My thoughts on getting started in IT - Part II

I’m not an expert on anything, everything I say is based on my experience, I don’t want to be an influencer or monetize this. I’ll try to condense my path to getting started in IT without dwelling too much on personal sacrifices, because everyone will experience their own.

I believe the first thing is to research IT careers, back, front, devops, cybersec, data etc and understand what you want to do. It’s really bad to try to start something without having any idea where you want to go. It took me about 8 months of study jumping from branch to branch, following hypes and course seller talk.

In the study part, it’s very important to get basic notions of algorithms and data structures before any language or framework and understand if programming is for you. A lot of people start excited about the idea of working remotely, working from home and think the routine is easy, but it’s a career that requires a lot, at some point you’ll have a heavy workload and every day you wake up obsolete if you don’t update yourself. If you don’t like it, in the long run it can be a big frustration.

About community, I have a not very pleasant opinion about the dev bubble, so surround yourself with few and good. At the beginning having someone who’s already in the field who can give you guidance can help a lot not to waste time studying things unnecessarily and even with a referral. And when positioning yourself on social networks, it’s important to have this thought. There are very good people technically and as humans out there, building good connections with these people will help a lot.

Don’t get excited about social network hype, don’t follow influencers and focus on what provides employability. After you’re in practice, you’ll always have to be open to learning new technologies. You’ll only choose 100% of the technologies you’ll work with if one day you deal with a project of your own. While working for others, you’ll need to be flexible.

I hope it was useful.

Cheers!