Is Coding The Golden Ticket to a Job For Life?
Mass layoffs at Big Tech, zero-cost education and millions of people pivoting to a coding career — do we have glut of software engineers and a dearth of traditional engineers?
Future Perspectives is a round-up of my monthly essays from the frontier of digital money, governance and organization. For more info on my technical API writing for Fintech companies please visit www.andrewgillick.com
Prologue
Musk firing half of Twitter’s workforce and the mass resignations that ensued is the most dramatic scene so far of the tech job cull. Musk even ordered developers to email him a summary of what their software code had “achieved” in the past six months, “along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code”.
While travelling 19,000 km across the world in September I got a 30,000 ft view of the Tech Job Bubble just before it burst. This is what I saw.
Chasing The Golden Ticket
Between the flight from Auckland to Sydney I was seated next to a Brazilian woman in her mid 20s.
Like New Zealand, there’s an exodus of Brazilian young talent going abroad in search of higher paying work due to the high cost of living, unaffordable housing and lack of well-paying jobs. In both countries accelerating wealth inequality is also tearing the social fabric apart.
She recently qualified as an architect and her boyfriend as a mechanical engineer. Both are now doing a 9-month coding bootcamp and she tells me many of their college peers are doing the same and thousands of young Brazilian engineers and other STEM graduates have been pivoting from ‘traditional’ to software engineers.
Why?
Getting a job with a US tech firm earning USD is seen as a Golden Ticket to a better life for young Brazilians. That $300k engineer job in The Valley has been glorified, even deified.
She admits that she’s worried that so many people have the same plan and that there will be a surplus of software engineers and perhaps a dearth of traditional engineers. There was a lot of talk on Brazilian social media among techies in early 2022 about a tech job bubble about to burst.
19,000km later I’m back in my hometown Dublin, Ireland, talking to my aunt.
She tells me that my cousin’s girlfriend, a neuroscience MA, has also ‘pivoted’ to programming following in her boyfriend’s footsteps who is earning more than twice as much as her with less qualifications at the same age. Rather than getting back to college for another degree she “chanced it” is retraining as a developer online.
These are stories of privileged middle-class kids chasing The Golden Ticket out of the middle class trap in developed economies.
Can you imagine the determination of tens of millions of people in third-world and developing countries with the same idea:
the slumdog in Dehli trying to avoid a life in the factories,
the ambitious Vietnamese teen who has been coding since he was 7,
a Nigerian Phd who wants to move his family out of a famine zone.
For all its warts, the internet has been the Great Leveller of education and with the thousands of coding courses available online, mostly for free, the universities, and thus middle class, have lost the educational edge in technology education.
For the past 20 years the most common education advice given to children to avoid the perils of automation has been to “learn programming or be programmed”.
Is coding still a good strategy to get a job for life? It depends on your stage of life and career.
Chasing the Digital Dragon
Getting a job with a good tech company is now a global game and very competitive as companies hire talent from anywhere in the world.
(I recently interviewed for a job with a major Fintech in Holland on Zoom — from New Zealand! I didn’t get it 😞)
Like in pro sports, where the competition is global, the rewards in our digital economy accumulate to a smaller concentration at the elite level while the rest fight for fewer crumbs due to the power laws that dominate. This is happening in careers and in couple of generations I foresee only the top 1% will have steady salaried jobs in their field.
Freelance marketplaces are a virtual meat market for the 21st century’s digital assembly lines and the labour is just as cheap.
Unlike medicine, law, accounting the ‘traditional’ professions, coding has no guild and one doesn’t need a degree. (Note: I use “coding” as a broad stroke from programmers to data analysts, avoiding nuances.)
That’s the beauty of it. People can learn by doing and building reputation through ‘Gigs’. A quick search for terms revealed the following number of gigs on each platform.
The other major freelance platform, Upwork, doesn’t give the number of developers on its website but there are estimates that there were 1.5 million registered as of July 2019.
Twenty years ago, one needed a computer science degree to become a developer. Today it’s a trade that people learn fully online putting theory into practice in real time and can progress at a far greater pace than a physical trade like a mechanic which is sequential task-based work (believe me, I’ve been training as an e-bike mechanic).
Every year India and China turn out over a million IT/computer science graduates each from its universities.
From MOOCs (Coursera, Alison, Udemy etc) to more specific learning platforms like Skillsoft and CodeAcademy there’s been a biblical flood of free coding courses in the past decade. Many coding and data analysis MOOC courses are created by Big Tech, Microsoft, Google, IBM, AWS etc.
Unsurprisingly tech and “ed-tech” companies have been pushing coding skills as a Golden Ticket to a better career and life.
As well as being educational, these courses are a form of marketing for tech companies to get developers hooked on their products. More than being official certification, these courses are more like brand Kool Aid.
I’ll assess some two of the most prominent claims about learning code — from a humanities graduate’s perspective.
1. “Learning code is like like learning Spanish”
I’ve seen at least one of these education companies claim that learning code is like learning the dulcet Spanish language.
In my experience learning code as a technical writer (with a degree in journalism and German) that’s not the case.
German grammar and syntax is notoriously rules-based and complicated but when speaking with Germans as a non-native they are very accommodating such as forgoing the formal “Sie” for the informal “du” when addressing someone older or for the first time.
People can infer from tone, gestures and body language what is meant and fill the gaps. Otherwise we can all default to the global setting of English.
Of course, there is no such global programming language. In the early 2000s COBOL was an attempt to create such a global English-like computer programming language that even non-coders could use but it never caught on for various reasons. And there is no room for inference — bad syntax or ‘grammar’ invalidate your arguments completely.
Coding rules are as rigid as German society in the Fourth Reich. The wrong indentations, spaces or a missed curly brace will invalidate code. A Python Version 3 default will invalidate Python 2 script somewhere else.
2. “Coding is for everyone”
On these coding testimonial stories of the outliers abound — the chef turned CTO, the marketer turned full-stack engineer.
The dream invoked is that you’ll soon be on that $200k engineer salary in The Valley. But the truth, from my experience, is that coding is not for everyone and unless you’re really inclined to it, you will at best make a mediocre developer when you could be excellent at something else.
It’s important to take a critical eye to these Big Tech industry-funded coding courses.
I’m doing a Bosch e-motor mechanic course which has taught me a lot about e-bike systems but I take it with a shovel of salt to swallow the marketing!
The Traits of a ‘Gun Coder’
To be a highly successful (financially rewarded) coder it might be instructive to adopt the Anna Karenina principle which states that even a single deficiency in any one of many factors causes an attempt to fail.
In other words, you must have all the traits present of a great coder to go on and thrive otherwise you’ll be a glorified factory worker on the 21st century digital assembly line creating bullshit products.
From working with developers as a technical writer over the years I’ve noticed many traits. The best are:
Meticulous to the nth degree
Able to explain what is in the “blackbox”
High ocular pain threshold
Inclined to a sedentary lifestyle
Marathon focus
Obsessive about efficiency
The best dev I’ve worked with was so meticulous he couldn’t walk past a microwave without resetting the timer back to 0:00!
Also, you are most likely to be male. According to a 2022 survey, 92% of programmers are male, only 5% female, the rest non-binary.
What if developers are actually the first jobs to be automated? After all, isn’t that the point of machine learning and neural algorithms, that they can evolve?
Headwinds to a Fledgling Coding Career:
The tens of thousands of high-calibre staff laid off from Big Tech now entering the job market
There are millions of people from emerging countries with the same plan graduating and learning to programme
People from some ‘emerging countries’ such as China, Vietnam, Russia, Ukraine are more inclined to become prodigious programmers due to the technical structure of their mother language that lends itself to programing and also their STEM-heavy school curriculum
The world is already afloat in software and apps no one needs or uses and there is an emerging consumer trend towards digital minimalism
The consumer trend to No-code and Low-code websites and apps
AI and machine learning is self-evolving code and already AI can write as well as humans can
Conclusion
IF you’re still a teenager reading this then programming is still your best chance but I don’t believe it guarantees security, even less so happiness or fulfilment in your work.
If you’re in your thirties, don’t be fooled by the ‘success’ stories of the chet-turned-full-stack dev peddled by online tech courses. Most people who don’t have all the right traits intact (the Anna Karenina Principle) will more likely end up working on widgets on the global digital assembly line doing contract or gig work.
There will always be high-paying dev jobs, like in pro sports (and the economy generally) the rewards will accumulate to a smaller concentration of the elite level who may only hold a job for life.
ABOUT ANDREW GILLICK
I create industry-leading technical and API documentation for Fintech startups that frees up developers, attracts new investors and captures customers. For more info on working together please get in touch at www.andrewgillick.com
Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn and Twitter
The "golden ticket" keeps changing with time. Faster and faster it seems. So it is important to master one key skill: Learning to Learn