Course creators are always telling you to learn this or that but how does any of it help your goals? That's the missing piece 🤔
Courses come out of 2 places: passion and opportunity.
Person stumbles into a technology, gets excited by the possibilities, tells everyone. "Wow this thing is amazing look what I can do!"
They found a flower and it gave them superpowers. But the flower was hard to eat.
You need to cook it right. Cut off the stem, avoid the poisonous seed, boil the leaves, and flambé the petals. Then you gotta freeze for 2 hours before warming up in the microwave.
That's opportunity. Help folks avoid the poisonous seed and the months of research.
A new course is born. 👼
When to buy a course
You buy the course when you want the super power.
Lots of engineers cherish the discovery process. Pick a technology and figure it out. It's fun and rewarding. Bang your head against the wall until it breaks.
You end up with lots of knowledge.
Little details you've figured out, patterns you've uncovered, and massive gaping holes you don't even know you're missing. The typical self-taught challenge.
We see this a lot at my dayjob when interviewing experienced engineers.
"You know SQL right, use it all the time?"
"Oh yeah lots, our entire database is SQL and I fetch data like at least once a week"
"Okay how would you design a schema for a user table?"
Oops, candidate "knows SQL" in that they know where to find mystic incantations in their codebase and cobble them together into something new.
Knowledge, no understanding.
How to leverage a course
A good course helps you in 3 ways:
- Skip the long research process
- A guide through unknown terrain
- Understand, don't just know
You get the super power faster and you avoid the bad parts. When you're done, you understand the material.
Understanding compounds over time, knowledge doesn't.
Once you understand cooking, you can look in the fridge and whip up a meal. Bit of this, bit of that, everyone's happy.
Or you can follow recipes and get stuck when there's a bug or your ingredients don't match ...
Same with code: When you understand the rules, you can use the recipe as a guideline. No need to memorize. But if there's a bug, something doesn't quite fit, you got dis. 💪
Can courses make you money and supercharge your career?
No. Not on their own. You have to use them.
Technology is ever evolving and you have to stay sharp. Yes there's still demand for COBOL programmers, but you don't wanna be stuck in a stack.
Use your understanding to jump ship. The more you understand, the easier new tech feels. "Oh Thingabob in NextJS is just Bobathing in Gatsby, d'oh"
You can learn new things fast.
That's what employers and clients pay you for my friend. Solving new problems.
You don't wanna be a factory worker churning widgets until the day you die, you want to design the factory.
The important work is the work you haven’t done before.
— Swizec Teller (@Swizec) July 15, 2020
We’re engineers not line cooks.
You're solving new problems, building assets, saving and creating money. When you build something, it's used for months and years.
That's your job as an engineer. You create the flower for others' superpower.
Cheers,
~Swizec
PS: the Standout Developer Bundle is on sale until Monday
Continue reading about How *do* you standout as a developer?
Semantically similar articles hand-picked by GPT-4
- Why everything must change every five years
- How resumé-driven development shapes our industry
- What a hockey legend can teach you about career development
- Why senior engineers get nothing done
- The best engineering books get good 5 years into your career
Learned something new?
Read more Software Engineering Lessons from Production
I write articles with real insight into the career and skills of a modern software engineer. "Raw and honest from the heart!" as one reader described them. Fueled by lessons learned over 20 years of building production code for side-projects, small businesses, and hyper growth startups. Both successful and not.
Subscribe below 👇
Software Engineering Lessons from Production
Join Swizec's Newsletter and get insightful emails 💌 on mindsets, tactics, and technical skills for your career. Real lessons from building production software. No bullshit.
"Man, love your simple writing! Yours is the only newsletter I open and only blog that I give a fuck to read & scroll till the end. And wow always take away lessons with me. Inspiring! And very relatable. 👌"
Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.
Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.
Want to become a true senior engineer? Take ownership, have autonomy, and be a force multiplier on your team. The Senior Engineer Mindset ebook can help 👉 swizec.com/senior-mindset. These are the shifts in mindset that unlocked my career.
Curious about Serverless and the modern backend? Check out Serverless Handbook, for frontend engineers 👉 ServerlessHandbook.dev
Want to Stop copy pasting D3 examples and create data visualizations of your own? Learn how to build scalable dataviz React components your whole team can understand with React for Data Visualization
Want to get my best emails on JavaScript, React, Serverless, Fullstack Web, or Indie Hacking? Check out swizec.com/collections
Did someone amazing share this letter with you? Wonderful! You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec.com/blog
Want to brush up on your modern JavaScript syntax? Check out my interactive cheatsheet: es6cheatsheet.com
By the way, just in case no one has told you it yet today: I love and appreciate you for who you are ❤️