Climbing the corporate ladder can be really difficult. I know programmers that have spent almost 10 years building his careers in order to gain knowledge and become a well-paid programmer.
However, what if we took it to the next level? What if we decided to become a well-paid programmer in just 1 year? Is it possible that, within this time frame, become a well-paid programmer? Is there a strategy you can implement?
John Sonmez: Hey, what's up? John Sonmez here from simpleprogrammer.com. I just want to give a quick shout out to one of our sponsors Tech Academy. Tech Academy is a software development bootcamp which offers online or in-person training. Their program is self-paced and offers students flexible scheduling. They also offer open enrolment which means yo can start at any time. If you're looking for a coding bootcamp I definitely recommend checking them out.
Today, I am going to tell you how to be a well-paid programmer in one year, at least I'm going to attempt to answer that question. This is kind of a bold question to ask and kind of a little ambitious to be a well-paid programmer in one year. Can it be done? I don't know. Let's see here.
Mark says, “Hello, what should I do if I want to be good, well-paid programmer in one year please? I know it is impossible to be professional with HIGH salary in one year. Is it possibly to be just a good programmer with a decent salary? Let's say I have only one year to learn programming languages. What should I do? What si the best way to achieve this goal? About me: 21 years old, 1 year free time – almost 8 hours a day. Location: Central Europe.” Okay, so he's 21 years old. He's got a year and he's got almost 8 hours a day of free time. “Addition info: basis programming experience, P2P, Java. I will try my best and work very hard.” Well, you better if you want to be a well-paid programmer in one year.
Okay, let's talk about what I would do strategically, what will we do here if we want to be become a well-paid programmer in one year, not a super professional, not super high salary, but well-paid in one year. You've got 1 year, you've got plenty of time. What do you do? First thing I would do is I would enroll in a coding bootcamp. I know that some of you are like, “What? Why are you saying that? Are you promoting coding bootcamps?” Yeah, because I think that the best thing—like if you can find a good coding bootcamp—I'm actually going to plug my book.
I've a book called The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide. In the first section of the book, you can sign up here for—it launches in July so maybe it's already out by the time you're watching this, otherwise you'll sign up and get the chapters via email. In the first section of this book I talk about comparing between going to college, self-taught and bootcamp and I lean heavily towards bootcamp and I'll tell you why, because it's the fastest way, if yo have a good bootcamp to acquire knowledge. It's like immersion. If you're going to try to learn a language, immersion is probably the best way if you really want to do this. If you spend 12 weeks and you're just focused on learning a programming language and doing the actual work and actually building something and working with something and you're spending 10, 12-hour days on that, that's going to get you a super—it's going to have an exponential increase in your learning and knowledge.
I did this video a while back called I Can Learn Anything in 3 Months. It really pissed a lot of people off because they don't think it's possible. I'm telling you, like immersion, you get a 10x benefit when you put in that much effort, when you just immerse yourself. If you've got 8 hours a day, go to a coding bootcamp and just spend. In fact, don't just spend 8 hours a day, spend 12, 14 hours a day focused for 3 months in your coding bootcamp and start with that base. Next, after that, or well, during that, I would start a blog. Check out my course on How To Create A Blog To Boost Your Career. Get the blog going. You've got a year, you can write a couple of articles a week to get that blog going. You might even start a YouTube channel and start doing tutorial videos and maybe you produce 2 to 3 videos a week. Again, I'm giving you the optimal here. You can scale this back to suit what time you have and how much you're willing to—how bad you want it, how willing you are to go for it, but I'm giving you the optimal.
I would do that. You could start a podcast. I've got a course on How to Market Yourself as a Software Developer. I'll plug that here, but that talks about all these things, on how to build a name, how to market yourself and how to do that. If you've got a year worth of time you probably want to implement a lot of this stuff and get yourself your name or your marketing out there because that's going to be the best way to get a job and to get a well-paying job. Because if you start writing blogposts, if you start doing a podcast, or you start doing YouTube videos and you get your name out there and people know who you are or they find you on a Google search or when you go for a job interview, they find your blog and they find a lot of information on there, that's going to be really fundamental in getting a good paying job even though you don't have a lot of experience. That's going to make you seem a lot more knowledgeable, have a higher authority than what you would if you didn't have any of that stuff out there, even though you don't have as much experience.
At the same time, you might even consider writing a small book and putting it on Kindle. I would probably start writing a few applications, some mobile applications is a simple way to go. You've got a whole year so you've got time to do these stuff. If you can write some simple applications and put them in the app store, what that's going to do is even though you don't have experience, when you go to a job interview you can say, “Hey look, I have 5 apps in the app store, I definitely know how to program. I can show you the source code for them. I've been selling these apps.” You can also start your own company at that time that is an app development company and say that you work for them because you do work for them and so it will put some experience on your resume.
I'm trying to think if there's anything that I would be doing. I mean I would basically focusing as much of my time as possible to—I would go deep. I would specialize. Pick one particular programming language. You've only got 1 year so you're not going to be a jack of all trades. Specialization is important anyway. I've got a whole playlist on specialization that you can look at to get some ideas of what I mean, but essentially pick something. Maybe you've picked the mean stack or you pick some kind of framework or maybe it's Angular or maybe it's React Native or React JS or whatever it is, but pick something very, very narrow that you're going to get really in-depth knowledge, deep knowledge of, something that you feel like you could be the best in the world at that you could honestly do that. That just means that you're going to have to slice something really, really thin.
There's a lot of people that are best in the world at things. Look at the Guinness Book of World Records, it's not that high of a bar but you've got to pick something. Narrow it down. That's my strategy. Like I said, just to summarize: Bootcamp it, become the best programmer in your bootcamp by devoting more time and energy as possible. Get your name out there, use How to Market Yourself, my course, if you want, but get your name out there from a blog, from podcast interviews if you can, from YouTube videos, whatever that you can do to build up as much content in a year and then go out theree and build some applications. Like I said, that's going to help you as much as you possibly can, I think, in a year's worth of time. You're going to learn along the way. All that stuff that you're going to be doing is going to be teaching you as you're building up your reputation as well.
One last thing I would say is go to as many meet up groups as possible for programming in your area. That's going to make a whole lot of sense because you're going to make a ton of connections, you're going to be building your network. If you do this now, if you have a year worth of time to build your network, by the time that that year is up I guarantee you it's going to be super easy for you to get a job.
All right, I hope that helps you. If it does, if you haven't subscribed already, click that subscribe button below and I will talk to you next time. Take care.