Coding Is Not What Changes Your Life

Near the end of the first day I asked the room what they were doing in August of last year.

Five people answered. One had finally taken a family vacation. One had spent that year hunting for a course like this one and couldn't find a real one. One was working. One was running a business. One had been rethinking her whole career.

So the year wasn't lost. Everybody could name something.

Isn't it, time goes so fast? You look back and it was like yesterday, and it's gone.

Twelve months. Long enough to become somebody else. Short enough to lose without noticing it went.

Nobody in that room is going to lose the next twelve months because Java was hard. Java isn't what ends this. Java isn't what saves you either. Everything that decides this sits outside the syllabus.

Thirteen movements on the part of this program that isn't on the syllabus.

Seven are about the market you're walking into. Six are about the six months in front of you. Not one of them is about code.

It'll feel like more than it was. This is four hours of a first class, and three of those hours had no code in them at all. Some of it will land as something you already believed. You did believe it. You just hadn't paid anything for it yet.

The fix isn't motivation. Motivation is weather. The fix is that you decide, once, in advance, what you're not going to defend and what you're actually selling. Everything after that is arithmetic.

Every one of you has worked with somebody brilliant and unbearable.

You know the type. Sharp. Fast. Right most of the time and happy to say so. Impossible in a meeting. And nobody ever did anything about it.

Ask yourself why. It wasn't kindness.

I ran a software company. We had an architect. He designed the application, he handed work to the front end people and the back end people and the testers, and he'd lived inside that codebase for two years. He was cocky. Genuinely difficult.

I did nothing about it. If I replace him, I need to find another one, and what am I going to do? Somebody has to understand that code base. There was nothing I could do.

That was the trade. Companies swallowed the behavior because the expertise was scarce, and scarce expertise sets the terms. Every difficult expert you've ever met was standing on that same floor.

Then the scarcity went.

Not the expertise. The scarcity. When knowledge that used to live in one head can be reached by anybody who knows what to ask for, the person holding it stops being irreplaceable. And the moment they stop being irreplaceable, nobody has to swallow anything.

So the trade is dead. Gone. That's done. The competence is no longer the hard part to buy, and what's left is the part you can't buy that way. Can people work beside you. Do they want you in the room. Are you kind when it costs you something.

If you remember one thing from this book, make it this. Nice people are going to be very successful. Kind people are going to be very successful. Not nice instead of skilled. Nice on top of skilled, in a market where skilled just became ordinary.

Think of the one thing at your work, or your last work, that only you know how to do. Two years from now, will you still be the only one who knows it?

If your answer was yes, hold on to it for a minute. The thing that makes somebody hard to replace is almost never the thing they're proud of. It's usually an accident of who happened to be in the room when something got built. And an accident is not a position.

For years my companies used an outside accounting firm.

We had entities in more than one country. The transactions crossed borders, the tax position was genuinely complicated, and I'm not a finance guy. We paid them three thousand dollars a month on retainer to reconcile our books. At the end of the year they charged ten thousand dollars for each business, because the tax is complex and it involves the owner and the business itself. I realized we were paying them around fifty thousand dollars per year just for doing tax.

I never checked their work. Not once. Do I know accounting? No. Did I trust them? Yes. But how do I audit their work when I don't have financial literacy? I can't.

And every time I had a question, they'd reply to me a couple of days later, because no matter how much money I paid them, I wasn't their only customer.

Recently I connected an agent to the bookkeeping platform. Then the payment processor. Then the customer records. Then the bank account.

I ran that analysis for the past ten years. Ten years, millions of transactions, done in two hours.

It came back with mistakes. Not one mistake. Fundamental ones, the same figure copied from one field into another, year after year, the can kicked down the road by the people I was paying to catch exactly that.

I didn't believe it. I told it, I don't trust you, I trust them, do it again. It came with proof and proof and proof.

Then I worked out what that job would have cost as human work. Ten years of records, line by line, run against the tax law and against our spending and against our bank account. Five or six people. A few months of their time. Tens of thousands of dollars.

What stayed with me wasn't the money. It was that the audit I'd always described as impossible for me had taken an afternoon.

The last thing you paid an expert for and couldn't check yourself. If somebody opened it tomorrow and went through it line by line, would it come back clean?

Everybody has one of these. The gap between paying somebody and knowing whether they were right is exactly where the old expertise premium lived, and that gap is closing from both ends at once.

The firm kept its knowledge behind a gate, and the gate was a paywall. If I had a question, I paid for the answer. That gate is gone. The knowledge is available for everyone now.

So is mine. So, in time, is the one around what you're here to learn. Which raises the obvious question. If the knowledge is free, why are you sitting here learning Java?

Let me sell you a car.

You walk onto my lot. You ask why you should buy the one in front of you. I tell you it has an engine.

You leave. Of course you leave. You don't buy a car because it has an engine, isn't it?

Not because the engine doesn't matter. Because the engine is assumed. You buy on mileage. On reliability. On safety. On the seats, the sunroof, the cameras, on how the thing drives.

Now run it the other way. Leather seats. Sunroof. Cameras everywhere. Beautiful. No engine. It doesn't matter what else it has. The car is useless.

That's the exact shape of technical fundamentals right now, and it's an awkward shape, so hold it carefully. With it, you're not going to get a job. You have to build other things on top. Without it, you're not going to get a job at all. It's kind of an interesting paradox.

The arithmetic is short. Ten times zero is zero. A hundred times zero is zero. A million times zero is zero. If you're zero on the knowledge, the tooling can only add zero to you. It just arrives faster now.

And I mean specific things, not a general feeling of competence. What an algorithm actually is. Why there are classes, and why there are packages. What the back end is doing that the front end isn't. Where your money physically sits at the moment a screen tells you it's in your account, and why it isn't mixing with somebody else's.

If the tooling wrote a hundred lines for you tonight, what exactly would you check before you let it out of the room?

If nothing came to mind, that's the honest answer and it's the entire reason the next six months exist. You can't evaluate what you don't understand. Evaluation is the part of this job that hasn't been handed to a machine, and it's the part somebody pays you for.

Now the part that's good news, and almost nobody says it out loud.

Look at the people already inside. Ten years in, a title, a network. They don't have that pressure to learn coding. They open the tooling, they describe what they want, they ship it. Six months of that and they realize they're forgetting how to write code.

That's not an insult. That's what hands do. Stop using one and it gets weaker. No skill survives not being used.

And they're not wrong to feel safe. They have the title, the years behind them, the people who already know their name. Nothing in their week punishes them for not remembering. The bill for that arrives later and quietly, which is the worst way for a bill to arrive.

Now look at the people trying to get in. Same tooling, opposite position. They can produce output on day one without understanding a line of it, so a lot of them quietly decide the understanding is optional. Why grind through data structures when the machine writes the loop?

So you have two sides collapsing on technical competency. One is forgetting. One is refusing to learn.

That's your whole opportunity, and I'm going to say the ugly version of it out loud. It is your luck that people are lazy. It's your luck that they don't want to learn coding. It's good for you. Now you just do the things that others aren't willing to do.

Most people will not bother. Use other people's unwillingness to learn, their unwillingness to invest in the fundamentals, as your competitive advantage, because that's exactly what makes you stand out when you go to market.

The supply of people who genuinely understand how software works is shrinking. The demand for somebody who can tell whether the machine got it right is going up.

So the boring answer is the winning one. Learn the fundamentals properly. Not because it's noble. Because hardly anybody else is going to, and scarce is scarce.

Which technical thing are you quietly hoping to get away with never really understanding? And is it the same one the person sitting next to you is hoping to skip?

If those are the same thing, it isn't a coincidence and it isn't bad luck. It's whichever thing felt boring to both of you in week two. Boring is doing the sorting here, and it only sorts in your favor if you're the one who goes back to it.

Let me be honest about something, because you'll find out anyway and I'd rather you heard it here.

You're probably not going to write much code at work.

I asked this room on day one. Press one if you think you'll be typing code in your job. Press two if you think you won't. Most of the room pressed two, and I told them I agree with you.

You'll use it to write code. You'll use it to audit code. And most of the time that coding experience is what gives you the judgment to do the auditing. Typing isn't the job any more.

So why learn it? If you're never going to type it, why spend six months on it?

Two reasons, and the first one is unglamorous. You have to pass the interview, and the interview still has coding in it. The market is going to be full of people who refuse to learn coding, who refuse to have strong fundamentals, and who with a little bit of the tooling want to apply for the same role you're applying for. To filter out the unqualified ones, they'll most likely still ask for a coding challenge. That challenge isn't about typing. It's the cheapest test anybody has for whether you understand what you're describing.

The second reason has nothing to do with getting a job, and it's the one that actually matters.

Coding is the best way of learning to solve a problem.

Genuinely. You have a big problem. You decompose the big problem. You have small libraries. Inside the libraries, small classes. Inside the classes, methods, and all of them are solving different problems. Then you connect them until they add up to the big thing.

Do that for six months and something moves in your head. You're building algorithm in your mind. You start doing it to problems that aren't software. You look for the seam. You stop being frightened of things that are simply large.

That's what you're actually buying. The syntax is only how it gets delivered.

Think of a problem in your life right now that feels too big. Can you name its three parts?

If you named them, you already have the instinct and this program will sharpen it. If you couldn't, that's the thing arriving, and it arrives through Java whether or not you ever type Java again after the interview.

Let me show you how the person on the other side of the table thinks. Most people never see it, and seeing it changes how you ask for money.

I'm businessman. My arithmetic isn't complicated. If I know that spending a hundred thousand dollars brings back a million, I close my eyes and spend it. That's not generosity. That's the only sane response to a ten to one return.

Now put yourself inside that sentence.

It used to be that you got paid for what you know. So most people walk into a pay conversation carrying a list of what they have. The diploma. The good university. The certifications on the wall. I can code really fast.

Gone. That's done.

Read that list again. Every line on it is a reason for money to go out of the building. Not one line is a reason for money to come in. Nobody buys a cost.

Turn it around. If you can solve a million dollar problem, ten percent of that million is a hundred thousand, and it is easy ask. If you can solve a five million dollar problem, asking for two hundred thousand is easy ask. You've handed them a return and asked for a slice of it.

Your value proposition is creating that margin for the company that wants to hire you.

This is also why the fundamentals are worth more than they look from outside. The person who genuinely understands the systems is the one who can find where the money is leaking. The person who only knows how to prompt can't find it. You can't spot a leak in a system you're unable to picture.

I'm not promising you a number. Nobody can promise you a number, and anybody who does is selling you something. What I can tell you is which sentence gets heard in that room, and it's never the one about what you deserve.

How would you finish this sentence about yourself, out loud, right now? Hiring me makes this company money because.

If you couldn't finish it, that isn't a failing. It's a to-do. You have six months to earn a real ending for that sentence, and that ending is the thing somebody is actually paying for.

Most of your interviews are going to happen through a screen. Let me tell you what the person on the other side is actually looking at.

Your chin. Or your ear.

The laptop sits off to one side and the second monitor sits in front of you. The camera is in the laptop. The face you're talking to is on the monitor. So you look at the monitor, and the interviewer is looking at your chin or your ear. I'm not sure you'd have the appetite to hire me in that case.

A man six months into the market asked me for a call. I opened my camera, and he was talking to me exactly that way.

Fix the geometry and you've fixed most of it. Put the camera on top of the monitor you're actually looking at. Now when you look at their face the camera thinks you're looking at the camera, and you're making eye contact with the person on the other side. That's the whole trick.

Then light. About fifty dollars buys a soft box. Put it behind the camera, pointed at you. Never behind you. A window at your back turns your face dark, and you're going to look like a serial killer. I'm not joking.

Then two screens. One to watch, one to type in. Not required. But without it you're switching back and forth all day, and you're losing a lot of time.

One more, and this one isn't about looking good. Your microphone and your camera are live more often than you think. My own laptop decided to connect itself to my phone camera and microphone, and it did that while I was in the restroom on a break, with fifty people in the class. It was so embarrassing.

None of this measures whether you can do the work. I know that. The hiring process is unfortunately bullshit, and you act accordingly.

When I came to this country I rented one room. It had a closet, and because we didn't own that much clothes I set up my learning desk in there. I was learning in that closet because my baby was crying. He was ten months old.

You don't need a large house. You need a decent corner.

Open your camera right now, before you read on. Is your light in front of you or behind you?

Whatever is back there, you stopped seeing it months ago, and that's exactly the point. Everybody on that call is seeing it for the first time, and they're forming an opinion before you've finished your first sentence.

So that's the market. Now the six months.

Watch what happens in the week after you tell people.

Before that week, you could scroll for the next two thousand hours and nobody is going to give a crap. Let's be honest, it bothers no one. Nobody ever said, why do you watch Netflix, why don't you study, why don't you work out, why don't you gain some skills, why don't you learn investing. No relative sat you down. No friend asked whether that was the best use of your year.

Then you say three words. I'm learning coding. And within a week there's an economist in your family.

Isn't it AI is taking over coding? I've heard lots of tech layoffs, isn't it? Aren't all the tech jobs gone? Economy is so bad. Did you hear they're laying off ten thousand people?

These are the same people who never once asked what you were doing with your evenings.

That asymmetry is the most useful thing on this page, and it has nothing to do with Java.

The mechanism isn't malice. If you think it's malice you'll handle it wrong.

When I gamble, when I scroll, when I play games, when I watch Netflix, when I eat chips all evening, nothing bothers you. As soon as I want to do something, it bothers you, and all of a sudden you're an economist. You're a subject matter expert.

Here's the thing. While you were scrolling you were confirming something comfortable. That this is simply what evenings are. That nobody really changes. When you start climbing you stop confirming it, and your effort turns into a comment on their evenings that you never made and never intended to make.

The discomfort is real. It's theirs. And it arrives dressed as concern for you.

The Java is not going to make you quit. The people around you is going to make you quit.

Which specific person in your life is going to say the discouraging sentence to you?

If the name arrived before you finished reading the question, this isn't a prediction, it's a memory. You've stood here before with something else you tried and let go of. The difference last time is that you didn't know the sentence was coming, so you took it as information and argued with it.