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When are courses counter-productive?

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When you wish to improve your programming knowledge, choosing the next course you’ll follow on platforms such as Udacity, Coursera or Udemy is exciting. All the courses descriptions promises that you’ll learn great new skills you can use to build cool projects and to improve your career. It’s also very easy to get started by just pressing a button. When you’re going through the process, the feeling of growing your knowledge is awesome and you’re surrounded by a community of learners going through the same process. Finally, you get the satisfaction of finishing yet another course and you can brag to your friends that you’ve collected a few dozen courses in a variety of complex domains. What’s not to like about it?

Learning and deepening your knowledge is more than just following instructions from a teacher. Most of those courses follow a similar format and difficulty level, and will teach how to be a beginner in a variety of domains and programming languages. You’ll master the process of completing courses, which may feel like the right thing to do to learn new skills. It’s easy to default to courses to learn new skills, but you must make sure it’s worth it and that you’re not just collecting certificates. You also must be careful not to become too comfortable with the process: if going through a course is a breeze every time, you’re probably not stretching yourself enough and you’re using this learning technique as a crutch that will slow you down.

I’m not saying that following a course doesn’t take any effort or is worthless, but choosing courses at random is a poor use of your time if you wish to grow as a software developer. In fact, the current state of online education is awesome: there are great courses available to improve your knowledge on any subject, and they’re a valuable tool to have in your learning toolbox. I don’t regret the old times when all we had to understand a programming language was a few thick books. But there are so many courses that you must cut through the noise to find those few that will help you reach your goals. You need to focus on a few core skills instead of signing up for everything that sounds cool.

Also, following a course is the beginning of the learning process and not the end. If you wish to really understand the material, you must use what you’ve learned, form your own opinions and improve beyond what you were taught. Don’t be afraid to start making your own mistakes, to share what you have learned and to make code that will be used by real people. You won’t have the time to do that if you’re cranking out certificates: you’ll get a lot more out of the courses you do follow if you do your own work that’s beyond what’s presented instead of sticking to the curriculum and stopping when it’s done.

Reaching an ambitious goal takes time

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Working toward a goal is easy if you’re just starting out and everything is fresh and new. For short-term goals such as learning a new programming language, reading a book or completing a course, it’s not hard to see it through if it really matters to you. You just need to follow the process and you can reach the end relatively quickly without losing steam. You’ll have many of those goals over the years and they’re essential if you want to keep improving as a software developer and keep up with technology.

On the other hand, you also have long-term goals that shape your path as a software developer such as:

  • Choosing to study and work as a software developer.
  • Committing to writing blog posts or giving conference talks.
  • Starting an open source project or getting involved with an existing one.
  • Moving to a brand-new technology stack to keep up with the industry.

It’s motivating to have such an ambitious goal when you’re just getting started. You’re growing fast as a newbie, and nobody is expecting you to be an expert the first day: everything you do is an occasion to learn. But after a while, those big goals gets harder to manage. You’re on your own and you’ve reached what seems like an endless plateau, making you wonder if it’s still worth it.

Plan for the long-term

When you commit to a large goal, you need to be aware that results won’t come quickly and that you must keep working regularly to reach your goal. You won’t become a star blogger or a recognized open source contributor in a few months. You can see good progress in a year, but if you really want to see strong results that have an impact on your life, a five-year commitment is a good timeframe to aim for. Think back on your career and hobbies up until now: did you really master anything worth it after only a few months of effort?

Looking at what you’re going to do in the next five years may seem like a very long time in our fast-moving world, but you need to give yourself the time to grow and learn. In your first year, you’re just going to start seeing some results. Once you’ve mastered the basics your progress is going to slow down, but you must keep working. After you’ve accumulated a few years of experience, it’ll start snowballing faster and everything will click. Voilà, you’ve finally reached your overnight success!

Give yourself time

If you stick with a job, a career path or a project for only a year or two, give up, and start all over again, you’re not giving yourself enough time to see where it could take you. Reaching a large goal is like growing a tree: at first, you’re laying down your roots and strengthening yourself without any visible results on the outside. You need to give it time to grow, instead of complaining that this tree is taking too long, yanking it out and trying again.

You also need to be flexible if you want to keep growing. If your goal is too restrictive, you won’t be able to adapt when it doesn’t work as planned. For example, if you’ve committed to increasing your number of open source contributions, you don’t want to force yourself to work on a specific project. Things can change and it may not be the best project for you after a few years. You also need to stay alert so you keep growing and don’t repeat the same year of experience 5 times.

This blog was started as a five-year project, and I’m at the start of year three. There are a lot of people with larger blogs, but I’ve improved my writing a lot in the last two years. If I gave up after only six months, I would have missed on a lot of growth, speaking with interesting people and even giving a conference talk. I’ve not been doing the exact same thing since day 1: I’ve tried writing very technical posts (such as my series on Android storage), and posts about being a software developer such as this one. I’ll surely explore other kinds of writing before the 5 years are up to keep learning.

What are you going to work on during the next five years?

Take a break, go out and play

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There is so much to learn and so many cool things I can make as a software developer that I can stay on my computer all day without getting bored. It gets a bit hard to concentrate after a few hours, but nothing that a cup of coffee can’t fix. If I feel stir-crazy, I can always take my laptop to a coffee shop or meet other developers and talk about code. Sounds familiar?

You can learn a lot about programming this way, and this lifestyle brings back fond memories of cramming on exams and student projects at university, but you won’t be at your best if all you do is code. You need to put in the time to become a good programmer, but this is a phase in your life: if you let it take over, it will limit you in the long term. Software is a way to solve problems for people, but to do this you need to be able to relate to many different kinds of people. If you only speak with are thirtysomething programmers working at startups and your barista, you’ll have a limited scope of problems you can solve. You need to live it up a little and try other things.

Programming during all your waking hours is also hard on your brain and your overall health. To be at our best, we need to switch to various modes of thinking and give ourselves space to assimilate what we learn. If you stay too close to a given subject, you won’t give yourself the occasion to get your best ideas and you’ll waste your potential. It’s no accident that the shower is known as a place to get great ideas: it’s a moment to slow down, relax and process everything that went on earlier.

But what can you do if you’re getting too much of a good thing, and need more perspective in your life? You need to find a hobby that you can enjoy so you’ll disconnect completely from your computer and the Internet for a few hours. It needs to be something completely different that gets you moving and playing in a different way. You could for example create art, play music, take up a sport or cook your own food instead of calling for pizza. If you stick too close to what you’re already doing, you won’t see the same advantages: I like writing, but it doesn’t count since it’s still solving problems in front of a computer.

If you’re not sure where to start, you can get books or watch YouTube videos to explore new prospective hobbies, but the best solution is to take a course or join a club to meet real people. At first you won’t be at your best, but over time you’ll have another way to play and create in your life, one that doesn’t involve computers or electronics. You’ll be more productive when you go back to your computer, and have fresh ideas you can use to make your software better.

Go back to the introduction of this series : Play and learn as a software developer

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