Should I Go To College

Today we're gonna be talking about whether you should go to college. If you already know the basics of web development.

This is one of my favorite topics to talk about, as I love to bring down worthless institutions. #shouldigotocollege #iscollegeimportant #iscollegeworthit

Transcript Of The Video

John Sonmez:

Yo, what is up guys? John Sonmez here from simpleprogrammer.com. I've got an email from a gentleman here who wants to know whether or not he should go to college. This is one of my favorite topics to talk about as I love to bring down the worthless institutions. Let's take them down. Let's burn them to the ground.

If you guys are just joining me for the first time and you're wondering what this channel is and why this extremely, what can I say, buff, Greek god looking guy is here talking to you about programming topics. It is the simple programmer channel. This is where you are at and I teach you how to become a better human being, how to become better, not just as a programmer, but as yourself, to actualize your full potential in life. And if you haven't already, check out my book, The Complete Software Developer Career Guide. It is a large tome, which will teach you everything you need to know about your software development career. I basically condensed all the knowledge that I'd gained over my whole career and from interviewing hundreds of software developers, coaching them all, put it in that one book. It's also a bestseller on Amazon, so go check it out.

The audio version is what I'd recommend. It's got some bonus content in there and is narrated by yours truly. So if you haven't already click that subscribe button, go get the book and let's jump into the fun stuff that we do on this channel. All right. So should I go to college if I already know the basics for web development? Name, Chris. Question, currently, I am majoring in computer programming at my college. I am mainly interested in becoming a web developer. Here's the thing. One, my college doesn't have any web dev degrees. Two, I already know the basics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and three, I feel like since I already know the basics, I'll be wasting my time continuing to take college classes. All my web development knowledge, I've learned on my own at Udemy, Codecademy, Treehouse. I'm just not sure what to do. Additional info, I feel like I will do just fine furthering my skillset with the online resources I use, Udemy, Treehouse, et cetera. I'm just not sure how important getting a degree is to getting a job.

Okay, so here's what it comes down to. All right, guys, I just want to teach you a very important principle, just thing in life here, which is that you should be focused in life in gaining applicable knowledge and wisdom. Those are the two things that you want. So what's applicable knowledge? Applicable knowledge is knowledge that you can directly apply. Okay? It is the opposite of Jeopardy knowledge. All right? Unless you're going to try and win on Jeopardy, okay? Then you don't need Jeopardy knowledge, what you need is applicable knowledge. All right? So that would be skills that you can actually utilize. And the reason why I'm saying this is because in the context of going to college, in the context of doing things that require a lot of money and time, you should always be thinking through this frame. All right?

The second thing that you need is wisdom. You should be acquiring wisdom, right? So I read a lot of books. I've got a lot of books back here. I listen to audio books whenever I'm running. The goal of a lot of what I'm doing when I'm doing that is I'm acquiring wisdom, right? Some of it comes from history. Some of it comes from different sources, from pop psychology. Some of it comes from philosophy and stoics and all of those things, but what I'm trying to accomplish in that sense is that I am trying to get a bigger picture to see the pattern of things and to gain a better understanding of the universe and the world around me so that I can apply that to whatever domain that I'm in. So knowledge that's applicable and wisdom, those are the two things.

So when you look at your course of life and action, and you're trying to figure out what should I do? Should I go to college? You should be looking at, what do I need to learn? How can I learn that most effectively? All right? And where will this benefit me? If you're just going through the motions, if you're just like, “Oh, I just need to go to college to get a degree.” You're doing the wrong thing for a couple of reasons. So one of the reasons why is because it's just not going to be useful to you. Okay? If you can go on Udemy and Codecademy, and Treehouse, what I'm saying about that is that if you can learn all that stuff online, and that's what you need to get your job, to do your job, let's say to do your job, okay, then go ahead and do that, right? If you can learn it from books, go ahead and do that.

If you haven't picked up the Complete Software Developer Career Guide, I talk about a lot of that stuff in here. I talk about how to really get a job as a software developer, all right. The key thing is that today in the world that we live in mostly what really decides whether you get the job is whether or not you can do the job. And so you should be focused on trying to learn the skills you need to be able to do the job. So if you're going to go to college and I'm not totally against college, but if you're going to college, don't go to get the piece of paper and get the degree. That's stupid, okay. Yeah, maybe it will be easier for you to get a job if you have a college degree, maybe, okay. But are you going to spend four to five years of your time and a bunch of money in order to make it easier for you to get a job?

Does that even make any fucking sense at all? Could you not spend one year, let's say it takes you an extra year to find a job because you don't have a college degree, okay. Isn't that better than four years of of wasting your fucking time and money? Don't you think that you could make it so that you could find a job faster by using that time on your own, rather than giving it to a school and wasting your life? Okay. So now with that said, I'm not against getting a degree.

I'm not against going to college, but if you do it, do it for the right reason, do it for the reason of actually obtaining an education. Go to school and learn everything that you can, utilize the professors, ask them questions, go to their office hours, go pour through that textbook, okay? Give it your all. Try to learn as much as you can. Spend time networking with people in your college, okay. Get some wisdom from it. Have philosophical debates with teachers, make it an actual, the way that schools originally were formed back in the old Roman and Greek days, those types of schools. Make it into something that will become a huge benefit for you for being there.

Do you guys get it? You get what I'm saying here. Okay? You have to think about this in terms of strategy, all right? Don't just follow the script, right? There's actually a really good book. It's really long by my friend, M.J. DeMarco. It's called Unscripted. And it's essentially about not following the script in life. Pretend like there is no script. There is no way to do things, okay. There's not a way to make money. There's not a way to get a job. No one told you, “You go to school. You get good grades. You go to college. You get good grades again. You do some extracurricular activities. You write your resume. You get a job. You put your money in a 401k, and then you retire.” Pretend like all of that doesn't exist. And you're just like, “Hey, I want to write code. I want to be a web developer and I want to get paid to do that. How can I do this?” That's what you need to be thinking of. Forget about all the constraints, all the … How can you do this?

Well, if I'm just a logical human being, I'm going to think, “Well, what I need to do is I need to learn how to do web development.” And Chris says that he's learned that already. That's good. The basics of it. “Okay, so what will be the next logical step? How can I prove to people that I know this and provide a value to them?” Well, if I were you, I would create a blog.

I've got a free course on how to create a blog. We'll put a card up here, a link and a link in the description below, all right. How to create a blog to boost your career. I think 5,000 developers have gone through that and probably 2,000 have created blogs. Then I can share my knowledge on there. Maybe I'll start a YouTube channel. I'd start a YouTube channel today. That's what I do. You can use the same approach as a blog. And then I would probably go about trying to learn as much as I could, and then build an actual application, a real world application, using those skills and learning what I needed to learn in order to do that.

My point is is that you learn the shit that you need to to be able to develop this application. And then now, what do you do? “Well, do I know anyone in the industry? Do I know someone that is working for a company? Can I talk to them? Can I buy them coffee? Can I get a referral to them so they understand that I'm a good developer? Can I show them some application that I've built to convince them first and then have them go to their boss?” You see what I'm saying?

You don't have to follow the script and go in and get college and do all that stuff. Right? College could be a part of it, maybe in your master plan. You're like, “Well, I'm going to go to college. I'm going to network. While I'm in college, I'm going to learn as much stuff as possible. I'm going to become a valedictorian and get the best grades so that I'll graduate with honors at the top of my class, so that I can get into an internship at a company like Microsoft, because I really want to become a career developer and get infected with the social justice bug.” Whatever, I don't know, you know what I'm saying?

That could be a plan, but that's a solid plan, but don't use the script to figure out the plan, okay? You come up with a plan and then you do what makes sense, all right? You guys got it backwards and this is why I'm making this video is because you're asking me questions like, “Should I go to college or not?” And that's the wrong question, okay. The question is, “What are you trying to fucking do and how is the best way to do that?” That's the question you should be asking yourself. “Is that on your path? Does it make sense to you to do that?” Not, “Am I supposed to do this?” Forget about what you're supposed to do. That doesn't matter. What only matters is what will actually be effective.

All right, guys, that's it. I've run out of time for today. Make sure you click subscribe if you haven't already, and if you haven't checked out simple programmer, go check it out and get some courses on how to market yourself as a software developer on 10 steps to learn anything quickly. I've got a real estate development course on there to teach you how to invest, a bunch of stuff. You'll find it useful. Don't forget to check out the book and I will see you next week. Take care.