Shadowing Practice: I don't like Programming - Learn English Speaking with Video

Guys, I have a confession to make.

I don't like programming.

i never liked programming in fact programming.

Now I'm being a little facetious here, but I'm going to tell you what I mean.

And that's going to include a few themes, including are the things that we learned as programmers or the things that maybe you should learn if you're getting into it.

Are they useless?

Does it matter if you know what a hash map is or like a lot of those fundamental concepts and stuff?

I also want to talk about the type of programmer that I am and a bit about my like programming career trajectory.

how

in some ways at least people are saying the joy of programming has been taken away from them

and i feel like in certain ways because of the type of programmer

that i am that maybe i've adapted a little bit differently than most people

when i was in school in college i took an intro to c class back in 2016

and i learned all sorts of things of course a lot of which i used in my career i learned

learned about memory management.

Right.

And I don't think professionally I ever needed to do manual memory management.

Even using a language like C++, there's smart pointers now.

Why does anybody need to know how to manage memory?

Maybe there's some niche areas that it's like extremely important, but most people, they're never going to need that.

And also what about DSA, data structures and algorithms?

I spent a lot of time doing that, learning that.

And I enjoyed it.

But Did I ever really use it on the job?

I mean...

Not really.

I mean, the fundamentals, obviously, like hash maps, loops, like efficiency and general optimizations, but you can get that, you know, at mostly just the leak code easy level.

You're not going to need those graph traversals on the job.

Why would you?

The only time I remember something like interesting coming up at Google, you know, the company.

I'm not trying to mention that in like a bragging way.

I'm just mentioning it because it's kind of the company that's known for like DSA interviews, right?

And then you get in and you don't really use that.

And I remember there was a case where Google has CLs, which is basically like pull requests, and then each CL will get like a unique number.

And I forgot what the exact detail was, but I think it was like each CL will have like a unique ID, of course, that's auto generated.

And then when it's actually merged in Google, they have like a mono repo.

So every piece of every CL, every pull request is merged into the exact same repo.

And I was asking like a question about like something about the CL number conflicts.

I don't remember the exact details, but basically what he said was, yeah, these are monotonic, so that there won't be conflicts or issues.

And you'll know which CL was merged before the other one.

And when I heard that, I was like, Holy shit, did he just say?

And this was actually like right before I left.

And he said it and I was like monotonic increasing like hey, DSA, right?

But for the most part, like those concepts really were not needed.

And maybe Nowadays, We don't ever even need to know how to use Git,

but I mean, you might still want to because it's so damn painful to watch these LLMs do it.

And I don't know who made the judgment call to not just allow maybe like a text input or something.

And I can just type my own damn commit message and get this done with.

I know I can use the terminal.

And this must be how Vim users feel watching normal people type, but I'm.

You know, mentioning a few things and I'm not going to act like I have the answer to these things, but I'll tell you for my opinion, my very humble opinion that.

I don't think.

The things that I learned and the things that I worked on that I didn't directly use, I don't think they were wasted.

I really don't.

Because I did a lot in my life and so has everyone, right?

What I mean by that is I did so much things in school We all learn so many things, so many subjects, so many concepts and Do we really need that?

I mean, we all remember sitting in class thinking, "When am I ever going to need this knowledge that's right in front of me?" And many times you don't, but does it mean it's useless?

I'm not convinced.

Holistically, we are like people that have all this like knowledge.

And I don't think it's worth like cutting out fundamental things.

I think that's very like dangerous.

It sets like a really scary precedence because, OK, maybe maybe it is useless.

Maybe nobody needs to ever know math anymore.

We have calculators.

But I think learning is extremely important because it's not just about like the concrete thing.

Okay, I learned this random framework or random tool.

And now I got to start a different job and I have to learn a different tool now.

everything I learned before is completely useless.

I don't think that because of this concept that I haven't invented, but it's called like a mental model. And...

We.. all learn a lot of mental models just from school.

If you pay attention, for example, In math, you learn these logic rules, these rigid rules, and they're consistent.

And they teach you how to think.

If you take a math person who's super good at math and then you try to put them into a programming career, they excel, dude.

Like, it's just a thing.

I can't tell you exactly which math concept directly, you know, made them a super good programmer or not, but it's a phenomenon.

This is a thing.

And there's so many different mental models in the world of so many different concepts, many in the programming world,

many in psychology, many in nature. of evolutionary biology.

And the important thing about these mental models is they allow us to reason about things that we do not understand.

Like in physics, there is this concept of laws of nature, Newton's laws of nature.

They explain things.

And when you don't have these things, you do lose something.

I strongly believe that because I remember, I don't know about you guys, but I remember being a kid.

I remember thinking, why does the moon go around the earth?

It's so right?

And of course, an adult who knows is going to look at the kid and say, oh, it's gravity.

It's gravity.

Gravity is just a word.

That doesn't really explain anything.

Newton's laws.

Newton's laws explain it.

An object in motion will stay in motion.

And the beautiful thing about these mental models, is Newton's laws, they don't just explain why the moon goes around the Earth.

It explains so many things.

And when Einstein, you know, built, went on top of the things that Newton did,

he had to deeply understand the mental models that Newton did, right, that he created.

And so it turned out that certain things that Newton, Newton's, certain things about Newton's theory of gravity were wrong.

But was it useless?

Obviously not.

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But anyways, I could ramble about this literally all day.

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So I'll move on to the type of programmer that I am and I'm about to make

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a very offensive statement to a lot of people.

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I know that.

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And I'm going to say it.

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I was the type who got into programming for the money.

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I did.

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I got into Fang for the cash.

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I really liked math and physics, so I actually studied electrical engineering when I first started in college, but they required me to take a programming course, which I wasn't happy about,

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and it was Intro to C.

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And I really wasn't excited about it.

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I really struggled with it.

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Even just print F was really hard for me to wrap my head around.

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I don't know why I'm kind of a slow learner, but once I think a month or two into the class, you learn about variables.

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You learn about the different types.

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You learn about...

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if statements loops functions, reuse code, you learn about structs.

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And then there comes a moment where For me, something just clicked.

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I realized that, wait a minute, these small number of primitives that are very logical and very consistent,

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actually it's so few of them yet they're so extremely powerful they have the power of infinite complexity

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These small primitives can create incredible software operating systems, right?

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And That's what I loved about it.

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The same thing I loved about Newton's laws, that a small number of things can actually explain so much, that a small number of fundamentals have an incredible amount of power.

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So actually, I loved it.

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I love memory management, but then I had to get practical.

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And then when I was looking at the job market, I was like, OK, well, I got to learn web development, right?

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Got to learn JavaScript and I got to learn what an XHR is.

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And an XHR, an XML HTTP request, is named that, yet it's not necessarily an XML format.

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And it's not necessarily HTTP and it's not necessarily a request.

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It could be a response to an XHR could mean response.

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So as a person who likes logic and likes consistency.

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Oh my God, you cannot believe how much web development pissed me off.

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I hated programming.

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to an amount I cannot articulate As much as I loved C, and the primitive nature of it.

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I hated web development just as much for the opposite, for the same reasons, because it was kind of the opposite.

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Right?

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So I did get a little bit jaded.

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I I have talked about this before, but I was unemployed for like a year after I left Amazon.

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And during that year, let me tell you something.

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Let me tell you something.

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I did not do any sort of real development.

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All I did for that year was make leak code videos in Python, only Python.

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And then I was lucky enough to get into Google.

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And when I got into Google, I did not do any Python.

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and not do any TSA.

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But I also...

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did pretty well at Google.

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I got promoted within a year.

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And I think obviously the fact that I have a CS degree and I didn't cheat through that degree, I actually did learn the fundamentals and the important stuff.

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that did help me a great deal.

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And the fact that I was still thinking like a programmer doing DSA videos and also kind of communicating my thoughts.

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I think that helped me a lot.

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And then so at Google, I was a what I would call a copy paste programmer.

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And I'm embarrassed to admit it, and I know I'm not doing myself any favors.

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by admitting that.

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But I was just so lazy because a lot of the work at Google is not that interesting.

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You're not doing a lot of the fun, interesting computer science concepts that I enjoy.

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Development just looks very different.

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there and I wasn't really enthusiastic about learning all those internal tools and stuff like that, but I still did it.

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Basically, most of the code, you know how people say that with AI coding, most people aren't handwriting code anymore.

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Baby, I was not handwriting code for a long ass time.

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I mean, not literally, but for example, like, you know, back in 100 years ago when Stack Overflow was a thing,

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a lot of people were the types of programmers that they would just You know, if they had a question, they just blindly open open up.

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stack overflow, copy and paste a code snippet into their code, maybe change some variables around, and then they're good to go.

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Maybe they didn't even fully understand that piece of code.

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I did that.

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They don't have Stack Overflow, but they have their internal Mono repo, which is in code search.

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I need to use this library.

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I could go read the documentation.

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The documentation sucks ass at Google.

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Screw it.

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I'm just going to go into the code base, find somebody else who used this API, copy and paste their code, try to understand it a little bit.

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change my variables around and I'm good to go.

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And so even though I'm the type of person who likes to go deep into things,

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I like to do a small number of things and do them extremely well and extremely thoroughly and extremely deep.

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But that's not the nature of being a programmer in most jobs, including at Google.

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Because let's say, you know, you have like one document you're trying to learn about this tech that you're using, right?

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That document is going to link to like five Right.

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You could spend your whole life doing a depth first search, trying to read all those documents, and you still won't get anywhere near to completing your task.

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Right.

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So what I did.

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at that point is I'm like, as much as I want to learn all these things, I'm just going to do my job and I'm going to get my work done.

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And so rather than focusing on like the joy of programming, I focused on just trying to be good at my job.

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And I sacrificed the joy of programming in that moment just to be better at my job.

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And I, And I accomplished that.

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I was lucky enough to be promoted in a year, which I think is like top five percentile at Google from like L3 to L4.

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But I'm not going to act like it's because I'm a genius.

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I think it's just because I've made certain choices and I did have some luck as well.

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So now that we are seeing this big transition to prompting LLMs and then waiting for them to fix something,

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which they're pretty good at nowadays, you still kind of have to be a programmer, I think, to get a lot of the value out of them.

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of people it's just not as enjoyable as it was before and I think that matters.

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That definitely matters because I think joy matters a lot.

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For example, you guys know Jared from Bunn?

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He was just a chill dude.

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working on a JavaScript runtime for several years.

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Why would he do that?

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Why?

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What? Where?

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How would he possibly make money doing that?

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Right?

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But he just wanted to, and I guess he had investment and he really, really enjoyed it.

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Turns out he got a pretty big acquisition from Anthropic.

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And so it ended up paying off, right?

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And even in my own case, when I was making these DSA LeakCode videos, do you really think I thought anything would happen from them?

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Of course not.

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But I really, really enjoyed making them because like I said, I like going deep into things.

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So when I'm making that video, I'm like, I'm going to go the extra mile to make it as good as I possibly can just

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because I want to, just because it helps me sleep better at night.

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And so because of that, I think the videos were maybe a little bit better than most people's.

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And because of that, I ended up having.. a lot more success than I would have ever imagined.

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But like I said earlier, I think in some ways it can be good to maybe not enjoy programming too much.

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Because then you might, like we've all seen like the types of programmers

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that care too much about like their their code or the tools that they're using,

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like they care, like they'll do some random migration that really has pretty minimal benefits, but they just want to do it.

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They just love tech.

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They love coding so much that, you know, maybe they love it too much.

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And they focus on that more than the business.

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So I think it's, you know, I'm not here to tell you what the right answer is or anything, but I think these are interesting things that are worth considering.

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I think this transition to AI coding has been something that's in many ways, like kind of familiar to me.

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It doesn't feel that new to me because like I said, I had to make that transition so many times and I can see why it would be harder for other people who've, you know, just focused on

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Casey Muratori and he is probably had the opposite career

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that I have and so I think but I think

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that was by choice that was his choice to do that and I'll be uploading that conversation pretty soon

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if you're interested in that.

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But I could have made similar choices as him, but I just decided not to.

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In my case, I was broke.

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I needed to make money.

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I had to be pragmatic about things.

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And so that's kind of what I prioritized.

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And I think today, I'm kind of doing the same thing.

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that I kind of did at Google, which is, yeah, In some ways, like this is kind of boring.

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This is not what I like.

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I'd rather be in my underwear making leak code videos rather than at the Google office.

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eating the free food and, you know, editing config files.

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But I think you can still learn to enjoy things.

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If you choose to, In my case, for example, I got Google.

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I would think to myself like, OK, like maybe I can reframe this.

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to give myself some gratitude.

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What I mean by that is

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rather than thinking like okay this is kind of boring i made it my goal rather

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then to go super deep into these technical concepts that I found interesting.

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Instead of doing

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that, I made it my goal to go super deep in

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the direction of being what I would consider an elite engineer at Google, like what makes somebody elite at Google while just doing your work

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and solving the problems and trying to have as much of an impact as you can.

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And at the L3 level, As a junior, you want to try to be as independent as you can.

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So that's what I tried to do.

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And yeah, I didn't love editing config files, but I told myself I'm going to be somebody who can read this code.

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And I want to be proficient.

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I looked at these senior engineers around me and I see, damn, they can just, do it so much better than me.

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I want to be on their level.

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Definitely helped me.

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And so I think with this whole agentic coding, I think I've tried to have a similar mindset.

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I'm not the best agentic coder.

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I think I'm not the best coder.

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I'm not the best trad coder, traditional coder either, but I try to go deep

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and try to be the best that I can be in my own way.

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But let me know what you guys think about that, because obviously I'm just one guy and everybody's, kind of handling this transition differently.

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I do think we all have somewhat of a say in the matter.

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It's kind of like that meme where those two people are on that bus.

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If you don't embrace change, you're going to be pretty depressed because the world is always changing.

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But If you do, you can kind of see the other side of that.

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What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: I don't like Programming - Learn English Speaking with Video

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About This Lesson

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