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Develop Yourself
To change careers and land your first job as a Software Engineer, you need more than just great software development skills - you need to develop yourself.
Welcome to the podcast that helps you develop your skills, your habits, your network and more, all in hopes of becoming a thriving Software Engineer.
Develop Yourself
#232 - The Harsh Truth About Coding, AI, Bootcamps, and Breaking in to Tech
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Think you need a CS degree to get hired? That bootcamps are scams? That AI is making developers obsolete?
In this episode, I share some very hot takes on what it really takes to break into tech — and why most of what you’ve been told is dead wrong.
I talk about the rise and fall of bootcamps, the myth of guaranteed outcomes, why advice from FAANG engineers probably doesn’t apply to you, and why can hate JavaScript but you still must learn it.
Shameless Plugs
🧠 (NEW) Parsity's The Inner Circle Program - a highly customized roadmap to take you from 0 to hired. For career changers who want to pivot into software.
💼 Zubin's LinkedIn (ex-lawyer, former Google, Brian-look-a-like)
👂🏻Easier Said Than Done Podcast
Already a developer? Check out 👉 Not Another Course
Serious about joining Parsity? Schedule a call with me ☎️
Welcome to the Develop Yourself podcast, where we teach you everything you need to land your first job as a software developer by learning to develop yourself, your skills, your network and more. I'm Brian, your host. I hope you don't hate me for this. I want to share some controversial opinions about coding that I think should not be controversial at all. And let me be clear before I start these are my opinions, but they're rooted in experience, with a dash of data to back them up. Before learning to code, switching careers, becoming a moderately influential influencer on LinkedIn so lame. I know everybody hates LinkedIn. Before this I was speed running life, drugs, crime, high speed chases in foreign places the whole nine like a bad rap video type of deal. Right, I reveal a little bit about my past on the Develop Yourself podcast and a few articles I've written If you're curious about that sort of thing. But I'm not going to go too deep into that here at all. We're not here to talk about my poor life decisions, though Today marks 10 years sober, in case you were wondering or cared, we have bigger fish to fry. Right, I've been on the internet lately Too much, you could even say and it is filled it's really loud with beginner experts with really loud voices and the ability to infect millions with brain rot. Critical. It is an anti-bootcamp, but I have a business. I'm also a software developer with 10 years of experience that came from a very non-traditional path. I have children, too, and I think about what their future holds. What I wanna talk to you about is about learning to code, ai, tech influencers and JavaScript. What I really think my unfiltered thoughts that will hopefully help you out or at least give you a differing opinion than much of the junk that you're reading online. That, I think, is not only dangerous but completely wrong and way off base.
Speaker 1:Let's dive into my most hated and favorite myth out there Degrees in coding boot camps are scams and they also work. I was an engineering manager for a few years at a very large company. I hired nearly a dozen people. I interviewed even more. I read too many resumes to count at this point. When I came across a resume from a person from Stanford or MIT or some fancy pants university, I would read it a little more closely. That's it. They got the same interview as the dude that graduated high school, and I hired both people that had high school degrees and master's it they got the same interview as the dude that graduated high school, and I hired both people that had high school degrees and master's degrees. Myself, I have a degree in a completely unrelated field. I didn't even use a computer in college.
Speaker 1:That's not to say that it is easy to become a software engineer. That is also a major myth that I hope you already understand is completely untrue. Anybody telling you you can become a software engineer in three months is, of course, lying to you and giving you a completely false sense of reality. That might've worked a few years ago. It will not work now.
Speaker 1:Now, saying all this, even though we had zero requirement for people with degrees, the majority of people we hired had computer science degrees. Why do you think this is? If you spent four years learning about software design patterns and coding, then you're likely going to be a good candidate for a career in software. If you went to a boot camp and got hired in three months for a fraction of the price, you somehow consider that a scam Interesting. It should come as no surprise, though, that how you acquire your coding knowledge is of zero importance. You can self-teach, you can go to a bootcamp, you can go to a university. None of them has a monopoly on knowledge or a magical formula that's going to guarantee you a job, even though I know that's what you want. You want someone to guarantee you that you're going to get hired.
Speaker 1:I even experimented with this at Parsity and I completely abandoned it. I regret doing it. I think it, one, attracts the wrong kind of people and two, how can I guarantee you something that I don't know how much effort you're going to put in? Does Stanford have a guarantee? Does MIT, does your gym have a guarantee? The idea we can guarantee an outcome without being able to control the inputs is insane. It just doesn't work, and I think it's a marketing tactic and potentially a scam that I regret even considering doing and that I will never do in the future.
Speaker 1:But here's the real reason. I think that college-aged people and people that go to colleges are more likely to succeed in general, at software or whatever. When you're college-aged 18, 19, 20, you're already in that school mode. You're much more likely to complete a rigorous academic program than a father of two who's juggling work, failing marriage, aging parents and trying to get his weight under control. Is it any wonder, then, that most bootcamp students will fail? This is exactly why at Parsity not to make this a pitch or anything we go way deep into your personal development in life. If I'm being honest, we have to make sure that you have all the right tools and systems in place so that you actually can find the time to do the thing and the mindset and understand how to network and do all the things outside of just learning how to code which are actually going to make you hireable. Learning to code is like step zero in my opinion. So requirements in the US four degrees, especially in tech, are at companies you probably don't want to work for anyway. If you're at 30 or 40 considering getting a degree, I would take note of this. I've noticed an interesting phenomenon the more a company cares about a degree, the less likely that they are to be high paying, flexible or use a modern tech stack. But hey, do whatever the hell you want to do. The takeaway here, I hope, is that no one cares. Learn to code however you want.
Speaker 1:Boot camps have a really high distrust because they have a really low bar. They accept anyone. Not Parsity, though. If you call up and say, hey, I have the money, that's cool. We obviously want to get money as a business, but we just can't take everybody, nor will we money as a business, but we just can't take everybody. Nor will we. We'll take like 70 people a year and that's it, and we'll get them all incredibly good outcomes. And if we know we can't, we'll either ask you to leave and refund you or we just won't let you in the program in the first place. We try to stop people at the door and say, hey, you know what? Maybe you should consider something else. So if you do go to a bootcamp, including Parsity I don't know if I would tell people that there's a high sense of distrust in bootcamps. They're closing left and right. So learn through YouTube, learn through Parsity, learn through books, go to college, go to a coding bootcamp, do something, build something complex, be above average and be curious. This is the way to make it in the industry, all right.
Speaker 1:Now on to my next, most least favorite thing I've heard on the internet. Ai has made coding obsolete, which is exactly why the number of tech jobs has increased. You don't believe me. You think that can't be right, can it? I want you to go to trueupio slash job dash trend. This is a chart which shows the number of open tech positions, it might be thinking what? There's more open positions now than in 2023. Kind of crazy, right? Let's explore why.
Speaker 1:You've heard CEOs on podcasts some nerd telling you that, hey, ai is going to take all developer jobs and you never think. Why would they say that? Could it be for clicks? Could it be for clout? Could it be that developers are really high paid and annoying to work with? Could it be that CEOs would love to automate us? Big tech also knows how gullible normal people are. When was the last time you went to the metaverse? Have you used Bitcoin to buy some pizza? Yet How's your NFTs doing? Is Web3 coming this year, or is it already here? But hey, maybe I'm just being paranoid. We all know tech CEOs are notoriously upstanding moral people, so, yeah, maybe I'm just absolutely wrong here. Oddly enough, like I just said, though, there's more tech jobs now than in 2023, by a pretty large margin, and you're thinking how Much smarter people than me have written studies on this thing, and they basically prove that innovation leads to more employment opportunities, not less. Now let's do a mental exercise, a thought exercise, if you will. The barrier to entry for starting an online business is super low, right. You have people who don't know how to code building working apps that won't work as soon as they attempt to add more features.
Speaker 1:Security, complex deployment strategies. Imagine asking your uncle or your aunt or whatever some Facebook mom to vibe code a web app and then deploy it on AWS using serverless, and then debug it. How do they decide the database schema? How do they do database migrations? How do they update libraries that they don't even know exist? What about security patches? How do they observe the code and how people are using it in things like bug reports or errors or crashes? Let me explain something very simple to you More code equals more bugs.
Speaker 1:More code equals more maintenance. More code generates more code. So why on earth would you think that, as we create more code at scale, we would somehow need less software developers to maintain and extend this code? Feel free to argue with me on this one. All you want, look up the software development lifecycle at a very fundamental level. More code be extend this code. Feel free to argue with me on this one. All you want Look up the software development lifecycle at a very fundamental level. More code begets more code, which is why one of the most valuable things you can do as a software developer is to delete lines of code. If you're a vibe coder, though, you're just creating code and bugs at scale, all right.
Speaker 1:Next on my list of hot topics here, I think that FANG engineers have great advice for other FANG engineers. Fang stands for big tech companies you will never, ever get into, or something like that. It actually stands for Facebook, apple, amazon, netflix and Google, sometimes also referred to as MANG because Facebook became META. Software engineers at META Google. They make up around 1% of software engineers in the US something like that some really tiny amount. Yet they take up most of the online space when it comes to interview tips day in the live videos giving general advice about software careers. One little problem you, the person watching this, almost certainly never work for any of those companies. Sorry, to burst your bubble there. What works at Airbnb will not work at a company where the tech team is 20 people. It won't work at a startup of seven people. In fact, this is sometimes the case when startups hire people from Fang to come join their startup and realize they don't really know how to work outside the boundaries of big tech.
Speaker 1:Not to say that people in big tech are somehow inferior. In fact they're probably superior to most of us as far as coding skills. But the way they work is so different from what you will find at your mom and pop or kind of your mid-tier or lower-tier company where many of us work that it just doesn't really relate. Their interviews are wildly different than what you are likely to encounter. In fact, at Parsity I asked people what their interview was like. I'm always curious to see how many DSA problems did you get? It's usually somewhere around zero. Now if you're on the West Coast in San Francisco, even, maybe LA or Seattle or maybe in the East Coast or something like that, you might be more likely to get DSA problems, but in my experience doing hundreds of interviews, it's just way less likely than you could ever imagine outside of big tech. And yet here you are. You're blindly taking advice of people that went to these top universities at age 18, got into really massive tech organizations, and you think that same advice can apply to you a father of three or a mother of two or a person in their 40s or 30s trying to switch careers, and you're wondering why it won't work.
Speaker 1:Interesting my business partner is one of those smarty pants developers who went to Google after a successful career as a lawyer. He has excellent advice. Name is Zubin Pratap. You may have heard of him or seen him on the show or whatever. Smart dude to follow. Has a really interesting story and a very interesting career path. Now he's one of those smarty pants dudes that actually got in there Much smarter than me, looks a lot like me too. He's pretty good looking, but that's beside the point. Don't tell HR. He also strongly suggests that you don't consider going to Fang Meng for your first job. The path is way too narrow and most devs at Google will quit within like 1.1 years or three years or something anyway. So to spend a lot of your time preparing for a small subset of interviews at a company that you're likely to leave doesn't like the best advice.
Speaker 1:Now, I know there's a massive amount of upside, so I'm not trying to say don't follow your dreams. If that's like really your dream to do, obviously do what makes sense to you. But if your goal is to become a software engineer and not necessarily an engineer in big tech, then you need to think of a different plan. And let me tell you this you can still make an unreasonable salary outside of big tech and learn skills that are going to be much more transferable than working within big tech. There's obviously pros and cons. I am biased, no doubt because I've never worked there, so take what I say with a grain of salt. Again, my opinion Now.
Speaker 1:Have you read this quote online anywhere? It says, like no one uses JavaScript for serious software. I'm like, yeah, javascript isn't a real programming language. It's the only programming language I hate. When I hear people disparage JavaScript or make people feel embarrassed to be learning JavaScript, I'm like, yeah, no one uses it. No one, no one at all, except for NASA, netflix, uber, linkedin, walmart, paypal, the entire internet. Javascript is the language of the web. This is not changing. You can still hate it, it's everywhere and you're going to be forced to use it at some point. Javascript has been the most popular programming language for years, with no real sign of decline, and I tell people this there are really two types of programming languages the ones everybody hates and the ones that nobody uses.
Speaker 1:Don't be ashamed to learn JS. Don't be ashamed to be a JS developer. Also, learn other languages Once you learn JavaScript. Learn TypeScript, learn C Sharp, learn Ruby, learn Python, learn whatever. Maybe don't learn COBOL. But you know, take what you understand from learning JavaScript and the principles of software design and apply them to other languages. It's not really that much different With AI tools. Now. You can code in basically any language, as long as you understand how to construct a web app or a mobile app or some kind of system that involves code. Knowing the implementation details in the syntax is increasingly less important, but nothing wrong with starting with JavaScript. There's a reason why most boot camps and colleges even want to start with it. It's simple, it's everywhere and it's highly in demand. So don't run away from JavaScript. Run towards JavaScript and stop letting idiots on the internet fool you and telling you that it's a stupid language to learn.
Speaker 1:Lastly I'm gonna end with this there are too many software engineers and still not enough. It's odd, isn't it? There's more people than ever that can code Poorly. There's tons of amazing coders out there who I've met that don't care about building good products. They just want to be in their code hole, write code that's really lovely to look at, but don't care about the bigger picture.
Speaker 1:If we keep scaring off a generation of talent for clicks, views and clout, then who's going to replace us? If you say AI, I swear to God, just turn this off, go away. But seriously, we need smart people who actually enjoy this profession to work here. Otherwise who's supposed to replace us? So we can go into cushy management jobs with stocks in endless meetings that's the dream, right? But honestly, for my kids' sake, for the younger generation out there, we need this pipeline. We have to stop scaring people off. At the same time, the bar has risen. I'm glad we're ushering in a new era where boot camps are on the decline, software engineering is on the incline and people are building at lightning speed and need a new generation with new skills to keep up.
Speaker 1:If you want to be part of that new generation and you're not looking for some get rich quick scheme, if you are go to one of the few boot camps left, give them your money and in three months let me know how that worked out for you. But at Parsity we're still taking applicants. We'll take another 40 people, maybe max for the rest of the year. We'll work with you for a full year to get you into that first position internships. Any way, we need to give you the skills that will actually help you land a role and have a good career, not just pass the interview. That sounds like something you're interested in.
Speaker 1:Hit me up, go to parsityio, slash inner dash circle. Anyways, hope I didn't get you pissed, but if I did, maybe that's good. If you liked it even better, I always hope it's good. If you liked it even better, I always hope it's helpful. See you around. That'll do it for today's episode of the Develop Yourself podcast. If you're serious about switching careers and becoming a software developer and building complex software and want to work directly with me and my team, go to parsityio. And if you want more information, feel free to schedule a chat by just clicking the link in the show notes.
