I’m 25, when I was young we didn’t have a computer and I got ethernet at end of basic school. My first programming experience was in university, at age 19. I studied chemistry, but we had a computer lesson, where we played with Scratch (a drag and drop program). Before that, I had had a look at my blog source code and tried a few things there. At the end of my bachelor degree I took a course “Introduction to programming”, where we studied Python. Subject took much time, but I was hooked.

So after finishing my bachelor’s degree in biology, I decided to go study software development in vocational school. It wasn’t easy, but at all times was interesting and challenging. I love trying out new things and finding answers to my problems. And now I work as a UI developer, am about to finish my studies and I really like programming.

Unfortunately, that is not the case for most people. The rates of dropping out of IT is very high. In my course, we started out with 36 people and at the moment only 12 are planning to finish school. Okay, not all gave up programming, a few got a job and weren’t interested in studies anymore, but still most found out this speciality doesn’t suit them. Why is that?

A small list of reasons I have thought: 1) Wrong study methods I think that programming is like learning a language. Unfortunately people think that I’ll take a course in Codecademy and I’m ready to write a program. That would be the same as I finish a course in Duolingo and I’m ready to write a book. So it’s not enough to be familiar with a programming language to write good code.

2) Lack of interest All things come out better, if you’re interested in what you’re doing. The same is with programming. As you need to focus on your work and develop constantly, you just can’t succeed without interest to the topic. So, if your only motivation is high salary number, you should reconsider your career choice.

3) Lacking creativity or logic As I said before, programming is like being a writer. If you don’t have creativity, when soon robots can do your job. And I’m not talking only about design and front-end, but back-end as well. Problem solving always needs creativity, but at the same time logical thinking is still needed. So if you like to do same thing over and over again like a machine, programming is not for you.

4) High variety of languages This is a point, where I am a little disappointed in vocational school. The reason is that we were taught many languages, but none of them thoroughly. This means you can declare variables in four different languages, but can’t do a real project in any. It actually makes sense, when we think that internship is a crucial part of vocational education and there you can get familiar with a certain language. But getting the first internship place was quite hard because of that. So I would say, that knowing one language thoroughly is better than trying to learn many languages.

5) Impatience Much time in programming goes for debugging. This means you can concentrate on same code snippet for hours and for that you need patience. So if every error message means a disaster for you or on the contrary, you don’t have patience for perfection, when it’s quite hard to be a programmer.

So what I would suggest? Firstly learn a language and when become a writer (coder). I would say that start with Codecademy, when go to Hackerrank and practise, practise, practise. Even if you don’t have a real job yet, try out tutorials, join hackathons and competitions, do free-lance projects and try to get an internship. Don’t be sad, if your first job doesn’t pay so well. Although there is a high demand for IT-sector workers, most companies want experienced workers. So don’t be afraid to do free projects, because you always gain knowledge.

That’s all for my ideas. Love to hear yours.