WHY EVERYONE SHOULD NOT CODE!

Hi everyone, I’m Saahil. I have been working as a Software Engineer for the past 3 years and before that, I went through 4 years of college with a degree focused on Computer Science and Engineering. And today, I’m here to tell you Why Everyone Should Not Code.      

?5,12,208 PA

This is the average salary of a computer engineer starting in India. The ones falling on the bright side of the median, the upper 10% earn more than ?10,00,000 PA and can afford big apartments and shiny cars. On the other side, the lower 10% earning less than ?2,50,000 PA are making the bare minimum with little to no savings, and just plain surviving.

Even after this, programming is a pretty well-paid sector when you compare it to more artistic fields like photography, content writing, or even filmmaking. Today a film student, after completing 3 years of Film School and pumping in close to 15 lakhs of college tuition can at best bag a salary of ?5,00,000 LPA, provided s/he is exceptional in every aspect of the film (pre-production to post-production), did tons of unpaid internships with reputed production houses and was highly proactive in every aspect of the curriculum.

Simply put, programming pays the big bucks. But it’s not just a trend that will fade away as Mechanical Engineering did. It is the inevitable direction of where things are going.

We are often told programming is the future. And maybe it is. Is it a valuable skill to learn? Absolutely. Should it be made mandatory in schools along with Maths and Sciences? Maybe. But is it as important as reading and writing? Not at all.

Before we go any further let‘s understand the difference between programming and computer science. Programming is memorizing what to type and how to make a computer do something. Computer Science, on the other hand, is solving complex and difficult mathematical problems. This is what the big tech companies pay a buttload of money for. Some might enjoy doing these complex problems, but not everyone wants it as a career.

The problem nowadays is that the way programming is being taught is just not honest. You can learn programming in 3 months by paying any institute. But that is not what these huge paychecks are paid for. To make the skill accessible and to oversimplify everything, programming has become

TYPE TYPE TYPE--> Error occurs--> Google--> StackOverflow--> Error occurs--> Google--> StackOverflow

and the process goes on. Today, we are not sitting at a desk and tackling a logical problem by using our problem-solving skills. The reason being that most of the people in programming are in it for the money, and they end up hating their jobs.

Such a brainwashing process to make every student on the planet a Software Engineer results in them becoming just another victim of the Dunning–Kruger effect, where people who are incompetent at something never end up finding out what they are good at, fail to recognize their incompetence and even go on to become overconfident of their work, even though they are terrible at it.

This may seem all fine and dandy because, hey it pays the credit cards. But there will come a saturation level at which point the supply will outgrow the demand and salaries will fall. Because there will be more demand for programming but not an unlimited one. So rather only those people should take it up as a career who are genuinely interested.

You might imagine thousands of employees working behind a big tech company, but very few of them are engineers. Instagram had only 4 engineers when it had 7 million users and only 13 employees when it was bought by FB for $1 billion. WhatsApp had only 55 employees when it was bought out for $19 billion.

To come back to the problem, there are two main stakeholders of the Everyone Should Code bandwagon. Politicians and tech companies. More programmers mean more jobs. More jobs, better salaries. Better salaries, more taxes. And more taxes, well you get where I am going with this.

As a nation’s leader, you always want the biggest tech companies that regulate the world (FB, Google, Amazon what have you) to have their base of operations in your country. The power these companies possess is unbelievable. This is the reason why everyone, from world leaders like ex-Prez Barack Obama to actor Ashton Kutcher, have been a big advocate of the coding movement.

But these tech companies are not professing that Everyone Should Code. Just simply, everyone should flood the industry with the skills they need. Today it’s all data science, tomorrow it will be Blockchain.

Now, people don't care about these stats and effects when you look at the job security of a software engineer coupled with the comfort of working from home. Even under a global pandemic, IT companies are going on smoothly with their operations whereas the productions of the documentary film industry have been called off for the entire year. So it makes sense to become a software engineer. It pays the big bucks. But so does being a Dentist, or a Psychiatrist, or even a Surgeon (almost 6 times as much). So why are people not rushing to become just that? I have no clue.

The reason being generally given is that not everyone has the interests and the aptitude to be a good surgeon. The same should go for software engineers. The society works with the collective efforts of farmers, chefs, scientists, surgeons, and engineers of the world. And this is the basis of civilization. Is programming as important a skill as reading and writing for someone who aspires to become an artist or wishes to serve in the army? Absolutely Not. It’s so difficult and time-consuming that it just doesn’t make financial sense.

Coding is a good job. But that’s just what it is; a job.

To summarize, if you are already on board the benefits of programming, it’s easy to advocate its importance in looking and thinking about the world differently. Programming is something that should not be compulsory, but rather optional. Because everyone learns at a different pace and takes different time and this is not a skill which we require for survival. But there are some skills that we do need to survive. Subjects like Personal Financing and Public Speaking are more beneficial in forming a critical approach to our thinking and for overall personality development.