What can you study when you’re learning to become a programmer that would start to get you an income in a few months? Let’s talk about that today.
Again, the topic was, “What can you learn, that you can really learn to study in just a few months that will give you the opportunity to start earning an income as a programmer?” Now, this is a question that I see relatively frequently and the first thing I’m gonna say is, that is the wrong way of looking at a career in programming.
If you’re purely looking at this as an exercise to quickly start generating money then you might be better off, not focusing on computing but going back to something basic to give yourself that income. Then start really taking a more structured, timely approach to learning how to program. If you’ve got a need to earn money, I mean let’s face it, in today’s society we do need money to live. If that’s your overriding focus and you wanna learn something as quickly as possible then in my opinion, you’re really setting yourself up for failure because you’re focusing on your end goal of money as opposed to learning programming. You’re gonna be taking shortcuts, you’re gonna be watching videos at perhaps two times the normal speed, you’re gonna be skipping sections because your goal is to finish your training as quickly as possible so you can start earning money.
So, again, I would focus on taking your time and making sure you go through a course in a timely fashion. I’ve got a video on that on my YouTube channel where I talk about the reasons why you don’t wanna rush through a programming course. So take your time to do that and if you do need money, which again, I know we all need money to survive in today’s society, then try and see if you can earn something else. Go back to something you know, perhaps another career if you’ve done something.
If you’ve worked at McDonald’s or something in the past perhaps you can treat this as a more a long-term thing, get the money, start earning that money in whatever that base job is while you’re learning to program. That way you’ve taken the pressure off yourself to earn an income. Because I can tell you generally speaking that if you’re thinking that you can just pick up a programming language or learn something and then within a few months start earning some money, that’s gonna be hard work for you. I’m not saying it’s not possible because I’ve seen people achieve that but you just have to think about this logically.
If you’re thinking about someone or working, or going for a job position or a job opportunity against someone who’s got a lot more experience than you because they’ve taken the time and they’ve been in the industry a lot longer, they’re gonna have better skills. They’re gonna better all round skills and be in a better position to compete against you for work. So if you’re only spending like a few months and, you know, worked really hard to learn the basics, you just haven’t got that real world knowledge is what I’m saying. It’s just the analogy that I’ve used before with driving a car. If you start off driving a car you can learn the basics really quickly but you can’t compete against a Formula One/ Grand Prix driver immediately. They’ve got years of experience, they’ve honed their skills. You both know how to drive a car but the Grand Prix driver has got a lot more skill that he’s built up over the years from a lot more. He’s driven a car a lot longer than you have and has those skills.
So the same analogy works with programming. That you’re not going to learn the skills to really be a productive programmer in just a few months, at least one who’s earning a lot of money. So I would suggest you take your time, realize that this is a journey, try and enjoy the journey, take the stress off yourself of having to earn money by going back and earning money in another area initially and treat this as more of a longer term plan to build the skills you need.
If you’re in a rush to learn the minimum you need to learn to become a programmer you are gonna cut corners but you probably also are gonna make decisions that might influence where you end up as a programmer. For example, you might think, “Well, to become a game’s developer, from what I can see I just need to learn so many different things. That’s gonna take me maybe six months or 12 months or 18 months. I haven’t got that amount of time.” So you’ll eliminate that as a possible area of programming that you may have loved doing, you might be great at it, purely because you’ve dictated that you’ve only got a limited amount of time, again because you need to earn money. So it’s really best to try and focus on this and think that, you know, this is a longer term plan, it’s a skill, it’s a career that you’re making here and try and earn some money in other areas. And support yourself while you move forward and learn the skills you need to learn to become a productive programmer, which takes time.
I hope that helped. If you’ve got any questions feel free to leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.