How long did it take for you to become a successful Developer?

#career

Jun 14, 2020 ・1 min read

Edit: you decide what success means for you.

Discussion (10)

I got a full time job with benefits after a year of study, although I didn’t get very serious until the last 5 months. Since then, I’ve changed jobs once and been promoted so I’m doing very well after 3 years. I’m a major advocate for this career path.

códigoisaac • Jun 14 '20

That sounds good. And what did you learned in that 1 year of study?

Mason Embry • Jun 14 '20

I studied full stack JavaScript. HTML, CSS, JS, Angular 1, Node, Express, SQL. This was three and a half years ago. I did the Treehouse Techdegree.

Tom Swift • Jun 14 '20

Wow. Going back a few years - I learned my trade on opensource code, I was never really one for tutorials - once I felt comfortable there I joined a few freelancing websites after about 5 months in I got my first full-time job as a developer stayed there a while then went back to freelancing for 5 years - Then got hired as head of development for an environmental education company, Left there after 2 years - got hired by a Hosting company in the US to head there development team left there after a while and Now work at my current company - You just got to work at what you want, Nothing in life will be given freely. Work hard - You can achieve, You will achieve this has always been my motto :)

To cut a story short, I felt successful 5 months when I got my first paying client.

códigoisaac • Jun 14 '20

What a journey. And what did you already knew about development when you felt successful? HTML, CSS, JS?

Tom Swift • Jun 14 '20

HTML, CSS, JS, Jquery, MYSQL, and PHP at the time - PHP was my first love and is still my go-to language when I want to quickly prototype something - A lot of people don't enjoy PHP but I've always found it very easy to understand and it does what I tell it to do!

Valentin Radu • Jun 17 '20 • Edited

Depends on how you define success. It took me around 10 years to be able to understand things independently of language, platform, tools etc (i.e. to see the bigger picture and have an intuition that holds well in front of any "new" situation)
And I still feel like I have tons of things to learn and that I'm quite not there yet, considering there are people able to write production-ready modern compilers by themselves out there.
Then again, I wrote my own, successful app (my only personal project that actually made $), after just 2 years in the field. So again, it really only matters how high you aim and how you define success.

códigoisaac • Jun 17 '20

For me success is firstly to make a living with it, and then to make the world a better place with it.
I liked a lot your response, thank you.
I am curious, what is "the big picture" you took 10 years to grasp?
And also, what is the app you did after 2 years in the field?
In this thread you can define what success means for you.