23 (I’m now 29) because it was fun and addicting. I’m not saying you’ll never find programming fun. It wouldn’t be proper for me to comment on that, as I wouldn’t know about changed attitudes and feelings towards programming. I just don’t get why you would force misery upon yourself.
Imagine your parents, or maybe they did it, made you play tennis and play the violin, and you hated every minute of both.
You could have potentially become a winner of Wimbledon or be an orchestra member at the Sydney Opera but why force yourself to go through the required practice? Just to obtain a skill you use to accomplish dull, boring, and endless activities?
Closing Thoughts
These are Red Flags and you are free to ignore them. In the end, you don’t need to like programming to keep learning it. Programming is a profession.
Although having a profession that you thoroughly enjoy is great, you don’t need to.
It can be just a job and that can be fine.
But if that’s the case, you need to treat your learning trajectory like an actual school course. You need to have a consistent timetable and goals for when you want to have learned what.
You can’t just make fun projects for yourself to learn to program if the ‘fun’ part is lacking.