61–70 of 70 posts
You can pretty much learn the job and be f-ing done for the rest of your life, more or less.
Otherwise, be ready to be forced to re-learn stuff every two years or so, because of the new trend/framework/language/craze.
By the time you are already interviewing, it can be too late to start leetcoding. Unless you're a genius who has a natural knack for this kind of stuff, or are a networking savant that has a knack for finding the rare, good companies that don't hire via leetcode interviews.
Otherwise, I would focus on making as much money as quickly as possible so you can get out once you realize the toll it is taking on you. It sucks to be trapped in a high-stress, average paying job, with no alternatives and a family to support.
One leetcode problem a day keeps unemployment away (and helps career advancement). By the time you are already interviewing, it can be too late to start leetcoding. Unless you're a genius who has a natural knack for this kind of stuff, or are a networking savant that has a knack for finding the rare, good companies that don't hire via leetcode interviews.
Have an exit plan with fallback skillset. The current SW industry is due to go through a dramatic implosion once AI truly takes off.
Get a good mentor
Lots of people have mentioned how important it is that you communicate, and equally important is, you need to find other people who communicate well and willingly! Its incredibly hard to teach yourself everything, and even if you attempt to teach yourself what you dont know, well timed feedback from another person can save you hours. Same with imposter syndrome, working with good people helps mitigate your self-doubt. Get feedback faster and spend last time thrashing (ie painfully learning) the basics.
Imposter syndrome is real. Kinda soon you'll be in a position where others look up to you, thinking they'll never get as good as you, while you still think you're a total noob. If coding, don't do everything from scratch. I've seen multiple people losing interest in their projects, because they didn't even really start them. It's almost always parsers, they (my old me included) write their own parsers for stuff and t…
Software is an interative process. Sometimes it can take 5+ draft versions before you produce high quality code.
There a good talk on this topic: Writing Software by David Heinemeier Hansson [1]
If you're short on time, you can skip to the highlight here: [2]
You are not smarter than others, your code does and will have bugs and design problems, you documentation will suck, you will need ways to debug tricky bugs, the dev language you are best at is sometimes not the best for the task, you can't work more hours than others and you still need a lot of time to learn new things.