[00:00:00] Guys, I'm super excited to bring this podcast episode to you guys say, because I've got three people in the show, a couple of them from big tech, Amazon, Google, and stuff for that.
[00:00:12] And yeah, really interesting conversation where we're going to share a perspectives on coding as a career in what most people get wrong about it when they start to learn.
[00:00:21] And the assumptions they've made that are incorrect. That's one thing we're going to talk about.
[00:00:24] The second thing we're going to talk about. Is the various stages that you need to pass through when a becoming a Coda and B when you are a code on your own level, up your career to the next deck, job promotions, big tech and so on.
[00:00:36] And the last topic that we ended up covering is really quite fascinating. It's
[00:00:40] why non coders think that AI is a threat to coding, whereas coders don't actually think so. And the real analysis of what AI is actually going to do for any job, not just coding.
[00:00:50] So you're going to love this episode and I'm going to give you a few snippets now of what to expect, and then we get a demand episode. Enjoy.
[00:00:56] I think the main thing that people [00:01:00] really underestimate when they're trying to weigh whether or not they should break into code, is the amount of friction they're gonna encounter. But let me tell you, the longer you avoid social interaction, The less chances your salary will increase faster. So you want to be like a lone coder for as long as you want. That's cool, but you're going to cap out your salary pretty quickly. They don't realize, the stress of being a software developer that people just don't realize, like it's chill in some ways, but it's really stressful in other ways. literally your entire notion of the job is built on highlight reels and people don't pause to think, okay, I'm seeing a two dimensional, 90 second representation of what people are spending eight to 10 hours a day on what's being left out.
[00:01:45] INTRO
[00:01:45] Welcome to Easier Said Than Done with me, Zubin Pratap, where I share with you the tens of thousands of dollars worth of self development that I did on my journey from 37 year old lawyer to professional software engineer. The goal of this podcast is to show you how to [00:02:00] actually do those things that are easier said than done.
[00:02:05] Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Easier Said Than Done podcast. And today I'm super excited to have a couple of my friends here with you.
[00:02:10] Well, not a couple, three, technically. I heard my mom's voice just then saying, three is not a couple. Anyhow so we've got three of my friends here. We've got Anna, we've got Nate, and we've got Brian, and I'll let them introduce themselves in a moment. But we thought we'd all come together today to have a conversation with those of you listening in and watching about the nature of getting into code as a profession, and then what leveling up looks like in that profession and how the journey is long continuum.
[00:02:35] And there are many paths to Rome as they say, and, and, you know, we can, we can walk you through all our philosophies. All of us have sort of done it in different ways and touched the industry in different ways. And we have an experience spanning from, from big tech to very non traditional backgrounds here.
[00:02:48] And so we'll walk you through all that. So. With that said, let me try and get go around the table and have everyone introduce themselves. Anna, let's start with you. Awesome. So hi everyone. My name is Anna. I'm a co founder [00:03:00] together with Nate, who you'll hear from of Code Career Mastery. My background is actually in product management and I worked in tech for 10 years before I went out and started my own business, helping career changers and software engineers navigate their path in tech.
[00:03:15] I'll pass it over to Nate. Hello, everybody. As Anna mentioned, I am the other co founder of Code Career Mastery, and I've been working in tech for over 10 years now. I do have a non traditional background. I started just in freelancing, doing some consulting work and then made my way into small companies and then eventually all the way up into big tech.
[00:03:34] So currently I'm working at Amazon as a software engineer, and I'm super passionate about, you know, helping people really focus in on what their next biggest mover is, whether that's breaking into their code career or trying to get to the next level. Awesome. And Brian, Brian's no stranger to the show.
[00:03:50] Brian and I've spoken in the show before, so it's great to have Brian back. Yeah. It's great to see my long lost brother on, on the show again. So I'm Brian software engineer, about 10 years [00:04:00] of experience, most recently an engineering manager and also the owner of Parsity, a coding bootcamp for career changers.
[00:04:07] Perfect. Awesome. Well, it's wonderful to have everybody here. And just for those who've never heard from me or of me in any way before I'm Zubin. I am from a non traditional background. Like a few other people here as well. I, I was a lawyer for a very, very long time and in my late thirties, taught myself to code and ended up being at Google for a while.
[00:04:24] And I work globally remotely as a, a engineer. So very, very, Bizarre background. And I also coach very busy people who typically can't go to something like what Brian's offering. I teach them how to get into code as an alternative. They can't do the bootcamp thing and that's not viable for them. And so that's what I do as well. And my program is called Future Coders Inner Circle Program.
[00:04:45] So guys, let's talk about a couple of things. First and foremost, what I thought I'd love to hear from you guys about is our perspectives on coding as a career and
[00:04:54] You know, what I really want to start, start with is how so many people get their expectations wrong [00:05:00] about this, right?
[00:05:00] I'm just going to leave it there at a high level of what most people get wrong when they think about coding as a career and they're coming in outside. Or they think about big tech or whatever, you know, those assumptions, those hidden assumptions that most people haven't examined and build their entire plan on and often find they're wrong.
[00:05:16] So, you know, again, why don't we just go in the same order?
[00:05:19] Anna, why don't you, you know, sort of share your views of what people often get wrong? Okay. So although I'm not a developer, I've worked with tons of developers and I've coached a lot of developers. And what I find is that a lot of people assume that going into development, you can avoid a lot of social interaction.
[00:05:38] And in fact, in the first couple years of your career, you can. But let me tell you, the longer you avoid social interaction, The less chances your salary will increase faster. So you want to be like a lone coder for as long as you want. That's cool, but you're going to cap out your salary pretty quickly.
[00:05:59] And the second [00:06:00] thing, a lot of people assume or kind of get wrong is that when you get into tech, there's going to be pathways. And a lot of support and some companies do have some version of this, but tech is a very entrepreneurial space where taking as much initiative as possible is rewarded again in the right company.
[00:06:24] So it's really important to know that you are responsible for creating your pathways. And if you're not at a company that doesn't provide good mentorship, or you don't have supportive managers, or you don't like your team. You have to do something about it. No one's gonna go handing out things to you. So it's important to own your pathway.
[00:06:45] And there's a lot of opportunities to do that. Yeah, I've got a few thoughts on that. But Nate, how about you? Yeah, I think the main thing that people really underestimate when they're trying to weigh whether or not they should break into code, is the amount of friction they're gonna [00:07:00] encounter. I think that's, that's a really big one.
[00:07:02] And I'm, I'm excited to talk a little bit more about that in relationship to the whole AI discussion that I think we're going to touch on today. But just like with any career, any career change or entering into any career, there's always going to be a little friction for sure. But when you're, when you're coming in for another career, or you're sort of coming from a non technical background there's just a lot, there's a lot that can, that can cause you to stop.
[00:07:26] And. Myself included, there have been times like as I was trying to get into coding where I just stopped. I think for like a year once I like, I was doing a bunch of coding stuff and I stopped and I kind of had this panic that I was going to lose all of my skills. And thankfully I found my way back to it.
[00:07:42] But just because of the nature of the beast, because of the technical, all of the technical things you have to, you have to learn and all of the concepts that you have to not only wrap your head around, but then start to apply and start to master. There's just a lot. There's a lot. To keep you or I [00:08:00] should say it this way, the number, the number of things that can cause you to give up or kind of like change your path is very high, so you have to really, really be determined and you have to be really, really clear on your why.
[00:08:12] And sort of your your motivation for wanting to change careers in the first place. I think that's really important. That's huge.
[00:08:18] That resonates a lot with me. And how about you, Brian? What are your thoughts and what people often get wrong when they want to learn? Because you see this a lot in Parsity, in the bootcamp and when people approach you.
[00:08:28] So for sure. I mean, I think TikTok has made us all think big bags, chill schedule, Lattes, foosball, those day in the life things. And I think that's ultimately what people are chasing a lot of times. They don't realize, like, I'm sure Nate or Anna or any of us can talk about things like on call, the stress of being a software developer that people just don't realize, like it's chill in some ways, but it's really stressful in other ways.
[00:08:54] Yeah. And, and so just on that, especially like, I think, I think the [00:09:00] problem is when people's entire world is defined by what they saw in 90 second videos. Like literally your entire notion of the job is built on highlight reels and people don't pause to think, okay, I'm seeing a two dimensional, 90 second representation of what people are spending eight to 10 hours a day on what's being left out.
[00:09:19] You know, if you start asking that question, you're like, okay, pretty much 99. 999999 percent of the details being left out because it's 90 seconds versus an eight hour day. You know, the ratio I see in social media is one commit to three hours of yoga and full quarts of of kombucha, right?
[00:09:34] And it's, it, that's just not the ratio in the real world. You know, it's just you know, the commit to quart ratio is off, right? It's just not right. So, so that's a huge thing.
[00:09:46] you said something really, really interesting, which is The the importance of the social angle, right? So question for you just on that how do you factor remote work into that and a little bit of context?
[00:09:57] The reason i'm asking that is i've literally just a few hours [00:10:00] ago posted on linkedin about how I think remote work is Not work from home flexible that I don't consider that to be remote work I just consider that to be flexible working when you work from home a few days a week remote work being your Always at home.
[00:10:11] There is no office. You're not meeting your colleagues. And generally they're in a different city or time zone or like me. I work my teams across seven times on the planet. So, you know, it's a whole different ballgame. In remote work, a lot of people seem to think that this is great. I can live and work from anywhere.
[00:10:25] And I agree with you that not having building the social capital, I'll be talking about this in another episode of the podcast about, you know, remote working skills, but not having the social capital can really come back to bite you down the track. And you also miss out on that vital period of apprenticeship when you think you know stuff and you don't for the first two years, and you really need people to help you in person.
[00:10:47] So what are your thoughts on that? And how do you balance the social side with the trend towards remote work? Yeah, absolutely. And this is super, super important, especially people that had kind of come to tech later in their career. [00:11:00] And on top of that, if you come to tech later in your career, and it's from a career that isn't computer or knowledge base.
[00:11:08] Like if you were a doctor and you interacted with people or you're in retail or service based industry or in the restaurant, anything that's not computer first or like a knowledge work it's going to be really hard to transition, you will be able to, but you basically have to take all those skills of interacting in person and transition them to the digital space.
[00:11:35] Thank you. And this is doubly hard because we don't have tactile feedback. And as humans, we're scared of rejection. So when I say something like in the first three months of your job, DM everyone on your team and set up one on one meetings with them so that you can create your own relationships with them outside of your work projects or [00:12:00] your scrum meetings.
[00:12:01] You may say, Oh, what if they don't want to meet with me? What if they're busy? So if your response is I'm scared of rejection, you're going to limit your ability to build relationships, which means you're limiting your ability to opportunities and projects and better pay. And growth. So you have to transition your social skills or learn them into the digital space by taking complete responsibility over initiating conversation.
[00:12:34] Spot on. I love it. I'm actually building a short course on this at the moment because I've been remote working in one way or the other for about since 2012, 2013. And that includes back when I was a lawyer and I was doing sort of International work. Most of the people had to coordinate with an influence and at your point, instead of build those relationships enough to influence were in multiple countries.
[00:12:53] So a lot of the work I did where people around the world, as we coordinated a lot of legal work, and I had to lead those teams that are [00:13:00] people I've never met. And that's a whole different scale because you have to think through how are they going to respond? When are they going to respond? What are they in the middle of when they see this?
[00:13:09] Cause it's not like you have a visual cue anymore. And the lack of visual cues is something we just don't think about. So You know, it's, it's a huge ones. And that's why I'm sort of building this course around that, because I think people underestimate, especially folks who haven't got too much workplace experience, underestimate what the osmotic benefit of being in the workplace used to be like, and how that needs to be translated to a digital world.
[00:13:31] Right. Awesome. I always joke that there's no onboarding guide when you join LinkedIn. Similarly, there's no onboarding guide when you join Slack. 1000 percent there isn't in fact, it's funny you say that I've been trying to sort of build something like that. And and when I was when I was at google I was Onboarding during covid which was a really hard time to onboard and it was remote And that was hard like they just hadn't thought through it, you know And like the world's largest code base and stuff like it was really hard I was very lucky to have a supportive team But I [00:14:00] observed plenty of people who didn't and it's really hard to onboard people when they're 17 hours ahead of you Let me tell you that you know 17 hours behind you depending how you look at it You It's a really hard thing.
[00:14:08] And sort of building those relations. There's no way, if that was my first or second job, there is no way I would have thrived. . It was because I was in my late thirties and I'd been around and I'd led teams before. And I was, you know, I wasn't a people leader, but it was because I had all that experience in the workplace that I was able to parlay that into a completely digital setting saying, all right, what's the digital map or what's the equivalent of that that I need to do, you know, to get Nick, did you have something to say?
[00:14:31] Because it looks like, you know, you, yeah, I unmuted. So can you tell? No. So I had a very similar experience when I was onboarding with Amazon, it was during COVID. And I was supposed to relocate to New York and I was, that was in progress, but no one was in the office. So it was my first time being at a big company.
[00:14:50] And as you know, you'd expect like these big companies to have, you know, all their shit together when it comes to tooling and when it comes to processes and documentation, but it's [00:15:00] just like really overwhelming. And Google may be a little bit better than Amazon, but still. Extremely overwhelming. And the only social interactions I had were these really kind of like awkward force one on ones that were assigned to you.
[00:15:14] And then your standup, which everyone was kind of like sheepish is saying like what they did yesterday and what they were doing that day. And it was like really uncomfortable for a while. And that totally changed when, when I went, started going to the office, like the social cues just kind of help.
[00:15:30] One thing. And digitally, it's a totally wild experience and you know, it's, and I think it would have been especially hard for you, Nate, I'm, I'm imagine I'm sort of using my imagination a bit here because if you don't have big corporate experience, there's all of that, the unwritten rules around all of that and the practices that would have been alien to you that you would have had to navigate like scooters to you for sort of, you know, persisting and going through that, because I can't imagine how difficult that would have been you know, not having that sort of background as well to understand how these big corporates work.
[00:15:58] Yeah. It's really, [00:16:00] really, really hard. So look, really interesting discussion. One comment I had on what on what Brian said which is about you know, the, the social media stuff. Just, just going back to that for just a moment. Brian, why do you think people believe that? that that's what it is. Is it hope or is it just that people aren't being critical in their examination of, of critical in their research?
[00:16:24] What do you, what do you think it is? I'm sure there's some sort of human condition that leads us to want to believe that things like this can be easily solved. You see a problem. And the reason why people go for a weight loss supplement rather than working out really hard, I think oftentimes we know what we're actually supposed to do.
[00:16:41] We think there's a shortcut that somebody smarter has figured out. And if I just do this shortcut. I'll get all the benefits with none of the hard works. I think it's enticing to believe that on the other end of this thing, there's something that's going to magically make you unlock the potential of your life.
[00:16:55] Yeah, that's a bit scary. It's a very perceptive comment because I was just reading or [00:17:00] hearing, listening to a podcast was, I can't remember who was where they said that the supplement industry is four times bigger than the gym industry. And the reason is Because people think it's the shortcut. It's the easy way, you know, and I'm like, that's just mind blowing, right?
[00:17:15] So so that that's really fantastic. And Nate we're going to talk about I feel like a lot of people will try multiple shortcuts until they don't see the outcomes and only then will they reach The threshold of pain that they'll try the hard things And we've all done that, right? Yeah, 100%. 100%, we've all done it.
[00:17:34] Yeah, well, I mean, I think that's part of the human, that's also what drives innovation. Like, I doubt we would have invented the wheel if we didn't want an easier way to get around, you know? Like, it's that impulse to laziness that drives us to do things like that. And, and, I mean, I see this a lot because I've actually worked with folks that have been you know, who've tried all sorts of things.
[00:17:53] People have done computer science degrees. People have done boot camps. People have started from zero. And very few of them actually, Anna, [00:18:00] end up thinking, hang on, this is not working because I've tried the wrong thing. Surprisingly large and a distressing number. This is what depresses me. A distressing number.
[00:18:07] Think, I'm not good enough, you know, it's like they did the wrong thing, didn't know they were doing the wrong thing, had all the wrong expectations and then blame themselves for the lack of success, you know, and that's really unfortunate because I think we lose that, especially as people get older, it does things to your confidence when you don't, when you try and don't succeed.
[00:18:28] You know, but if you tried the wrong thing and you don't succeed, it shouldn't affect your confidence because that had nothing to do with you. It had to do with the fact that you were, you know, using a hammer to try and, you know, I don't know steer a boat, whatever, like, you know, it's a ridiculous metaphor, but you know, you're using the wrong tool for the job.
[00:18:43] So yeah, so it's, it's, it's, it's, that's why I try and sort of, and I think all of us do this, which is why I brought us all here together is to, it's to sort of lift the curtain a little bit on what the reality is like, because the right expectations will help people make a better plan. You know, because we're all defeated by wrong expectations more than the wrong [00:19:00] effort.
[00:19:00] And I think that's something we need to help people avoid. So just going back to Nate's point about friction. So do you remember, Nate, for yourself, the stages that you needed to pass through before you started to feel, Okay, I think I can actually get this. I don't know if I have like a super clean, like these, this was stage A, this was stage B, but I have sort of like an interesting like perspective and framing on this.
[00:19:26] First of all, I think like becoming a good coder, becoming a good developer and problem solver is just getting really good at failure. Like that's kind of what it is. Like that's what it boils down to. So whenever you do something wrong or you feel like you're not making progress, you're hitting that friction.
[00:19:42] What I've always encouraged me with is like, you're doing the hard work, you're doing the thing that's actually making you better. If that's actually, you know, you solving your own problems and, you know, learning how to build something. Right. So for me, I had some, some cool opportunities to like cut my teeth on [00:20:00] paid projects before I was ready.
[00:20:02] Nice. And At every stage that I was kind of like leveling up my technical abilities, it was always because I was able to like find a project that was like just outside the scope of what I had done before And that's like where it all started for me. I remember my first technical project was Literally just building a WordPress site.
[00:20:23] It was like a custom WordPress theme. And I love telling the story. I signed on to that project. It was for a friend and they were going to pay me like a hundred bucks. I wasn't even planning on doing coding as a career yet. Like that wasn't even on the table. But I remember like pouring over the template hierarchy and WordPress lube documentation pages.
[00:20:43] I don't know if you guys have worked with WordPress before, but I didn't have any like PHP experience. I remember like literally like. Getting so frustrated. I think I was like 18 or 19 at the time. It like brought me to tears. I'm not even kidding. This actually happens. But I had already said that I was going to do this.
[00:20:59] So [00:21:00] that commitment was a factor in sort of pulling me through that friction and I got it eventually, you know, I just had to sit with it. I had to like give my brain some time to sort of like try to absorb the concepts and then sit with it a little longer and kind of keep coming back to where I was getting stuck and eventually was able to get through that, that wall.
[00:21:19] And that was a big point of growth. And then a couple projects later, I was like, Oh, like I can actually charge real money for this. And then I was able to find people in my, sort of like, within one connection of my general network who, who needed more work like that. But that was a big, that was I think the main thing that started, started it for me to like really take it serious, was these actual work opportunities, you know, that I had early on.
[00:21:44] I 1000 percent relate to that. So I think similar to you. I mean, I first tried to learn to code 2013. So 2013, 2014, 20, I missed 2015 and 16 because the NBA and then 2017 and 2018. Those are the [00:22:00] four times 2018. The only reason I succeeded, I believe, is because the reason I started Restarted trying to learn to code was I was in the middle of my startup.
[00:22:09] I'd lost six figures on it All invested six figures in it And my fractional cto quit because he had a baby or was getting about to have a baby and he said I can't take on This kind of risk anymore And so I had all these contracts with with local governments and stuff that I needed to deliver on and I was like this Is a question of honor, you know being able to honor my own contracts for my startup Which I know is going down the toilet, but I have to try and do it And that's what gave me the sticking power enough to overcome all those failures you talk about, Nate, because it is, I'm a grown ass, there's a picture that my ex wife has of me with my face in my hands, crying at 1.
[00:22:43] 30 in the morning, because I just, I thought I'd thrown my entire life down the drain, I'd left a successful career in the law, left a successful career in management, and there I was trying to freaking out. I don't know what, whether centering a div or actually doing something more meaningful. I don't know what was that I was doing, but I was defeated at 1 30 in the morning.
[00:22:59] She, she very [00:23:00] kindly excluded the part where my butt was hanging out of the track pants because I honestly looked like a completely desolate homeless guy just with my head in my hands and that like, it was absolute devastation. Right. And the only reason I stuck through it is because I was afraid of losing face with the contracts that I'd signed and not being able to deliver on my reputation.
[00:23:19] I genuinely believe. That had I not found my mentor shortly after that, who was more like a mind, she was non technical mindset, I would not have persisted. Like, I genuinely believe without the help, I would not have persisted. And then the rest of, you know, my history, same thing with you, right? Like, you need something that's really going to make you suffer through that pain and that discomfort before you'll break through to the other side.
[00:23:42] And Brian, I know you're no stranger to this, man. So, What are your views on, especially when you see people coming to bootcamps? I know we've spoken about this in the previous episode, but what are your views about what it takes for people to succeed versus what they expect coming in and that friction between the two?
[00:23:58] You know, what's the stuff that makes [00:24:00] people succeed? Those that do. Yeah, when I think about this a lot and I've even had to gather some data and metrics on it and when you think about it's not the particular job they may have come from. It's not like their grades or other things. It's generally have they been exposed to a little bit of coding and kind of have somewhat of an idea of one.
[00:24:18] Do I enjoy this? So they've now found some sort of emotional attachment to this thing because I do honestly think it's really difficult to you. Give your all to something that you just don't like. And I've seen bootcamps except people that don't know any code. He said, well, don't worry. We'll take care of the whole thing for you.
[00:24:33] They find no emotional attachment. They can even get through and succeed technically, and then find out I hate this job. Yeah. And that's the worst thing in my opinion that can happen. The other one is oddly enough, I see there's a few occupations that tend to do very, very well. And I wonder, and I think there's something within that musicians, people from military Teachers also need to do very, very well in this coding bootcamp and also at other bootcamps I've worked at.
[00:24:54] And I, and I wonder why I think part of it comes from creative problem solving. I think a lot of the discipline [00:25:00] that is involved in some of those occupations. And I do know that that's a hard thing to test for or check for, but look at the people who just concede. It's their detail orientedness. They they are very, very detail oriented usually.
[00:25:12] Yeah. I have a slightly different theory on that, which is. I'm self taught in music. It's exactly as Nate, it's exactly as what Nate described, like, you know, the guitars that I've played over the years, it's you, you spend a long, okay. You come into it thinking. I'm going to sound like Slash, okay, for those of us in the 90s, or those of us these days, you know, I'm going to sound like, you know, incentive.
[00:25:34] You come in thinking, this is who I'm going to be, which is the equivalent of, I just saw the social network. I'm going to build the next Facebook in a weekend. That's the same sort of thinking, right? And then you start playing and you sound like shit. For a very long time and you struggle to find the note nowadays It's easy and it's the same principle.
[00:25:52] You can look at a youtube video See what somebody else is doing and copy along and you still don't learn the principles. Properly because you're just copying along [00:26:00] Right back when I was starting out you had to do it by year or because I can't read shit sheet music You know, and that persistence, that ability to go through failure after failure, after failure, until finally it sounds right.
[00:26:08] That practice mentality is for musicians, for military people. Cause I've seen that as well. It's because they're trained in discipline, like for them, it's a question of identity. You have the grit to stick with it, right? So the military people have tend to have the discipline and they're very organized, very structured with time, very disciplined with everything.
[00:26:23] All the discipline that's. Ancillary decoding also helps with the coding and finally for teachers, because they're used to seeing what learning looks like on the other side, they've absorbed those lessons about what learning looks like and what the process of learning looks like. So they're naturally better learners.
[00:26:39] So I've noticed exactly the same pattern, right? That, you know, interesting. Yeah, let's test them on how many failures they've had. And the higher the failure rate, the better the developer. One thousand percent. You're accepted. Yeah. One thousand percent. One thousand. And I have the same problem with folks who come for the personal coaching and mentorship that I do is about, and I measured this, about 56 [00:27:00] percent have never tried to code before and want to earn six figures in the next 12 months.
[00:27:03] Right. And this is the last 24 month thing. It's happened post COVID. And I now say, look, I'm very happy. I'm pretty confident I can show you how to do it, but I don't want to yet because you don't know you want to yet. You know, you know, you want the money. You don't know. You want to do this eight hours a day, six days a week, five days a week, whatever it is.
[00:27:21] So I'll typically go and give them like free CodeCamp resources, some YouTube video and say like that all this stuff is free out there. That bit you can learn if you like it, come back to me. And honestly, I think maybe in the few hundred people that I've said that to in the last two years, maybe about 11 have come back to me.
[00:27:37] And that's a tiny percentage. We're talking less than 5 percent of people will come back after they've tried it, you know, and, and, and that makes me worry because there are lots of people, like you said, Brian, who won't do that. We'll say, yeah, you want it fine. I'll sell it to you. Not a great business model.
[00:27:48] Cause I do that and I, I, and it, it hurts business a bit to be honest, but it does give us better results for the people that do, but it's not. It doesn't, it doesn't make a great, easily scalable business, [00:28:00] honestly, as you know. No, you, you can't do the mass market thing quite easily. And we have to accept, we'll have better results because obviously the kind of people we bring in that truly committed.
[00:28:09] But also there's plenty of people doing the mass market stuff. And I don't know if that's going to work anymore, given the way, you know, technology is maturing. I actually did a podcast on this recently of the maturity curve, the way technology is like, I think that world is gone, you know where you have, you do a three month bootcamp and you just get snapped up.
[00:28:24] I think it was there for a while during the gold rush days. And you know, like every gold rush now, now is the time when the industry matures with this genuine wealth to be made in technology. But like just after the gold rush, it came, it went to those folks who, who didn't just pick up a pick and keep hacking at some dirt.
[00:28:41] You know, they actually sort of built up the infrastructure on their, their their gold mining operations, which is what the successful engineers will do going forward. So yeah, I mean, you know, I guess this brings me to Nate and Anna to your offer, which is about leveling up. So, okay, let's assume people go through all the friction and they go through all the stuff.
[00:28:58] They're now coders, you know, they've, they've [00:29:00] achieved the dream and they've overcome the obstacles. It doesn't end there, does it? Not exactly. Nate, why don't you share your most recent? Transition. Yeah. So this was about three years ago and I had, I had, you know, successfully learned how to code and I had successfully made a career out of it.
[00:29:19] And that was really exciting. Cause I remember specific points in time when I kind of like looked at the road ahead and I was just like, I don't know if this is going to work. But I was able to push through that friction and, you know, now I'm making decent money, you know, working in the Midwest and was married, bought a house and, you know, we were expecting our, our first kid and it was working at a small design company.
[00:29:41] So it was like the sold software guy. You know, did projects for a bunch of different clients and it was super fun. Love, loved working with those people and had some really, really interesting projects that I got to work on, but came to this realization that like, you know, part of the reason I got into this whole thing.
[00:29:58] It's because I [00:30:00] thought there was going to be like multi six figures or something like that, you know, thought maybe there's like the chance of that happening. You know, it's kind of part of that big promise, right? And I was like, you know what? I don't think I'm cool. Just kind of sitting with the status quo.
[00:30:17] And that was at, you know, I think like year six or seven in my, in my coding career. I wish it was a lot earlier. Yeah. I really do. But pretty quickly I had to realize that what got me to that point, right, to my five to six year mark was not going to get me into the big leagues. I had failed a couple phone screens that I thought I could just like roll into with my five years of experience and be like, look.
[00:30:43] I've been doing this thing for five years, you know, just go ahead and give me the offer, you know, but that's not how it works. You know, when you get up into these into these bigger opportunities, you know, your You're interviewing alongside of hundreds of other candidates and there's, you know, very strict [00:31:00] process for you know, making sure that people are qualified and making sure that you're good to work with.
[00:31:05] And not only that, but I had some crippling anxiety around interviewing because of some bad experiences I had, I'd had in the past. So I had to square up to that. I had to square up to, okay, I've got to learn this new skillset. I had never really looked at data structures and algorithms seriously. And I kind of like you know, had a little bit of a stinky attitude towards it, honestly, because it's like, you know, they shouldn't be qualifying candidates based on this.
[00:31:31] It should just do like. You know, just, just do like practical coding questions. So I had to change my mindset towards that. Cause you're not going to learn something or become effective if you have like that resistance to it. Right. So I decided, I remember specifically it was February of the year that I ended up at Amazon.
[00:31:50] And I think it was 20, I'm really remembering exact years, but I think it was 2021, I want to say and I said, okay, I want to get into big tech. Like I just. Made that [00:32:00] decision. And I said to myself, it may take upwards of five years, but let's, let's go, like, let's do it. So it's like, okay, what are the things I need to do?
[00:32:11] You know, what are the steps I need to take? And I got real serious about it. And I became the type of person that prepared for these types of things and, and kind of went through the mindset and sort of like the the vision work of being in these long interview loops. Right. Right. And then six months later, I accepted an offer for coming from the Midwest for an amount of money that I never thought was possible.
[00:32:36] Which was crazy because I come from a culture of very, very deep culture of just stay put, just chill, stay in, you know, suburban Cleveland, Ohio, everything in your lane, be safe. Right. You know, but I just had this. I really wanted to see what was out there. And I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing intrinsically, but it was just me.
[00:32:59] It was my [00:33:00] personality. And I decided, you know what, that's the other thing too. My wife who grew up in the military, she was very used to moving around. She had a real openness to you know, moving to a new area, moving to potentially like moving to a bigger urban area. And it was really me. It was all this resistance that I had deep down.
[00:33:21] That was kind of keeping me from taking those steps. But yeah, once I did that, it was like it happened thankfully a little bit faster than, than I thought it would, but it was, it was still these, you know, these mindset things that I had to work through and these, these things that I had to learn.
[00:33:36] So That really echoes a lot of what I did as well in the sense that. I did not focus on big tech for my first few roles is what I thought it was going to be. And then I first focused on really understanding how interviews work. Now I had an advantage because in my other three careers before that, in the 15, 17 years before that, I'd been on the interviewing side and I understand how different it looks from the candidates point of view.[00:34:00]
[00:34:00] So I had that, and I've done that in three, four countries. So I had that. Perspective that okay, there's a certain meta meta pattern across industry country recruitment generally, right? There's a whole meta pattern around it and so I didn't do the big tech thing at all And then when I did it was a completely different plan from my learning to code plan But that's because I had the advantage of knowing how these recruitment processes work what they're looking for and stuff like that But the mindset work was huge because the odds are against you whether we like it or not, right?
[00:34:29] It is a statistical outlier to get into any company forget big tech You Like any one interview, your odds are probably 90 percent against you for on a per interview basis, unless you're like distinguished with PhDs and a whole crazy ass track record, right? But for the average person, any one interview is a 90 percent failure rate.
[00:34:49] What I teach my students now is Learning to code is honestly the easier part getting interviews is way harder and then performing well in the interview So like I take people through all seven stages of from goal [00:35:00] setting all the way to Negotiation and people tend to focus just on the learning to code part Just like, you know, people think, Oh, being an author means that to write the book.
[00:35:06] And everyone knows that, well, those who've done actually tried to write a book, know that writing the books, the easy part, getting, getting an agent, getting an editor, getting publishes, ridiculously hard. All the folks who've launched a startup, I'm going to do a startup. They built the product, got zero customers, no marketing.
[00:35:21] I've done it too. I've done that like three times. Thousands of hours. You know, just guilty. Yeah. I think. Yeah. Same. Right. So we all think learning to code is the hard part. No, that's not. It's, it's actually marketing yourself, getting the opportunities, getting in front of people, getting interviews, because ultimately you're a, you're a product that's being sold in the market.
[00:35:40] So buying your, getting your first paid customer is the same gig. As launching a startup product, it's exactly the same principle. So those meta principles really happen, you know and, and I got lucky, man. Like all the times before that I tried for Google as a lawyer, as a product person, never got it engineer.
[00:35:56] And this is what I keep telling people. Don't make this your plan. If you think Fang [00:36:00] is your plan, the plan is like saying, I'm going to go. Fishing and I'm gonna get the one tuna that's called Brian that lives near this, this, this coral. Like it's ridiculous. , you would never go fishing anything. You know?
[00:36:11] So it's, it's the same sort of principle. Now. I know Brian's gotta jump in a bit 'cause he's very busy and important and I think , you know the paparazzi is here. The paparazzis, yeah, the B one of, you know. Yeah. Yeah. He doesn't even know who anymore. It's just like one of the
[00:36:24] Oh. You know, I just show up, you know. Yeah, they're in the summer house by the pool, you know, the golden retrievers are keeping them company. So that's fine He'll he'll go and handle that in a moment. But brian before you jump off man, you know, because I know you got to go Given all this stuff about leveling up careers and you know, how hard okay, so there's two parts of it getting into the industry and then As what, you know, Nate and Anna now do with their offer is helping people level up, right?
[00:36:49] And you and I do the, get into the industry and they do the level up. Where do you see AI changing the structure of all this and the pathways? Oh, wow. That's a loaded question. Geez. Yeah. You got three [00:37:00] minutes before the, yeah, holy moly. What does that mean? I mean, I, I've, I use AI every day. Like I'm sure we all do, you know, especially in engineering, whether it's Co pilot, chat, GPT, or whatever other tool people are using right now.
[00:37:13] I see this, my little crystal ball is a, is a moment where people are going to have to become lean less into their technical ability and more into their higher level, like system design, architecture, and communication with other humans, because the thing I hear the most from people that get on the phone with me and think about a bootcamp, what hasn't AI taken over the jobs yet?
[00:37:34] One, no. Two, if you think that all coding is, is just writing code, then you've, you're not aware of what the job actually entails. Like the amount of communication between all the different parties, the product management, like the thing that Anna was doing, or the design team and the business and the executive team, the legal team, there's so many competing interests and you need to coordinate all this and then write code to implement the actual code.
[00:37:58] Business feature that [00:38:00] the AI was should help with the implementation, but the money is not in writing the code as much. I think anymore, there's still, I think a lot to do there, but the real money I feel like is in understanding how to orchestrate all these different people. And even as a junior, I think nowadays.
[00:38:16] The clean code you write is going to be less impressive than you being able to like write a really good peer review, for example, or coordinate with a team and quickly upskill. So I just see the shift from like technical ability is like, I'm the lone wolf coder person sitting in my hoodie in a room is like, no, you're going to need to learn how to be really personable and communicate at a higher level than you may have had to even three years ago.
[00:38:40] What do you think, Anna? What are your thoughts? So, because I'm not writing code or doing anything particularly complicated, for content for me is not that complicated. I don't rely on the bots, as I call them, the chatbots, to really support what I'm doing. The thing is, the [00:39:00] AI and the chatbots, they can support you, and they're good for ideation.
[00:39:05] And if you're stuck or want to find information quickly, it's kind of like a more advanced Google, I guess, but at some point, everything will just be like chatbot like or voice enabled. So listen, like technology moves at a good at a quick pace is going to keep improving. So no longer is coding going to be like, This special skill because at some point the bots will do the code for you.
[00:39:34] It's going to be real AI right now. In my opinion, it's not even artificial intelligence because nothing is intelligent. It's just reading trillions of data points and making its best estimation. And that's why we have all these weird, you know, hallucinations and like. You know, misplaced information and just like things that the bots pick up from Reddit that they think makes sense.
[00:39:56] It's, it's crazy. Like I would never ask it any [00:40:00] information that matters to me. What I would say is the takeaway is make sure you understand the business and whatever business you want to work at. That's it. Because your value will be helping to grow the business right now. No bot is going to grow any business.
[00:40:18] Yeah, it could be a support. It could be like help you learn something, but it's not going to deliver clients. It's not going to create all the content for you. Like you have to still be the brains. So unless it's actually intelligent, it's not going to really change that much. But you do want to learn the skills to help it.
[00:40:39] To help you do your job if it's part of the ecosystem. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Sorry, just to jump in there, Brian, do you need to, do you need to head out? So how, how much time do you have? Okay. Cause we'll keep going for a bit, but if you need to drop out, you can just drop out.
[00:40:54] I'll edit all this bit out. Hey, awesome. Seeing all you today. Thanks so much. Thanks for joining [00:41:00] Brian. Bye. Thank you. See ya.
[00:41:02] So, Anna so I, I know you, In your, given your specific background, do you think, let's leave the code stuff out of it. Do you think AI poses a more general opportunity or threat to junior level anything?
[00:41:15] No, because junior levels, anything less than three years of work experience, you're not getting hired for your work experience. Mm-Hmm. . Let's just, good idea. Agree on that. Yeah. And you wanna think that you have some experience and some value that you're bringing because you could build an app or make a document that's cool.
[00:41:35] You, you do a little bit. That's what you learn, right? You gather experience and you learn that stuff. Yeah. But they're not paying you like. All that money because like you you're really good at writing or something like that comes later with work experience Maybe on one end of the spectrum You're just a really really fast learner and you go from like zero to 100 Like from junior to senior in like a [00:42:00] year and a half because you're just like really really good You have a lot of social skills a lot of technical skills fine.
[00:42:06] But like You have to learn to be yourself and that has nothing to do with chatbots. So, yeah, I know. In the beginning of your career, you know, I have, I've developed. So initially I totally had was 1000 percent of the exact same view. And then I've developed a slightly more nuanced view. And in the last few months, because Late last year I started paying attention to what was happening in other industries and it happened kind of accidentally.
[00:42:30] I was invited to a, to some sort of online legal symposium thingy because of my background in law and now tech. And they wanted to understand AI, what it meant for them. And I'm like, huh, interesting. So, you know, people are really starting to think about it. And. It made me dig into like the legal AI space.
[00:42:46] And then I looked into the architectural AI space. And now I've looked into marketing tech. And I have not found a single job that uses a computer that isn't in some way being impacted. And I'm using the word impacted by AI, right? [00:43:00] So I started digging deep. I said, okay, what does this mean? And so the very common objection is all about AI.
[00:43:05] The AI hallucinates. And I had one question for the legal guys. I said, because, you know, I understand their industry. I said, how many of you have had a junior legal person join the team and make mistakes and 100%. I mean, yeah, of course. And I didn't say that the industry isn't going to be affected. Of course, every single industry will be affected by the change in behaviors.
[00:43:27] Like there's this one startup I heard of that rely on Google search for people to find them. And then the product that they sold was like answers to like questions in universities. But with chat GDP, you could just ask a chatbot those questions. And even if they're not a hundred percent accurate, still kind of like helps a little bit and their audience with students.
[00:43:52] So that company has to completely shift everything. So of course it'll affect the industry every [00:44:00] part of tech, but I'm saying like, You can certainly educate yourself on like what parts of the chatbots you want to work with and how they can enhance your workflow. But if you don't know what the workflow is, like you gotta start with the basics.
[00:44:16] 100 percent and along, around the same time I dislocated my shoulder and I was at the hospital having it shoved back in, in the The radiographer who was sort of looking at all the, all, all the x rays I asked her, I said, are you, are you worried about the AI thing she said a little bit because the AI can process and interpret x ray data far faster and at greater volume than she can.
[00:44:39] And you know, she spent eight years developing that skill. She was in a, in a very early thirties. And she said, I watched this thing getting better in three months. What took me a few years to get better at. And she doesn't know. Sorry, go ahead. Other industries outside of tech are going to Be using these machine learning AI bots first, [00:45:00] because It's much easier to analyze billions of medical data records and then make suggestions than figure out what like code needs to be written for some feature and how to optimize it and all that stuff.
[00:45:13] Like, so, so this is what, yeah, this is where I think potentially. Could also impact tech and that, and the reason I say that is, I think perhaps all of us here on this call have a slightly skewed perception of what, because of our limited experience, we've experienced really premium level roles, you know, we're quite privileged to have sort of had the experiences we have when I see some of my students who come through, who have engineering backgrounds on paper, the kind of coding work they've done is the kind that could get replaced by.
[00:45:48] Okay. by AI because it's a lot of very simple web manipulation, DOM manipulation, data entries. Some of them have engineer in their title and they really kind of data entry. And it will be a hundred percent. But you know [00:46:00] what? We're asking the wrong questions. What we really want to know and I don't yet know because I don't study this is how will work evolve when aided by AI and what higher level work will become available when we have chatbots to analyze our data within seconds.
[00:46:16] Personally, I wanted to analyze our data and give me an accurate response. I wanted to give me, you know, you know, percentage rates on conversions on sales and taking spreadsheets and give me decks with all my charts in two seconds, of course I want that. Right. And, and, and I think that's where it'll end up being, is that the nature of the bundle of skills required and what is considered to be effective will change.
[00:46:43] Mm-Hmm. . 'cause a lot of people I see outside of tech as well, will end up saying, Hey, the, the, the more entry level work that I pay someone 'cause wages at the biggest cost on any balance on any BL, right? Mm. Wages the single biggest cost. Mm-Hmm. . Where the wage can be replaced by something [00:47:00] big, depending on the kind of work, which is why I tell a lot of folks, it's not enough to just know how to code anymore.
[00:47:04] You actually level up and be be a designer engineer and a collaborator being a developer is no longer a commodity. It used to be a little bit of a commodity and in the beginning it was kind of like a commodity because like you could just hire a ton of developers and build something and I don't know, be lucky.
[00:47:24] Now, as the industry has progressed and matured, it's less and less a commodity and more like a commodity. A higher knowledge work. That's not just anyone can do Because they know how to put a few lines of right In fact, most of the coding work i've been doing for a few years now is reading code I write far less code than I than I read and that's interesting.
[00:47:47] How many jobs do you think will be about? you know, making code more efficient Getting code bases that are like, you know, ready and then working off them. I [00:48:00] mean, that's already, yeah, there are probably apps right now that could do like lightweight that like. You know, they can develop like lightweight, lightweight applications, give you a whole cold base.
[00:48:15] No one has to write it like that technology. Those have been around for a while. Yeah. We've had code generators for a while, right? Like you just write one npm command and you have a scaffolded app. I'd like, sure. We've had that. Exactly. So that's already been around. It's not that new. Well, yeah, I think like, it's really, you can't deny that it's going to impact.
[00:48:34] It's going to impact the industry and it already has like co pilot GitHub co pilot is very good at what it does. It's not perfect. But it is very good. It does. What's that? I said, but which coder is anywhere? Like the expectation of perfection from AI is unfair because we don't expect that of human beings.
[00:48:51] Right? Right. Right. I don't know. Eventually I expect it to be perfect. That's the only reason if I was a hiring manager, that's the only [00:49:00] reason. I would use AI versus buying. So you wouldn't do it because it could save you a hundred thousand dollars a year and give you the same level of imperfection. I think that, I think that you would, I think that you would probably replace it if it was at a certain threshold, but what I'll say is even if it, even if it, even if it's not perfect right now, it's early and like, it's.
[00:49:22] It's not going to be that long until those problems are fixed.
[00:49:25] Let me tell you this, when we got like, you know, Excel sheets started being available. All of a, all of a sudden the people that had to sit there and like put data in a thing and then create tables and all that stuff, like their jobs are no longer available.
[00:49:41] Right? So that's in a way that's like an actual you're 1000 percent right. But I feel that analogy breaks down when the thing that is doing the work. is also learning and improving. I hope so. Yeah. Okay. I mean, folks have said that all, you know, when, when the car was invented, all the [00:50:00] carriage drivers went out of business.
[00:50:01] It's true, but it is easier to learn to drive a car. You can learn to drive a car in 48 hours. You can't learn to code in 48 hours or code faster than the AI can. And this is the thing I was telling the legal folks is that. The average junior takes in law takes about a year before you're confident in what they do, because you have to constantly, there's constantly iteration cycles, right?
[00:50:22] And that that trust needs to be developed. The AI will fix it for you then and there. Like you can literally say, that's not right. That's not right. Try it again. And it'll learn and it'll get better. Right. And it's learning velocity and it's training velocity so much more, which is sort of, but I think, Anna, your point is still valid in that ultimately building products is, is a human exercise because we're building it for humans.
[00:50:44] Right. And then there's a judgment layer that needs to come into it. There's a human intuition layer that needs to come into it. And ultimately all the AI is going to do is the way I use it, Nate, I'm not sure if you use them in the same way is it saves me a shit ton of key strokes and research, but the actual polishing, like it [00:51:00] takes, it gives me the lump of clay and I don't have to get my hands dirty with, with clay and water and getting the trough ready.
[00:51:06] It just gives me this half. Formed lump of clay. And I've saved an hour of shaping, or two hours of shaping, you know. That's all we've done. I feel like at this point AI is these like high level CMSs that exist. Like we went from WordPress, To square space, and maybe there's like other thing things right now that just kind of like creates a website based on some prompts you put it in.
[00:51:29] And I expect the tech industry to go that route. And another thing I wanted to mention is like companies rarely go and hire junior people in the first place. That's just a fact we all know this. How did I find a job? I didn't. I freelanced for two years working always by myself Because I had no clue how to even position myself and also I didn't really have the work experience But notice if I don't have the work experience, I don't know how to position myself [00:52:00] and like I don't know It's a catch 22 situation 100 percent So anyways To get into tech was never like a one and done, like, I'm just going to snap my fingers.
[00:52:08] And people are, have very rarely been commodities in tech. And we need to understand that your uniqueness, you have to learn how to sell that. That's what gives you salaries. That's what gives you opportunities. So it's interesting that nowadays selling yourself has been even more important because we're remote first.
[00:52:28] So anyways, as AI increases and gets better, good, good for the space. And Nate, what are you seeing among the younger developers? Cause you, you know, you've been around doing it a while in terms of these, a very specific question here for you, Nate. When when a younger developer swaps out asking a senior developer in place of asking chat gpt, for example And then using that code you know Is it just exactly the same thing as we did with with stack overflow?
[00:52:59] Or is it a [00:53:00] little bit more subtle in terms of the downsides of doing that? I can tell you what it's been recently I don't I don't know if I can if it necessarily is going to be a reflection of how it will be five years from now Right. Yeah Right now, and probably for the next year or so, if you're trying to learn how to code for whatever reason, I would, I would really caution you against using general chatbots.
[00:53:24] I think it, not only does it give you wrong information sometimes, like straight up just gives you, which that problem will be fixed eventually, right? But not, not only that, but you're doing this thing in your brain, Which is what we also used to do with Stack Overflow, you know, before chatbots is you would see this error pop up in your console, like it, whatever.
[00:53:48] And instead of reading the error, you would immediately go to Google, right? And what you're doing is you're actually building up a resistance. In your mindset to actually [00:54:00] doing the work of trying to understand the thing now What you'll do eventually is you'll do the stack overflow thing enough to get through that problem and then over time Your understanding will level up right and you'll get better over time What I see chat gbt doing right now is it's it's that on steroids.
[00:54:20] So you're actually building An even stronger resistance to doing the work in a, in a, in a much earlier stage. So if you're trying to learn how to code and listen, if you're, here's, if I can like speak to people who are saying, Oh, I don't want to get into code or I'm trying to get into code when I'm afraid AI is going to take it over.
[00:54:37] In the next five years, like, the good thing is, that's just another one of these pieces of friction, right? It's literally just another, it's another excuse for people to not take action. Oh, AI is going to take over, I'm not going to learn how to code, right? Great, that means if you stick with it, You know, you've already, you've already done hard things.
[00:54:56] You've already pushed through a lot of friction. You're [00:55:00] already like 95%, you know, further ahead than other people who are kind of just dropping off when, you know, the TikTok reels don't end up being quite as true as you thought they would be. Right. Or, Oh no, AI is going to take over. Buh, buh, buh. Let, let that cause people to fall off the path.
[00:55:18] And you know, if you love doing this and you are energized by building things and creating things, I would say like, ultimately, once you get to the point where you can understand these systems, you're an orchestrator anyway. Guess what? When you try to get to senior, you're an orchestrator. You're demonstrating how you're delivering through other people anyway, right?
[00:55:37] You're, you're showing like what code reviews you can do. You're showing like how you can put systems together. If chat GPT or like AI helps in that process or aids in that process, amazing. But I don't think that, I think like, and I'm a little bit of an AI curmudgeon too. I actually, I haven't found a good use for it in my workflow that like makes sense for me.
[00:55:58] But I'll say that's [00:56:00] after 10 years of individual contributor work where I'm just like real muscle memory with stuff. Yeah. That doesn't mean that they, I have people on my team even that use it sometimes, but I don't think it's like, it's not, it's not a problem solving mechanism. You still have to be able to like explain to your management, like how something works.
[00:56:23] Or you know what I mean? You're on the hook. Yeah, and you've got to understand the system and, you know, going back, looping back as a mindful of you guys time as well as your evening you know, looping back to the start of this conversation where we talked about how people chronically underestimate what coding is, they have the wrong expectations, they have the wrong assumptions about it, right?
[00:56:42] I have a feeling the AI thing makes it worse because what I'm seeing is a lot of people without any coding insight or knowledge using Chatsheepie to build something and being convinced of their original wrong assumption that it's actually an easier skill to achieve than it is because hey, I was able to build a primitive app and [00:57:00] that reinforces the misunderstanding that that's what software engineering is, is writing a bit of, you know, we, nobody that I've never walked into a job and written on a clean file that had no code on it before.
[00:57:12] Like, 99 percent of what I do. It's a lot rarer than you'd think. Right. No code, like everyone works from some code base, unless you're lucky and you'll get to work on a Greenfield project. It's sometimes happens. I actually did it a lot when I was freelancing for like smaller projects. But when you get into these bigger teams, it's like 99%.
[00:57:33] Yeah. You know, my first job was all Greenfield code because it was a new startup. There were four of us. It was brand new. So it was, it had to be Greenfield because it was starting up. But once you get to what, six months of work onwards, if there's been at least two engineers, we're talking about thousands of lines of code, you know, you're not, it's, it's by that point in time, you're working with stuff that's been there longer than you have, much longer than you have.
[00:57:54] People really need to understand how to read a code base and communicate within the code base. [00:58:00] That's the main skill. 100%. And debug it, because I, so I did this LinkedIn. Survey about nine months ago and I said anybody with more than one years of experience, please in software engineering Please answer how much time do you spend reading code?
[00:58:12] Oh, so do you spend most of your time reading code? Did you spend most of your time writing code and 81 said reading code, right? And that's it makes sense because what we're learning on tutorials is okay create a new index. js file and start That's what the tutorial is going to tell you people will do it and they think that's what coding is but when you walk into a code base, you're like Oh my God, this tree is ginormous.
[00:58:32] I don't even know where to start. There's hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Where's the index JS file and why does that? Like, that's really what it is. And then you've got to piece it together. Now that's really hard to do in a YouTube tutorial because it's not a lot of typing, there's no feedback.
[00:58:47] It's a lot of reading. Are there tutorials? Of like engineers just reading codebases? Not a lot because it's dull as watching paint dry. It is the most Right. That's, that's the work though, but you I [00:59:00] wonder who can make it interesting. Nate, you should try it. Yeah, Nate, you should try it. You know, commentary.
[00:59:05] I'll license it off you because I'm too lazy to do it myself. Could make a commentary video. That'd be like a reaction video, you know? You basically react to the code. The closest I do think is a really, really, a really, really critical skill that you can actually develop. Relatively early. Eric Anderson actually had a really good list about this.
[00:59:25] There was, I don't know if you're from Eric Anderson. I got to go dig it up. It was a while ago. He's like, whenever I find a code, like he's like, this is a really important skill. Whenever I find a new code base, I immediately do these things. Where are my routes set up? Yeah. Where are my log files? How do I dump and die?
[00:59:42] So I can see like what's in a variable. How can I actually see what's going on at runtime and depending on your environment, that's going to look different, right? How do I deploy? What are my deployment schedules look like? Are there tests, you know, and basically code based navigation, that's like. That is a huge, huge [01:00:00] critical skill that you have to develop.
[01:00:02] And I think that's really, that's not something you can just code based navigation. Check GPT. Yeah. And that's the thing when you try to teach code based navigation, cause I've done it, you know, and I've had people teaching me that like at Google, we didn't use VS code and stuff because the code base is too big, right?
[01:00:16] So they have their own cloud based ID. Everything's being built in the cloud. Nothing's on your local machine. So you have to learn all these new tools and navigating with those tools, which are unfamiliar is really hard. You know, and, and so. When somebody else teaches you, it's actually like, I've seen a few Twitch videos where people try and do this, you know, they're trying to build something and they will always 2x their own recording as they're stumbling around, fumbling around, you know, and mumbling around like, yeah, because it's boring as batshit to watch this.
[01:00:43] Cause that's, I'm not saying coding is boring when you're, when you're the person doing it, you can get lost for hours, right? Because it's truly addictive, but it's not a speculative sport. You know, it, it really isn't. And so that's why there's not a lot of content on, on good debugging or, because a lot of the times you're not going to debug [01:01:00] an app that you wrote from scratch because as you went along, it was so primitive that it kind of sort of, you know, it's fairly bug free for the demonstration purposes, but production apps, the, the bug could be hidden so deep inside and just getting that trace could take you, you know, two weeks of work of digging around.
[01:01:15] I guess that's the reality of it. If, you know, these chatbots today could ingest a code base. And tell you all the things that you need to know to understand like the main principles of it, that would be really useful. I don't know if they're doing that right now. I've never heard it, but they do a smaller version of that.
[01:01:31] And I'm sure Nate's right that they can do it eventually, but they do a smaller version of that. Like you can paste a ginormous file and say, Okay. Tell me what this file is doing so I don't have to read it. Like you can do, and it'll do a decent enough job. I saw there's a VS code extension. I think that was, it was like advertised on one of fireships videos.
[01:01:49] I don't know if you're familiar with fireship. Big fan of that guy. But basically you install it in VS code and it will, it's like a chatbot, but [01:02:00] it will also take into account your file directory and like the tabs you have open to, which I thought was really cool. That's so that context is like a really, yeah.
[01:02:08] Yeah, no, I mean, there's no doubt that it will compress time for a lot of tasks, but it's not necessarily, you know, but ultimately, like, I would not, I would, the other thing is accountability, because you cannot sue a chatbot. Oh, it's not accountable at all, right? Oh, you cannot fire a chatbot. Someone's got to be accountable for the chatbot.
[01:02:27] And that has to be a human person. So, you know, there has to be a human layer for it as well. So I don't see it as replacing, but I do see it as potentially impacting since junior level roles to your point, Anna, which I agree with junior level roles are always more challenging. And that is often the layer that could get targeted by these things.
[01:02:44] I now feel more than ever that getting any role, and I'm seeing this, not just in tech, I'm seeing this in at least six other industries that I'm, that I'm looking at at the moment the, the nature of what a junior needs to do to stand out. Is, is different and it actually less technical, in some senses, [01:03:00] yeah, and it's also less technical, it's less about the topic that you've been trained in, because that's changing so fast, and more about your ability to, to, to grasp the bigger picture and work with it, you know, work with it.
[01:03:12] So Guys, we've had a long conversation. So thank you so much. I'm sure, you know, I'm keeping some of you at least from dinner. So I apologize for doing that. But you know, it's been a really fun conversation. Thank you so much for your time. It's been great. You're welcome. Yeah. And thanks for sharing all your perspectives.
[01:03:25] And this is why I brought the group together is because we all have such diverse perspectives. And I really want people out there to understand there is no one road. Yeah, there are certain principles that are common to all the journeys, but there is no one road and you have to choose the one. So for those of you guys who are still watching and listening, check out Anna and Nate, and they're going to tell you in a moment where you can find them and check out their, their new program, you know, for folks in tech that are looking to level up their engineering careers.
[01:03:52] And I'll drop in the show notes, stuff for Brian, for him, for Pasity, his bootcamp and stuff for my sort of coaching program, because the reason I bring people [01:04:00] together like this, even though we're, you know, some people say, Oh, you know, Aren't you sort of competing? No, I don't believe so, because we're all here to do the same thing, and there are different flavors for different people, right?
[01:04:10] And everyone has the right to choose what's right for them and self actualize that way. So that's why I bring the group together. And Annette, where can people find you and where would you like people to go to next to understand more about your offer? So our offer is called it's a mentorship program, six month mentorship program called Code Career Mastery.
[01:04:26] I handle the networking and branding, help software engineers talk about themselves so they can stand out in interviews and beyond. And Nate handles all the technical interviews. So you don't get so nervous when you have to whiteboard. You can find us on LinkedIn. And of course, co career mastery.
[01:04:42] com. Perfect.
[01:04:42] Nate, do you have anything else to add to that? Couldn't have said it better myself. And yeah, we hope to see you soon. Wonderful. Yeah. And I'll leave some links to the future coders match fit mastery program as well in the show links. And my job is ready to help people who are not sure about whether they want to code, figure that out.
[01:04:59] And [01:05:00] also those who show they want to code change career while they maintain their family and their existing jobs. It's a little bit longer, but I believe it can be safer for some people to do it that way because you're less likely to quit when you have the right plan and you're not financially anxious all the time.
[01:05:12] And so that, that's how I do it. So yeah, that's it. Thanks for joining guys. And Nate, it was lovely to have you here and it was great to have Brian as well. I'll send him a message separately, but we'll, I'll, I'm sure I'll see you guys on, on LinkedIn. Awesome. Thanks, Zubin. Thanks guys.
[01:05:25] Just subscribe, you know you gotta do it.
