Ten years ago, I entered the web development industry for all the wrong reasons, chasing money and escaping a job I loathed. But I ended up staying for reasons I never expected.
There’s so much confusion these days. Lots of people are considering careers in tech, or switching into tech from their existing job. There is so much money in tech, fairly low barrier of entry (comparing to med school or attorney license). And yet, people are getting laid off, AI seems to be taking over, uncertainty is overwhelming.
Last week I mentored another new Dev who’s finishing his CS degree and technically shouldn’t have any trouble getting the job as a software engineer, and yet here we are.
A friend just asked me to help her break into tech. She wants to know what language to pick up, she wants her first job to be at least $80K, she wants to know how soon it’ll happen… Is she asking the wrong questions?
Just two years ago software engineering market was booming. Certainly a bullish market for devs, and now it’s Ice Age. Folks paid tens thousands of dollars for coding bootcamps, a ton more thousands for CS degrees and now what? One guy I know said “screw this” and went to work as a barista at a coffee shop. After paying $12K for a bootcamp.
And yet, my response is still the same. Try it. Take some programming classes. You will know pretty quickly if you love it or not. If you find yourself lost in the flow creating a little Python app and the world disappears for a few blissful moments… In that case, stay, you’re probably in the right place. Bullish market or Ice Age, doesn’t matter so much.
Back to those wrong reasons. 10 year ago I needed money and I hated my last job. Someone recommended programming. Take some online coding classes, they said. You can get your first job with at least $60K, they said. (It actually happened exactly like that…)
But those were, of course, the wrong reasons to become a programmer. HTML and CSS were exciting right away. JavaScript not so much — it was confusing and scary. Until I saw something. Something that really fascinated me. I was learning the Object Oriented programming and was creating a Dog object from the Animal prototype, and I could extend the Dog object to create different types of dogs. Sounds ridiculous, right? And yet, it was like magic to me. This was paradigm-shifting — to be able to transform the world into code, find the patterns, and solve the problems there.
This is when I knew I should stay in tech. These were the right reasons. The love of tinkering, being curious about how things work. Being able to re-create the physical world into another dimension, more organized, more predictable, more scalable, where you are the big great Ruler. Until stuff breaks and you spend 2 days debugging, questioning your life choices.
I think tech is all around us these days. It’s great to have understanding of different things, regardless of what we end up doing. But no one really knows what jobs in 10-15 years will look like. I think lots of jobs don’t even exist yet, so we (or our kids) can’t study them at schools. Instead we can study the world, the basics of economics, maybe coding, or maybe biology, or maybe philosophy and shoemaking, who knows.
But most importantly, we can become better of what we humans are so amazing from the start: adaptability. Adopting to the ever-changing world around us, being flexible and curious.
In the end, whether you’re just starting out or deep in the trenches, tech is more than a possibility of a good job. It’s even more than coding. It’s about embracing curiosity, adaptability, and the ever-evolving landscape of our world.
(This article was NOT generated with AI tools.)
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