Is Coding Right For You?

One of the many questions which go inside a beginner’s mind is whether coding is right for them or not, and that is what I plan to address in this blog.

Coding is not the most fun activity out there. There is a lot of debugging which goes in to code, and most of the times you find yourself in a position of debugging. This can get REALLY frustrating for some people, but for others, it is the best thing in the world.

Some people ask me, “How is it such that you can stay in front of your computer for more than 7 hours per day coding? Don’t you get stressed?”, the answer to that is absolutely not. I enjoy the entire procedure of coding, and not just merely the benefits which come with it. There is a lot to learn out there, and I am a knowledge hungry person.

For those of you who quit too easily, coding is not for you. In fact, I’d argue whether anything will be good for you, because everything in the world requires hard work, and a “WANT” to do. If you cannot do that, then I must say that life ahead of you is going to be really hard.

For those of you who just don’t find pleasure while debugging or who just don’t find coding to be fun in general, I’ll say that you should go and do some other activity which interests you. Yes, there is a lot of money in coding, and that is the reason why some people do it, but think of the days of your school. Did you like to be in school? Or did you just stick around and you thought of school to be a waste of time, but you had to stick around anyway? In the first case, I am sure that you must have learnt something new everyday in school, and you might even remember a lot till date. In the second case, however, I can guarantee that almost all of you won’t have remembered what you taught the previous day. It is merely because you did not like school itself, but you stuck around anyway. Same thing happens in coding, if you truly enjoy it, I am pretty sure that coding is right for you. If you don’t enjoy much coding, but you are sticking through anyways for the money, I‘d say that you don’t stick around, find some activity you are interested in, and persue that. It will take you much farther in your life than coding will.

Another reason why coding is not for you is if you are not pretty good with learning new things at a regular basis. Technology is ever evolving, and you have to cope up with it, else you will just be another normal coder. If you want to be an excellent coder, then you will have to cope up with the latest technologies and implement them in your workspace. If you cannot learn the latest technologies ASAP, I think that the least you can do is give it a month but at least TRY. Even if you don’t learn it, you won’t be out of the industry or something, but you always have to remember that you can’t consider yourself to be a “God” at something. If you are good at one thing today, it is not necessary that that particular skill is valuable in the future. You should always have that learner’s attitude and if you have too much ego, and cannot put it away easily, I am sorry, but coding might not be right for you.

The last, but definitely not the least, is going to be if you are not good with communication skills, coding is not right for you. It is a highly neglected fact which I wanna talk about today. People think that programming is just the technical skills. That’s not true at all! Programming is more about technical skills, yes, I will agree on that, but if you do not have the communication skills which are essential for becoming a programmer, I am sorry but programming is not for you. Programming is a teams sport. At your office, or in your workplace, you will be working with several people, who will be relatively new to you. But you will have to adjust and try to communicate with them as much as you can. There will be issues that you will run in, which might spoil the entire code, but no one knows why is that happening. It is because you did not communicate with the other person about the problem which you are facing, and hence they have no clue what in the code went wrong.

If you have struggled in any of the above listed skills, but still think that you are extremely passionate about coding, then I recommend that you read self development books and you start to work on your soft skills. It is a really big part of the coding industry about which hardly anyone talks, so I wanted to address that in this article.

Thank you, I hope that this article brought value to you! Stay tuned for more!