Develop Yourself
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Develop Yourself
#239 - Is Learning to Code Still Worth It? An Senior Developer's Perspective
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Chris, a mentee at Parsity was feeling a bit down and asked me straight up what I think about the future of coding careers.
I had to really think about it.
With headlines screaming about AI taking our jobs and markets being oversaturated, it's enough to make anyone question their path.
But what if the doom and gloom narrative isn't matching reality? In this candid episode, I tackle the question head-on: is learning to code still worth 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. So everybody, and their mother's telling you why you should not learn to code. Automation Claw Cursor Devon AI. Does anybody remember Devon AI, the people that claim they're gonna take away your developer job in six months? That was about 18 months ago, so I don't think they're doing so hot right now. I don't know, but you should check on them. Devon AI, I hope you're doing okay. People have told you now that the market's oversaturated. Nobody's hiring junior developers in a 30-mile radius of any tech center, right? So there's enough reasons that you've been told not to learn to code Now.
Speaker 1:I'm not some silly optimist or person that wakes up and says affirmations in the mirror or pretends that things are all roses when they're not. I can only go off data, my lived experience and what I've learned coaching dozens of people through Parsity, a program I own that teaches people how to go from career changer into a profession as a software developer. It's not one of those three-month fly-by-night bootcamps. Anyway, I was speaking to a student today, chris. Chris shout out to you. He's a young guy, he's only 21 years old, one of the younger people in the program, for sure, and we were talking and he's going through a bit of a rough time right. He's in college, he's trying to keep up with the work at Parsity, which is non-trivial, he's doing a lot of stuff and he's feeling a little bit overwhelmed. And he even asked me. He said sell me, can you sell me on becoming a software developer? And it kind of caught me off guard. I'm like what do you mean by that? Like sell you on the program that you're already in? Like you're already paid to be in the program? Like why do I have to sell you again? But I'm like I'm happy to. But he's like no, no, no, sell me on becoming a software developer. Why is it still worth it? And I thought, man, that's a really good question. It made me think a lot about it.
Speaker 1:This year has been a very stressful one for me personally. I went through one job, I was laid off, I got another job, I quit that one really small startup, and now I'm back at another startup really small. I'm kind of leading the team and stepping into more of a leadership position Not easy, right? Very stressful. Switching jobs, no matter the context, is difficult. It's very, very stressful. I've done this too many times over the years and I honestly am sick of job hopping. I want to stay at a company for a long time while I'm running my own company. I love what I do, which made me think a lot about why I would suggest or not suggest people to get into this profession. Here's a few reasons that I'm still very, very bullish, meaning very, very excited about the future for software engineers.
Speaker 1:I'm seeing right now in real time, the rise of automation. We're all looking at AI and seeing how it's changing how we work in our day-to-day Our text editors. I'm using Cursor. A lot of people are using whatever came out last week. We have AI tools on top of AI tools on top of AI tools that are claiming that they're going to either take our job or make it, so we just prompt engineer all day Now.
Speaker 1:How much of this is reality and how much of this is fiction? I'm seeing that this is a lot of fiction, a ton. I'd say that AI tools like Cursor or whatever you're using can get you very, very far very, very quickly, but this myth of productivity begins to clash with reality the moment that your code base gets more complex. More lines of code get added, more context, more business logic has to get added, more new libraries, more new code things that our AI tools haven't been trained on yet. It makes it much more difficult for them to be effective. I mean, I'm yelling at Cursor nowadays.
Speaker 1:It's gotten so awful that I'm like, hey, why did you just change working files? Why would you do this? I'm literally thinking what in the world made you think this is okay to write? And if you're a junior developer, this is probably very scary, because, one, you don't know what's good code versus bad code unless you've been exposed to it. And two, you're thinking this thing actually is producing good code, when I guarantee you, I guarantee you it is not. And if you think it is, then you should probably go do some more coding.
Speaker 1:I don't know, but the reasons why I'm excited about what's happening now is one it's really easy to build products and launch them, which means that there are more companies than ever being spawned every single day. The barrier to entry is like non-existent. Here's the thing More code equals more code. More code equals more maintenance. More maintenance equals more bugs, more developers that need to maintain the code. I've never in life, there's never been a point in history where more code equaled less developers, and we're seeing this.
Speaker 1:If you go to trueupio slash job trend go to that website if you want to check it out the number of developer openings now is at a two-year high. I've mentioned this many times and I like to mention it over and over again because I hate when people come at me with like no one's hiring. I'm like just look at the data. That's just not true, it's not accurate. So no people are massively hiring. It's just maybe not at the rate they were five years ago. We're not going to go back to that time anytime soon, but we are heading towards what looks to be a rise, an increasing rise, in the number of developers we're gonna need.
Speaker 1:But beyond that, beyond all the numbers and stats, why should you become a developer? If you like solving really tough problems through code, if you get addicted to doing puzzles, if you like working with abstract problems, if you like working with business problems and translating them into code, if you're an entrepreneurial type of person, I can't think of a better industry or skill to learn than coding. Also, not to be a fear monger and not to put down anybody else in any other type of job, but when I hear people talk about developers and the fear that we're going to be automated away or we're just going to be replaced with some stupid AI tool, I ask them what they do. What turns out is that they do jobs that are much more ripe for automation. I hired a lawyer last summer or a couple summers ago. I actually had ChatGPT craft me a document like a legally binding contract that I showed to the lawyer. He said, wow, this is actually pretty accurate. It wasn't quite accurate, but it was pretty accurate.
Speaker 1:Do you think that an AI tool could replace a lawyer, tax assistant, maybe medical professionals, any other kind of knowledge profession, like maybe secretarial work, maybe things like where you're pushing numbers on an Excel sheet all day, or where you're basically just sending emails in an office all day or where you're writing copy. These are jobs which I'd be much more concerned, that may be automated and that a lot of companies are looking to automate. Now, whether you believe that or not, I'd say that the race to the bottom to see which job is completely not able to be automated is a silly, silly goal and it's not going to work out for you in the long run. I think that you can look to trucking, you can look to manual labor, you can look to things like HVAC and you can say, well, these are safe for now, and what about when they get replaced?
Speaker 1:Learning any skill is a skill. It's a valuable thing and you can take it many places. I would argue that the skill of coding gives you more optionality than the majority of them out there. If you look at the top five richest people in the United States, three or maybe four of them know how to code and yet people are telling you don't learn how to code, which I think is silly and a bit interesting, because it feels almost like a word I hate to say, but a little bit of gatekeeping like oh no, don't learn to code. No, no, no, you don't wanna do that. You don't wanna get a computer science degree or go to some coding bootcamp or learn to code on your own and then enter into one of the most highly paid professions that doesn't require a degree and has room for leadership and all sorts of opportunities. No, no, don't do that. You know I'm like where is this coming from? I don't think there's some nefarious group or some secret group of people trying to keep us down. I don't know, maybe there is, maybe I'm just naive or something like that, but I would argue that this profession gives you so much more optionality. Hey, I hope you're enjoying this episode no-transcript different way and how we have so much gosh dang success. If you're interested in being one of the few people that works with us this year, go and apply at parsityio slash inner dash circle. And now back to the episode.
Speaker 1:Here's the other thing. It's fun. As much as I get stressed out at work or I don't like sometimes playing politics or having to do all the other kind of office work nine to five junk I have fun with what I do. I build stuff. I get to see it launched out to the world. I squish tough bugs. I get to sit in meetings with really, really smart people and discuss things that are way outside of my sphere of knowledge and learn from them.
Speaker 1:This is an amazing profession, especially in a place like the Bay Area, where you get to meet some of the smartest people you could ever imagine, and that alone is one of the best perks of this job, in my opinion Not the stupid coffee thing or the free gym memberships or the. Well, the money's pretty good. Let's be honest. The money is the biggest perk, but besides that, the people you work with the quality of the people you work with is amazing. My partner, zubin, who I met through this show through being out there on LinkedIn, who's also a software engineer, he said the same thing. I mean I think this is why a lot of us get drawn to this profession. You meet incredibly smart people. You meet a lot of entrepreneurial minded people. In fact, the person that I took over this show from, aaron, started off as a coder. Then he got into just being an entrepreneur and we just did an internship with a company where the CEO was a coder, turned guess what entrepreneur. He doesn't really code much anymore, but he's now a fully-fledged business guy.
Speaker 1:This is not an atypical story, so the optionality that you have in this career is really like no other that I've really seen. I can't imagine many other careers. We could come in with zero degree, zero formal education, rise to the top in an organization, potentially lead it, and make stupid amounts of money. Now, it's not all about the money and most people will never get that kind of money. So if that is your main goal, look elsewhere, because you're not likely going to get it. But if your main goal is, hey, I like to code, I want to get paid for this. I'm ready to really solve tough problems and I know I have to study some academic things, some practical things. I know it's going to take longer than three months. I encourage you to consider this profession Now. Here's where I put on my senior developer hat and I put on a little bit of my concern for the industry as a whole.
Speaker 1:We keep feeding people, especially junior developers, early career people this myth, this fairy tale, this fear mongering to say please don't get in the industry, telling you, go away. We have a class of senior developers now that are getting oversaturated with jobs. Let me say that again. We have senior developers who are highly in demand. Right, senior developers in general are in the most demand that I can imagine I've seen since I've started 10 years ago. What's going to happen when we move on to management, or when many of us retire, or when many of us go outside of coding and start our own businesses? Where are we going to get these junior developers from? Where are we going to train them. We can't just pluck them out of the dirt. We can't just make up mid-level developers. We can't just keep cloning senior developers.
Speaker 1:If you say AI, I swear to God, there's always some idiot in my comments saying, oh, just AI, I'll just do it. I'm like, oh okay, well, thanks for that. Yeah, sure, they haven't figured out how to write simple code in Cursor. With all the tools in my $20 a month subscription, they're going to replace whole senior developers. No, they're not going to do that. So we need junior developers. We need good people coming into this profession, not just people that just want to do React or people that just want to code and not learn business. We need real, seasoned software engineers that are going to come into this profession, make it better and become the kind of seniors that we need to keep this train going, to build the software that's going to enable businesses, keep our countries running strong and to basically make sure that we are not last in this technology race that, like it or not, all countries are in. If we cut off our pipeline of people and we simply rely on AI, which hasn't been invented yet, and put all our eggs in this one basket, we're going to be completely screwed.
Speaker 1:So for a number of reasons, I would encourage you to code Now. Obviously, if you're looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, if you have never coded and you don't really know if you like it and you think I just want to get some more money, or if you think it's a flexible job where you can just kind of sip coffee at home and not work very much, or you're expecting something like four-hour days, you're probably in the wrong profession. The reality is, some days I work 12 hours, some days I work four hours, some days I work zero hours and some days I work beyond belief. I pulled a few 12, 14-hour days in a row before. This is not sustainable. This is not something I encourage, but obviously it's reality. So even your dream job is a job. So, if I haven't scared you off and maybe you're still there listening consider coding for the right reasons. There's still room for you in this profession. There's a lot of optionality and trajectory that you can enjoy here, and there's a lot of money. If I'm just being honest too, if you're in the right place, you know the right stuff and you're a personable person, you can make it. Now it's beyond just knowing how to code, obviously, which is one of the reasons why at Parsity, we go well beyond just learning to code. We work a lot on people's personal development, their communication skills, all those things which can mean the difference between getting a job and having a long, healthy career, which is what we want.
Speaker 1:Hope that's helpful, as usual. I hope that gave you a little bit of a boost. If you're out there struggling or freaking out about social media posts or stuff on YouTube. I hope this gave you a bit of a light at the end of the tunnel and if you have any more questions, I'm happy to answer them. If you have comments, please leave them, because I would love to know what you're thinking.
Speaker 1:Some of the stupid things maybe you've been told and maybe if you think I'm being naive and maybe that I'm wrong or something like that, or if you've seen that this oncoming wave of AI and automation really Boom, then I would love to hear your argument as well so I can rebut it. Anyway, hope that'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. See you next week.
