how many programming languages do you need to know in order to be considered a successful
software engineer well let me reverse that a little bit how many programming languages
do you need to know to be successful in your software engineering career today
I'm going to share with you my thoughts on how many you should learn to start with and
how many most programmers end up learning in their career before we get to it though
you know the drill we need to collect coffee let's go come on okay wait wait wait wait wait
before I head out actually we need to talk about the interact conference it is a free
virtual conference that I will be attending and I want to see you there I attended the
last conference and one of the best things about it is you get to learn from the top engineering
leaders and what I really found helpful is it was kind of like a day full of mentorship and guidance
from some of these incredible leaders that you wouldn't get to typically hear speak otherwise
especially all packed into one day also there are two tracks that you can focus on at the conference
one is Dev interrupted where you will listen to stories of failure Redemption panels featuring
the biggest names in engineering leadership this track has insights processes and really lots of
know-hows on how to turn Engineers into leaders and companies into unicorns then the second track
or the other track is linear Beyond learn about tactical practices insights and success stories
that Linear B customers have used to transform their their value delivery pipeline okay I keep
on mentioning engineering leaders that will be speaking at this conference who are they
some of them include ruckmany Reddy who is the SVP of engineering at slack charity Majors CTO
and co-founder at honeycomb and Lewis Tapp the VP of engineering at blockchain.com
and there are so many more make sure to check it out I linked it down in my bio so you can
check out who is speaking uh one thing I like to do before conferences is really check out who's
speaking and then also to think of ways to follow up with them after the conference it's a great
way to kind of you know start a conversation you heard them speak you really appreciated certain
points that they made and then kind of open that conversation up that's just a little side tip also
speaking of networking and mentorship there is a live event to connect with speakers and other
audience members so if you are there make sure to come say hi to me virtually and you get access
to the dev interrupted Discord Channel this is a great way to also interact with other engineering
leaders now a question I get asked a lot is do I have to be an engineering leader in order to
attend this conference the answer is no no matter if you are currently an engineering leader Midway
in your career just starting out this is a conference that you'll find a lot of value
from I linked it down below go sign up today did I mention it's free and come say hi okay let's go
okay we are on our way to the co-working space and of course to get some coffee some much needed
coffee coffee and code or coffee and Tech in general they go hand in hand in my opinion I'm
curious though are you a coffee drinker or are you more of a tea person do we have tea
drinkers in the audience here let me know okay let's get to the question here though how many
programming languages do you need to know as a software engineer and I'm going to answer this
in a few stages the first one being how many you need to know when you are starting out
looking for your first job second part I'm going to answer is throughout your career how many do
you need to know because that changes as you grow in your career okay one thing though I
should know before we even get into this video is how many programming languages do I know
so I'm going to share with you how many prank whoa we got bright quickly here for myself for
programming languages the first one I Learned was JavaScript and honestly it was a really good first
programming language to learn for me I think if I was to start all over again it might be python
that I would learn first but JavaScript group was the first one I learned I was learning the
mer and stack so [ __ ] Express react and node and after that I spent a lot of time with JavaScript I
ended up focusing mainly in the front end with react side of things and absolutely loved it
then as I progressed in my career there was some requirements to do PHP so I did PHP full time I
was really nervous to dive into PHP because it does have a bad rap I think it's a great
programming language actually but it doesn't have the best reputation in the tech industry
I find especially when you're starting out people are like oh PHP but once you grow in your career
I think it's a really really great language to learn and it's used in so many different areas
that it's a really important one to learn as well then as I progress further in my career I wanted
to pick up Python and this wasn't because it was required in my job but it was required or sorry
wasn't required but it was something that I was super interested in it's very popular and I knew
it was a skill or a language I really wanted to know so I did the self teaching method at that
point it was really easy because I had already picked up two other languages now I want to take
a second to note here that when going back to JavaScript when I was working my last job at IBM
I was on the Consulting side so I was doing a lot of projects for different companies which really
meant working in different Tech Stacks so the main one I was working with for a framework was angular
but also there was some react as well and then on the side I was tinkering I would say with view a
little bit it not so much anymore but I found that as I progressed in my career whether it be
for my day job or even through you know Finding resources and learning for this channel for my
tech Channel it slowly became less about learning new programming languages and more about learning
new Frameworks especially with JavaScript but that's just the way I preferred to grow it doesn't
mean it's the way you have to go going back to how many programming languages do you need to know
if you are just starting out start out with one programming language and there
might be some debate around this I find but I think starting out with one typically there's
always different use cases is a really good way to go because you want to focus
on learning the fundamentals you want to focus on learning the basics and what that will do is
if you are able to really grasp that later on in your career when it's required to learn more
languages it'll be easier to pick up because you actually have a strong Foundation versus
you skim the fundamentals and went straight to a programming framework the next question
I get asked is well what programming language to learn first and it really depends on what
you want to be programming what you want to be building so I'm going to list more generic ones
overall overarching but take this with a grain of salt in the situation of depending on what
you want to learn so if I was to go all over again I would learn as I mentioned probably python first
but other great ones to learn first would include JavaScript or I would say Java those are the three
main ones if you are going the self-teaching route that are something that you can learn on your own
and easily pick up and there's a lot of resources online about them which really helps too also if
you're wondering Tiff why aren't you going to your co-working space I thought you're getting coughing
going there I got locked out so we're just going for a walk around Toronto and talking and walking
a very casual friend intimate way of doing this video which I you know I love okay so as I just
said one programming language to start with now as you grow in your career does that change or
can you just focus on one programming language and the quick answer is yes you can focus on
just one programming language and really dive deep into that for example I had a co-worker who
they had been programming for 10 plus no not 10 that would make sense
they're all going for a very long time all they focused on was JavaScript and react so
and it was right when react came out how many years was that when react came out but anyways
right when it came out till now they went hard on react they love react you can ask them anything
about it and they will know and that's kind of them going really deep into one they have zero
interest in taking a job or a project though that would require learning a different uh framework
or programming language so that's definitely one way to go really deep into one there can be some
downsides to that such as if you're not willing to even be flexible or consider you know you
might be missing out on some opportunities but on the other hand some companies might really really
want someone who's a very deep specialist in that so it's not a negative or positive I think it's
just a preference thing for me anyways I never went that way because I'm way too curious I love
exploring different languages and Frameworks the other way to go though is more like what
I did where you were growing in your software engineering career and naturally as you go from
company to company over time it will be required to pick up different programming languages and
when I was looking online and I spoke to I do a little poll actually texting some of my software
engineering friends who I've worked with in the past and said how many programming languages do
you know not tinkered around with but like actually no and on average it was around two
to three I would say closer to three for most and they are mainly individuals who are Midway through
their career so still have a lot of growth to do so maybe that will change as they grow but what
I find is that really depends on how you grow in your software engineering career which I mean you
can go senior engineer and continue to grow and be coding your entire career but more often than
not we see that software Engineers end up kind of evolving with their roles as their career grows as
well and I think that's why the number three is a good number for typically on average the number of
programming languages that a software engineer will know really in depth now as I mentioned
there's a ton of different uh caveats to this that you could include but but I would say on average
based on my research about three now I don't want that to stress you out though if you are starting
out in your career it doesn't mean that you have to know everything right away please do not take
this as that but it's more something I was just curious about how many programming languages do
most developers know actually on that note leave in the comments how many years you have been
a programmer for or been coding for and how many languages you know once again not just like Tinker
around with but really no okay I hope you found this video very helpful in a fun and Casual way
I really wanted to connect with you on this topic and there's no right or wrong answer to this this
is just based on my research what I've learned and my experience I think more than anything
to have a successful career as a software engineer and continue to evolve it's being
open to learn new learn it's being oh my goodness you can tell I needed that coffee it's being open
to experiencing and learning new things I think that's the most important thing of all okay I
hope you enjoyed this video if you haven't already as I mentioned earlier leave in the
comments what programming languages you know how many you know and if you haven't subscribe
for more Tech coding and career related videos I mean I'm sitting in the middle of a park here
people are looking at me and I'm filming for you so give me some love give me a like give me
a subscribe and also let me know down below what other questions you have I make these videos for
you based on what you want to hear so leave in the comments and I'll see you all soon thanks everyone
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