How many languages should I know to land a dev job

Hey freecodecamp Community, I hope you all are doing well. I have been surfing the internet like I normally do and I see and check a lot of the subreddits of people who are wanting to become computer programmers, people just like us and people in this community. A lot of people have been asking and wondering how many programming languages they should learn in order to land a dev job. The responses that I seen online were responses that would put me down if I was a beginner.

A lot of people were telling the beginner programmers and people just starting out that they will never land a dev job if they only know one programming language. I just wanted to update you guys and let you know to not always believe what you see online . some of those people have never worked in the industry and they have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to a person without a computer science degree getting a job or someone with a degree that is getting their first dev job.

I know you guys hang out in some of those subreddits and you also surf the web regarding these types of topics. I can’t express enough how important it is to understand that everyone’s path is unique and its own way. some people may search Forever and have to learn multiple Technologies to get a job and some may get one right off the bat . I have a lot to say about this because it is very important that you understand how the process works and what companies want when it comes to hiring a new Dev. I have made a video to express my opinion about this topic in more depth.enjoy

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I don’t know, I really only know JavaScript and I got a job. (Node is JS for the backend.)

I think the goal should be to learn a popular front end view library (React, Angular, Vue) and to learn a backend language (Node, Python, Go, Ruby, etc.). You learn those and the supporting libraries to get a functional fullstack. You learn and build. And once you get some depth there, you can start branching out and getting some knowledge in other languages and libraries.

FCC is a pretty good introduction to the popular MERN stack. Just sayin’.

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Also learning a new language or library/frameworks goes quite fast if you have a solid foundation. The basic syntax is almost the same in every langugage.

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You only need one but it’s always good to become proficient with more tools

If you have/are in a team with people of different programming skills, then by every means it’s okay to learn just one language. I speak from experience - my brother and dad both have their own tech stacks (one does networking and the other does back-end programming) so I took it upon myself to do front end programming (the geek?). The things we can make together are on the level of Splynx, YouTube and other cool stuff. I just do the front-end designs cause their designs look the 80’s billboards… (I did not say that)

I’m trying to learn backend techs cause I personally love coding and would love to expand my skills for as long as I’m passionate about it.

If you need to land a dev job by learning one language, you should look for employers who want a team of skilled programmers where each individual is a master at one.

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It’s also important to distinguish between “can get a job” and “likely to get a job”. Yes, you “can” get a job with just a little JS. Are you “likely” to get that job? Not really, and it keeps going down each year. Yes, you “can” survive jumping out of an airplane and survive - that doesn’t make it a good plan.

The goal shouldn’t be to figure out the bare minimum to get a job. Your goal should be to keep learning in ways that keep increasing your hire-ability. I refer to my earlier post on the approach I think is best.

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There are most certainly JavaScript developers, Ruby developers, C# developers etc… who know their language well and expanded that knowledge into libraries that depend on that language.

I think its far better to focus on getting really good at understanding one language and what comes with it, than spreading yourself thin becoming only familiar with a lot of languages. The languages you know may not even be in the tech stack of the company you end up working for, but if you can demonstrate that what you know, you know well, they will be confident you can pick up whatever they use pretty quickly. You want to be skilled, not someone who is all over the place and doesnt know any of your languages on an advanced level…

That being said, Im pretty good at JavaScript, familiar with C, C#, Ruby and I want to learn Python… cause I suck at taking my own advice. Like Ron Swanson said… “Never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing” :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Yeah, I would agree that you can spread yourself too thin. That’s why I advocate learning a frontend and backend and get pretty good at those before moving on. But I think the number of “just one language” jobs or “just front or back end” jobs are diminishing. But I think the fullstack approach is a better way to think of it. I learned so much about what is really happening on the frontend when I learned the backend.

Above question depends on what do you want to learn, you fall in love with which language?

Web:
Front-End: HTML (HTML5), CSS (CSS3), JavaScript (jQuery or SPA such as: Angular, ReactJS, VueJS, …
Back-End: PHP (or Python, Ruby, Java, .NET, Go, …)

App:
iOS: Swift, Objective-C, C, C++, C# (Xamarin)…
Android: Java, C# (Xamarin), …

Designer: Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, CorelDRAW, GIMPP, …

3D: 3Ds Max, Cinema 4D, Blender, Maya, …

Visual Effects and Film Production: Premiere Pro, Sony Vegas, After Effects, …

Feel free to choose what languages (tools) you fall in love with by spend a bit time to read about all of those, after that, doing some demo projects for more exactly to decide.

Materials and Tutorials for you to learn everything you love on my Youtube channel:
youtube dot com/channel/UCg7GE5bWGvBGnvjt7ZiL04g

Hope yoy get your right learning path for your career!!

Happy New Year 2019!!!

Learn JavaScript really well first. That goes without saying. Then learn TypeScript:

  • its just JavaScript plus some nice extras, so its an easy win
  • it teaches you about statically-typed languages
  • its popularity is growing like crazy
  • its essential for Angular, and getting more popular with React

Then learn SQL. Everybody uses it. Its probably the one of the most used languages in the world. And it will teach you how data works. Knowing a bit of SQL will get you brownie points in an interview, while knowing MongoDB will only get you raised eyebrows.

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One way that newbies break into the field is by doing WordPress sites. Don’t scoff at that, over 25% of websites are built on WP. To do WP you need to know HTML5, CSS3, JS, MySQL and PHP. WP has a boatload of free help on the web. You can put a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server on your machine, load WP and practice all you want. WordPress will host it for free. It’s a free sandbox to play in and improve your skills. One of the great things about using WP to learn is that you can look at their existing files, like their CSS files, and learn some advanced positioning and transitioning skills. As far as JS libraries, JQuery is quick and easy, but React is gaining popularity in my job market.
After that, if you want to learn another easy language, go to Python. It’s being used not only for apps, but it’s also used in Big Data, which is another fast growing field. It also works for cyber security, and there aren’t nearly enough people in those last two fields. They are pretty logical spin-offs from web development.

Keep on keepin’ on,

Randy Morris

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I think the most important thing you need to learn for programming is how to learn. Languages come and go. COBOL used to be the most popular languages, and JavaScript will not be the last most popular language. Learning how to learn new languages/frameworks will give you the easiest time finding a job. The best way I have found to learn how to learn a new language is to pick an application to write and write it in multiple languages. (Mine is always Guess the Number)

Depends what you want to work with. Frontend you should know HTML,CSS and JS as well as one framework (React, Angular, Vue), don’t try and learn at all once. But focus on learning one framework well.

Then I would recommend a database language, most likely a relation one like SQL. How to query a database and get the information you need.

I started by learning C# (and still do) and I think learning a proper OOP language is good, I think it’s easier to go from an OOP language to JS than the other way around. JS is loosely typed, where’s C# is strict.

The goal should be to know the full stack, even if you prefer or intend to work more on one side of the stack. Knowing the full stack will lead to more options and eventually open up for freelance / starting your own business.