one of the most controversial topics in programming has always been the college degree there's traditional education and then there's self-taught programming and in past videos I've expressed my opinion on college degrees and how important they are for software engineering roles but I haven't specifically spoken about self-taught programming because I did go the traditional education route but in this video I have someone who didn't my friend Kenny gunerman is in town and he's a self-taught programmer who works as a software engineer and he's also a YouTuber so I had him come over so that I can make a video specifically about self-taught programming I have a lot of strong opinions on this topic but since I come from a traditional education background I did want to get that other perspective from an actual self-taught programmer so I'm going to share my opinions and advice first and then we'll cut to his opinions and advice later on in the video but before we do that I do want to 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work on your soft skills and one of the coolest things they do is they have a career path quiz and based on your current skill set and career goals they recommend the perfect path of learning for you they have monthly annual and lifetime memberships and a ton of people use it and I think it's totally worth it so if you guys are interested definitely go into the description of this video click the link and check it out it's an awesome platform thank you for sponsoring this video Zero to Mastery and now let's get back to my opinions on self-taught program programming all right so coming from a traditional education background my advice has always been is college great yes do you need it absolutely not now of course that's a little bit of a generalization because there are programming jobs out there that do require a college degree when it comes to advice on this like should you go the traditional education route for self-taught programming route it is really specific to you as a person but since this is YouTube and I'm speaking to a lot of you here I'm going to generalize and say that most programming jobs nowadays do not require a college degree over the past few years people have started to place a lot of value on self-learning and since everybody moved to online and people have developed all these resources and courses people understand how easy it is to self-learn and there's absolutely no way that anybody can say nowadays that a traditional education is necessarily more valuable than a self-taught education the same information that you will be learning in traditional education you can teach yourself that information is out there for everybody to learn it's more dependent on you as a person and what invite environment you want to put yourself into so that you can learn this stuff in the best way possible college is great right you get to learn alongside peers and develop your skills and learn from your peers and instructors who have different knowledge and different things and you get face-to-face interaction with people which makes communicating really easy for Learning and retaining all this information however this doesn't necessarily mean it's the best environment for learning first of all it's tough to generally say that college computer science is a great thing to go into considering every computer science program at every different University or college is completely different the instructors will be different the people will be different the environment will be different the material will be different and when you're enrolled in a program in college and you're having a tough time learning from an instructor the way to change your instructor would be to drop the class or switch the class or maybe switch universities all together into a different program whereas if you're self-teaching and you're trying to learn something and you have a certain resource that isn't doing it for you you could switch take a different course learn from a different online instructor and May maybe learn it from someone else that easily I just don't necessarily think there's any right way for you to learn just because you went to college doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to know more or be any better of a programmer than somebody who's self-taught and just because you're self-taught doesn't mean you know any better or are going to be any better of a programmer than somebody that went to college because of societal conventions people put a lot of value on the college degree however I don't know about you guys but when I was in college I remember there were a lot of people partying sleeping in class skipping class and even people cheating but when it comes to self-taught programming there's also flaws there some people have a tough time learning on their own whether it's because they can't commit to a schedule of learning and practicing every single day or because they have comprehension issues and they're the type of learner that needs to ask questions and have face-to-face communication with somebody that actually learned generally to me it doesn't really matter which way you choose to learn whether you want to go traditional education or self-taught programmer it doesn't really matter all that matters is that you learn and develop your skills right until it comes to the financial commitment now as education is extremely valuable and it's actually considered investing in yourself there's been a charge for education for forever and valuable educational resources can become very pricey but it's up to you to not make bad financial decisions this is extremely important to understand because a lot of people just look to programmers and people that have software engineering roles and see how much money they make and just think I want to do that let me get to there no matter what it takes I'll do whatever I'll pay the most money for education and just just get me to that point but you shouldn't just automatically equate an expensive education to a valuable education and thinking of an education like an investment is really important right you could buy a really expensive stock but maybe it's actually not that valuable and over time you're going to lose money for investing in that stock well when you invest in your education you want a valuable education that is going to have a return on that investment so you might pay for your education but it makes you a lot of money in the long run you get a successful career out of it and it's totally worth it you do not however want to pay for inexpensive education and then not make a lot of money from it and this happens to a ton of people when they go to a really expensive school and they think it's going to be a really great life decision but they don't actually learn that much and develop the skills that they need to have a really successful career and get that return on investment instead you might be stuck with a ton of student debt and no job this could also happen at something like a boot camp that's extremely expensive that advertises that you should be able to get a job after nine weeks but maybe they don't guarantee it right and you pay all this money for the boot camp but what if you don't get the job after so unless you're completely fine with wasting money and going into debt you need to be extremely careful when you're considering the investment for your education make sure that you fully understand what you're getting yourself into and what you're going to learn from this education and what you're going to do with those skills afterwards to get that return on investment so those are my opinions and advice on self-taught programming versus traditional education but since I'm not actually a self-taught programmer I'm now going to throw it over to Kenny gunderman self-taught programming YouTube so let's talk about ways that you could learn how to code as a self-taught programmer now there's a lot of great material out there online and a lot of it is actually free resources that I've heard a lot of good things about are free code Camp the Odin project and then there's a great lecture series by Harvard on YouTube called cs50 you may have heard of it before but I think it's important to realize when learning how to code it's not a one-size-fits-all solution you can start with free code Camp you could start with the Odin project or you could start with the cs50 course and maybe that just doesn't work out for you I originally wanted to start learning how to code because I wanted to make mods for the game Minecraft and when I started I didn't have a solid structure I didn't have a thing like the Odin project or free codecamp to guide me I watched a couple YouTube tutorials to get my IDE set up in Java and then I watched a couple tutorials on how to make Minecraft mods and I think another really important thing to understand is that when you are first learning how to code and you're watching tutorial reels the information isn't going to click right away I remember I was watching these tutorials on how to build these mods and I was typing out the functions and making the classes and I didn't understand really how it was working I was kind of just copying the code and praying that it would run but the thing is if you do that consistently enough and you do that for a long period of time things just start to click and I think the best advice that I could give you is that if you want to get better at learning how to code as a self-top programmer is you gotta keep exploring resources figure out resources that work well for you but just don't stop coding as cliche as that sounds you really just gotta keep coding you got to keep banging your head against the wall you got to keep Googling to find answers to your bugs so on and so forth and once you start getting down the basics you won't have to rely on a tutorial to actually code you'll eventually be able to make your own projects without a tutorial and that is something I highly encourage you to do come up with a project idea and doesn't really matter what the project idea is honestly I think a good place to start would be something like a Twitter clone or a YouTube clone or something of that nature just come up with an idea doesn't have to be unique but don't follow a tutorial when you're writing it start building the project get stuck use Google to help guide you so on and so forth eventually you do that enough you'll build your own personal projects maybe you'll start building more unique projects and you can build your own developer portfolio maybe you host that with GitHub or maybe you build a website portfolio displaying all your work but don't expect to go from first starting to learn how to code to building these cool projects and making a portfolio overnight it can take weeks months sometimes even years to get to that level once you build your developer portfolio that's when the exciting part happens and that's when you can start applying for jobs but don't be too discouraged if you start applying for jobs and you don't hear back right away it can oftentimes take hundreds of applications but the important thing is to be consistent when you apply another great piece of advice that I give out is that building your network as a self-taught programmer is important because oftentimes it's not about what you know it's about who you know when it comes to getting a job there's many different ways you can Network in this digital age you can join Discord groups you can just find people online or you can meet up with people in real life and go to Tech conferences talk to the recruiters there get their business cards get their emails and then reach out to them like that so build your network stay consistent when applying for jobs but also stay consistent when learning how to code alright so that's pretty much it guys I was just making this video to kind of cover on some of these very big General coding YouTuber topics this is one of the ones I haven't really talked about in depth yet I know a lot of people are learning from different ages and backgrounds and you all have different crazy stories about traditional education self-taught programming getting hired in the tech industry maybe didn't get hired I'd love to see those in the comments below I always want to read and see what's going on currently in the world so please drop some comments so I can read from your stories maybe we can educate me a little bit if you enjoyed this video please leave a like subscribe to the channel and if you want to connect with me more personally follow me on Instagram and Twitter thank you guys for watching this video as always I appreciate all your support and see you guys in the next one peace