What are you supposed to do when you feel like you're always running out of time? This is the question that Andy asks on today's episode of Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cutrell, you're listening to Developer Tea. My hope on this show is to provide you with the coaching and the insight into answer questions like Andy's question in today's episode that help you level up as a developer. And most of the time you're going to hear questions on the show that apply both now and 10 years into the future, things that are not necessarily about the syntax that you're writing today, but rather about the market. Or they're about how you should behave or how you should think perspective. All of these are things that you can constantly set yourself up to become better at. You can only get so good at syntax. You can only master so many frameworks before they all kind of start to look and work the same. There's diminishing return in that, but there's always going to be return in becoming a better person, becoming a better thinker, becoming a better learner, becoming a better worker, becoming a better co-worker. These are things that you will always be able to invest in and see return. So that's why we focus on a lot of these kinds of topics on this show. So I want to read Andy's email to me. Thank you, Andy, for sending in this email. Andy is 23 years old. He's in Germany. His real name is Andreas, by the way, but he told me to call me Andy. So that's what we're going to do. I'm going to read Andy's email and then we're going to talk about this idea of feeling like you're out of time or constantly running out of time. Andy, first of all, thanks me for the podcast. He says, I want to thank you for your podcast. I'm grateful that you take the time to record so many episodes of Developer Tea. I love the fact that you want to share your knowledge and experiences. I simply can't stress enough how inspiring it is to listen to your episodes, especially listening to several of them and a row brings me into a mindset in which I feel empowered to shape my future, according to my wishes and reflect about me as a person as well as my strengths and weaknesses. Please let me tell you that you had a great impact on my life as I internalized many ideas that you mentioned in your show. Just a pause real quick. Thank you so much, Andy. This is exactly why I do Developer Tea. The show isn't about unlocking some secrets that are hidden somewhere that only I have and that you need. That's not what it's about. The show is about encouraging people like Andy that they do have a future, that they do have the ability to control their perspective. I'm very thankful that Andy I've been able to help you. Let's get back to the email. Right now I'm in a situation in which I need help. Maybe you can support me with your experience and your opinion. I started diving into iOS development in 2012. I've been gaining momentum in this learning process as it's been a hobby ever since then. My GitHub profile contains several open source projects and I have two apps in Apple's App Store. About a month ago, I finished my bachelor's degree with a thesis in which I developed an iPad app to control the ambient lighting and outy vehicles now to my inner conflict. The bachelor course I studied was called mechatronics. It's a combination of mechanical and electrical engineering and computer science. As my university has a great reputation in mechanical engineering, that field really shows up in all of the classes that I took. In the fourth semester of seven semesters total, I knew that my path pointed towards a career in iOS development. Since then, every mechanical assignment has felt like a waste of my time. Now I finished my bachelor's degree and started the masters in the same field of mychatronics. Most of my classes still feel like a waste of time, time in which I could do or learn much more interesting things. Thus I am dissatisfied with my current situation. On the other hand, after only three semesters, I will have my master's degree. In my presumption, I can benefit from that degree in terms of future safety even if Apple decides to sell trees instead of computers. I'm still qualified to do another job. During my internship, I learned that companies like Audi sort of require a master's degree in order for an employee to level up their career and take leadership positions. It seems like gaining this kind of position may be easier with that degree anyway. So my situation summarized only three terms until I have my master's degree, which seems like it's going to provide more future safety and opportunities to me, and it seems like it will open more doors than it will close. On the other hand, I gained enough experience in iOS development to go after my dream today. An additional one and a half years of development as a hobby will not bring me much closer, I don't think. I constantly feel like I am running out of time. I would love to hear your opinion about my dilemma. Do you think a background that is not based in computer science will be a disadvantage in the future as a software developer? Are hobby projects even valued as any kind of education? Do companies require a master's degree when it comes to leadership positions? Should I spend one and a half more years in a discipline I do not even pursue an exchange for safety? Have a great day and continue inspiring Andy. Andy, first of all, thank you so much for writing in. If you guys want to check out Andy's apps on the app store, one is called Tour Time to a URTIME and the second app is called Club News. But I want to dive into these questions that Andy has provided here and it's questions that I think a lot of people are facing. A lot of developers, especially developers who may find themselves in careers or even in school like Andy, and you want to shift direction. You feel like you're wasting your time and that every second is a second lost. We'll discuss this question right after a quick break to talk about our sponsor for today. Today's sponsor is CodeShip. CodeShip is a hosted, continuous integration service that lets you ship your apps with confidence. What does this mean? Well, if you are like most developers, most developers who are experienced are writing tests for their applications. This is very important and you can get the most out of those tests or you can just have them run locally. To get the most out of them, you want to take advantage of something called continuous integration. That's exactly what CodeShip does. It allows you to ship your apps and only let them go to production or only let them go to staging once all of your tests have passed, not locally, but on CodeShip's servers. This means that CodeShip is watching, for example, your GitHub repository for changes and then it's going to run all of your tests in that newest version of the software that you just pushed up. It's going to run those tests and if they pass and only if they pass, it will deploy to your production servers or to your staging servers. A CodeShip comes in two flavors. The first is basic and the second is pro. If you're using something like Docker to deploy your app, then you probably want to check out pro for most people, including myself, basic works on like 99% of my projects. It allows me to set up in less than three minutes and by the way, the first hundred builds are free on both versions of CodeShip. You can try out and see what CodeShip does. It's a really incredible service. It was just redesigned based on feedback from thousands of users. On top of all of that, CodeShip is dedicated to helping developers or dedicated to the developer ecosystem. Specifically, all open source projects can use CodeShip totally free. That's always going to be the case. OpenSource projects are always free on CodeShip. Go and check it out. Spec.fm slash CodeShip to get started for free today. Thank you again to CodeShip for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. Getting back to Andy's email, Andy asks quite a few questions here. I'm going to break down a few of these questions and really attack them one at a time. The first question is, I'm going to rephrase it, paraphrase it for people who are going through this similar dilemma. That is quite simply can studying something else other than development have any benefit for my career as a developer. This is exactly the way Andy framed this. Andy is in a super cool sounding field of Macatronics. This idea that mechanical engineering and software development can be merged into one field of study. Some other people who are listening to this episode are in much more varied fields. For example, you might be studying music or you may be studying business. For me, I actually went through an entire college degree program in communications with an emphasis and advertising. I then went on to get my master's degree in digital media. So I'm going to give you a very simple answer to this question that applies to, I'd say, probably 99% of developers. This is a guess, but any field of study, any profession, any other experience that you bring to the table will have value period. Any other experience you bring to the table, whether that experience is literally classes like in Andy's case or if the experience is that you worked in a different field. We've talked about this multiple times on the show. Once again, this is something that's going to keep on coming up, but the idea that you can pull from your experiences in multiple fields to inform others, this is becoming more and more true. If you learn about business administration, there's a lot of things that you learn in business administration that apply to how you develop software. It may not seem like it right away. It may not seem like, for example, that you're going to really benefit from the perspective of computer science, from writing and algorithm. How can I apply what I learned about music to writing an algorithm to solve an advanced calculus function in my iPhone app or something like this? So absolutely, this is in varying degrees and in different ways, but here's the takeaway. The way your brain works is in a very messy form. So your brain doesn't care about what subject you're learning. It doesn't care about what the title of the class is that you're learning in. Your brain associates thoughts. It associates knowledge. It associates different memories with each other. So one memory has the ability to enhance or clarify another memory. One concept has the ability to be compared to another to clarify that concept. We talked about this in a recent episode of Developer Teal. One of the valuable reasons for learning another programming language, even if you don't plan on using it in your work, one of the valuable reasons for doing that is to help you clarify some of the things in the programming languages that you will be using in your work. Andy, in your specific case, I absolutely think that many times you will be surprised as to the knowledge that you will use that you learned in your mechanical engineering classes. You will be surprised how much of that knowledge will come in handy when you're developing iPhone apps. It may not seem like it, but the reality is I'm using information that I learned in my communications program each and every day. In fact, I use it to help make this podcast. I use some of the information that I learned in that degree program to help make this podcast. So yes, any information that you bring to the table can be valuable. Now, does that mean that you need to go out and start taking every possible wide variety of classes that there is to take to become a better developer, not necessarily. But in your case, Andy, I think that mechatronics, the mechanical side of that is going to be absolutely applicable in more ways than you can even imagine right now. I want to answer a few of these other questions, kind of rolled into one. This next piece of what you're asking is about your master's degree and this element of time, the year and a half, the three more semesters until you get your master's degree in mechatronics. One of the first questions you ask, Andy, is whether or not a master's degree matters for your future job. It is possible that a master's degree will help your earning potential. It's also possible that an employer will make a decision between you and another employee, another potential employee based on your education, your level of education. All things considered equally, if you have two people that are exactly the same and one has a master's degree and the other one doesn't, statistically speaking, the one with the master's degree will be higher paid. Companies typically do not require a master's degree in order to receive a promotion. Some companies may set the bar at a master's degree, but leadership positions in the tech world are often earned as a result of a combination of various skills, which you're already working on, your relationships with other people and your experience. So you're building your experience, you're building your skill set, and the next piece of the puzzle is to build your relationships. There are plenty of leadership positions and plenty of people who are in leadership positions that don't require anything beyond a bachelor's degree. In fact, there are people who are successful even without a bachelor's degree. Unfortunately, I have to tell you that the answer is somewhat unclear. Of course, if you're going for statistics, then yes, it makes absolute sense to finish this degree out and provide yourself the extra knowledge and experience, but also puts you in that statistically higher paid group. There's nothing wrong with this perspective, but of course, just getting a master's degree doesn't mean that you'll end up in a leadership position. You still have to focus on communication. You still have to focus on skill set. You still have to focus on creating good relationships with the people around you. Andy, what I would recommend to you, and this is really kind of summing up the remainder of your questions, but what I would recommend to you is to continue pursuing this master's degree. As long as you have the funding to pursue it, which most master's programs at this stage in the game, you probably have something like a teacher's assistantship, or maybe you have some kind of scholarship that's covering your tuition, go ahead and continue pursuing this, not because of safety, but because of knowledge. You're in a very interesting career path, and there's nothing to stop you from continuing to learn about iOS development, even as a part of your classes. If you can find a way, for example, talk to your teachers, talk to your professors, and to your classmates, and your lab leaders, talk to them about potentially using iOS as a platform for projects that you do in this master's program. It's very likely that you will have the opportunity to integrate the learning in both of those spheres. You are not running out of time. I would recommend that you continue building applications, finding small things that you can build for iOS. I would recommend that you open up your perspective and allow some of the things that you're learning in school to make their way into what you're building on iOS. You're going to find that you have a leg up, for example, on other people when it comes to physical hardware, because you've learned about physical hardware in your master's program. If I was a hiring manager, and I was building a physical product for the Internet of Things, for example, and I had two candidates come to me, one with just iOS experience, and another one with a master's degree in Macatronics, this overlap between the mechanical engineering side, as well as the software development side, the computer side side, I would absolutely go with that second candidate. The caveat that I typically give when it comes to these schooling questions is if this is going to leave you deeply in debt, then it's likely that you can either press the pause button and go back at a later time whenever you can get a scholarship or a teacher's assistantship, you can go back and finish that degree out and just press pause and earn some money, save some money up, get out of debt so that you're not buried, you're not forced into a job that you don't want. You don't end up in a situation where you're deeply in debt because then none of this conversation really matters. You're going to end up taking the job that can help you pay the bills. But if you're not deeply in debt, then I would recommend that you spend the next three semesters, get everything you can out of this information and remember that you're not running out of time. You can start living that dream today, start merging these things together, bring as much of your dream life into your school, and then bring as much as much of your school life into your dream. There's no reason to view these things as totally separate, there's no reason to view one as a safety plan, you can allow them to maximize each other. Thank you so much for writing in Andy, thank you for asking these questions. You know, I believe this is true for any field. Obviously, mechatronics seems like a more obvious overlap, but this is true if you're studying music, it's true if you're studying humanities or business, all of these things can be brought in to what you're doing with software. Thank you so much for listening, thank you again to today's sponsor, Cochip. Cochip will help you deliver your code with confidence. Get started for free today by going to spec.fm slash Cochip. Thank you again for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. If you don't want to miss out on future episodes, you know what to do, subscribe and whatever podcasting app you use. Thanks again for listening, until next time, enjoy your tea.