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Comment by blindmute | Hacker News Reader

As far as I'm concerned, the ride stops when the masses realize how easy the profession actually is. You can take any office worker and train them to an entry level competency in 3-5 months, when they will get a job for at least $75k. They are then in a new career path and will soon make 100k. I find it impossible to convince non devs that being a developer is easy. They can't fathom why we get paid so much if it's easy. They think I must be lying, or lucky, or too smart. No! It's fucking easy!

As soon as people catch on to this, and start doing bootcamps with the same frequency that they do weird "side hustles", it's over. The current scarcity is mainly because people don't realize they can become developers.

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I used to think the same. I too find my job to be easy and sometimes feel like we have this secret in the software industry that our work really isn't all that difficult these days, with so many hard problems having already been solved. I say this as a senior SDE in big tech.

But, after watching a close friend, who is brilliant—she had gone to a top 30 college undergrad and had top SAT scores—go to a coding bootcamp (the same one I went to) and fail to switch careers I started to think differently. For some reason, I find the work easy and interesting, but many others do not.

I do agree that many more people are capable of becoming developers than choose to do so. But this fact may not be as interesting as it sounds. Many people just don't like coding. Many just don't want to spend their days writing code, even if it pays well.

I don't mean to downplay irrational reasons why people choose not to pursue software. The industry still has a lot of negative stereotypes about what the work is actually like that prevent people from giving it a try, but, more and more, I've noticed that, even among people who know such stereotypes are false, many just don't want to do the job, even if they could.

I just find it hard to believe that the typical office worker likes their job enough to do that, but would find software development at ~double their salary not worth it. People don't want to spend their days in Excel either, but millions do.

At a very high level a typical set of office worker tasks includes performing business processes, modifying processes in response to changing needs, optimizing processes, discussing and planning the future with co-workers, all in the context of the business domain and organizational structure + strategy. It frequently includes some kind of automation in the form of Excel sheets, e-mail / document templates, and the like.

This broad description basically sits on a spectrum with what many programmers do, even more so if RPA catches on in these type of jobs. Doing this stuff today isn't always a cakewalk, and there are plenty of full-time office jobs that already pay $75k sans writing code.

I'm pointing this out because there is a lot of cloudiness in what "the profession" is, what a "dev" is, what an "office worker" is. Someone with the title "software developer" could be working on firmware, cloud systems, or they could be scripting business logic & setting up processes for other workers. Someone with the title "market analyst" could be writing a couple emails a day and dragging files and folders around -- or they could be coding automated reports, constructing data feeds, and collaborating on VBA/JS macros in Excel.

I don't know if I buy that. The better bootcamps now have a screening process -- I don't know if they'll just take any office worker. And the crappy ones just churn out schmucks who can't get hired.

Statistics for boot camps are kept pretty tight, and a lot of the "we can get you a job!" claims only come true if/when the bootcamp hires you to teach after you graduate, thus allowing them to puff their numbers.

Anecdote: I know 3 bootcamp grads, and only 1 of them is working as a coder. She had a BA from a good school in Econ before doing the BC, and is now a senior dev. The other two weren't technical or math-y, though at least one was able to turn the BC into a STEM Recruiter job since he had an HR background. The 3rd, a Sales guy trying to change careers, is, as of today, still not a coder; I think he's doing some sort of IT support, and could have gotten an A+ and Net+ and been as competitive for that gig -- at a fraction of the price of a bootcamp.

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