5 myths about IT: true or false

Myth 1. On the course, they will teach me EVERYTHING

Courses will give you:

• Training program. You will follow the steps in learning the technology stack and complete specially designed tasks appropriate to your level.
• An experienced mentor. He will answer your questions and show you how to do the job correctly and where to look for mistakes.
• Other students who will study with you. Students help each other, learn from mistakes, can see alternative approaches, and formulate a theory for each other more clearly.
• Difficult practical tasks: term papers, graduation projects. They will allow you to train on tasks as close as possible to those that will be encountered in the workplace.

However, students study in courses only on their own. Teachers just tell a small part of the theory, and mentors help to complete tasks.

Myth 2. Only a person who understood mathematics at school can become a programmer

Mathematics is used in programming theory but is minimally involved in the industry itself of information products development.

We need common sense, logic, consistency, and the ability to establish relationships with the technical system. Programming and IT, in general, are about business, engineering, building technical systems, attentiveness, immersion in the essence, and searching for a problem among a large number of fragile parts.

There may be elements of theoretical computer science in programming, but, as a rule, this is less than 5% of all work in the industry.

Myth 3. You can make a lot of money in IT

It is true. HOWEVER! People begin to receive maximum salaries after intensive 5-10 years in the profession. This usually goes hand in hand with having to work 50–80-hour weeks a couple of times a year.

What else? Constant self-education including books, articles, videos, and conferences. Moreover, a lot of effort into setting up experiments, working out mistakes, finding solutions, and solving problems.

The IT industry is developing so fast that workers have to improve themselves all the time to just maintain their current level.

Myth 4. You can learn English later

English in programming is the main language of code logic, a study of documentation and communication. Documentation, code, tutorials, YouTube videos, Google searches, and communication with the customer will be in English. Without the skills of fluent reading, writing, and minimal speaking skills, it is almost impossible to master the profession.

Developers with the skill of googling a problem with a code in English and fluently reading answers find answers about 2-10 times faster than those who try to find an answer in Russian.

One more thing: the documentation for most new tools and technologies is created only in English for the first couple of years and only then is translated into Russian.

Myth 5. Programmers spend all day programming and do not communicate with anyone

Many people wrongly believe that working in IT looks like this: you sit in a corner at the computer, no one touches you, and you don’t touch anyone. This conception has nothing to do with reality.

The key skill of an engineer is to correctly understand the task he is given. Finding out what the essence of the task is, and what customer problem you can solve with code, is on average up to 20-30% of the daily tasks of a software engineer.

To achieve this understanding, you need to:

• Be able to read between the lines and extract the requirements that are meant.
• Guess what is meant by yourself and check it with the manager or mentor.
• Independently make many small decisions that may be wrong but are necessary to work on the task.
• Make mistakes and learn to talk about them in time.
• See which solutions are not as simple as they may seem at first glance and clarify the correctness of the solution with the customer.

The code solves people's problems, but you can only understand what exactly these problems are in the process of communication.

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