Is it worth taking an IT course as a teacher?

Within the framework of this text, I will try to answer the question from the title for you and myself. It will be fair if I also point out that below you will not find an answer to the question: is it worth taking IT courses to study?

I decided to write this text after four years of lecturing. I lectured at Otus on the GO course and appeared several times on the High Load Architect course. Now I don’t teach so often, but you can still hear/see me on the Golang course.”

Why did I go to give lectures?

Once upon a time I had a lot of code, I was happy to work and just solved problems. Little by little, my role began to shift towards a managerial path, and due to the nature of the project life cycle, my work tasks changed a lot. Instead of writing Golang code, I interviewed React developers, participated in planning and architecture development. I didn’t want to lose my coding skills, and there was an impulse to go write a pet project. Maybe I’ll tell you about this another time. At that moment, I saw a message about hiring teachers. Having responded to it, we discussed my experience and agreed on a demonstration lesson. There were two sections of 15 minutes and one of 30 minutes, after each they gave feedback.

I would like to note that I came as a lecturer to the developed course (special thanks for the work done), and my technical background was more than sufficient to convey the prepared material to the students and answer incoming questions. Therefore, after the onboarding stage, I immediately started my first lectures.

What did lecturing give you?

To learn how to make films, you need to pick up a camera and make films. (c)

To paraphrase the above quote, to learn how to lecture, you need… Well, you get the idea. I can say that this is a good start. The material is already ready, the rules of the game are clear, and this makes the process much easier than preparing new material for a new audience. As a result, it’s much easier for me to perform now; I’ve even learned to listen to myself on recordings.

If you have been postponing studying the source code of the language until a later moment, then when preparing the lesson, the time has come for this, as well as for “that article about the interesting things of Golang 1.19” from deferred reading. Once, while preparing a lecture, I found the answer to a question that I couldn’t answer at an interview 3 years ago.

I met interesting people on the course. I invited some to work with me, and I simply had interesting conversations with others. The guys who completed the course now even work in my company. On the other hand, I remember during an interview asking a candidate questions from a course he took at Otus. I was sure that I had explained it to him exactly. However, he did not remember this topic and could not answer. This saddened me, but I didn’t show it.

Dealing with criticism

There was exactly one lecture that I was pleased with. There were lectures that seemed good to me, but I received comments that something was unsatisfactory. There were also lectures that I was not happy with, but the listeners left positive ratings. If we put aside the ratings without explanation, the main points are the mismatch of expectations and “you can’t please everyone.”

In the first case, you may also encounter ignorance of some issues. The best solution here would be to take note of the question and answer it after the lecture. Alternatively, you can honestly admit that you do not know the answer to this question, but emphasize that it is not essential to understanding the material. You can come up with an example from a foreign language course: you are given interesting facts about the origin of words. For some words you may have prepared or known, but for others you may not. However, ignorance of the origin of the word does not make the lesson less quality. Here you can reserve the right not to know some points outside the scope of the material and focus on your work experience, which can enrich the material.

In the second case, take it for granted and follow the vector set by the course leader. If practical material is not enough for some, others will complain that they expected audio material with theory, and not the need to write code in real time.

Work Life the last word is loading.

Let us indirectly touch upon the issue of payment and time. For 1.5 hours – the payment was decent, but is it really 1.5 hours of time? Let’s try to figure it out:

1.5 hours – listen to the last lecture from the stream (possible at x1.5-2)
1 hour – brush up on topics you forgot
30 minutes – understand practical examples from the course
30 minutes – go through the material for the lecture
10 minutes – set up a connection and sit waiting for class
1.5 hours – conduct a lesson
15 minutes – stay after class to answer questions
5 minutes – download materials after

Total: from 4 hours 45 minutes to 5 hours 30 minutes. 3 years ago I managed to do this on the way to work. Now I live within walking distance to the office or work from home, which does not allow me to spend this time on preparation. Previously, it was possible to carry out most of the preparation on the road.

One small “BUT”: these are calculations if the material was ready before you. In the company where I teach, the preparation of material is paid separately. On the other hand, it requires more time, I would say that one lecture will take about 8 hours – to collect the material, structure it according to the class time and add examples. I did this fully once and I cannot provide full statistics here.

What turned out to be different

Starting the lectures, a picture was drawn closer to that of the institute – when students, for the most part, do not sleep in the “gallery”, but participate in the seminar. Now the world of remote work and Zoom has made this process closer to a monologue. One day I didn’t save the recording of a class and re-recorded the lecture without the students. The sensations turned out to be the same as when listening, except that there were no pauses waiting for answers to questions. I read the material 30% faster. Here you become prepared that it may turn out that only a small part of the audience will participate in the interactive experience that you have prepared. Or the students will not be able to answer a question that seemed trivial to you and has the function of simply keeping the class on its toes. This is corrected either by taking it for granted, or by teaching it in face-to-face lectures.

The second branch is the assessment of the mythical work-life balance. At the very beginning of teaching, paying for lectures in addition to my salary gave a good percentage of earnings. Thoughts were spinning in my head that it was possible to save up for a new (to be honest, I don’t remember what I was saving for then) video card quickly. In theory, it would be possible to fit in 7 lectures per week – getting an increase of about half the engineer’s salary. But theory is theory, weekends remain weekends. 2 days go to classes/sports/hobbies, 1 day to stay after work. And we already receive a maximum of 2 classes per week. Referring to the last block, 1.5 hours of lecture != 1.5 hours of time. The final recommendation is one lesson per week.

Now we remember that there is also the main job, which has its own deadlines, workloads and incidents in production. At the moment when my work began to mostly consist of communication, it became difficult for me to tell the material 1.5 hours after it. I still have mixed experiences from urgently intercepting lectures from a sick lecturer. I almost had to run away from work and give a lecture from my friend’s apartment. And I didn’t want to turn on the laptop, everything didn’t go according to plan. The scheduled lectures were somehow calmer.

A summary or summary in one paragraph.

Should you go teach? If you want to improve your technical or speaking skills, yes. If you like the learning process, yes too. If you want to earn money, you can get additional income here, but it’s unlikely to be the main one. Since lecturing at OTUS is not my main job, taking into account the free time to give lectures and prepare for them, in my case the payment is enough for small pleasures, but nothing more.

If you already have problems with free time or need more energy to relax, then no. Even if it is additional, it is the same work that requires effort and time.

Also, a lot depends on the course curator. If teaching is a new experience for you, go to teach courses with already prepared material and with an audience that already has an engineering background.