I have a different take on this. I am a seasoned programmer who has been in the industry for over 30 years now. I have a background in electrical engineering and that pretty much gave me an edge when I was starting out. I had an in-depth understanding of how computers worked from the basic circuitry. There are so many layers of abstraction even in those circuits and trying to understand all of them won't get you anywhere. The software industry is moving fast and companies are looking for engineers who are familiar with their stack. So I see no harm starting out at a higher layer of abstraction and moving on to lower layers when you get a job or after you get relevant industry experience. In the end people need to get by and it's okay if you want to start from a higher layer. Your value as an engineer is not measured by how much you know, but how you use what you know and what is available to solve existing problems. That's my opinion.

As a new programmer, learning higher level stuff is kind of like watching family guy without knowing references. You kinda get it because the jokes work on their own so you just move on without much thought. Then when you learn about the references (or tools) you look back at the episode and you’re like “omg I understand everything now!”

On the one hand, having a solid understanding of the foundations is almost always beneficial no matter the field. On the other, the current state of many fields is so far off in space that if you stop to shore up that understanding, it seems impossible to catch up to where everyone else is in current developments. One of my personal issues is a tendency to get obsessed with those basics and never moving on.

This is why it took me so long to learn basic JavaScript. Because JavaScript used to be "simple" language to manipulate your website, but then it turned into, "We also want OOP, we also want array methods, we also want X, Y, Z" And now there are 50 ways of doing the same thing instead of just one or two. As a beginner that's super overwhelming since programming itself is already quite confusing for a total beginner. This is why modern JS is just a bad way to learn programming IMHO.

The bad thing is that after learning all these things, we don't become good at programming; we just become good at using those abstracted tools. We don't know how these things work internally, and the moment these abstracted tools become obsolete, we're thrown back to step one

As someone who is in Uni now, we still do all the things Primagen was talking about and haven't even sniffed in the direction of a GUI. Our intro to programming back in year 1 was in C (not C++), and one of our first courses which is compulsory involved how floats ints etc were represented in memory and we did lots of binary arithmetic and learned MIPS assembly there. I've been feeling somewhat down about not being able to make an actual application outside of a terminal despite years of programming, so this video really helped reassure me that I'm on the right path.

At university, I see so many people with enough superficial knowledge to get by, and sometimes I really feel bad for them. As soon as things get complicated enough to go below theor comfortable layer of abstraction, they are lost.

This is why I feel bad for people trying to change careers at React bootcamps.

I program as a hobby but I’m so happy I started with C. I learned programming because I wanted to learn about computers, not necessarily because I wanted to make anything. I was just fascinated with the technology. Went from c to c++ and took an assembly course. I switched colleges and they wouldn’t let me continue the CS curriculum because they were learning Java and I was learning c++. I was like, “you realize I bought a book and learned Java in a week, right?” Like you said when you learn the actual art of programming learning a knew language is just matter of learning syntax and remembering how things work, you’re not trying to figure out why things work.

This resonates with me as well. I got filtered by Ruby on Rails starting out because there were too many concepts too far removed from what I was trying to do. Then I went to bare PHP and wrote horrible, unmaintainable code, but at least I was learning.

I personally prefer the bottom-up way of learning since your knowledge never depends on things you don't know yet and the bigger picture usually just clicks immediately.

The discipline required to peel back the abstraction layers is pretty overwhelming these days.

As someone who started learning to program a year ago I felt this pain. The first thing I tried to learn was .NET frameworks and it was so overwhelming. I eventually pivoted to Js, though due to the level of abstractions in things like react and other UI frameworks, it just didn’t make sense to me, it felt like there was something missing to connect the dots. I finally got a grip on things when I realized the question you need to ask is why? Why is this framework abstracting this feature and what use is it to me. I found that I much prefer to understand how the cake is made rather than throw icing on it. Now I primarily only use minimal third party libraries as I found it is easier to understand what is going on if you build it yourself from scratch. It may sound counterintuitive but that’s really the best way to understand what is going on.

Agree 100%. I got a CS degree almost 20 years ago now, and had impostor syndrome so bad I did something else with my life. I've tried to get back into it a few times. It's amazing that there's a library for everything and modern developer tools are voodoo magic. It's so easy to make a functioning one-off business logic project with infinite tech debt, but that next step is a doozy.

This is why i honestly think people should learn c as their first language. If you can build a data structure in c it becomes much easier to understand the abstraction in other languages.

Completely agree with this. Was talking to my friend about this yesterday... With how they try to churn full stack web devs out it feels like they are trying to take shortcuts... Its absolutely insane you are expected to be full stack in a few months with having to know THIS much. Saying that as someone who has gone down this route myself. I'm grateful it's given me a door into the industry at least. I'd love to make Web plan b and get into something else like embedded systems, but it's going to take some time to get there for me.

I'm 36 in the middle of my cs degree. They taught absolute basics of python, java, and C++. I've been deep diving C++ on my own since there's no more other language courses during the degree. I always like watching prime's videos and play the game of inferring definitions through context clues for all the different technologies that are mentioned on a daily basis. I know I won't learn it all, so I'm just making micro-projects that can perform a task that I didn't know how to make before. Things like monitoring keyboard/mouse events from the windows library, or using sockets. I always have this anxiety in the back of my mind like I need to learn specific things before my final year at school is up. For now, though, I just keep writing things like linked lists or exploring new ways on how to fill up all my memory on my system.

As an electrician that enjoys programming as soon as you said electric motor underneath memory, I started laughing.

Tbh we have a history of trying to make programming more glamorous/difficult than it needs to be Like formally proving recursion or learning how to make an AbstractFactoryManagerFactory are both completely optional if non-trivial vs just knowing how things fit together and what to consider in code/system design

I feel like you highlighted the 2 different ways you can aproach a problem. Where taking the university route takes longer, but you learn the absolute basics, allowing you to use that knowledge to quickly learn and understand the higher lvl concepts, ideas and abstractions every one takes for granted (up to a point). While the bootcamp route makes you quickly learn the high lvl stuff, but because you lack the lower lvl understanding might make learning certain things or new stuff more difficult. Of course the hope is that with the bootcamp route you learn the relevant low lvl stuff while doing, while the university expects you to pick up the high lvl stuff while doing. Both are valid but just for different ppl and situations.

2 pieces of news for programmers who are just starting out: 1. It's hard, and most of you probably will quit after a few punches you'll inevitably receive. 2. If you can manage the stress and take those punches without throwing your laptop out of the window and staying diligent, you'll have a high chance of becoming a professional in this field.

I found that learning ASM on 8-bit PIC microcontrollers helped with the low level stuff. For the modern tower of babel problem where the simplest thing depends on everything and the kitchen sink, I let copilot help with the discovery lol.

I don't mean to sound like a downer but I'm kind of glad that this video exists. I tried to learn how to code and get a job throughout the pandemic. I worked hard but it wasn't hard enough AND then I got told by a recruiter, after having multiple projects, interviews, even a little freelance experience, to go back to boot camp. that's when it hit me that I had learned a little versus actually understanding what I was trying to learn and do. So I honestly gave up and am now happily pursing a different career path in tech. If you want to program for a living, the challenge is higher than ever I think so good luck!

Im a self taught developer still kind of finding my way but have gravitated to web over the last couple years as it was easier to make money. The most difficult thing as a new developer with little to no guidance was wrapping my mind around the whole ecosystem of software/web. To make things even more confusing throw in all the buzz and hype for things like blockchain, ai, data science, game development etc and as a beginner its just insane. My first programming experience was a course building a decentralized shop using react and solidity. I managed to get through it but was so mentally taxed it hurt my motivation in some ways BUT I think if you can keep yourself afloat it can be beneficial but its such a whirlwind to start off. After a few similar bouts like this I finally took a step back took time to do some dsa, learn about networks, os, compilers to some degree and didn't try and make a website or application for probably 2 years and when I did I was crushing it. Out performing people who have been developing since before I knew what a function was xD

dude my university doesn't even teach how MEMORY works, none of my peers know what assembly is, the lowest level language we're being taught is JAVA

Thank you, you have encouraged me. Because sometimes i feel overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge you have, i have 2 years of programming and i am learning rust and seeing you talk i really feel that i know nothing, i wish i could understand the binary thing, but i currently don't have the time to do so, i need to work on the thinks i already know in programming and i have a life besides programming... So thank you, it will reach a point where level of abstraction will become so high that the person will get to choose or understand the metal or do something useful because you will not live longer to understand both. So thank you for saying 28 times: "I feel bad for you", it has motivated me to accept my limitations and my ignorance, i am pushing forward, i heavily suggested the use of Rust so i could learn it... but i cannot go back in time and learn everything that theprimeagen learnt and have a life and work, i cannot, so again thank you for helping to accept my life condidtion! I am from Brazil BTW, love you channel, thank you for reading or not reading this...

I get your point, it's beyond easy to get into the meat and potatoes of coding nowadays. Back in the day, I remember placing into a notebook ipo and flowcharts before writing the pseudocode. Accompanied with my notes would be the math for whatever optimizations I needed, along with other problems that needed to be solved. It was fun... I would then go to my computer and start creating the folders and files I needed. The files I created were crated with Notepad using 'save as'.. The examples you gave, I learned very similar. I remember in class, I would have assignments like create a doubly-linked list and make sure it is reusable. Essentially, you built your own stl. I'm sure some colleges follow this format still.

17:50 This reminds me of something: One of my trainers during my apprenticeship also had some friends who worked at VW. He told me that programming apprentices get electronic training there.

In my opinion, and mind you I am a very junior self taught developer with less than a year of experience and stupidly lucky to get a job, is that the way you can go from the bottom up, you can also go from the top down. The difference is those abstractions make it easy to to see progress which is by far the biggest motivation bump and then you see in practise why you must learn all the things those abstractions are based on.

Been majoring in Computer Engineering, building computer, OS, and compiler from scratch. And when I was picking up on web dev it was suck a walk in a park. I can just bottom up every single concept and understand exactly how those technologies work, and the relationship between them.

React bootcamper here. I definitely feel the pain. But I wonder how much of this is down to employers. There are so many adverts there demanding aws, docker, kubernetes etc from junior frontend devs

It's not even about the complexity or how close the technology is to the computer. It's about how using languages like c/c++ and focusing on things data structures and algorithms in the early days strengthens one's fundamentals. This not only builds patience as a developer but also helps build a problem solving mentality.

So nice to hear this from you man. I started on pascal in highschool, at uni I started CS in 2005 but failed, 2009 did an IT diploma, 2017-2021 did my CS undergrad, Doing a AI Postgrad Cert now part-time. The point? I've kind of been in the barrel of the technology wave for what feels like forever, every year I feel like "A New Programmer" and never been able to get the illustrious "IT/CS related job". Every time I learn something it seems it's already too late, need to learn another dozen technologies, frameworks, and stacks so I can be employable. I use to run nightclubs during my studies, so throughout my life I've never known anyone technology inclined, in fact most people in my circles would often just mock what I did. But during my postgrad I started my own web agency doing wordpress websites.... and it's nice to have money slowly starting to drip into my home now I have a baby daughter who will be born any minute now. It sucks to have spent nearly 2 decades learning tech to end up using what many of my contemporaries or young working engineers would think is lame... but I really persevered, I really envy guys like you using great technologies professionally that pretty much are enjoyed by every westerner. But in my experience most people just want a wordpress site for small businesses, need it built fast and cheap which just can't be done with a programmer-enviable stack. I did all my studies online after 2009 and so had to live off of Stackoverflow for years because I had no teachers to help me, no colleagues for support or to even compete with, all the while either running nightclubs or doing construction after I got too old and stood out at the club. (I can tell you now, after studying independently long before KZfaq tutorials were a thing, now is the dopest time to be an independent programming student. ChatGPT answers all those stupid questions I spent countless hours figuring out my self through trial and error or honestly, maybe never having answered for me). ...have considered teaching a private school as it came up recently through a cousin but they say most teenagers have no idea how to even email let alone how a computer works (you'd think Gen Z were tech literate but it turns out they aren't - not counting social media and related apps). I have been doing this 20 years and I can barely keep up with the studies so kudos to those young new programmers that make it and succeed.

my personal opinion: which one is easier depends on your goal: 1- you want to program as fast as you can and MAYBE get hired then we have it easier. 2- you want to learn computer science and then dive into the web stuff later on with solid foundation that wouldn't change with new technology that becomes industry standard and end up without a job, you had it easier. but again i'm just a beginner and this just what i got from watching you and doing some courses

I think the biggest issue, as you've said, is how many different approaches to the same thing you have when learning the ropes. Want a framework? you can pick from 10 available. Want routing? 10 available. CSS styling? 10 available. Database consumption? 10 standards available. What serving strategy will you use? 10 options available. Very few people can learn effectively from this. When I was transitioning from HW to SW, even with a lot of knowledge on fundamentals, peering into web dev already made me flinch from the enormous amount of stuff to learn. There's just so much, happening so fast, and you don't know really where to focus to stand out. It felt like I would have to invest too much to reach a point where I was satisfied with my skills, in something that I wasn't really into. These days I understand much more about the field, but I still don't consider a career in web. It just looks too unstable for me to plan ahead appropriately.

I absolutely agree with you, Prime!! I honestly struggle with all the abstractions in front end. I don't write code like I do with a shell script or other languages that I'm learning to get away from front end. Instead I google the vast array of "stuff" I need to put together a mishmash of abstract terms that have meaning only in the framework or repo I'm working on. It truly sucks. I can think logically. I can't hold 500 unique terms in my head.

It is ridiculous how complex modern development is. All CS should be bottom-up. Not top-down. Yes, assembly and machine code are hard... but they are hard not because understanding it is hard but because putting together lots of simple instructions is harder to wrap one's head around. We should all be learning how the machine works and how it has to be talked to first. No other field of engineering starts at the absolute top and works down.

I get that it's proper to learn C or C++ first, but I realized that learning them first usually make people give up early in the process so I switched to learning Python instead first.

I completely understand everything being said here about the bottom up approach and it's long term benefits but at the same time I really don't know whether or not I'm going to have the time necessary to actually go through all the more complex fundamentals first before then finally learning relevant shit (of which there's a hair pulling amount of now) and then finding employment and building sufficient experience after that. We're talking about like half a decade or even a bit more to really get the ball rolling career wise since I'm not the fastest learner around or most highly motivated either and I can't afford to take the risk of wasting that much time so I'm just gonna dive into the relevant shit first I think regardless of the consequences, I can worry about those down the line.

10:00 A friend of mine and I were talking about this recently. He went through bootcamp and I am currently finishing my senior year. The way we finally came to a conclusion that 4year gives you stronger fundamental and flexibility. Bootcamp teaches you how to code but doesn't enable you with as much problem solving (his experience).

training and learning is becoming less and less important in this age where everything has to be BLAZINGLY FAST, including development. businesses want quick RETURN ON INVESTMENT for their devs, and they dont even care what the dev actually knows or wants to learn, as long as the job gets done. we dont have time to fully learn all the things we are using these days, but it forces us to learn quickly when we do need to dive deeper.. its a double edged sword.. I took this all in my stride, and have been exposed to so many new technologies and projects, and have grown in a way that I dont think would have been possible before this. It was really tough to keep up, but its the only skill i truly got to train: being resourceful and prioritising knowledge. experience: 6years

This is the exact problem I have. I have been learning programming since 2018 and I always find it very very hard to learn about the low level stuff. It's not easy to find resources online for low level programming and I'm someone who can't learn (feel comfortable) if I don't know how things works under the hood.

I starting using computers and learning to program in the mid-80s. I've been at it every since... hardware, networking, app programming, web development, and more. I honestly think those learning to code in the last 5 years have the best resources and therefore the best chance(s) to learn what's necessary to develop amazing apps. The main problem I see for today's "students" is there are too many good tools/languages available for them to learn. Best advice I heard is pick an area (ie. Web Apps), find out what *most* mid-level developers are using, and focus on learning ONLY the essential "core" tools... and then build, build, build.

man, you're speaking from my soul. I didn't start out studying IT so I'm fully self-tought and just setting up an environment to follow a tutorial is such a drag. 27 embedded layers wrapped in 4 virtual dockers just takes the fun out of creating code.

This is soo much true. In my first job and university, i focus only on build and deploy apps in intranet enviroments (no connection to internet). I have to build everything from backend and frontend proyects scratch and deploy it using Apache. It was hard, YES, but it give you the knowlegde of how everything works end to end, that's a great feeling. I recommend everyone to try that at least. The other realization i have when i pass to consuming libraries to write/read or PR libraries code. That give you soo much understanding of more things, because it help you to learn from others people code, is so nice. I don't thing the current state of code is broken, but is harder to get there if you start only with KZfaq videos. Learning algorithms in university and for my tesis was a great base, and is harder to get that watching only KZfaq videos, i'm not saying that's imposible, but little harder. And yes, in my university i have programming tests in papper :) (really hardcore hahahaha)

A testament from a self taught. Before I started, I didn't expect I'll be this deep in CompSci, and that's for a reason. Started coding in Python, then I learned HTML, CSS, JS, and when I'm there learning React and Node js, I discovered how deep the iceberg really is. Long story short, I realized how shallow my understanding is of the tech I'm learning that I have to learn CS 101 by myself. Started with Crash Course Computer Science, then some more CS learnings, heck, even some basic Networking stuff to better understand web dev, then Data Structures and Algorithms, then revisited web tech with HTML, CSS, and JS, and things made much more sense. My key takeaway here is that the innovation in tech made it so much harder for newbies as we have to learn not just the fundamentals, but also the new technologies, at the same time, which can easily confuse any informally unguided newbie like me.

Yea, I realized this during my Comp. Sci. degree. Programming can go so deep in so many directions where any one project is gonna be using like 20 different APIs. My strategy has been to learn the main languages at a mid-level (Java - Python - C - HTML - CSS - Javascript) and the rest of my time is spent studying data structures and algorithms. The truth is, anywhere you get hired they are gonna expect you to learn THEIR stack and the chances that you just so happen to learn all of those things are effectively ZERO. Focus on fundamentals and build a few functional websites, web apps, google play store apps, whatever. Build simple apps that have been made before but add your own little twist.

This made my day. I feel so overwhelmed starting to learn python. I have a midterm in 10 days and I'm literally plagued by fear.

You put into words what i have been feeling for months. Motivation runs very thin when simple things are fullstack apps. Thanks for the video❤

I'm a more UI focused person and one big advantage of the top down approach is it allows you to build stuff quickly, giving motivation to learn and build more stuff. Despite all the frameworks, cloud services, dbs, etc; it doesn't take too long for a beginner to throw together a simple React app. For me personally, that was much more rewarding than stdout. Building something first, then learning the theory behind it keeps you from having to ask "why am I learning this?"

@ThePrimeTime I just finished a 2-year bootcamp. I wasn’t fully invested in it, so I only did what was required and didn’t spend much time on additional projects. Now that I’ve finished, I’m focusing a bit on JavaScript and Angular as I start looking for my first job. While I’m still practicing Angular and haven’t applied anywhere yet, I found out about your channel. Just from watching your Twitch VODs, whether it’s coding article reviews or you explaining something, I got so hyped that I enrolled in a university program starting in October! :))))))) I’m hoping to land a front-end developer job in the mornings and study my classes in the evenings. Thank you! Also, you’ve inspired me to learn Go (but not Rust, since I haven’t found a use case that interests me :::)))) )

Current comp sci uni student here. I have friends who went through boot camps instead of uni like me, they constantly are learning, however when it comes to low level concepts like memory management and building real algorithms they struggle. I think that the uni path is easier because we get to focus on one thing at a time.

Its so fun to browse youtube after finishing some studies (to become a frontend developer) and constantly be blasted by youtubers saying our efforts to become something is useless. ”Why programming is dying” ”Why you wont succeed in 2024 as a programmer”

As a new programmer, that is why I am trying to learn C and assembly. Using languages like Javascript can be easy but they make me feel like I am not learning much since everything is already built in.

This video feels like telling someone who wants a construction job so they can feed their kids that they need to learn construction from first principles. 90% of the job is going to be "swing this hammer."

I graduated in June 2023. Before my studies in software engineering my only knowledge about coding was modding game file values, which isn't usually doesn't require knowledge over software principles. Abstraction caused a lot of issues. I didn't often even know how to word my questions properly. I was baffled by how did programmers know what methods they can use to do various things, how do they know to add .length after an object? Confused, lost. Nowdays I am a junior fullstack developer doing consulting work at companies and it took a lot of courage to go to the very basics and root of software development into the hardware and lower level programming languages. Over time I began to understand all of it so much better.

As a veteran programmer, I completely agree with you. Sometimes I think about these bootcampers that have no motivation to dig deeper than what their short course taught them, and if they happen to land a job creating life-critical systems... This keeps me awake at night!

You can get a math degree, or you can take courses on how to use a TI-84. One will teach you the fundamentals of math enough so you can learn how to use the TI-84 yourself, the other will screw you if a new type of calculator is invented. I graduated during the height of AngularJS and Gulp, if I went through a bootcamp, I would've been screwed. I'm sure Assembly programmers thought the same as C programmers who thought the same as Java who thought the same as PHP and so on. And now with AI the abstraction level will only get higher. That's why I hate it when people complain that their CS degree was useless because they didn't learn how to program. These are only tools, learning the fundamentals of how a computer runs code gives you a holistic view where you can learn anything

Dude you’re the first person I’ve ever seen put this feeling I’ve had into words. I want to learn programming but it feels so, so complicated and I’ve never understood where to start.

Unlike the title of the video I feel really good for new programmers that are starting today. The more time that passes the easier it is to get into this field, because there's more way to access it (nt implying it's becomeing easier, don't misunderstand) I think that of you want to learn CS or get into programming, TODAY is the best moment to start learning. Even if you are skipping some abstraction layers, you are learning and lets be honest, there are so many layers of abstraction that it is definitely overwhelming. If you start right a the high level, you might miss how stuff really works, but if you start at the lowerst level, it is so alien that you will not even understand the purpose of it. Sure, one has to start with a general picture first, then pick one abstraction layer and start learning there and then explore bit by bit higher and lower layers of abstraction. And never stop learning new stuff. Modern bootcamp devs that think learning stops after they graduate from their bootcamp, they are just wrong: learning never stops. You stop, you get stuck, become obsolete and that's it, its over. Never stop learning new stuff fellas.

Self motivation and application is a big part of what makes a good software engineer. You can go through a full 4 year university program and learn all of the theory, but if you never actually apply it in ways that you find meaningful you'll never truly understand it. Bootcamps tend to provide a very fast way to get to something "meaningful" to a lot of people, but I suspect that speeding through some fundamentals will ultimately mean that all other things being equal, the individual that went through university and did their own projects on the side with what they've learned thus far will be far better off long term than the same individual speeding through a bootcamp (that is, unless they're also doing their own things with what they've learned on the side)

Been out of the programming industry for 7 years because of a mental break down I had. Burnout from another job, and ADHD, and other causes. Want to get back in, but often feel really discouraged when I look at job opening being posted. There is like a hundred languages, and then 100 tools for each language they want you to know.

It's frustrating sometimes having all these frameworks, libraries, abstractions, and APIs, that just do everything for you. Yes, I know it's not good to "reinvent the wheel", but how can you get truly creative with programming when 90% of your code or data is imported, required, or parsed by some 3rd-party library or service, and the little bit of code you do write has to follow some strict paradigm of a framework. I know writing your own crappy web app, or making your own solution to a problem that already has a package, from scratch, is not "good practice", but sometimes I feel like modern coding lacks any creativity or personality--most of it feels "cookie cutter". P.S. ..and most of the little code that we do write can often be generated by AI software like Copilot or ChatGPT. It saves a lot of time, but sometimes I feel like coding no longer has any "personality" or "soul" put into it like it once did.

Went to a boot camp 7 years ago, and now a Senior Frontend Dev, and I totally agree about boot camps! You have to have the motivation to learn beyond what they're teaching at the BootCamp! You have to spend the hours after you get home practicing, learning, and putting in the extra work! And then you have to continue to do that when the BootCamp is over and you start working! Always have to be learning! I also think that there's probably a fair amount of luck and timing involved when getting into the industry after boot camp, especially in today's world!

The problem is job requirements need a lot more these days and getting a job is really a higher barrier to entry…

I mean, part of it is, there are very very few *good* teachers out there when it comes to learning programming. Most of them are adept coders who are abysmal teachers. They are so far removed from the mindset of someone who is new to coding that they add several layers of abstraction by themselves. That is to be expected though. As a lifelong coder, the last thing you exercise is what happens in the mind of someone else.

self taught web dev here in this day and age, there's no wrong answer in picking your stack. Every framework and new technology is copying features from each other, not to mention open source contributions. So any way you take will get the job done, accordingly pick whatever you're comfortable with

You described the reason I am in my third try to learn how to program. It always feels like an insurmountable amount of knowledge required to just start.

A whole lot of this feels to me like it depends on where your interests lie. I don't really want to be a web dev. I think it'd be cool to do embedded systems or maybe just standard application development, but so many people go crazy about emphasizing JS frameworks and whatever the next hype web thing is. I wouldn't want to go the bootcamp route because those seem to be designed to churn out a very particular type of dev that I don't really care to fit into.

Agreed, I god damn hate it. I am in my 4th year in the industry, self taught from KZfaq during COVID. I honestly hate CS, I hate this job, and I hate coding. It's just a good paying job and I don't feel like i understand ANY of it. Edit. I just needed to vent a little bit of frustration from my brutal impostor syndrome. I'll stick it out and hopefully it will get better.

I'm self taught web dev, and have been working full time for about 7 years now. I feel I lucked into a very nice learning curve. - learned basic PHP, HTML, CSS, JS - picked up a PHP framework and chose to focus on backend dev - got a junior backend position because I knew the framework they used - started learning the "other stuff" (CICD, hosting, docker, testing) while working - switched jobs to a midlevel position after about 2 years forcing me to get better at design patterns and some more Ops stuff - switched to a senior role working in cloud, forcing me to learn kubernetes and AWS If I had started where I am now but as a junior it would've been too much. It's nice when your first couple of years you can mainly program, and then learn the other stuff as you go. Also focusing 90% on just backend helped a lot.

I wouldn't say you had it easier. The thing you mainly point out is that you had it easier to understand what you where actually doing since you encountered less layers of abstraction. But in the end, what is valued by businesses is that you can deliver a feature, and not how well you understand given feature. I see that in the code base I'm working on right now. So, many things look quirky to me just to find out, that it's just one or two layers of abstraction farther away from how I would have done it. So, what I think you are trying to say is that "I had it easier to understand what I was actually building than you have nowadays." But the other way around, newbies have it easier to build things, without the need to understand wht they're actually building. It's like going hunting with a bow vs a gun, i guess.

Relatable, few days ago we were having feedback session and one of the guy stood up and said python should be taught instead of C because projects are easier to make and relate better to current ai hype.

for me two big paradigm shifts in self-learning to code were when I realized how far abstracted React, Webpack, JS, etc really were from what the computer was actually doing .. and then (2) that getting errors doesn't mean I am a de facto bad programmer, ie that working through errors IS programming, and that a lot of mistakes are happening at the abstraction level (eg, version incompatibilities) rather than at the level of predictable logic

I went from an unrelated engineering background to data science to cloud dev. Because at first I stuck to the maths and modeling I kinda got what was happening. Once I got how to model stats I then learnt how to deploy/ host things and that eventually led to me picking up C. I think what REALLY helped was having a logical path and reason for what I'm doing/learning at every point of the way. Otherwise I would be completely lost.

The way I compare it is that there's 2 types of people, People that learn by 'how', and people that learn by 'why'. These days, people just learn by 'how' because there's way to much information and people just want to know how to get things running. The downside is when they have to do things differently, they BSOD. While there're people that learn by 'why' where they try to understand why things work or why things are done a certain way but in today's world learning 'why' is too hard with the amount of content that usually contradict each other.

I'd say on average, every 4 days the overwhelm of it all really gets to me. Then I bounce back and learn as much as I can before the next wave hits

I'm a university CS major, but I've been programming for 10 years. I was exposed to systems programming using C on Linux early on. I have written a lot of software in C, including device drivers and some embedded systems work. A lot of my friends come to me when they have questions about programming assignments and regard me as being talented, but the reason why is just because I took the time to learn things and do stuff myself. A great example is when I made a clone of Minecraft using C++/OpenGL; I did it purely to improve my programming abilities and learn OpenGL, but a lot of my friends were like, "Why not just use a game engine?" and my response was, "that defeats the purpose." This type of mindset has helped me improve immensely. Not saying that other students at my university are bad at programming, a lot of them can use tools that I can't use, especially in the realm of higher level languages. There is merit to that as well. However, I do think that I have a far deeper understanding of how the machine works at a fundamental level than most of my peers.

New guy here! I've been learning to code for 3 years now on and off since I'm a parent. It wasn't until just recently that I feel comfortable enough to apply for a Jr position. Took me a while to learn what I learned compared to my peers who are all senior developers, but if you have the will it can be done, even if you are a busy parent like me

I was 11 when I started coding, and I started with fundamental concepts like variables. Built scripts, dabbled into Game Dev, fooled around for quite a few years before deciding to do a small job recently. Recently learned stuff like frontend and backend, so I felt like I'd wasted many years, but maybe those years of solidifying fundamentals helped a lot. If I was to teach someone to program, I'd do it like this: small basic cli apps, do the fundamentals, then we can go up in abstractions (frameworks) or down (kernel, compiler, etc) because that will make your life much easier.

I tried learning to code so many times but got stuck by this very problem. Until I learned super low level stuff nothing clicked for me. Owe a lot to Ben eater's breadboard computer series

This is very hard indeed, even though i went to college i was very distracted by the high level abstract stuff. Even if it doesn't make me as relevant job wise I will still be trying to balance fundamentals with learning "abstract modern things", college helped a lot in understanding fundamentals, but even going through college i still think there is a lot more for me to learn on the fundamentals. I'm about to get a VPS to work configuring Nginx and other things from stracth, no GUI or crazy stuff like Terraform, just a terminal and neovim, i'm hoping this forces me to learn more and more about how things actually work. Maybe after that do some graphics with C and OpenGL to understand, instead of just doing the minimum like i did in college, i just did it to get the grade to pass, i didn't understand at the time how much i would miss knowing this stuff, i wasted time, and now i will go back to learn this stuff. Hopefully it is better now that i don't have to worry about exams and professors

Dude the way Prime writes the letter S upside down drove me up the wall lol.

I feel that. My Intro to Programming in first semester was taught in C (to teach us the foundations), semester 2 was focused on the fundamentals of C++ and OOP (memory allocation, pointers, inheritance, polymorphic objects etc), and semester 3 built upon that foundation and taught us mostly about the STD and STL libraries. I felt like it was a good progression, and learning C++ gave me a good understanding of core concepts; that's why I was able to pick up and learn other languages like C# quickly and easily. I heard that my university is thinking of replacing C/C++ with Python, because it's more "modern and relevant". I think that's a bad choice, I learned way more in C++ and became a much better programmer out of it than I did from Python tbh

As a new-ish programmer I feel bad for older programmers. It is a lot to learn however, starting at a simple C++ project I can see the path ahead and it's designed for me. The unlearning, re-learning and catching up on missed changes, kill established programmers fast. Everyone tries to take jobs right out of a degree using ALL the knowledge they have never implemented. My job is slightly beneath my knowledge level. However I can actually do it well, while learning from people around me working on more complex tasks. Every uni grad I know dropped out of their first job within 6 months. Choose something you can actually do. A degree means you should be able to go learn in the wild. Not that you are useful yet.

Learning specialized topics like compiler optimisation is also a big reason to go to university.

These are two very different careers. Software as an engineering discipline is still the same, it requires years of dedicated study to even scratch the surface of understanding, and still starts at the metal. Bootcamps are trade schools, you learn to use a tool to build useful things that people want, without caring how the tool is designed or works. But like many high paying trades before, the market often over-saturates and they are hit hard by automation.

When i started to learn programming i was like 13, i went to an extra class for Pascal, and we didnt really learn any data structures or anything, we mostly did simple games. I think what was important is that we didnt have any overly-abstract frameworks/OOP/fancy design patterns, we just used some built-in functions like DrawPicture(x,y), so a lot was still done by hand, and it was a great way to get hooked onto programming without it being too abstract and far from metal like with frameworks, but also without it being "boring" or "useless" like when you start learning from data structures.

Would be super interesting to hear about if there was / what kind of pressure people faced back in the day. Feels like the hustle culture / startup game has people rushing for minimum viable learning to produce something they can try to sell or even just market themselves as more skilled than they are… Was there equivalent things back in the days?

Based take Prime! I don’t 100% agree that DSA is easier but that also could be my uni bias. Good ish on this one, def opened my perspective to how starting with these web technologies in todays works could be extremely overwhelming.

in 1989 I accepted a short contract to re-write an assembler system. my toolset was the databook for the micro, a pad of paper, an eprom programmer and eraser and the target board. I wrote the assember on paper, assembled it to hex by hand, typed the hex into the eprom programmer, and blew the chip. took the chip out and inserted it into the target board and powerd it up. Then worked out what was wrong with a logic probe and took the chip out, and into a uve eprom eraser and the cycle started again. no oscilloscope, no computer other than the target eeprom based microcotroller.

Maybe the best way to describe it is that, in the past is was a lot harder but also a lot simpler. While now things are so much more user friendly and easier, but also a lot more complex (if you really want to get into it).

I kinda feel the same. I also started mostly with php and a simple apache webserver. While at the university i've had a small job, where i created webapps, but since then I've been mostly a games programmer for my professional and personal life. And I feel like overwhelmed from the amount of js frameworks and let alone the amount of tooling that is present in the web development today, compared to back then.

yeah that's why i'm doing CS50, i already purchased a few full stack JS courses but felt like i needed more when i found out about CS50. and you genuinely were another reason i chose to go with CS50 first for this kind of advice so thank you. i'm learning C in the course and it's killing me tbh lol, i think rust/GO are gonna be easier and better i assume

As a newcomer(I've learned to write HTML last autumn) I would like to say that I actually feel excited about all these new tech around - so much learning opportunities which make programming always feel novel. I've just yesterday decided to use Redis to make it easier to upload images to the app I'm making and it was so much fun finally realizing how this could be a better solution than what I had initially. (I don't store images in Redis, no)

I think there's a lot to be said about HOW someone learns, more-so than WHAT they learn. I am a practical learner, a hands-on learner, a SLOW learner. For me, the only thing that works is to learn at my own pace and to immediately see practical results. I can't learn something without seeing how it works by making something with it. I need the practical element to cement the theory, the theory does not hold its own weight.

I'm glad that when I started programming (web specifically) I purpusfully refused to use any libraries if I couldn't do what they offer without them. So it wasn't as deep as it cold be, but barebones php, htnl, css, js and mysql. And so many times I heard smth like "yeah, you need react for this." and... no, you don't. You don't need to rewrite whole project to make an ajax request. Just write this fing request.

The main problem I have with Bootcamps (and a lot of teachers in general) is that they only teach the "what", not the "why". And I really struggle to understand (and remember) stuff without the "why".

Ok... so imagine someone like me, im an artist, im ok a math in an academic setting, never had to really use it for my career. Ive "used" computers, and by that i mean, i know how to open applications and move files around using windows interface. Where would i go to switch careers and become a seasoned engineer? Do i have to like... learn electronics and sodder my own computer together start? A lot of these videos, and terminology is brand new to me. Its almost as if I'm fully color blind and your describing the concept of a rainbow.

Yep I agree with this video... it's like people starting today and thinking a full stack app is a next js, react, vercel, and firebase db...