What I learned working as a Software Developer without a Degree

And Yeah it was hard like everything else

Published in

ZestGeek

6 min readSep 7, 2018

I left college in the first year with a feeling that I wanted to do something more and this is not enough. I didn’t have a clue what I am gonna do.

So I quit. Just like that. Didn’t think it through. I didn’t want to because I knew I would have changed my mind if I thought about it.

It was hard. Yes, it was very hard.

This is how I describe my journey to this day “HARD”.

Like everything else, it was very hard.

Taking the decision to leave was hard.

The most important thing which we consider when taking a big decision is how our decision going to affect the people around us. We are social animals. We love being liked. We love when people appreciate us and we hate to get rejected. We hate when people don’t like us. This is human nature.

It matters to us what our loved ones think, what our friends think and sometimes even what the whole world thinks about us but as it turns out not everyone going to like everything you do and it’s okay.

I said to myself

I am an artist. I do whatever it takes to make my art. Sometimes they will like it sometimes they don’t I will do it anyways.

But before going on my own I have been programming for 3 years, built my own Linux derivative, built my own lisp dialect ( Of course by following a book I am not that smart ), built a social network for my friends and did a couple of freelance gigs.

I learned a lot of things from the time when I left college to this day when I am happily working as a Javascript Developer. I love to share those things with you.

Things I learned

1. We are not in software business we are in a people business

The most important thing I have learned is

We are not in software business we are in a people business

We have to understand the most important thing in the business and that is Profit.

Do you know why people even hire you in the first place? they want to generate profit from you. We have to understand that we are not in a software business, we don’t get paid to write code into the code editors. No, we get paid when our clients get paid because of what we created.

It’s very simple.

We create something => Clients sells it to the end user => Clients get paid => Client pay us.

This is the simplest business model yet we fail to understand it. You don’t need a degree or you don’t have to be the smartest developer. Just find a way to make the profit for your clients and there you go. The more profit you generate people will hire you more.

2. Say yes and Yeah of course only in the beginning

I was 18 and a half years old when I left college and immediately I started working for a local firm. The pay was very low. I have to walk like 10 KM to reach the office to save money but I have to say yes. I don’t have any other choice.

I should have quit. At least I thought about that every day at that time. But I was curious. What will happen If I don’t quit? What will happen If I say yes to every opportunity that comes my way?

So I started saying ‘YES’. I said to myself I am here to stay. I stopped thinking about what should have happened if I didn’t leave college and started focusing on what opportunities was present in front of me and started acting on them. I started adapting. Instead of saying no I started adapting and it was the best decision of my life.

You see, in the beginning, you are not in a state of making demands. You have to say yes to everything that comes your way and then learn in the process. You have to get your name out there. You have to build trust. You have to build experience and in order to do that, you have to start saying yes.

The pay is low? just say yes. It will improve over time. Now I make more money in a day then I used to make in a month when I started.

You have to build your portfolio. You have to meet new people. You have to make more connection. You have to learn lots of skills.

And guess what? these things will not happen automatically you have to go out there take any opportunity you can make these things happen.

3. Personal Brand

Write Articles. Build a personal website. Start open source projects on Github. Answer questions on Quora and StackOverflow. Start a project and host it somewhere no matter how shitty your code is.

Do you want to create the next Twitter bot there you go who is stopping you?

If people put your name in the google search your website should be the first search result.

Put my name in google “Manoj Singh Negi” its all me there.

Build a Personal Brand. Be everywhere on the Internet. The benefit of working with technology is that you have the power to use the internet as a place where you can showcase your skills easily because our audience the people who want to hire software developers are all over the internet.

You know what beats a degree? A brand. A brand on which people wants to spend money. A brand which people can trust. A brand which people can show off.

And you need to be that brand.

A CS degree is a thing of past. Show your potential clients/employers that you can make things work and to showcase that you need something to back you up and that’s where your brand comes in.

Instead of a degree and a boring resume share the things that you have been doing on the internet.

Share all of your GitHub projects. All of your medium articles. Your personal website. Your personal blog. Every question you ever answered and they are more likely to hire you.

4. Teach everyone

Teach everybody. Be the person who wants to help everybody in every situation. Solve people problems for free. Answer people questions. Go to meetups. Educate people by writing articles.

Teaching puts you in a position where everyone sees you as an expert in your field. If you teach things, write about them you probably are an expert in those things and that makes a huge difference in your career.

People tend to notice you more because of your expertise, because of your helping attitude and companies can trust you easily.

By helping others you are just not another developer on the table, you enable yourself to become a team member who will no matter what the situations are always teach something new or help other team members and solves problems quickly.

5. Be the one everyone wants

Be unique. Be different. Do what everyone doesn’t want to. Always stay on the top of your game. Always improve yourself to be the better version. Always learn new things and teach people.

the one everyone wants

You don’t have to do the mediocre work. Be excellent. Do excellent work. Learn each and every day and become expert in what you do.

No one wants to work with average be the excellent one. Be the brilliant one.

Conclusion

In the end, nothing matters if you are the right person to do the job. You don’t need a piece of paper to dignify your knowledge or your ideas. You don’t need anyone approval to decide what you want to do in your life. It’s your life take control of it.

Be an artist. Share your knowledge and ideas with the world.

Tell me what do you think about this and I will see you on the flip side 👋.

Hi, My name is Manoj Singh Negi. I am a Javascript Developer and writer sharing my world view with everyone join my quest by following me at Twitter or Medium.

I am available to give a public talk or for a meetup hit me up at justanothermanoj@gmail.com if you want to meet me.

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Peace.