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ZubinVoice: hey guys, today's episode is actually another podcast of Develop Yourself where my business partner and I, Brian, talk about a lot of things to do with tech. I brought that in to this podcast to the Easier Said Than Done podcast so that you can have the video version of it with some edits and some annotations where necessary.
ZubinVoice: So I hope you enjoy.
Welcome to Easier Said Than Done with me, Zubin Pratap, where I share with you my journey from 37 year old lawyer to professional software engineer. The goal of this podcast is to show you how to actually do those things that are easier said than done.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Podcast today, I got my buddy Zubin fresh off a trip to Japan where he was skiing. And he probably missed all the AI news. I don't know if you heard about all the news hype. Were you aware?
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: definitely did not miss the stuff about Zuck saying what he did, or at least the excerpt. The thing with this though, Brian, is I'm so sick of the news doing this for the last 30 years, where they just, yeah, they just excerpt one bit and they don't give you all the context and they only report one part of it.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: [00:01:00] But yeah, let's talk about that, man. Like, it's such a one sided presentation of what's going
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Oh man. I feel bad for new coders. Cause first we had the Nvidia CEO saying, don't learn to code. Then we had Dev and AI, which didn't really hit the mainstream as much, but it was this AI code bot that was supposed to be able to like do all the things that coders do. And now apparently it'll do tasks for like eight bucks an hour. And it's, it never, it's not really taken off in the way they expected it. And now the latest thing, this one hit the mainstream hard. Joe Rogan, we got Mark Zuckerberg saying, you know, this year, the next five years max, we'll have AI replacing mid level engineers. And when I heard this, I was like, wait, what? Are we talking about the same mid level engineers? What, what is your take on this? What do you, what do you think when you hear this thing? Cause a lot of people, you know, they're not, they're not just laughing it off. This is, this is seriously discouraging a ton of people.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Yeah. But my question to those people is what else are you going to do? Honestly, it's a, it's a real question. What are you going to do? So I was in Japan this time, the amount of [00:02:00] automation that I saw there. So let me give you an overview of my last 36 hours, right?
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Japan airport, all the check in was done.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Through machines and A. I. Okay, all the passport control and immigration control was facial recognition in the eye. Okay, the border control folks aren't sitting there manning these things that much anymore. I got back to Australia. The immigration side of it again, border control, all facial recognition and the smart chip on my passport.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: I went to the supermarket to stock up on groceries yesterday. All the checkout is now one person for about 22 self serve checkout machines. Okay. Okay. So what are we going to do? Like, this is the reality of it. I've been a lawyer for a long time. All my legal friends are worried about AI.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: I know my friends in accounting and audit are worried about AI. When I dislocated my shoulder a year ago, the radiologist was looking at the x rays and was worried about AI, right? Sales and marketing people are worried about AI. Writers and authors are worried about AI. Content creators are worried about AI.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Video editors are worried about it. So what are you going to do? I mean, this is a ridiculous way to analyze the world because. [00:03:00] Technology has always changed everything for most people. What's different this time is historically, it's been a lot of manual blue collar work that got changed and automated.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: For the first time, we've got knowledge workers being automated. what are you going to do? If you don't want to be an engineer, and that's totally legitimate, Then find something else that's not going to be affected by AI. And what's that going to be?
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Wind turbine
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: technician is the fastest growing occupation in the U. S. apparently.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: 100%. And, and, you know, maybe it pays pretty well until the market saturates, then it won't pay that
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Exactly. There's not enough wind turbines, I don't think, to support
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: a boot camp style program for wind turbine technicians. But you have a great
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: point. Wow.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: And that's why, that's why Brian, when I was doing Inner Circle on my own, and I know you've done this as well, a huge component of this is learning how to learn, because whether you're an engineer or not, The speed at which you have to adapt to market changes is faster than ever before history.
Yeti Stereo Microphone-17: Hey, I hope you're enjoying this episode. And I want to let [00:04:00] you know that becoming a developer in 2025 is not going to look like becoming a developer in 2024.
Yeti Stereo Microphone-17: There is an overload of information, AI tools out there, so much conflicting social media BS that it's hard to understand what you really need to do. If you're interested in working with me and my partner Zubin in a very private, exclusive mentorship program
Yeti Stereo Microphone-17: where we teach you not just how to code, but how to reinvent yourself as a career changer and help you make a successful transition from your previous life into tech. We want to talk with you. This program is not easy. It is not short, but it is effective.
Yeti Stereo Microphone-17: If you want to schedule a talk directly with me or Zubin, just go to the show notes, parsity. io slash inner dash circle back to the show.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: There was a time in Fortune five, 500 companies, this is about 50 years ago, the average lifespan was north lifespan was north of 50 years, and in the last 25 years, the average lifespan of a Fortune 500 companies shrunk to 14. Like we are talking about enormously short, compressed timeframes of vast amounts of change.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: I mean, I remember blackberries, do you remember blackberries? The, the, [00:05:00] yeah. Yeah, what happened to them? What happened to Nokia? I mean, these are companies, what happened to Kodak? Instantly, these guys are wiping out, right? This happens. It's the pace of change is accelerating. And so the only way to get around this is either switch back to blue collar work.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Oh, by the way, last night, it's, I was watching, catching up the highlights of CES, right? The Consumer Electronics Show. Farming. Being automated.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Really?
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Of course. I mean, they're going to have GPS and AI enabled farming bots that are going to do everything for
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Oh! That, I mean, that makes a ton of sense to be completely
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: honest with you. You can, it's something that seems to be ripe for automation. It's consistent,
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: it's pretty deterministic, right? The times you plant crops and seeds and the spaces between, these are all things I imagine. I, I don't know anything about farming,
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: 100%. And there's, you know, weather data available.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Oh, yeah, right?
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: data available, there's enough crop pattern data available that you can train models. Of course, all of these things are going to be done. Of course. I mean, if podcasts can now be automated with, you know, Google, [00:06:00] yeah.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: So it's all going to happen. Now the question is, is it going to be good enough? That human beings are genuinely replaced across the board. I believe not. And maybe this is the lawyer in me speaking, but at some point in time, when you know, proverbial $HIT hits the fan,
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: hmm.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: you can't sue an AI. You've got to sue a human being.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: You've got to have a human being that's accountable in the court of law or under a regulatory system that needs to be held accountable. And so human beings will always be part of the equation, which is going to be augmented. I remember when I started my legal career, we had pools of people in, you know, the typing pool.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: We had pools of people who are just there to type because the older school lawyers weren't fast enough at
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Oh,
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: with one finger like that.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Yeah, my mom used to do this. She was a
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: stenographer. Yeah.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Steno's. Exactly. What happened to Steno's? They've just disappeared. Right. Because most people now grew up typing on computers. So they're fast enough.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Even if they're not formally trained with all eight fingers, they can still type fast enough with three. Right. think the world [00:07:00] survived that, like this is just going to keep happening, right? And if you don't want to be in software, don't be in software. That's totally legitimate. But if you think you've got a place you can run and hide that's going to be better, you're probably mistaken.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Oh, man. Yeah, that's like my big thing. And like, one, do whatever you want, right? Like, within reason, right? Like, if you find some joy in an occupation, like I found a lot of joy in coding, and I'm like, well, if I can get paid for this, even better, right? And i get paid handsomely. I'm totally down. I'm gonna, I'm gonna take this route, and I'm, and I'm going all in. If you were in it strictly for the money, I think that period, that short period we had where you could go and learn some basic front end and the market was so like desperate during that small period in the pandemic. That's over that whole bootcampization period. I think we're done with that. And that's probably for the best. But I I just yeah, I don't I don't see a way that you can hide whatever I saw this youtube video from this dude I did a reaction to it. I don't want to become a reaction youtube channel But this this guy like it was so indicative of what's going on in people's head spaces Like this guy has [00:08:00] 100 followers, right? And the video he did was like I spent I said 2500 applications. I'm a cs grad don't get into cs The market's cooked. No one is hiring And I'm like, one, this is not true, right? Like employment, all you do is go to the Bureau of Labor and look at the employment statistics
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: and realize that like
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: the software developers are well employed, right?
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: But then it's really tough to discern what's reality and what's like YouTube and like where, and these, I don't want to discount the people's stories because I'm sure they're real and they're not just doing this for clicks and views, some of them are, but it's really tough to tell like what's real and what's not.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: And then I think even further, like do people understand what a mid level software engineer does? When I think of a mid level software engineer, I think of somebody that's pretty proficient in a language or two, can be pretty autonomous, kind of work with little direction, take a set of tasks or a large feature, like a product manager, and says I want something, and they can pluck out this idea and then turn it into a set of [00:09:00] instructions and features and then translate that to code, which may be actually the smallest piece of this puzzle
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: 100%.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: 100%.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: and sometimes I'm like I don't think people know what software engineers do because I see the most fear coming from the most junior people or people that have not worked in the market or quote unquote normies people that don't work in software at all understand what they think we just like sit at a computer and type all day and you were at Google and
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: I'd like to like know was your day spent like eight hours coding.
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brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: they think we just like sit at a computer and type all day and you were at Google and
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: I'd like to like know was your day spent like eight hours coding.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Okay,
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: on a really good day, I may have written, I don't know, 50 lines of code.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: is
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Because most of the time, this is reality. And also, I mean, it's for these giant FANG companies, right, Brian? It's not The fairest comparison sometimes because like Google's got the largest mono repo on the planet.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: It's so big, it doesn't fit in memory. It doesn't fit even on a laptop. Everything's done in the cloud. Because it's too big to fit in the average laptop. It's, it's, I think, three and a half TB of, of code. Right. So it's, it's, it's just massive. So everything's different about their system. So most of the time you're poking around trying to say, right, this little patch that I'm looking at, I need to first understand what the heck it does and how it fits in.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: That's 99 percent of the time you're [00:11:00] spending in the codebase! And you spend maybe 30 percent of your time in the code base. The rest of the time is design documents, consulting with other senior experienced engineers to say, Hey, this is how I'm approaching this problem. give me feedback on this.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Is this design, right? Is this approach, right? What have I missed? What am I not thought? So it's a lot of thinking and a lot of analysis. And, and I think this is exactly to say not many software engineers That worried about AI. In fact, most software engineers I've met. And again, this is a small sample size of number of engineers Zubin's met.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: It's tiny, obviously, compared to the global proportion. They're excited about AI for the same reason I am. The stuff that I really didn't enjoy, which is Googling endlessly, typing in, you know, keystroke, keystroke, all of that's gone, right? Like it's just so much faster. The big thing for me now is to decide.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: What needs to be done exactly? You said, how do, how do I convert the business requirements, the scope and specs into actual code, and then to review the code of the [00:12:00] A. So what's really happened is I've got a minion.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Yes!
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: I've got a minion that does that. Yeah. That does, you know, my, that my keystrokes for me and I have to check its work.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Oh, yeah, you better check it's work, because, oh my,
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Oh, a hundred percent, a
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: hundred
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: as soon as you get past anything, like, trivial, like, I've been, I sometimes will re prompt it with, with a block of code, about 300 lines, and I've seen between the 200 line spot, things are fairly okay, you get above 300 lines of code, and I'm, I pay for chat GPT, so I'm paying for the, I'm paying for the paid version, and it gets wonky and it gives you okay stuff, but you cannot just directly take that and put it in the code. And now that I'm actually working with open AI at work, I'm actually starting to work with like vector databases. I've learned a little bit of linear algebra to understand how embedding works. So basically taking a set of strings and words and then tokenizing them
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: tokenizing.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: then looking at their similarity.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: And I'm like, I don't know any math, but I'm very interested in this stuff because I'm like, oh, this is how it works. You And so I'm like, okay, this is, this [00:13:00] is math, essentially under the hood, statistics and linear algebra at scale. And that, and that at scale part is something that's still a black box to me, but I, but I'm using it and I'm thinking this is really cool. But this idea of like agents, right? There's an idea of agents, like you can have one agent that will talk to another AI agent and each will have some different tasks that they can perform. And people think that's going to completely wipe away software developers,
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: but then simple statistics. If people do this mental exercise with me, if an agent has a 90 percent chance of giving you a correct answer, and it passes you to the next agent, which has a 90 percent success rate, and to the next agent, then that would be 0.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: 9 of 90%, then you have 90 percent of 90%, and then by the time you get down to like, more than a few agents, you're at less than half of a correct
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: answer that could be done.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: 1000%. Yeah, that's totally. And the thing is, I mean, when cursor came out and I use both cursor and co pilot, you know, I use the paid wording for both. I keep switching between the two ideas just to keep myself, [00:14:00] like I said, I, you know, I believe learning new tools is, is the solution to staying relevant.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Right. So when I'm coding now, I use both cursor and VS Code, depending on the day and the mood, I'll just. Open up one so that I learn new key bindings. I'll learn new ids
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: You know, so I just get between the two and they're both kind of similar. Sure. You know, so cursor compose, you know, when I got it to try and build something for me, I now realized that it can't because there's too much information in my head that I need to give it by the time I give it a solid prompt and combine the odds of hallucinating with that.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: It's probably not going to just build something. non trivial. Sure. If I wanted to do a web form, which I consider to be fairly trivial, but fiddly and annoying, it can do it.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: But the moment I get it to work on an existing code base with a large enough system and you have to fit everything in the code base into its context window and then give it a prompt, I'm spending so much time prompting and fixing that it's actually way better for me to not tell it, Hey, just do this for me.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: And instead flip it to, my next step [00:15:00] is this.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Yeah.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: If I had normally I'd have to google it This is just an augmented google search and say how do I do this quickly, right? And then I reviewed the answer and I am now i'm in a position to know if the answer is likely to be correct or wrong but then that's the same situation You're in with the stack overflow search or a google search
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: is you experiment with things and it doesn't always work So I keep telling the mentees and in our program
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: I keep telling them i'm like guys if you are not prepared to be a code reviewer. Don't just use the AI. Only use your co pilots and cursors of the world if you're in a position to review the code, as though you're, you're approving a pull request, it's your responsibility to approve this code.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: If you don't know what's going on there, then don't just rely on that because it'll build a lot of stuff for you, but it'll also wreck a lot of stuff and you won't know. And then you have no idea how to debug. And that's something I'm genuinely worried about.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: A little bit and maybe I'm being old school is that we lose a lot of the junior engineers are using losing the ability To reason about code and debug simply because they're not [00:16:00] getting stuck long enough
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Oh, yeah.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Simply because they're not getting
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: feel. You gotta feel that pain to, like, really get through it.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: And there's so much learning in trial and error. In fact, trial and error is far more rich as an information source than just getting it right the first time and not knowing why what you pasted work, like
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: it's so much more. You've got to stub your toes a few
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: And your brain remembers that better, apparently, too. Like, like when you have
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: something bad happen, like your brain has this tendency, your Neanderthal ancestors, of like, remembering, oh, there's something bad happened. I must keep
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: remembering this forever. And if you don't ever have
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: that pain, you're right, you just forget it.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Like, oh, yeah, it wasn't, that was easy. And then Stack Overflow goes down, or Chat GPT goes down, which it will. I have a feeling, not to, I, I don't have any dog in this fight. I don't, I don't know if they could be profitable. They're, they're already not. I'm wondering, is there a future aren't around. I don't know.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: I don't know what's going to happen. None of us do.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Well, you look at Stack Overflow search or it's, you know, it's trends you know, analysis,
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: and there's been a huge drop since the latter half of 2022. It's not that people are less interested in [00:17:00] R or Python or JavaScript or Golang. It's not that. It's just that people switch behaviors, right?
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: And that's why Google searches now have a Gemini summary on the top, right? That the AI summary is there and they're very good because they avoid you having to drill down into multiple pages or links and go down all these wrong parts that, you know, nine times out of 10, they give you a great starting point.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: And that's because what's happening is that AI LLMs are being used as an alternative to search, to get results, because there is a lot of junk on the internet, which goes back to the point you raised earlier is when people are following YouTube and all of this stuff, the reason they're getting discouraged is because they've confused
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: opinions and clickbait for facts,
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Yeah.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: right? The only data worth looking, whether it's historically, whether people were selling snake oil at the corner of, you know, X and Y streets, or whether people are selling career advice, the only thing that matters is genuine, genuine data. So the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Good places,
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: [00:18:00] right? Even true up, right? I mean, true up has this really interesting graph where they showed the decline in jobs as measured from 2022.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: I've seen that and I've seen you comment on it and I'm curious to hear your comment on it now.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Well, I'm just like they started measuring.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: In the middle of 2022 at the peak and said, Oh, my God, look at how much the jobs have dropped. The thing is that they don't tell you it's dropped back to normal pre pandemic levels. What happened was in the pandemic, there was such a huge spike of demand.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: And coincided with other economic
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Yeah, they are.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: It's it's missing everything before 2022. It's so misleading.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: It really
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: to me, that's like saying the human, you know, you had a fever. You had a really high fever. You started measuring the baseline from the point when your fever was at its highest. And now you said, Oh, my God, my body is cold.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: It's not. It's gone back to normal temperature. You do this because you started measuring at the height of the of your fever. That's kind of what they did on true up. If you don't take the broader context [00:19:00] into perspective, I think as of this morning and true up, for example, yesterday, I think there were what a quarter of a million open jobs available.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: tech and that says that's according to the M. I. A. I use that site quite a lot to look at the trends and it seems fairly accurate. But also, I don't think they're capturing every job out there. But, of course, there's so many jobs that would never be posted
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: or might not be classified as tech jobs or
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Correct. And that's, I mean, it's not only in the U S it's also in some global, but it's very U S centric, but also a quarter of a million jobs is plenty. All of us will probably have six or seven or 10 jobs over a lifetime, not even close to. So a quarter of a million means there's enough opportunity.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: What's different. And again, I saw this in the law too. Brian is there was a time in the law, Brian, when, you know, people didn't actually need to have a legal degree to practice. Like they didn't have to go to law school and be admitted. There was a time in the law. Yeah, well, this is the thing. And there was a time in medicine.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: If you go
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Oh, yeah, yeah, this is true.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: you change, you know, to be an M. D. to practice medicine, you just got
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: [00:20:00] let their blood out. Yeah,
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Yeah, correct. Exactly. Stick a bunch of leeches and you know, they'll, they'll feel better. Right? Yeah. See what happened. So this is how. All industries have evolved. The bar keeps getting higher, the more people get interested in it.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: That's what's happening. So now, and this is why you and I have teamed up, it's not enough to learn to code. You have to know how to separate yourself from the marketplace. How do you beat the existing coders at the game that is getting interviews Which is the first step and then doing well at interviews and then managing your career after that because there are plenty of engineers who are miserable at what they do.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: You don't want to leave an existing career, go into a new career, repeat your old mistakes and patterns and be miserable again. That's a huge penalty to pay
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: for not having thought through what it is you want. So learning to code is like one piece of the puzzle. And then after that, learning how to compete in a marketplace and again, going back to my original comment, there aren't too many jobs that give you the flexibility, the intellectual satisfaction, the growth and creativity, the high quality people to work with because it's [00:21:00] attracting so many people.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: part of the reason I left the law is in the nineties, the law was attracting some of the best people come 2010. The law was no longer attracting some of the best people tech was, right? I wanted to work with the best people I could find. And that's just the natural state of things. So it attracts great people.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: It pays really well compared to everything else. It pays pretty darn well. Yes. It's getting harder to get into. That's 1000 percent true of every job.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Oh
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: percent true. I mean, we've got 8. 3 billion people on the planet. Were we really thinking this is going to get easier as the population grew? No.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: That's the big too, which is kind of my other, I'm in a few other Reddit threads, so I do this for work. Sometimes I'll, I'm in a procurement thread. I'm in a sales thread for marketing. If you read some of the posts from people, I'm a grad and I can't get a job and I've applied to a thousand places. Please look at my resume. And you think, oh, CS grad. No, it's procurement or it's sales. And
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: it's, I think the, the secret here or the takeaway is that everybody's having a hard time. Also, the internet has [00:22:00] exposed us to people's individual circumstances. It used to be you'd buy by yourself and you'd be like, man, things suck.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: And you talk to your friend like, oh, I got a job. He said, okay, well, maybe things aren't so bad. Yeah.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: But then you go on the internet and now you can like commiserate with people that have a video with 30, 000 likes on it and say, oh my god, this is my experience and everybody must be feeling this way too.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: So it makes you feel like you're not alone and really yeah, amplifies these voices that have the worst experiences, unfortunately. That's, that's who gets amplified. It's not the person with the boring story. Like, hey, I got hired after a year. That's boring.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: nobody ever wants that.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: And you know, same thing happened with all the layoffs, right? So I know someone at Google, for example, who got laid off and then five months later, she got rehired for 30 percent more in a different part of the organization. So that never gets reported. What gets reported is that Google laid off whatever, you know, 6, 000 people or whatever.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: They don't tell you that 2, 000 of those got rehired else. I mean, I'm making up numbers here. I don't know the actual numbers, but you know, that does happen quite a lot. And when I was in, I was in Copenhagen last year for work and I met. Two [00:23:00] youngsters, you know, 22, 23, one, I think, had an IT and a cyber security background, and the other one had an environmental engineering background or something, and they'd been looking for a year.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: The reality is, it is really hard for fresh grads now.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: To be honest, every generation, fresh grads have thought it was really hard. I mean, the conversation that I hear from the US a lot, all the student debt, and so many college students don't get a job, that conversation has been going on, what, 40 years now?
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Yeah, it's not new. It's just, the
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: internet has really made things feel newer than they used to be. Like, H1Bs and like, outsourcing. Like, I was talking to guys that said, Oh, in the 90s, that was a big fear. And then in the 2000, I forget when the 2010s, late 2010s, I felt like that was another round of that fear.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Now I feel like it's the same story. I'm like, geez, we're still talking about this. Also, H1B is not just for tech, by the way, it's for doctors and lawyers, rocket scientists
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: all sorts of specialized fields.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: What happens is we, because most of us are a lot of the younger folks weren't around in the last time the, you know, these [00:24:00] cycles happened, they weren't aware of the last time the new cycle happened, that it was the same topic. It was the same principle. It was the same, you know, same, same political issue around it.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: And now, because they get all their news on 22nd TikTok, you know, assuming, well, TikTok's now gone dark for a while, but let's see what happens, you know, Instagram or whatever.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Yeah.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Great. Well, overnight, this is what happens when you go to sleep. Yeah. So you know, but if everyone's getting their new sources from 20 seconds, soundbites, they're not going to know their history.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: They're not going to have the overview of actually what's going on from, from a policy perspective. And it goes back to the fact that youngsters have always found it really hard to break into the market, which is why I've been saying, and I've got a YouTube video on this saying that career, and I think a free article
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: gonna link to this in the show notes, by the way, for sure.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Yeah, let me see if I can find it and give it to you, but you know Career changers have an advantage if you know how to leverage that advantage because you're not a new grad Okay, you have what's what's known as workplace maturity. You have runs on the board. [00:25:00] You have a prior track record Is it the same for everybody?
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: No, somebody's been driving trucks for a living and never been in a corporate environment is not going to have the same You know Corporate work experience. That's somebody who's, let's say, been an accountant, right? Or, you know, been in sales or procurement or something. So, many career changes do have significant advantages.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: A 22 or 23 year old today does not have those advantages. They have a bunch of student debt and they come into a market which is leery of employing people because they don't know where the AI thing is going. Not just in tech, in everything. There is not a single 22 to 25 year old person I've met in the last year who feels Optimistic that they're going to get employed.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Not one.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Yeah.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: the world has changed when it comes to that. So if you're in your 30s and you're looking to change career, don't be crazy and give up the existing job you have. Hold on to it because it's better to change career when you're employed than when you're unemployed.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: If it takes an extra six months, who cares?
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Do it. That's why we do the program the way we do for 12 months is [00:26:00] so that people can hold on to their jobs and not risk their income and their families, and then systematically build a plan, not just to learn the technical stuff, because, you know, that's not the hard part. And the AIs, AIs can do that as well.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Now it's to learn that And then know how to market yourself and then know how to build a career where you will always be in the top 20 percent of applicants so that even if you get laid off, which you probably will, statistically speaking, all applicants.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Yeah.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: It's the reality of the world. And again, that's not new.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: That's been around for 30 years too. So you're probably going to get laid off at least once in the course of your career. If you know how to manage your career to a point where you're not worried beyond a point about that happening, you know, it's going to take maybe two months, maybe three months, maybe six months, but you will get hired back again because you're that good.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: You're in the top 20 percent of any market. Then you don't have to worry, you know, there's no job security anymore This is what one of the students put in the assignments. I was reviewing last night is you know They I think it was miguel actually, you know, and they said oh, you know for me job security I realize that [00:27:00] companies can lay you off at any point of time So that's not what job security is but job security to me is You know being able to to be rehired or hired at any point of time.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: That's not actually job security You know, that's actually just personal security that you're employable
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: It's very different from job security. It's just being employable. Now being employable is a whole super skill to have. It's, and it has nothing to do with just the coding bit because that's table stakes.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Yeah,
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: You have to know how to be employable, and that's what we teach. That's really what we emphasize in the Inner Circle program is how do we, how do we make you employable and give you the skills and the insight to understand how the job marketplace works so that you can always adapt and skate to where the puck is going rather than be on the back foot and reacting all the time to changes in the market that you can't control because you can't control the market.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: You can only control your decisions in the face of those changes in the market.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: what an excellent point eloquently put to shout out to Miguel to for that that epiphany as well that you kind
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: of, that you had there. The last thing I'll just say is that I hope that if you're listening to this and [00:28:00] you are getting into this fear mongering mind state one selfishly, I want more people in this industry because we need a pipeline of talent. And if we keep scaring off an entire generation of people. We're not going to be able to replace ourselves in the future, and we're going to be in a very, very sticky situation. I don't see this going well in five to ten years out. So if you're interested in becoming a software engineer, changing careers, And what we say makes you think, I like what these guys say.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: I could see myself doing this. Schedule a call with us. You can find the link in the show notes and we're happy to chat with you. Thanks for listening. And thank you, Zubin, for being on the show. Happy to have you. Sure. We'll be talking next week
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: about whatever else. Yeah. And if you have a topic you'd like us to chat about, let us know
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: Yeah, and reach out on LinkedIn. We're always responsive on that as well. And ask the questions, ask the hard questions because we will be happy to give you honest answers because frankly, I'm and I know you are too Brian. I'm kind of overall BS that's been around for a while. Now it's time for some straight talk.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: There's no cotton wool in this world that's going to sit and protect you and your [00:29:00] feelings This is a marketplace. You've got to compete in it and you've got to know how to do it And that's that's the truth for everybody. No one is spared that pain. So let's get get let's get match fit You know, let's get serious about it.
zubin_1_01-20-2025_083240: And build the careers because you need to know how to compete
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: I love it. It sounds good, man. Thanks for being on the show. See you guys.
brian_1_01-19-2025_133152: Bye
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