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Comment by jventura | Hacker News Reader

I used to teach programming to students and really enjoyed that novice people learn how to program. But when I read things such as how someone got a high paying programming job with only 5 months of learning, I can't stop thinking about an old saying in the stock markets that goes something like "when your taxi driver starts giving you tips on which stocks to buy, sell it all and leave the stock market asap"..

I don't know if it is me and I'm too stupid that I've done 12 of higher level studies (5 BSc + 2 MSc + 5 PhD) when 5 months were enough, or if I'm targeting the wrong subfield. If we look carefully, all this "boom" with shitty software practices and instability is on web development and front end tools, and this is what most of these "5 month" learners are targeting. Similarly to the taxi driver above, I guess I should leave the web development job market asap..

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Hi jventura, I completely agree with you with the exception of one axiom: efficiency is more important than time spent when learning. If you read the article, I only mention the best way to get your first programming job with the least amount of friction. It takes years and years to truly develop your skills, but I have met many people that get discouraged because of the little progress they seem to be making when they are starting off (especially when they don't come from a computer science background like yourself). I wanted to write this article to show someone how it might be done in order to get those positive reinforcements as soon as possible so they become good developers in the future and they want to put in those years of practice (but efficiently) to get truly proficient.

Hi evantai, please don't get me wrong as I'm really glad that you could figure out a better deal for you.

My comment should be seen more as a kind-of rant because, in one hand, there's lots of instability on the web dev subfield, on the other hand, there's too much people without real skills entering the job market and these things are interconnected. On a final note, my comment only shows to me that I should think about moving along to another CS subfield, as web dev is currently too "hot" and plagued by low quality tooling and practices.

All in all, it is me that is wrong, not you, as I've probably lost too much time learning only to be doing web dev.. :)

Did you actually do that stuff to get a job as a programmer? Getting that much education with the idea that it would make you more employable probably would be pretty misguided, but I doubt that was your motivation.

I don't think the investing comparison is apt either. When a taxi driver is paying attention to the stock market, it is getting a lot of attention from the public. This is a different phenomenon than companies offering high wages for (presumably) relatively basic skills.

> Did you actually do that stuff to get a job as a programmer?

No, I just climbed the academic ladder as I was very fond of teaching. Unfortunately the academic world has too few jobs..

> I don't think the investing comparison is apt either. When a taxi driver is paying attention to the stock market, it is getting a lot of attention from the public.

The idea behind the saying is that when everyone is paying too much attention to the stock market it's because it has been rising so fast, lots of "dumb money" has been coming in, and a crash is imminent. I see something similar when I read about learning how to program in 5 months.

> This is a different phenomenon than companies offering high wages for (presumably) relatively basic skills.

These workers with basic skills is similar to the "dumb money" that is entering the market, with all its consequences..

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