Some of you may be wondering if there’s a right number of hours you should be putting into learning programming every day in order to guarantee that you’ll be able to get a job at the end of whatever period of time you’ve chosen to study, which may be 3 months or 6 months or 1 year, or whenever the deadline you’ve alloted in order to find a job.
And of course it depends on how quickly you want to be able to get a job, meaning you probably want to be putting in more hours the more quickly you want to find a job. But one recommendation is that no matter how long any deadlines you have set regarding finding a job, you set aside — at minimum! — at least one solid hour every single day where you can focus completely on programming without distraction and without interruption. And learn something concrete and practical.
Before you start accounting for the exact number of hours to study per day, you want to make sure you realize that it’s more important to be consistent in terms of how often you program, rather than trying to figure out how many total number of hours it’s going to take you in order to learn programming. For example, you’ll learn more by studying programming one hour a day for one week, rather than spending seven hours on one Saturday, and not programming the whole rest of the week.
You also want to be fully engaged when programming. This means you are not going to be checking your emails or looking at Facebook or talking to your friends on the phone, or chatting with your girlfriend or wife or boyfriend or husband, and not multitasking by having Reddit open in another browser window and Netflix playing on your TV beside your desk. You are going to study programming for at least a solid hour without interruption and without taking a break, aside from maybe a bathroom break or two.
An hour a day is the bare minimum you would need in order to get any kind of momentum going, so that you can learn enough on a consistent basis to actually build applications. But in order to be properly equipped to actually find a job as a software developer, you will most likely need to put in some extra time in addition to the minimum one hour a day takes to learn basic programming concepts.
Ideally, you would be able to put in 20 hours or more per week studying, the majority of that time being spent in actually building applications in order for you to be equipped with any kind of meaningful, productive knowledge that makes you able to accomplish programming tasks on demand, like you will be asked to when you start working.
Some of you may be able to put in even more than 20 hours per week studying. For example, some of you will be able to put in two or three hours on weekdays after work, plus another eight hours or so per weekend day. Which means you will be able to dedicate 30 hours or more to learn programming, which will of course shorten the time it takes to learn programming to an effective degree.
And I know a lot of you may have a very demanding job, which takes more than 40 hours a week. Some of you may have kids or parents or grandparents that you have to take care of. So it won’t be possible for you to put in this amount of time.
And that’s okay.
Go ahead and progress as quickly as you are able, but just make sure whatever goals you set are realistic. And don’t expect too much too quickly, because that can be very discouraging when it comes to actually wanting to see a particular goal being met.
For example, if you’re only able to put in one hour of programming every day, and that’s the maximum amount of time you have available because of your life situation, don’t make it your goal to be able to get a programming job three months from now. Because those two things are pretty much mutually incompatible… you are not going to be able to get a job in three months with that little amount of programming practice, if you’re starting from scratch.
However, you should still be able to absorb fundamental programming concepts by the end of three months, even if you only put in one hour a day. I think one thing that people don’t realize about programming is that you really don’t need to learn all that much in order to be able to do productive tasks like build basic applications.
The total scope of knowledge in programming itself is incredibly vast. And it could take somebody a whole lifetime to learn everything there is to know about just one subset of programming, such as web development. But in terms of actually building small productive applications, it really doesn’t take that much programming knowledge and practice at all. So just keep that in mind.
One thing you should always be careful of however is to be spending way too much energy on programming, to the point where you actually burn out and don’t want to learn it anymore. If you ever find yourself not enjoying this whole idea of programming anymore, and it’s really stressing you out to a point where you may even start to hate it, then maybe you should take a step back.
Maybe you should try to take more breaks, and maybe you should try to set a more conservative goals. For example, not trying to get a job in three months but instead trying to get a job after one year, which will take a lot of the pressure off of you, and not make the task seem so daunting and overwhelming.
There’s actually a major reason why people enjoy programming, and that’s the little dopamine rush that you get whenever you solve a programming problem. That’s the thing that makes programming pretty addictive, because programming in the end is basically just a series of problems that you have to solve. And every time you solve a problem, you get a little burst of satisfaction.
But if you’re pushing yourself so hard and you’re getting so frustrated and so stressed out over trying to meet a minimum number of hours of practice per day, then it’s possible that this little enjoyment that you get from solving problems will get overwhelmed by the sheer stress and pressure that you’re putting on yourself, to the point where you may not even want to program at all anymore.
Similarly, this is also a situation you may run into at work where you’re being driven so hard by your boss to meet deadlines that are completely unrealistic, and you may find yourself burning out at work. This happens a lot too in a lot of programmers’ careers. So it’s important for you to pace yourself and to program in a way that’s sustainable not only for your schedule, but also your health as well, which is more important than anything else when it comes to learning programming.
Make sure you are pacing yourself properly when it comes to learning on your own. And make sure when you do eventually start applying for jobs that you only look at jobs that provide a reasonable work-life balance and that’s not going to completely crush you when it comes to the amount of work you have to do, especially pertaining to very unrealistic deadlines. This is a problem inherent in a lot of the big game companies, but that’s a topic that I will cover another time.
The bottom line is you should try to make sure you are enjoying the process and not pushing yourself to the point where you start burning out. At the same time, don’t be lazy and be sure that you are consistently moving forward toward your goals by doing a solid amount of programming every day.
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