Career Advice For Your 20s

Here's some advice to follow if you're early on in your career. This advice is specifically relevant to people who have big goals and aspirations.

[bilyspenser]

Every family has that one person who will break the family financial struggle I hope you become the one

[lauris]

25 year old unemployed yet, living with my parrents here. My advice. Start to learn while you are in highschool. The faster the better. Find out what you like and what your good at. I didnt know what to do in my life. Now at 25, I regret not learning coding or something usefull to find a job. Im learning now, but very slowly.

[Hiperultimate]

To anyone who are in college, get good enough with competitive coding so that you can solve almost all the medium problems relatively quickly. Making projects and learning new things is good and all. But I have seen people get huge salary offers just after they solved some tough competitive coding questions in their college placement offers. What I did wrong was to not to take comp coding as seriously because I thought learning how to make things are more important for a job. But in college its different.

[PoojaDutt]

Interesting points! I somewhat disagree with the first point about treating your career like a sprint. I think some people prefer that for obvious reasons (promotions, money, learning etc). And you’re a credible source in the sense that you’re wildly successful because of your work ethic.

Personally, I’m a workaholic at heart (constantly working on side projects, giving 110% at my job) and all that’s gotten me is more promotions and more money. After a certain extent, it hasn’t really brought me exponentially more happiness (-:

it’s more the journey of working on projects and failing/learning that makes me happy - not the end goal as you mentioned. I disagree that this advice should be used as a one-size-fits-all. Again, yes you’re very successful, but not everyone wants to be exactly where you are. Some people enjoy the simpler things in life. I’m trying to strive for simplicity as well. (Given your audience though, I’m sure people DO want to be exactly where you are.. so I digress haha!) 😅

[spongechameleon]

I relate and endorse this advice. Thanks for posting.

I graduated ChemE and realized after a year that the career options didn't appeal to me. Software piqued my curiosity and the career options (for me) were better.

So I quit and moved back in with mom and dad while teaching myself web dev. Got a job and realized I did indeed like software more, so I've decided to stick with it for now. After a year at the job i felt like I wasn't learning as much anymore, so i got a new job. Better title, better salary, different domain. Compounding the resume, bank account and my education, just like you said.

I'm happy with my choices so far and very grateful that I'm lucky enough to have been able to make them.

I always thought my 20s should be focused on working towards two things:

(1) Finding something to pay the bills that I'm good at and enjoy

(2) Finding a mission I care deeply about

I don't expect to settle on answers anytime soon, in fact I think the answers will change over time, but I feel much closer to answering question 1 and I'm looking forward to starting on question 2 in the next couple of years.

[luissolanodev]

I paused at 2:43 just to say that what you just said is absolutely outstanding. I feel so related to your comment, where people who usually didn't have any path to follow or things that they wanted to accomplish with desire tell you these kinds of things making it clear they don't understand how hungry we are to climb the mountain.

[leisuregaming]

I'm a 28 y.o Software Developer. I graduated as one of the best students and my uni friends (I love them) always saw me as someone with huge potential in tech. Fast forward 7 years from my graduation, they have better careers than me. Be careful to not get into the environment that doesnt encourage growth and toxic (if you want to grow or innovate something, you need to do everything yourself and get blamed when you do wrong). The longer you stay in such environment, you will feel like as if everything is normal (calm down its a marathon, be grateful for even having a job, etc) until you look to the outside, spend 1 or 2 weeks with people outside of your workplace and see how outdated you are as a Software Developer. This is my biggest career regret, I have years of lost time, sure I got money but it's nothing really

[gabrielpedroza]

Great video clem; I'm 20 years old with about a year n half of frontend under my belt and I want to be as prepared as possible for any opportunities that I will have when I start applying for internships to big tech companies. I'm glad a found your channel along the way. You, Conner, and Tim are a blessing in disguise for the swe world

[jakx]

I really take this advice to heart. I took a bootcamp a little over a year ago based on you're youtube video. I got hired as an intern almost right away out of it. I diligently worked hard at learning software and systems design principles. I just signed a contract this week for a senior dev role because of how fast I progressed, I love the career as a 'sprint' mentality.

[prokhan]

I love this... I just got my first entry level position at a big company, and am glad you re affirm my thinking! Thank you!!

[mattcarlucci]

This is the best advice you will ever hear, whether you are in your 20's or beyond. Take heed. Listen up. Go be great!

[prumchhangsreng]

I'm totally on the same page as you for the first advice. I annoyed me when people tell me to relax a bit or whatever. I am speedrunning. The thing is, u are proning to burn-out. But with enough time, u'll just learn to expect and not get the burn out at all

[emonyr]

Totally agree. Actually I happened to carry out every piece of your advices, and the result is so rewarding.

[An-Engineered-Journey]

I pressed the reset button.

I pursued business and that got me a job as a car salesman making minimum wage working 60 hours a week. I quit with no backup job, just the idea that I wanted to be a software engineer but I didn’t know how to code. I remember going in to tell this to my manager when I quit. He tried so hard to talk me out of it and said I was making a huge foolish mistake with nothing in stone. Fast forward 5 years, today I am a senior software engineer at one of the largest banks in the world.

[logancope]

100% agree with taking advice from those in positions to which you aspire to rise. The early grind is also really smart

[thakursaad]

Thank you for your advice. I am turning 22 this August. I have a similar philosophy as yours. But yours really gave me reassurance.

[travismorin]

Great advice! I'm 22, currently in a completely unrelated field and I am dying to change career, I want to pursue my studies full time to hopefully get a job within a year in front end web/software development, but money is what's stopping me from doing so, It's hard to try to study full time at the same time as working full time in a physically demanding job.

[yashupadhyay]

Tbh, I was expecting something super generic out of this video but to my very pleasant surprise, I think every word that Clement said is very valid and not something you’d hear elsewhere, especially if you follow his narrative through the videos. Appreciate you for putting these ideas to actual words, Clement!

[wadecodez]

Love this video. So true.

Life is a one way trip. Nobody really knows how to navigate anything. They can only talk from hindsight. The hardest part is building relationships that you know won't last forever.

[gtaeverrr]

Definitely agree with pivoting. Before pursuing software engineering, I was majoring in mechanical engineering. At first, I enjoyed, but I as I progressed through my degree, I started to realize that it wasn't the right fit for me. The only classes I really enjoyed and were proud of getting an A in were the few coding classes I had to take. I decided to make a transition and now I'm on my way to becoming an SDE at Amazon.