Develop Yourself

#275 - Terrible Advice for Software Developers (that you're hearing in 2025)

• Brian Jenney

Share episode

After 11 years helping hundreds of career changers switch into software development, I've found the hardest part isn't teaching technical skills but rewiring brains from misleading online advice that hurts new developers. 

Much of this advice is well-intentioned, but some is designed purely for clicks and engagement.

• "Don't chase titles!"
• "Don't build CRUD apps!"
• "Coding bootcamps are a scam!"

Take all advice (including mine) with a grain of salt. 

Your path is unique, and a personalized approach to career development is more effective than generic advice. 

Question everything, take what makes sense, and leave what doesn't.


Send us a text

(Not so) Shameless Plugs


👉 Build Your First Website in 30 minutes 👈


✉️ Got a question you want answered on the pod? Drop it here


🧑‍💻 Join Parsity - Become a full stack AI developer in 6-9 months.

SPEAKER_00:

Can we please stop saying these things to software developers? Over the last 11 years, I've worked with hundreds of people to change their careers and land jobs in software. I'm also a senior software engineer with around 11 years of experience. The success rate that I've had, especially in the program which I currently own, has been extremely high and we have the stats to back it up. But one of the hardest parts isn't teaching people JavaScript or React or Python or Cloud or whatever. Ultimately, the most difficult thing has been rewiring people's brains because they have to unlearn all the garbage that they've picked up online. And this has gotten much worse in the last few years because now there is so much free advice and YouTube videos and courses and hot takes and Twitter and all these people telling you all these different things. I'm one of them. You know, I am part of the problem, if I'm just being completely honest with you. I mean, here I am in a video on a podcast telling you what I think you should not be doing, right? And a lot of this advice you read is well-intentioned. But a lot of this advice is just for clicks. I see this especially on YouTube. I'm seeing this more and more on LinkedIn. And I've always seen this on places like Reddit and Twitter, honestly, which actually have some of the best and some of the worst advice that I've ever read. And sometimes I question whether these people have ever worked a single day as a software developer or in any field or do anything besides live in their mom's basement and just go on and troll people all day long. But some of them sound pretty smart and you might even fall for it. Either way, this ends up hurting people, especially developers who don't yet have enough experience to see through it. So I want to break down some of the worst career advice I've seen floating around on the internet, starting with this one. Don't chase titles. This one drives me crazy, right? I see people write about this all the time, including some people that I kind of respect, right? And I get what they're trying to say. Like titles don't matter, but they do matter, right? Titles, no matter how you might feel about them, they dictate a few really important things. Your current salary, your next salary, how you're perceived by recruiters. If your title is email developer or French Fry Chef or Underwear Inspector, it's really difficult to get a job as a software developer. Would you agree? Right. I like to think in extremes, right? If something is true, then it should be true at the extreme of either end of the spectrum, right? So if titles don't matter, then I could literally be called whatever I want. My title could be underwear inspector at my company. And I should expect then that for a recruiter to not care about that at all, I should expect the next manager to not care about that at all. I should expect nobody to worry about anything besides my skills. That will not work. And if you think that will work, try it out. Change your title to whatever. You're gonna have a very difficult time finding a job or finding a recruiter, especially, that's willing to take a chance on you. They're looking at your current title. If you want to go for an engineering manager position, it is infinitely easier to do that if your title is already engineering manager. Even if you're a senior software engineer, they're looking at that title and thinking, well, you're not an engineering manager, so I don't think I can hire you for an engineering manager position. Now, obviously, people get promoted within their organizations, and that is based on titles again, right? If your title is software developer one or two, then you can go to the next level. Titles are important. This is how the job market works. And here's my hottest take on this one. I think you should chase titles, if I'm being completely honest with you. If your goal is career trajectory and getting more money, then you absolutely need to quote unquote chase titles within reason. If you have one year of experience and you want to be called a senior software developer, you're setting yourself up for failure, most likely, because now the expectations have moved way past your actual limitations, right? So if you call yourself a senior software engineer or if somebody is dumb enough to after six months on your first job, then now you've kind of set yourself up for failure because the expectations have way outpaced what you're actually able to do. That being said, if you go to a company and you have five years of experience, or if you really want to get into management, sometimes it can be preferable to just get a title change without actually getting this salary increase. I'm gonna try this maybe at my current company and see how that works out. I'm like, well, I'm kind of doing more management stuff. I think I'd like the title, even if you can't give me the money, because I'm thinking about the next place I want to go to. And they're gonna be looking at this title to determine how they are going to rank me, what kind of offer I'm gonna get, and just the opportunities that are gonna come my way in the first place. If you're a director of engineering, you're gonna get a lot of director of engineering positions coming into you. If you're a senior software engineer, like I am right now, you're getting a lot of senior software engineering positions coming into you. When I was an engineering manager, I got a lot more director, associate director, engineering manager positions that came into me. Now, here's the next thing that I really hate reading online that is so silly and just causes a lot of frustration, pain, and insecurity among coding bootcamp grads, especially. Don't build crud apps. You're building just a crud app. Oh, lame, right? No one builds crud apps. CRUD stands for create, read, update, delete. These are the foundation of basically everything you do as a developer. And it's kind of laughable when I read people saying that, hey, don't build crud apps, or oh, you're just building another crud app. And I'm like, well, that's kind of what the industry does, right? That's kind of what we do for a living, isn't it? So create, read, update, delete essentially references how we update data in a database. And you might have an app that will like read from a to-do list, update the to-do list. Maybe you'll check something off as done. Maybe you'll delete that thing when it's done, and then you read it because all your to-dos are on the screen. And you can create a to-do, right? A to-do list is an example of a app. Maybe it has a back end, it persists the data, so you can see it long after a person is logged out and you store it somewhere in a database. Is this a great example or something that will get you hired building a to-do list? No. Do major companies build essentially this? Absolutely. How do you think Instagram works? How do you think Twitter works? How do you think Reddit works? These are create, read, update, delete operations going on at a massive scale beyond what any of us will likely work on in our lifetimes, right? You make a post. People read through your post. You can edit and update the post. When people like or comment, that's another type of update on the post. You get embarrassed by what she said and you delete the post. That's crud, right? Billion dollar crud. And the funny thing is, the people dunking on these projects are saying, oh, this is so lame. You built this crud project. These people have usually done projects like this either in college or at a coding bootcamp or on their own, and they've gotten hired, but now they want to tell you that you shouldn't be doing it. I get it because it strikes a nerve, it strikes an emotional nerve, especially with coding bootcamp grads who are thinking, oh, there must be some magical project that really senior people do that I'm not getting. And that's going to be my key to employment. When really it's just people that want to have a little laugh at your expense online. And I really, really hate this advice for that reason because I think the people writing it know better and they still write it because they know it's going to trigger you and it gets the likes and clicks and engagement that they want. Sometimes I think this is actually rooted in some sort of helpful advice they're trying to give, like, hey, go beyond building a to-do list. But what it often comes out as is just don't build crud apps when you should absolutely be building crud apps. Now, this next one, I gotta admit I'm super biased. So take this with a grain of salt. But when I hear people say, don't join a boot camp, I've read this a lot. I've heard people on the podcast that I interview say it. I've said it myself, if I'm being honest, and now I run one. So how much of a hypocrite am I, though? Here's the thing boot camps work. They do. Full stop coding boot camps work. Tens of thousands of people enter them, many of them find jobs, many people don't find jobs. If only 10% of the people join the program and 10% get jobs, is that program a failure? Would you consider the failure rate of colleges where about half the people drop out and even less get jobs within their major a failure? Would you consider that a failure? Many people would. Many people still choose to send their children to school. Many people want to go to school to learn and then get employment and find that a viable path to a career that they want. Now, now, does higher education in general not work because people don't get the exact result they want from it? I don't know how you feel about that. All I know is that coding boot camps have consistently been a viable path for people to get into a career in software. Now, the problem I have with them, and kind of why I've labeled parsity as an anti-coding boot camp, is not because of the actual structure, but because of the marketing hype and the gimmicks and the approach that most big boot camps take. There's a couple out there I really like App Academy, Hack Reactor. I've heard some good things about even General Assembly. I've even heard some decent stuff about Triple 10. I haven't heard that much good stuff about Triple 10, though. So I don't want to dunk on them or anything like that. But I haven't heard a lot of great things about certain boot camps. But they work for some people, right? They're working for a lot of people, aren't they? Right. So if you have 100,000 people enter these programs, you know, you're gonna have a lot of people that have success stories. Parsody, on the other hand, will have less than 100 people a year, and we have many more success stories. We have a higher percentage of success stories because we have so few people that enter the program. So what gives these coding boot camps a bad name? High pressure sales calls, unrealistic promises, and there's zero barrier to entry. Your credit card is your barrier to entry. It's like going to a community college, right? Like, can you pay? Okay. Are you breathing? Okay, you're in, right? This is not a recipe for success. And this is why most coding boot camps fail. They take literally anyone off the street and they add them into the program. They have zero tests to get in. They don't even talk to them. They just want to know, can you pay? And now you're in. This lowers the quality of the people that you're working with. It lowers the networking quality. And it makes it so the people teaching it have a harder time trying to keep up with the pace. And then these people inevitably drop off because they can't keep up with the pace of the work. People get frustrated trying to work with them. They basically have entered into a program/slash career that was not meant for them, unfortunately. If I'm just being completely honest, if you don't know how to open up your file explorer on your computer and you want to be a software engineer, you're going to have a very, very difficult time. I actually saw this exact same situation in a coding boot camp where I was working at around 10 years ago, where a woman entered the class and she couldn't find her file explorer. She didn't know how to even really type on a computer. And yet here she was paying$10,000. Remember, 10 years ago, paying$10,000 to be in this program. Mind blowing. That being said, the actual model itself of accelerated, structured learning, accountability, obviously this stuff works, right? Now, people can learn all this stuff on their own. You could learn how to be a car mechanic on your own. You could probably learn how to do surgery on your own if you could somehow source the cadavers or something like that, right? The reason why people go to coding boot camps is not because the material is like, oh, I'm learning this proprietary material. Do you think Stanford, by the way, would teach you anything you couldn't find online? Do you think Harvard teaches you something you couldn't find online? What you're paying for structure, accountability, the networking opportunities that you have, basically a very clear path to get somewhere fast. If you have lots and lots of time, I might not go to a coding bootcamp. If you have tons of time, just learn it on your own, right? If you want to get there within a year or less, then yeah, join a coding boot camp, join maybe a college, join some kind of program which is going to give you a well-manicured, laid-out path to get there. This next one is one that I read all the time on Reddit. It essentially goes like this just give up, right? You'll never make it. The market's oversaturated. AI replaced you. Just quit. Truly big-brained activity from these people on Reddit. This is just cynicism and it's disguised as realism. It's the same thing as being so optimistic as saying anybody can learn to code and make six figures in three months. Saying that is the same thing as saying that nobody can make it. These are both wildly untrue things, and they both are on either end of a silly spectrum that does not reflect reality. There's hundreds of thousands of open software jobs every year. Yeah, people fail to break in. People fail to do a lot of things, right? People fail to do a diet, people fail to run three miles, people fail in their marriages, relationships, all sorts of things. Is it any wonder that many people fail to break into software? But why tell people to stop before they even start? It's lazy, it's annoying, and it's just not rooted in reality. These people who believe this advice or that say this advice the most are people that typically just gave up on themselves. Just sorry to say that, but I really don't like this stuff. I think it is some of the most damaging narrative we see online, telling people, hey, just don't even do it. Just give up because I couldn't do it. You can't do it. It's uh a bit arrogant, too, if I'm being completely honest. Here's some more big-brained activity from people saying, don't learn the popular thing, right? They say, don't learn React or JavaScript. JavaScript sucks. React sucks. Python sucks. Node.js and Express sucks. SQL sucks. NextJS sucks. Here's the deal. These things are popular usually for a reason. Companies hire for them, right? People say, oh, the MERN stack sucks. That's lame to learn. That's what boot camps teach. And they teach this because companies tend to hire for this kind of stuff, right? Most companies aren't hiring C developers, even though C and C is what a lot of college students learn. They're hiring for people that know React and JavaScript and Python and all the other technologies, languages, and frameworks that I just mentioned that often get dunked on online. Here's the thing: there's only two types of languages and frameworks, the ones that nobody's heard of and the ones that everybody hates. Don't overthink it. Do the popular thing, maybe even do a little bit of research in your local market and see what keywords pop up the most and what technologies and languages pop up the most so you can make an informed decision rather than going off the hot takes on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Reddit. And this last one, whiteboard interviews are biased and they suck, and DSA doesn't really matter. You'll never really need to know this stuff. This one's partially true. And I kind of believed this one too in the beginning of my career. I really believed it because I wanted to believe it, because I didn't want to admit that I don't know a lot of things that I should know. I came into this industry, mostly self-taught, went to a front-end only coding boot camp and didn't even know the most basic stuff, right? And then I'd read stuff online like, oh yeah, nobody uses binary search trees at work. And then on my first couple years in the job, I'm like, oh, they're kind of right. Like, you don't really need to know data structures and algorithms until I had a really, really difficult time on the job market. I couldn't go to certain interviews. I was like, oh, if you're doing a whiteboard interview, then there's no way I could actually even approach this. So I can't even take the interview. Also, sometimes my coworkers would be mentioning things like big O notation or performance issues and talking about things in terms that I had no clue about. And I thought, well, why am I refusing to learn this stuff? Right. And so I did, and it opened up a ton more opportunities for me. I ended up going to Google to interview, Facebook to interview, Amazon, all the big tech companies. I was actually able to interview and even pass the rounds and get to the final rounds at a few companies that I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined that I could get there. Here's the thing, though, it's not about grinding 500 lead code problems. And you don't even need to go that deep into any of these topics. I think learning a little bit about some basic data structures, a little bit about the most common algorithms, and a little bit about system design by reading a couple books on this kind of stuff will take you really, really far. It's going to accelerate your career, it's going to open up a lot more opportunities for you. And if nothing else, it's going to make you a lot more confident. So to sum it up, the truth is a lot more boring than hot takes. So when people say, don't chase titles, don't build crud apps, don't join a boot camp. Whiteboard interviews suck, don't skip them. It might make you feel good. These takes feel contrarian, they feel bold, but they're just misleading without some context. Or at worst, they're just there to stir up controversy and get clicks and likes. Here's some meta advice for you, by the way. Take everything, including my advice, with a grain of salt. My perspective is very limited. It's based on anecdotal evidence and hard evidence, right? So I have evidence and statistics from the coding program that I own that we keep track of how many people get hired per year and how many people either fail to complete the program or how many people do and what their trajectory is like and their salaries afterwards. Really small sample size, right? It's around a hundred or so people. I've helped out hundreds of people in the last 11 years as well, through various coding programs, through other mentorship programs, through just personal mentorship and other coding boot camps where I've worked. And I've also talked with about a thousand developers on the phone in little 15-minute conversations. This pool size is extremely small, though, when you consider that there are millions of software developers out there. What works for one, or even what works for a group of them, may not work for you. And that's why we take a very personalized approach to career development and learning how to code. It's much more than learning how to code. That actually, to be honest, is probably the easiest part of our job because creating the curriculum for you and helping you execute that curriculum is nowhere near as difficult as working with you on things like market development, research, understanding your needs, wants, motivations, schedules, triggers, the things that are likely to make you fail, and then finding ways to navigate those to make sure you get to the finish line and actually get the result you want. That's much more difficult, right? And that's why it takes a very personalized approach. If it was all about curriculum, then we'd have a lot more people that are software developers and a lot less people on Reddit telling you why it's impossible. Anyway, always hope that's helpful. I hope when you hear these pieces of advice, even from me, you question them. You take what makes sense and you leave what doesn't. See you around.

Podcasts we love

Check out these other fine podcasts recommended by us, not an algorithm.