The work that a person has decided to do in life should be meaningful and necessary for other people, bring real practical benefits. You can cultivate yourself internally and claim that the most important thing is your rich inner world, but, in fact, everything that happens in a person’s mind has no meaning or significance if it does not give real tangible practical fruits that affect life and the development of society in whole. Objectively, a person represents his/her career, and this is the end result of the effort. Everything else is just the soil from which such a fruit – the result – can grow. People who fail to realize this in time, are determined to remain outsiders for a long time, if not forever, who can only whine, complain and wonder why society rejects them?!
Therefore, it is especially important to understand as soon as possible whether you have chosen the right profession for education. It is also topical for programming, because many applicants easily decide to become programmers blindly follow fashion trends or ghostly desires, and then, when a tough stuff in learning begins, they start to wonder if they really need it. It is important to understand whether you want to do what you are learning, or to radically change the direction of study. Pro-Papers experts have prepared some practical advice on how to understand whether your job is programming.
Why become a programmer?
Many decide to become a programmer because they “like to program”. However, if a similar analogy is applied, then, for example, we can say that those who like to write something should immediately become writers, who like to play football, immediately become a professional athlete.
The choice of programming as the main profession in life can be compared with the analogous choice of mathematics as a profession: after all, not everyone who likes and is good at math is sure to become a mathematician! Usually mathematics is chosen by those who are more inclined to its abstract, who looks at the world through the prism of numbers and formula. The majority with a “mathematical mindset” still find themselves in a more specific area: various branches of physics, biology (this includes almost all theoretical biology, which again is essentially just a part of mathematics, and any experimental biology), geography (with geodesy and all possible types of calculations using maps and projections), and again computer science.
Therefore, the main question that everyone who thinks about a programmer’s career must answer is: do I really want to be a programmer, or do I want to use my knowledge and programming skills in some specialized field to be a unique specialist in it?
This is a very important question. Because it is better to be a good doctor, geodesist or cartographer with an average knowledge of computer science and use it effectively in your field, than to be a good programmer, but to know where to put your knowledge and what problems to solve with them.
Why is it better? Because the tasks that true programmers solve are very often less exciting and rarely are aimed at solving specific problems. It happens that in any project you have to do some percentage of work at the level of “do this button not blue, but gray”, “move this check mark slightly to the left so that it is at the level with another check mark”, and so on. What will be more interesting for you – to fulfill such requests or, for example, to think “how can I further improve the quality of voice recognition on my system? Maybe try to train the neural network to discard some grammatically incorrect options? “. Well, as they say, whatever floats your boat – but usually the choice is more or less obvious.
If you are not sure whether you would rather be a biochemist programmer or just a programmer, then try to think how easy the transition from one sphere to another will be. That is how difficult it is to get a programmer’s skill, already being a biochemist, and vice versa, how easy it is to become a biochemist from a programmer. It is often easier to master programming (especially as an applied discipline), rather than any science.
Another way to understand whether you want to link your life with programming is to distribute the arguments to the pros and cons. It is important to compare all the difficulties that are already present with the advantages that you will receive in the future. For example, the pros are:
- the work of a programmer is creative, possessing exceptional social value;
- continuous self-improvement, continuous advancement;
- is relevant and highly paid profession;
- it is possible to fully work for yourself;
- opportunity for professional growth;
- a specialist in this profession is clearly not facing unemployment.
But:
- programming is difficult,
- not everything comes easy,
- not everyone finds the strength to pull themselves together and master it,
- you constantly need to develop, learn something new (yes, for someone it is a disadvantage),
- you have to spend all the time at the computer,
- the brain works all the time,
- there is little time left for the family,
- you always live in the world of your profession.
Thus, by comparing all the pros and cons of programming right now, you can understand whether you should suffer and slightly conquer, or whether it will be more effective to change the specialty. In the end, if programming is not your hobby, or part of your work, then you will waste time starting learn it.
