Things I Wish I'd Been Told When I Started College in IT
IT is as vast as medicine.
Semester starting at college and a bunch of freshmen with questions in the Telegram group. It reminded me of my own doubts when I started my first degree and the things I wish I’d known back then.
1 - English
The overwhelming majority of documentation is in English, and a translation site won’t always help. In some cases, it will translate technical terms that shouldn’t be translated or have a different meaning outside the context of computer science.
- Reading in English: Having good English reading skills is already 50% of what you need.
- Writing in English: It will help you a lot when asking questions on specialized forums (Stack Overflow, Slack, mailing lists) and contacting support from other companies (Red Hat, Amazon, etc.).
- Conversation: It will definitely open more job doors, whether in Brazil, abroad, or working remotely.
If you’re still skeptical, in that short excerpt you just read, there were 9 English words.
2 - IT is as vast as medicine
Networking, middleware, requirements analysis, DBA, AD, Ops, QA, Linux, Front end, back end, Java, Ruby, governance…
Don’t limit yourself to just the most famous ones, support and development (nothing wrong with those two, of course). Try a bit of everything, identify with one, and specialize.
3 - IT is not an exact science
The statement sounds absurd, but anyone who has spent hours trying to solve a problem with no apparent logical error knows what I’m talking about. This can cause frustration in some cases, but the main point here is knowing when finding the root cause is more important than actually fixing it.
4 - Use the tutorial, but read the documentation
- ‘how to install git’: 3,020,000 results on Google
- ‘CRUD in PHP’: 7,530,000 results on Google
- ‘Configure NGINX’: 355,000 results on Google
These tutorials (how-to) are useful, but understanding what something is for and how it works is essential when you need to fix something or make an improvement.
5 - Don’t be afraid
When I started in IT, I was afraid of installing Linux and not knowing how to configure it or solve a problem. I was afraid of trying to do something and getting it wrong. It’s a cliché, widely spread and studied, motivational speaker talk, I know, but making mistakes is essential for learning.
Today, when I install or configure a system, create a pipeline, a script, or run anything else and it works on the first try, I get suspicious thinking I did something wrong and the problem will only show up in the future (and that’s good because it makes me review everything I did).
Fear will always show up when facing the new, the unexpected, and in those moments I think of a phrase I heard from a coworker a few years ago:
I don’t know how to do it, but if I have time, I can learn.
NOTE: If you’re doing something with a high chance of error, prefer the development environment, okay?
6 - IT is a tool, use it.
Spend a week writing code to automate a task, but don’t spend 2 days doing that same task manually. The extra time spent is easily compensated by what you learned and the possibility of running that same task in the future.