Phil Choi tells junior developers to stop waiting for rescue. He became senior after 30 by digging into resources, joining communities, breaking code to learn it, and putting in the hours. No mentor saves you. You do.
Questions this video answers
Phil Choi
After the age of 30
"No one's coming to save you" — junior developers must become self-reliant
Chapters
No one is coming to save you. You wait and wait and time passes. You open your computer and your VS code is empty. Not even one line of code. You said you were going to be a programmer. Even if I was your mentor and I spent 24 hours a day with you, I can't magically upload the knowledge I have and the work ethic it took me to get here into you like the Matrix. I didn't give a F about who the President was. I didn't have time to worry about that. I had work to do. I had responsibilities to take care of. And coding was the instrument or the vehicle that helped me get to where I wanted to be. I saved myself. And you also can save yourself. My name is Phil. I became a senior developer after the age of 30. If this video becomes of use to you, please share and like on how programming has changed your life. I read all of my comments and it would be great to motivate each other through our stories. At a certain point, you have to realize that no one's going to come and save you. Like, at school, maybe you have the teacher to save you. At the boot camp, we definitely had you. It was like, okay, you could give up on a problem or give up on a project and you're going to get saved. And that's all good and all in like, a safe environment. But later on when you're working and you're expected to do a task, it's either like, you know, fight or flight or do it or get gone. You know, like, you have to prove your work all the time. And definitely, like, it happened many times. Like, if you take on like an outsourcing project or something and you don't finish it, you're gonna get in a lot of trouble. It's not easy. Like, you have to realize at a certain point, like, oh, yes, I took on a responsibility. I took on like, making this website. If I don't finish, gonna be a huge problem. And it's not like you're gonna go ask your friends because those works, right? It takes time to do that work. And I don't know, like, if everyone's busy and it's your job, I mean, you have to take responsibility for those things. So definitely I've ran into those problems. But, you know, you have to suck it up. You have to lose hours of sleep, you have to lose sometimes your voice because you're. You're so tired your eyes get bloodshot. But you, you have to realize your fingers start hurting because you're typing a lot. You're sitting there, your back starts hurting, you're running on fumes from energy drinks and you get it done. And that's the only way to do it. That to survive your brand, to survive your name, your reputation as a developer. Because you know if you start something, you have to finish. And especially if someone gives you money to finish something, you have to finish it or else bigger issues are going to happen and pretty much all you have is your name. So in the end it's like, yeah, like if you take on jobs or you get a task at work, you have to finish all that kind of stuff on your own. Or else if you keep on asking someone else to help you, it teaches you to become weaker. So in the end, you have to wake up sometimes and just say, hey, no one's coming to fucking save me. I have to be my own savior and I have to do the things that I say I'm going to do. So some of the next steps, once I realized the problem, right, I have to find a solution. It's kind of yes. I can keep texting people, I can say, hey, how do I do this? How do I do this? How do I do this? But in the end, all the answers are online and you have to just dig deep and you have to, you know, think hard. There are certain situations like maybe I'll be doing an algorithm or something and it'll make me sad because I can't, I don't understand it at the time, right? I don't understand like, I don't know at the time maybe like how to get a palindrome or like how to do a depth first search problem. I don't know, there's like a bunch of instances like this and like at first it's too, like it feels hard, right? And when like I get an outsourcing project and I get stuck on something like a E sign verification kind of thing, I don't know. And it gets really hard. But it's not a problem that you, you're the only one that's had. Find the right community, find something that can help you solve that problem. And if you look through enough resources, I'm sure you can figure it out yourself. So I mean, definitely don't be afraid to ask, don't tell people to do your job or something. But honestly, just like ask for advice, ask for tips, go read about some other issues that like maybe somebody else had and you can kind of figure that out on your own. So also, like always, just be learning. And once you're learning and all those problems and struggles, like, yes, like, I feel like I want to quit. I'm going to be my own savior. And then once you kind of get that mindset, I think at the end of it, like, if you run into the same problem you have, that's how you gain wisdom. That's life. So if you identify the problem, you know, kind of like the solutions, and if you're an aspiring developer or like a junior developer, definitely, like, just, you know, you know, keep going, be consistent, get your 10,000 hours in, you know? Like, I know that sounds cheesy, but it's the truth. If I run into the same error message and error message over and over again, I know it's not going to be a scary. The first time. Like, I don't know. The first time you run, like, react native and you get the red screen of death, it's. It's scary. You're like, how do I get out of here? Like, what's going on? It seems like a huge error, but it's actually not. Like, on flutter, when you start seeing, like, the yellow construction symbols everywhere, you're like, what's going on? But after you see them and you expose yourself over and over again to problems, you get, I don't know, like, what the word is, like, desensitized or something. Like, you're like, oh, no, I've been here before, so be excited to break something and fix it. That's the only advice I really have. Whenever I talk to my mentees, I always, like, maybe get them to a certain part of the project and I make like, a commit and I say, hey, try to break it. Go ahead. Like, do whatever you want. And then coming back to the working phase of the project is like a big learning process anyways. So break things, live life, break things, fix them, repair and make it stronger. So that's my advice for a junior developer. If I can do it, you can do it to Coding saves lives.
