Learning to Code: A Waste of Time?

Hey there, buzdies! Hope you had a great day.

About a month ago, I was just surfing the internet when a certain article headline freaked me:

Source: The Telegraph

I spent years learning to code as a thirteen-year-old by following tutorials, developing games, reading books, and all and now they say learning to code is a waste. of. time.

Why’s this, all of a sudden?

If you search “is learning to code a waste of time” about 3 years ago, you will find all the results to be a huge NO.

But after the ChatGPT’s takeover, everything started to change, mostly affecting content writers and— fellow coders. People started to think that the world no longer needs software developers or software engineers and they can build all the apps and websites by themselves. Which also resulted in…

… these situations, haha

Although I didn’t believe in AI taking over coders in the near future, Devin the AI software engineer made some doubts. Well, that’s another story.

So let’s jump to the important part

Is it a waste of time, really?

In my opinion, NO.

But if you’re considering a future job as a Software Engineer or a related coding-based career, maybe you should give it a thought.

If we look into the part of why it’s not a waste of time, there are a bunch of reasons. Considering the skills it requires, coding helps us to improve everything— logic, creativity, problem-solving, and most importantly, patience. And yes, it could be a fun side hustle if you love it.

Above all, it could also be a huge PLUS for many careers even if coding is not required for the job in practice.

Now let’s see why you might have to give a second thought to learning to code aiming for a coding-based career.

First and foremost, it’s about layoffs. The tech industry is growing rapidly and has a high demand, but the dark side is how volatile it could be. Layoffs are more than common nowadays, even in some large and established companies. For example, Google. Thousands of software engineers lost their jobs at Google after several rounds of layoffs happened.

In 2024 alone, nearly 100 companies announced around 25,000 job cuts which further shows the uncertainty in the tech job market. Most of us could be a software engineer or a developer fearing to open emails since there could be a “thanks for being with us and bye-bye” email at any time.

The rise of AI and automation is the next concern for most of us. Now with a complete AI software engineer called “Devin” , even I have some doubts about choosing software engineer as my future career. At present, for sure, software engineers have a high demand and AI can’t completely replace them no matter how capable they are. Even for the next 10-15 years, software engineers will still be in the industry with good demand but the value for them (let’s be honest and call it our salary) could be much less than it is now. Why?

Software Engineers will have to supervise everything and do some things too but they will have to do much less work as AI and automation will take care of most of the things. Therefore, the number of jobs for software engineers might fall and the pay would also go down considering the workload.

Clearing the doubts and Conclusion

And if this section doesn’t answer your doubts, please drop a comment!

– Learning to code is a waste of time, you say?

NO. Not at all. It has a bunch of benefits, I haven’t even mentioned. True, I said it might not always be a good idea to learn coding aiming for a future career that is completely based on programming but still, if you like to work in database management systems, cybersecurity, AI, and IoT fields, your job is way safer than others too.

– Your predictions are based on?

I wrote this article within a time duration of about 3 hours and all the predictions or statements mentioned above are only driven by Google results and facts I have seen/heard throughout the years from my experience. I’d be happy to do at least a week-long research only if I had enough time tho.

And as a conclusion, learning to code is not a waste of time. Well, it might be if you spend about complete 5 years on it and still haven’t gotten a job and you have 0 experience in anything else other than coding but that’s an impossible scenario. If you start learning to code, you’re gonna learn everything. So even if you lose your job as a programmer or whatever, there’s still a career you can easily switch into using your experience as a coder.

That’s it for today, see you next time!

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Portfolio: buzzpy.github.io | LinkedIn: Chenuli Jayasinghe