[00:00:00] hi guys. Welcome back to the easier said than done and how you can do it. Podcast. Look today, I want to actually talk to you about a post. This wasn't actually a planned episode, but there was a post that I did that went a bit viral over a hundred thousand views in in less than actually two days in on LinkedIn.
[00:00:17] And it was a post that came from a place of sadness, because, as you know, I have a coaching practice that I do along with my full time job. It's more of a, you know, evenings and weekend thing, my way of giving back.
[00:00:28] And as part of this practice, I get to speak to quite a few people. And unfortunately, most of them, I've just had to tell them, look, I think
[00:00:35] realistically your expectations aren't right. And increasingly I've had to tell that to people. Now, of course, this is completely contrary to what they're hearing from social media influencers.
[00:00:46] And you know what I think about that and also what they're hearing on social media generally, and from blogs. Now, let me tell you guys, the world has changed a lot since 2015. Okay. The reason why there's a lot of junk results on Google searches and [00:01:00] other things is because people have understood how SEO works.
[00:01:03] And there's a lot of content being produced that is, Made to sort of game the algorithm, get attention, get your eyeballs and all the rest of that.
[00:01:10] And so my entire no BS policy is driven by that change because I come from a generation that's a little bit before all the social media stuff where
[00:01:19] We really have to figure out what's real and what's not because you couldn't instantly verify things and there wasn't a flood of information There's not a lot of information and what little was there you needed to sort of Use your brain about, you know, reasoning about it.
[00:01:31] Okay. So I come from a very different context in that sense. Now this post was inspired by a few people that I'd spoken to a couple of weekends ago where, you know, they had the impression that you could earn six figures for Pretty much minimal amounts of work like we're talking a few months worth of effort and it was a mystery to me
[00:01:53] Why people would believe that's possible when there is no evidence through human history to suggest that High [00:02:00] income is something that comes from a few months of work or high Achievement is something that can come from few months of work or high income Anything can come from a few months of work other than, you know, the lottery being lucky or, you know, starting off from a much higher baseline that other people did.
[00:02:15] But in general, when you're starting from zero, it's highly unlikely that you're going to get to tremendous outcomes in a few months. Like it's just not likely. And so that's what inspired this post and I'm going to share this post with you for a moment But that's the context and really what I want to talk to you about is Why learning to code is not enough to become a professional coder?
[00:02:36] I say this so much publicly on linkedin on other places on blogs and on other podcasts Learning to code is not enough. It wasn't enough when I was doing this five years ago though there's some evidence to suggest that some people manage to get by with minimal amounts and i'll explain why that is Right, like even a dead clock is going to show the right time twice a day But it's never truly been enough to build a career.
[00:02:59] And so that's what [00:03:00] the post was about. So I want to deep dive into what The true motivation behind the post was why I feel this way and give you historical context for why a lot of people who started their careers in the last five ish years, maybe five to 10 years, have completely the wrong impression of what's normal in any industry anywhere in the world, largely because the last 10 years also coincided with the growth of social media
[00:03:28] and the tech boom and this confluence of circumstances has made it extremely weird for people to now adapt to another reality, which frankly was always the reality behind the hype and, the honeymoon period.
[00:03:42] Anyway, so let me quickly
[00:03:43] PART 2
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[00:03:43] Start by sharing my screen. You know, the drill, you know how this works. And for those of you on audio, if you look at this in YouTube, you'll see that I share my screen and have some worksheets and things like that. But I want to show you this post that I did here, right? So I'm going to open it up for you.
[00:03:57] And this is the post that went [00:04:00] viral.
[00:04:00] You can see, you know, over 101,000 impressions in two days. And I say, basically, that I'm sad for all the folks
[00:04:08] I'm hearing from in the bear market who are struggling to find coding jobs, but have only been learning, within quotes, to code for about three to six months.
[00:04:15] I'm not sure at what point of time our civilization was fooled into thinking that getting a coding job is possible by just building a couple of sample websites. But Based off some tutorial or blog, imagine if we told aspiring soccer players that all they needed to do to become professional soccer players is to dribble the ball, kick it and tackle others.
[00:04:32] Imagine if we told an aspiring entrepreneur that all they needed to do was build a product. Imagine if we told aspiring authors that all they needed to do was write the manuscript. Imagine, imagine a world where the first step is all it took. To climb a mountain and I see I've got a little typo there interesting.
[00:04:50] I totally missed that anyway so that's the post and it went nuts, right? There's a lot of comments I encourage you if you if you've got if you've got 10 minutes and nothing else to do At a bus stop or [00:05:00] something, you know, you take a look at it
[00:05:01] at the comments a lot of people most people agreed the vast majority agreed and a lot of the older professionals And this is what's interesting Way more seasoned engineers jumped on board to say, well, this is kind of true.
[00:05:13] You know, a lot of people are getting jobs for not knowing very much at all. But that's not how the industry is actually meant to be. And then, of course, there were some folks who quite understandably were upset because it reflected their very difficult reality and it's not their fault for being kind of Misled into this way of thinking.
[00:05:30] But I, the real point of that post was to say, guys, if the mountain's really tall. And you don't actually know how high it is.
[00:05:38] Don't assume the first step's enough to get you there. Like that's kind of the heart of it, but we are fooled into believing and we forget to think for ourselves if this is the truth.
[00:05:45] So let's look at what I mean by learning to code. When I say learning to code is not enough, and I'm saying it's not enough to anymore. It's to distinguish against the previous 10 years. Okay. So now we're 2024, we're halfway through 2024. And maybe. [00:06:00] It was enough till 2022, 2023. I don't really know when it stopped being enough. In my view, it is never enough, but there was a time when some people got through with that knowing a lot.
[00:06:11] Sure, you know, you may think that okay 50 people 70 people got through without knowing a lot I read about them all the time in social media But you know, there are more than 50 million developers out there in the world. So even if you had 500 of these folks who managed to make it through And that's probably only in the US.
[00:06:28] That's a tiny percentage, like way less than 1%, right? The 99. 9 percent that you don't hear from is the reality of the situation, not the less than 1%.
[00:06:37] When we talk about learning to code, what do we even mean? Like I say, Oh, I'm learning to code.
[00:06:41] Okay. How do you know when you're done? What's the finish line? What is the evidence that you've learned to code? Like when I asked myself, do I know how to code? I obviously know how to code because I'm an engineer. I got into Google and I've got into Chainlink and other places. So I know how to code, but what does that actually mean?
[00:06:56] You know, what, what line do you have to cross to say you've learned how to code? [00:07:00] And the answer is there is no line. Traditionally, a computer science degree was the line. Nowadays, it really depends on your goals. So to me, if there's no one definition, then the next best alternative is to link Your progress to a tangible outcome and say, well, if I've achieved that outcome, that goal, and it's tangible, then I know what I need to know for that goal.
[00:07:22] So if your goal is to get hired as a coder, then you can say you know how to code when you got the job. Now, the reality is you'll actually know how to code well before the vast majority of people who learn how to code won't get coding jobs because they're not good enough for the job market, but they know how to code.
[00:07:39] Now, what do I mean by that? Right? Well, you can see the guitars behind me. I play the guitar reasonably well. Okay. I mean i'd say i'm a six on ten. All right, but I am not a rock star I'm, not a commercially successful musician partly because i've not tried But my point is just because I know how to play the guitar and I can even sing a little bit does not [00:08:00] make me A musician of a professional caliber.
[00:08:03] There are so many steps between where I am today in terms of my guitaring ability And me becoming the next chris stapleton or something like that, right? So That's the mental model I want you to carry in your head when we say, well, why is coding not enough? Because there are lots of other steps.
[00:08:19] Now let's take a step back and reflect on why some coding literacy was enough between 2015, 2017, 2020, around that time, some coding literacy was enough. And why is that? Well for that, and unfortunately this is going to be a bit visual. So for those of you who aren't watching this on YouTube and you're just listening to this on, on Spotify or whatever, you're going to miss some of this maybe take a look back on the video when you can, but I've got a graph on the screen showing, An image from Investopedia that talks about the stages that companies and industries go through.
[00:08:51] Now, the reality is whether it's a species of animal, whether it's a country, whether it's cultures, ideas, industries or professions, there is a pattern [00:09:00] that you can see in the starting phase, the growth phase, the plateau phase, and then the decline phase. Everything goes through this. Now, let's look at it in the context of professions Okay, or actually before we do that, let's do it in the context of companies or industries entire industries, right?
[00:09:19] There's a startup fair phase when there's new technology or there's a new resource So there's a new something and there's it's a massive period of growth. So for example Between 1900 and 1905, I think, when Ford Motor Company was starting out, there were more than 3, 000 car companies in the U. S.
[00:09:33] So there's a massive amount of activity when something new is happening. So that's the start up phase, and then it starts to, you know, grow, because, you know, it's a bit of a rocket ship. It grows like crazy, and you'll see from the screen, the curve there is Massively steep. Okay, there's huge growth and that's on the revenue curve typically, but it that's what we mean by size the company So there's massive revenue growth.
[00:09:53] Then there's a shakeout period and all these periods by the way We don't know how long they last but historically You know a startup [00:10:00] phase or growth phase Both of those could last maybe 15 years or so and then there's a bit of a shakeout phase and then there's a long period of shakeout of maturity where it's kind of slowish growth, then plateauing, and then a slow decline.
[00:10:12] And that could go on for 20, 30 years. Right. And we look at another chart about that in a moment. And then finally have the decline phase. Okay. So just keep these, these phases in mind, right? Startup, then growth, then shakeout, then maturity, which everything starts to flatten out and then decline where things, where the curves start to go down.
[00:10:30] So that's normal for all industries, countries, cultures, ideas. You can see this through the history of humankind. Okay. Now let's take a look at this. Arthur D. Little is a is a consultancy company. Now, Arthur D. Little had just done this analysis of oil maturity, and I've just pulled this out randomly from Google because I've seen this stuff before in my career, in, in, and especially during my MBA and when I was doing sort of other business stuff I understood the phases and cycles of the market.
[00:10:55] So you'll see that in the context of oil, so we're talking about oil [00:11:00] here as in petroleum.
[00:11:01] In the context of oil, there was a similar analysis. Curve, right? There's the embryonic, which is the startup phase, and then the growth phase. Then the maturity, which also happens along between growth and maturity happens is the, is the shakeout phase, and then finally the aging and the declining phase.
[00:11:16] Now, if you look at the dates here that Arthur D. Little has got, the embryonic phase of the oil industry was pre 1900. The growth was 1900 to 2000, so a hundred years of growth, which. We've seen that evidentially because the entire economy, the entire globe through two wars grew and the demand for oil just skyrocketed, right?
[00:11:35] And then it achieved maturity in this century. So 2000 to let's say 2050 is their estimate of when the mature phases where things are going to start to plateau and then it's going to age and decline. And look, It's possible that by 2050 petroleum is going to be far less important than electric and sustainable sources like hydro generated electricity and so on, or even potentially nuclear much more, right?
[00:11:55] We don't know. So, but we know that oil is definitely no longer in the growth phase. It's more in the maturity [00:12:00] phase. So again, industries follow the same curve. Now, I want you to start to think about this in the context of tech. And I've got another chart up here from start start afar, which talks about the five largest companies.
[00:12:13] And guys, I know if you're wondering what the hell is this guy going on about, just bear with me, I'm giving you a little bit of a historical context, the backdrop, the big picture to show you how much has changed in the last 15 years. We're 2024 right now, since 2009, which is 15 years ago. So much has changed.
[00:12:29] Okay. In 2010. Right after the great financial crisis, which by the way, I lived and worked through and it was a brutal time It was much worse than things are now, right? The five largest companies in 2010 were exxon mobil petrochina both oil and gas companies Then apple then icbc, which I think is a chinese commercial bank and then microsoft Okay in the top five companies in the in terms of market cap in 2010 Only two were tech companies google's not even there You [00:13:00] All right, facebook is not even there facebook was about seven years old at this point in time Okay hadn't acquired instagram wasn't even a thing in 2010 uber wasn't a thing in 2010 like so much has happened after 2010 Okay.
[00:13:11] So in 2010, there's only two tech companies apple and microsoft both of which started in the 70s That were in the top five Okay. Now in 2020, we have Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, which is Google and Facebook in just 10 years, the top five companies were all tech and which 10 years were they between 2010 and 2020.
[00:13:34] Just think about where you were 10 years ago your age now minus 10 And in that period the entire world economy shifted the nasdaq or the top, you know stock market companies were a mix Of petroleum banking and tech back in 2010 and now it's all tech.
[00:13:53] It's all tech Okay, and in that period of growth, this is what the chart looks like So i'm now showing a new chart by the new york [00:14:00] times that talks about the market cap of tech companies Between and 2011 and 2020 and it's all you know It's only the tech companies and they've all crossed 1 trillion in 2020, right?
[00:14:10] so In that period, there was so much growth, guys, so much growth in the industry. It was clearly in the growth phase that entire careers were born. Now think about it. Somebody who started their tech career in 2012 today is 12 years into their careers, probably a senior engineer, probably a people manager, almost certainly an engineering manager.
[00:14:29] You know, these are people whose entire careers have been sitting on the nose of a rocket ship, after a a period of extreme growth and that's the only thing they've known. That's the important point I'm trying to make here. That's the only thing they've known so it's not their fault Right, but this is the context to where they were.
[00:14:46] They were on a tide They were on a geyser that was shooting sky high Okay, and they thought it was a normal tide. It wasn't now let's consider what happens during growth phases And for those of you thinking what the hell does this have to do with why learning to [00:15:00] code is not enough? I'm going to explain everything in a moment.
[00:15:02] It's all going to tie together in a moment Okay, now during these extreme growth phases The good times make people believe that these good times are normal. This is just how it is This is how it always was this is how it's always going to be and the idea of a bust or a correction is Very remote.
[00:15:17] Okay. Now I've been through what, two, three recessions, including the dot com crash in 2001. Well, I technically wasn't in the labor force. That was one year away from being, but I was at the end of my law school years then. Right. And I remember how much the economy suffered during that point point of time, mainly in the US, though, where the dot com boom was largely happening.
[00:15:37] Right. And so I'd seen, I've seen these cycles before and what ends up happening is right after the cycle, it's all doom and gloom and right during, and then. Two or three years later, things start to pick up. Five years later, people have forgotten, even though they remember the memory of it in general, they act as though they've forgotten and an entire new generation comes on the scene that never knew.
[00:15:58] They read about it in [00:16:00] textbooks and they don't actually know what it's like. Now. I've read about war in textbooks. I've seen it in the news. I've no idea what it's like to live in a country that's actively at war and has been for years. It's completely abstract for me, right in in the same way.
[00:16:12] A bad correction or market recession is abstract for a lot of people. So there are two things. There are two forces at work here.
[00:16:18] One is folks inside tech have no context about what it's like outside in the real world. And I say real world, not in a derogatory way. I'm saying outside. In the real world being most of the world is not in tech So in some senses tech is the exception. It is the tiny sliver of humanity That is fortunate to be there in in that position of privilege and it's not the real world It's not representative of the rest of the reality of the world, right?
[00:16:42] And so that's the tech tech side of it and now I'm a part of it but before that I wasn't a part of it And I was part of a mature industry being law which had its growth phase in the 70s and 80s Massive growth exactly what's happening now with tech happened in the law in the 70s and 80s .
[00:16:56] So let's contextualize what's happening with tech, right? There was so much [00:17:00] growth in the market, as we can see in this chart between 2011 and 2020, there was so much insane hyper growth, good things, all good things that the market soaked up software engineers, like a sponge soaks up water, okay. Just suck them all into the system.
[00:17:14] Now, younger folks had never seen any of the market maturity cycles. Assume that, well, that means I'm super smart. Assume that getting jobs in four weeks or three weeks or two weeks was absolutely normal. That jobs were just being thrown at them because it was and that was not actually normal. That was a symptom of hyper growth in the surrounding context and not normal for the rest of the world, even during that time.
[00:17:37] So 2010 to 2020 industries outside tech did not have this phenomenon. So it was very much a tech thing because tech was in its ascendancy. That was the new stock market darling in that period and still is right. So people thought that that was normal getting jobs in tech four to six weeks, you know, You learn for three to five months There was so much demand that you get a job because there was just that much demand And [00:18:00] so that thought that was normal.
[00:18:01] However, I want to emphasize here that It was a new sort of normal for a good decade, a decade and a half, right?
[00:18:09] Now I was part of the in the australian team that helped for the restructure of general motors part of the global restructure when they had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009 you know, I was involved in all that.
[00:18:21] So I saw a lot of things about what margins look like in companies and stuff like that. Now, let me tell you, when I talk about margins and talk about the gross margin of the, you know, in some cases, the amount of cash that the company has, tech companies, software companies, not just tech, all software as a service companies, Their average margins are north of 70 percent which means that for every dollar they make they get to kind of keep 70 Most industries have like 10, 20, 30 percent margin, maybe 50.
[00:18:47] That's kind of pretty good. So 80 plus is insanely good, right? So that became the new normal, very cash rich companies in a growing industry. The entire world had moved online, et cetera. But most of the world, like I [00:19:00] said, do not work for software companies. They don't live in that world. And layoffs have been happening for more than 40 years across all industries.
[00:19:05] It's, it's a very old phenomenon. But tech companies get all the attention because they dominate the stock market, not because they have the most layoffs. It certainly does appear that way. But if you include the layoffs in all non tech sectors, it's more than those in the tech sectors over time.
[00:19:20] Right? And that's because every Every industry goes through the layoff cycles, especially when economic recessions happening. But tech gets all the attention because the media focuses in the top 10 companies in the stock market. And that's just how historically it's always been, right?
[00:19:35] There was a time when GE got a lot of attention and now GE is being delisted, right? So, It's a hugely different world from 10, 15 years ago. Now that's because I believe tech's in the shakeout phase. Remember this chart here, where we talk about the cycles you know, of all different sorts of things.
[00:19:50] There's a shakeout phase. And I think that's where tech is right now. It's having a shakeout. Hey, this shakeout could last. Two years? It could last 10 years? We don't know. Most likely the shakeout will [00:20:00] last about five years is my estimate and then we'll get into the maturity phase, which will still have strong growth.
[00:20:05] So if you look at the chart, the maturity phase still does have growth, you know and then it starts to decline after 10, 20, 30 years, or it may be replaced. Sometimes it's not a decline, it's a replacement or something. So who knows, maybe AI will start the new growth phase. We don't know, right? So that is what I believe is going on right now.
[00:20:23] Now, why? Why? Coming down to the golden question that you've been patiently waiting for. Why do I say learning to code is not enough? Because it was only ever enough during a hyper growth bubble. Okay. And if something's only true in a distorted situation, it's not true when things return to a more average, normal, usual situation.
[00:20:45] And if history teaches us one thing, since everything goes through cycles, when you go through. the growth phase, you're going to have very unusual circumstances appearing to be normal. And then when things stabilize, you're going to have the [00:21:00] normalcy that was behind the hyper growth reassert itself and reappear, right?
[00:21:05] Now, our view of normal has been distorted in the last 10 to 15 years. Well, certainly those of us whose careers are that young I was going through the entire last 10 years thinking, this is, Incredible. Like, there's no doubt about it that tech generates opportunities like no other industry ever has.
[00:21:20] Okay, that is 1000 percent true. But that was also true of the industrial revolution. It generated opportunities outside of farms that people did not have and a lifestyle that did not have. And that was 300 years ago, you know, so these big shifts in humanity's history are Absolutely produced tons of incredible opportunities that are unprecedented.
[00:21:40] And one of them is that tech does allow people with not a traditional background to do the same thing because it's a highly testable skill. Okay. But it doesn't mean that it reduces the amount of skill required to get top paying jobs.
[00:21:55] That has not been true in history in anything because of the nature of the way [00:22:00] markets work, right? There's demand and supply. And when supply meets demand, the price stabilizes. Now supply can meet demand very easily if it's easy to produce the thing that is being supplied. So if learning to code is easy, everybody would be doing it. And then that would equalize. And the price of software engineers would start to drop.
[00:22:18] The price of engineers was very high. Salaries in other words was very high because engineering is not an easy skill to acquire and to do Well, there was a period of time during the growth phase when there was so much demand that people who are functionally literate at code Would get jobs because people needed something and that was better than nothing.
[00:22:39] But now as the market matures It's not that there are less jobs guys. We're talking about trillion dollar companies here. We talk about the most important economic construct we have in the modern world, which is technology and software. It's not shrinking. All that's happened is that the markets become a little bit more disciplined, which is normal [00:23:00] in all industries.
[00:23:02] And right now there's also a bit of a weird situation going on where It appears the economic fundamentals are sound so we're not technically in a recession unlike the GFC when we were definitely in a recession But at the same time companies are holding on to the cash and not hiring Presumably because they're waiting to see where the AI thing goes where the fed's inflation index goes and all these other things So everyone's they're holding their breath and they're keeping their powder dry and they're waiting to see what happens But by all metrics and the economy You It doesn't appear to be that we're in a recession.
[00:23:34] It's just that people are pausing on hiring, which means if we don't go into recession and we may not, or even if we do this Pause in the history of tech is probably going to last I don't know three six ten months, maybe 24 months I don't know right not much longer than that because then things will go into the next cycle Because there's always been a boom and a bust cycle and it just keeps rotating, right?
[00:23:59] So [00:24:00] it's very important for us to now adjust our expectations For the new normal, which is that when you have a marketplace that pays an enormous amount of money for skills, then the skills are not easy to acquire. Why again the demand and supply curve, right? All that's happened is that the honeymoon is over It's now business as usual, which does not mean that tech is dead because remember every tree Loses its low hanging fruit first, but the tree can be healthy and bear fruits for decades to come Okay, and that's all that happened the last 10 years was Tech in its infancy in its growth stage in its early stages.
[00:24:38] We now know it post internet and therefore the low hanging fruit was Massive growth easier jobs than usual. You could wait two or three weeks and you can get a job, right? I can tell you that in my entire career most of the times when I was moving jobs Even if I had a good stable job, in fact, I generally had very, very high profile [00:25:00] sort of companies or firms that I worked for.
[00:25:02] It would still take three to six yeah, three to six months. It would still take three to six months to actually get a decent job again. Okay. Because that was not uncommon. Now, of course I was in a position of privilege that I could hold on and choose but the point i'm trying to make is It was never a situation that I just decide one day i'm leaving and i'll just get something You know drop into my lap like that was a very Unusual circumstance in the history of mankind and keep in mind again We don't actually know how many people did have that. What we did have is social media amplifying everything Even the smallest event would get amplified, right?
[00:25:36] So maybe a few hundred people had that kind of fortune in new york and san francisco there they'd step out They had lots of great networks. Everybody's a techie around them And so obviously they were in an opportunity rich environment and they got their next job in two to three weeks the vast Majority of the world does not live in New York or San Francisco these big tech hubs and it wasn't their reality
[00:25:56] Speaking of not their reality there are a couple of other assumptions that we need [00:26:00] to talk about but before we go into that I want to talk about the answer to the question Well, if tech learning to code is not enough then how much is enough? How do we know that? So for that I want you guys to reason by analogy, okay To become a professional musician is spending six months of learning to read music or play the guitar enough You Assuming you're starting from zero.
[00:26:20] Okay, ask yourself that question. Ask yourself about any profession. I don't care policeman, person in the Marines, accountant, it doesn't matter. Ask yourself, assume you're starting from zero, and it's a well paid profession to become a professional at that, to get a job at that, you're spending six months or so, At a school, gonna be enough.
[00:26:40] Okay? So, wanna be a professional tennis player? Six months, at a tennis school, is that gonna be enough? Almost certainly not, if you're starting from zero. If you're starting from zero, and you wanna become a published author, is writing a book gonna be enough? You know, there's a lot more after you write the book.
[00:26:54] So not only is the timing important It's also important to not assume that one [00:27:00] step is all it takes to climb the mountain That's a really important point to keep in mind Okay now if you want to know what are the other stages when it comes to becoming a coder and and like There's another episode on this podcast where I talk about it the seven stages of becoming a coder I can't remember what episode number it was.
[00:27:16] I think maybe nine or something one of the earlier ones Anyway, take a look at it Because I have a visual representation of the seven steps to become a coder and learning to code is step three Getting professional level skills at coding is step four and there's still a lot of steps before and after okay
[00:27:34] Very quickly guys in terms of managing expectations for yourself.
[00:27:37] Keep in mind that the assumptions we have that are That are untested produce false expectations in us. And when those expectations are met, we get discouraged, angry, and we tend to quit. And it's not because we were wrong. It's not because we weren't making progress. It's because our expectations were completely off the mark.
[00:27:54] So this is why I keep banging on about having the right expectations, or if you can't have them, because you don't know [00:28:00] enough to make a conclusion about your expectations, ask for help, get help. Okay. Because you could be absolutely on the right path, To to to your destination, but because there are not enough street lights and there are potholes and there's no one around to ask You may think you're completely off course, but you're not that's actually how the path looks Okay So only someone who's been there can tell you that.
[00:28:20] Now the last myth that I want to talk to you about is Engineers earning $200K or $300k US just as a matter of course.
[00:28:27] Again That's not normal anywhere outside the u. s. And even inside the u. s. It's not normal in 99 percent of places It's probably true in the high tech hubs and it's probably true in some higher Cost of living cities. Perhaps if you're going to the top shelf sort of big bigger tech companies. Yes. Otherwise 200 to 300k is a crap ton of money for most coders and that's just not normal.
[00:28:51] Okay, six figures. Yeah, it's pretty common That's not a problem. But you know, when you start thinking two, 300, 500, like, no, those are exceptions and a lot of it includes [00:29:00] stock. So don't, don't, don't sort of labor under those mistaken assumptions. Don't think this is a get rich quick scheme. And now I can tell you that while I am very optimistic about the future of tech, not just because I practice tech, but because I, or rather because I practice tech, I see how AI and other things actually help technology.
[00:29:15] It's not something that's necessarily going to replace everybody. Yes. It'll replace some jobs, but to be honest, that's probably going to be true of any job that touches a computer. It's going to be impacted by AI, but it's much more exciting because now you get to do a lot more stuff that you couldn't Otherwise do with the same speed and the same experimentation rate So that that's a really big positive to me, which means it unlocks a whole ton of stuff So I think it's a great time to look at tech and I think it's a really great time to remember That people and markets reward excellence and skills not things that come Easy.
[00:29:45] Okay. And if you want to get a top 1 percent job, you're kind of going to have to have top 1 percent skills. Like that's just the law of the jungle. That's just the nature of the universe. Okay. So don't be discouraged by this. Be encouraged by the fact [00:30:00] that this is just normal, that you have to be Very good at a few things to get that level of income and anyone can achieve it.
[00:30:09] I can tell you it's the same thing for the law or for management You have to be very good to get the top level top shelf income even in the law, right?
[00:30:16] But unlike the law and other professions You don't really need a formal degree. So you can still get very good without having to go to college, which is why I do the kind of coaching I do with my students. While they work their current jobs, I teach them everything that they need to learn to get into their coding role.
[00:30:33] But I tell them it's going to take more time than the bootcamp does. But on the flip side, you get to hold on to your income and your job. You're not out of the labor market. You're not unemployed when you're looking for tech jobs. There's no fake pressure. There's no anxiety around that. You're safely transitioning.
[00:30:47] But it's going to take way more time than you realize. It's not going to take three months. It's probably going to take nine to 12 months if you do everything I say, right? And that's a fair deal. That's a great deal. If you ask me, that wasn't possible 20 years ago. Nowadays it's [00:31:00] possible. So the huge opportunities just don't underestimate what it takes.
[00:31:04] Don't assume the market's stupid and just going to reward anyone for having some basic level of literacy. That is not normal. High paying jobs come from rare skills and that makes perfect sense when you think about it. So look that was a We covered quite a lot and that was I just want to give you some more context to that post you know, i'm not trying to be a downer for people i'm trying to give you a no BS realistic Honest appraisal.
[00:31:30] I don't know if I'm 100 percent correct. I'm pretty confident I'm 80 percent correct at the very least. a lot of it depends on the city you're living in. The reality of being in San Francisco is totally different from being in some tiny town, you know, in the middle of Iowa, you know, so that's just the reality of it.
[00:31:45] And We have to deal with reality the way it is. So I'm pretty confident that once you understand what it is, you'll be able to make a good plan. And to be honest, that's half the battle, making a good plan based on real data, real evidence, [00:32:00] having your expectations managed correctly, being optimistic because you know how to get there, but you also know how high the mountain is and how steep it is.
[00:32:07] So you can make an informed decision. Do I want to do this? Do I not want to do this? And there's no right answer. None of us actually know what the right answer for our life is. Even if it looks that way, we're all figuring this out as we go along, but if you're going to figure it out, then use.
[00:32:21] First principle reasoning, common sense, and the, and the opinion of experts, not social media, to make that decision. Okay, all the best guys, and don't forget, please like and subscribe to the channel as you can see, it's, it's not glitzy, it's not glamorous, it's all about just straight down the line talking.
[00:32:38] Honest to goodness truth. So yeah like and subscribe if this is valuable to you Check out the links in the description below if you if you are in the space where you think okay You've been trying for a while You've been trying to learn to code or anything else and and you want to make a transition in your career and you could use Some help, you know See if if what I do is is the right fit for you and i'll also help you assess that so you can find links to that in in the description You can find links to other [00:33:00] episodes i've been on in the description and do do look me up on linkedin and all the very best and i'll see you next time
