Quit IBM - Takeaways from 3 years as a developer with no degree

what's up guys so today's my second to
last at ibm just cleaning out my desk
that's kind of a bittersweet moment you
know been here a couple years
but we're moving on and i'll tell you uh
in this video how i did it
yeah so it's my last day at ibm now
and i really wanted to get the moment
when i closed my laptop for the last
time
all right goodbye you served me really
well
but i do really like the smell of new
laptop new work laptop
i got a dell i think you guys were
wondering for the next
workstation and i just wanted to take a
moment to
go over some of the lessons that i
learned at my second
ibm was my second job in the tech
industry
and so i wanted to go over some of the
things i learned over my time there
and how it kind of relates to our
careers
as developers self-taught developers
with especially those with no degrees
and these things will
apply to people with degrees too but i
think it'll be especially helpful for
people without degrees because it's
a lot harder to find um a career path
that helps people on on that route
so i really first of all highly highly
recommend any of you guys
without degrees to look into
apprenticeships or
some people you know prefer boot camps
but an apprenticeship will get you a
paid
way to work for another company and um
you you know you get to work for them
and if they like you you get to be hired
on full time
and it's a win-win situation for the
company and the person like in my case
um i was billable for uh
for over two years uh for two years
actually
and we basically come in as super cheap
labor
and that's one of the things that that
i've learned over the past few years
is that our advantage as um
non-degree holders is that it might
sound weird but
we're basically cheap labor
it's messed up but if you think about it
we didn't pay for tuition and things
like that so
they don't really need to put on that
premium of someone with a university
degree and eventually things even out
anyway because i mean as i've seen with
my third job in the industry now
my my pay rate is much more in line with
what you'd see as a university graduate
in my opinion so another lesson that
i've learned is that you really have to
have a concrete vision
for what you want your career to look
like in the future
because if you don't one of the
necessary things you'll
you'll need to do as a non-degree holder
is potentially take up some jobs that
aren't exactly what you're looking for
for example i like to do like node.js
development back in development
front end i can do front end but i've
learned over time that i prefer
to do back in things and uh
work on the more logical side i find
funny kind of tedious
in a lot of ways and i might
with my work with ibm and with the law
firm that i worked out before
it was mostly front-end work building
dashboards and in ibm actually was able
to
carve out an area where i was actually
working in javascript doing back-end as
well as the front end
so basically full stack and that really
helped prepare me for my next
job as well as you know making me very
valuable at the company that i was at
and if i had some kind of black and
white mindset where i have to do what i
want to do right now
i would never have gotten to the
position where i'm i'm going to be
at next because it's that flexibility
and knowing your vision and trusting
yourself to get there eventually
that's going to actually get you there
and i don't want to sound preachy or
anything but
i really truly think that having solid
goals is how you
achieve your goals another thing i've
taken away from this journey
is that at some point in your career
after you hit like the two three year
mark it like the game
kind of shifts it start it starts off
being very difficult to land interviews
and getting the jobs
like any job basically in the industry
but after two three years in the
industry and
after you've built your network up
enough and i really can't stress how
how important it is to build up like a
linkedin network and
any network professional network that
you can build online
like building your own brand it's going
to be super important for you
to build those that way they're kind of
like nets in the future
so you can actually collect these um
inter
interview um what are they called not
interview offers
but yeah so people just come at you
offering you
interviews and then it becomes a game of
passing the interviews versus getting an
interview
and then it just changes everything
completely because once you're
you start you shift your mindset from
building portfolio pieces
building um yeah portfolio piece is
pretty much
you'll be working on passing uh the
passing the interview skill like you'll
be doing mock interviews you'll be doing
um lead code things like that and that's
really a pivotal moment in your career
whenever you
it feels a lot less stressful because
even if you for example lose your job
you'll still have all these
interviews coming in and you could
potentially find something pretty easily
i mean i say pretty easily but it's
still interviews are very difficult
and it's a skill in itself really
and uh yeah so that's my takeaways
briefly from the past few years of my
career
and hopefully it helped some of you guys
out especially those with no degrees
uh trying to grind it out out there and
uh this is my channel code phony if you
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i really appreciate it this is
codephoney out
peace