I’m a gen Zer (albeit on the older side) and I don’t feel this way about work. Probably depends what field you’re in, I quite like being a programmer.
This job is truly an anomaly. There are very few careers where you can earn top 1% income with no degree, no physical exertion, under 8 hours a day "on the clock", the freedom to quit any time and have multiple new offers within days, etc, etc.
Out of the hundreds I’ve had this conversation with, two that I’m aware of took my advice and just tried to start making stuff. One now runs a dev shop, the other is at alphabet making bank.
I think, more than anything else, learned helplessness is crippling people. so many are mollycoddled from cradle to grave and never understand their own capabilities.
I was able to excel at CS in college because my parents shoved a DOS computer in front of me when I was 5 and challenged me with math and general problem solving at every opportunity. My whole childhood was basically debugging and critical thinking. If you didn't have that growing up, it's really hard to start learning the skills when you're 30.
let me guess: because not anybody wants to be a programmer? different people have different ambitions, not anybody needs to be a coder
and life would be pretty mundane if all people were doing is writing code
Almost anybody who works in retail, manual labor, etc would jump on a job offer for 5x more money, better hours, and better working conditions. The reason they don't is they can't get the offers because the skills are hard to learn.
Anyone talented at something thinks everyone is like them. Some singers think this too, they’ll say all you have to do is X, Y and Z and you’ll be a great singer like me, easy!
It’s like saying “I don’t understand why not everyone is fit, all you need is to eat less and go walk outside for free”.
I have taught a few people programming and almost everyone started picking up the basics and moving along well but some would just completely give up once no one was prodding them. This usually correlates with other things like health and general life situation. Some people just aren’t motivated to get up, go run, eat healthy, and learn a valuable skill.
If you are motivated and have the right material to learn from, you can do basically anything. This seems pretty true for me. I haven’t found any skill I can’t just grind through learning if I put the time in.
If more software developers used examples like those, maybe more people would consider software as a career? If nothing else, seems like I should give it a go when I have those conversations with people.
[0] Adafruit have an image of a 1967 article in Cosmopolitan, which quotes Hopper. https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/03/12/a-1967-cosmopolitan-art...
The market is flooded with coders, which is why you see coveted companies have the exhausting interview processes that they do. And that's where the big bucks are made.
Smaller companies with low or inexistent barriers to entry may appear appealing to your average bootcamp coder that lacks deep understanding that comes with a CS degree and/or years of experience, but they come with their own severe drawbacks one of them being the fallacy that one can jump from these to the FAANGs, another being the veneer of a career while in reality you're as expendable and replaceable as a minimum wage worker.
As a millennial in my 30s I was fortunate to be able to break in and start earning a nice paycheck without a college degree, but even that possibility is deteriorating now due to a sudden flood of entry level applicants. Companies are now seeking mid-level-to-senior candidates almost exclusively because they don’t want to bother with training and mentoring a newbie, they want someone who can hit the ground running. There are still some possibilities for one to get one’s foot in the door with barely paid or unpaid college internships but from my perspective the gates are slowly closing.