Learning to code is not enough

It is an interesting thing that recently, there is more emphasis on learning to code, there are several paid and free coding academies, bootcamps, youtube tutorials, and several other free and premium materials on coding. while this is a welcome idea that when people learn to code, there will be more employees to fill the wide skill gap in the global tech industry. A lot of wanna-be programmers are jumping into learning code, thinking that knowing how to code will get them into big tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. Yes, it will, when the required skill level these companies are looking for is attained, but is that the only way to get into FAANG? Obviously no.

Yes, coding is an interesting thing to know, and learning how to code comes with its own price, what is most important but gets less emphasis is that not everyone has to know if else statement, do while loop, Regex, or how to declare a class in javascript before they can get a job in FAANG or even found a tech start-up, there is project management, accounting, and even janitor role in FAANG with awesome pay. I found it fascinating that in recent times, the role of software engineers has changed quite a bit, in Facebook, Google, or Netflix, coding is not really a huge part of it anymore, just like about a few decades ago when software engineers code in assembly language, Fortran and Cobol then turns out that people are not writing in these languages anymore, and attention switched to C++, Java, and then programmer switched to writing code in JavaScript, Golang, Python, etc. nowadays some programmers are not even writing code anymore because, they are using a bunch of microservices platforms, tool, web services, cloud infrastructures and configuring all of that by bringing it together through APIs and frameworks.

Let's take a look at this when everyone learns to code, is everyone going to build the next Facebook, google, to-do app, or dating site? Well, it is possible to build a new dating site, if it will be powered by AI and machine learning so that users will have the feel of who they are interacting with through virtual reality and learn their character and behavior on the go, without all these, your codes are not going anywhere. these days you can’t rely solely on your own brain thinking that your knowledge of data structure and algorithms, binary search trees, hash map, and recursion can build something that will get the world talking about like Facebook and Google, obviously that knowledge alone won’t take you anywhere far. Think about it, most algorithms these days are not handwriting anymore they are handled by machine learning, software engineers are not writing their algorithms anymore, they just generate their data through model libraries and frameworks.

In today's technology, it takes more than just pure code to build a product, unlike some years ago when you can just design a website and get a job as a webmaster in Microsoft, which is no more working. Consider that most apps nowadays support video streaming, face recognition, email marketing, payment gateway, real-time presence, and chat. Not to mention blockchain, AI/VI, user analytics, and add performance across distributed serves, etc. These are pretty beyond the knowledge of coding alone or a single person to be able to handle all of these anymore. So the question is if everyone must not code, how do you build something fascinating that meets up with today’s cutting-edge technology?

as it stands, the role of software engineer today is not only to code but to understand how to use all of these web services, cloud spaces, and microservices platforms out there, like Microsoft Azure cloud services, Amazon AWS, Google cloud to fully managed backend and database, frameworks, open source libraries, and VMware. So the roles of software engineers soon will be just spending their entire time reading documentation and learning about all of these services, platforms, and cloud then implementing them to manage their backend needs other than the actual code that they do write, maybe with some few lines of code, in the end, to put all of these together to redirect or extract data.

while all of these may sound unfamiliar or ambiguous, it is important to note that the role of software engineers is not necessary to write code but pushing the edge of technology to solve problems. Consider that a few years back people don’t even know they could make a payment online, do video conferences or hold meeting online. and today, with new ideas In technology everything becomes easier. So, it is no more challenging to build just a website these days it has to go more than that. People are looking for a little package or framework that can deploy an entire website with just a click. looking at all of these, you will realize that you don’t need to build all of these services by yourself if you know where to get them and how to use them to solve problems. So, it is not enough to learn how to code, emphasis should also be put on learning how to use these web and microservices, cloud APIs, and Amazon AWS Services to be able to stand the chance of getting a job in the world leading tech companies or found a promising startup.

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