why developers are walking away from coding

It's no secret that a lot of programmers developers are questioning their career choices. Personally, Bogdan and I are getting messages from people asking themselves, hey, should I still do this? I have a, you know, mental block, would everything that's going on. It's being a programmer still worth it. Again, I believe programmers are making a huge mistake, but I do think they have a point. And here are the seven reasons I think why programmers are walking away from software dev and why I believe they are making a table mistake.

In the last five years or so, we trained over 300 students, helping them level up to senior and get new positions. So the first reason programmers are walking away from software development. It's the AI paranoia. A few days ago, we've seen Mark Zuckerberg coming out and saying that they are building a machine to automate the mid-level developer job. And all the companies are working on that. We've seen dev in AI, right?

Coming out and saying, hey, we're going to automate you straight together. And I think this belief that AI will replace software engineers. Sometime in the near future is making a lot of people quit. Bogden, what would you tell developers? You worked a lot with AI. Yeah, exactly. Like you said, uh, Zuckerberg came out and said they are building a AI to basically effectively be a mid-level engineer.

That works independently and extends the code base. They have around 30,000 mid-level like under senior engineers at meta. So, uh, we're talking about a lot of people. To be very honest, we need to change from AI to LLM. That's what we're talking about. And, you know, large language model, it's very far away from being an engineer. The engineering word comes from Latin and it it means uh thinking, right?

Uh heuristically coming up with solutions. And I do not think AI is capable of doing that. I worked with AI, several AI tools full time, so I added them fully to my workflow. able to let go go away from the lead code snippet, right? Because AI is really good at solving this lead code kind of hacker rank kind of problems. And go to a full code base and you'll find yourself in a big mess if you are relying too much on AI.

Reason number two, programmers are quitting software engineering. It's competition. It's local and global and I think we've seen this in the last couple of few years, months, especially after the COVID. When the world went remotely, right now programmers feel like they are competing with the whole world. Like not only competing locally, you are competing now at national level, like because you have all these remote jobs, everyone in your country can apply to them.

And then you have all the outsourcing going on and all the remote international jobs, right? So I feel like talking to to programmers, many of them, they have this pressure where they feel like the bar has raised, they feel like they are competing with everyone else that's screaming out there on social media, how good they are, how many side projects they've done. And it gets to a point where some people are so intimidated by this competition that they put all together. Fuck them.

Uh you've been in the game for more than 10 years. What would you tell someone that's getting intimidated by competition? So when it comes to local and global, it's it's very different, right? So the uh the local competition is mostly due to boot camps and a lot of people getting into software dev. And then the global competition comes from the whole remote work and the fact that everything went remote.

And hey, if you can do your job from Italy, then why don't we completely outsource it to somebody that's cheaper all over to uh to Asia. So on the local competition, yes, there's been a bunch more a few more people getting into software dev. There's all the boot camps, but for the boot camps to actually produce productive programmers. It takes a lot longer than they estimate. And what you have, it's a lot of entry level job seeker.

Like it's even not junior level knowledge, it's job seeker knowledge. Because they cannot even qualify for most of the times for a junior. Those people will have to upskill and maybe they become junior developers. I would not worry about that. It takes a lot of dedication and effort to become really good at software dev and from what we see regarding a global competition. money, for most big software companies, most outsourcing efforts were negative.

They think it saves up money, but it doesn't in the long run. It doesn't in the delays, it doesn't in the quality you get. So, think about the best software you use. It's usually made in the US, where developers make the biggest amount of cash. How come it still makes sense to buy software from the US if they are the most expensive ones? Well, because the value outweighs the cost. And you should focus as a developer on creating more value for the company you work in terms of, you know, engineering skills, system design skills, communication skills.

Not soft skills, okay? We're talking about communicating hard technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders. That's not like, oh, emotional intelligence. We're talking about somebody that very well knows their stuff and it's able to get people to get a ship or product. It is true that things are a bit more complicated than they used to be. And it makes sense. There was a lot of free money in the software engineering market.

Every startup was raising money, creating, you know, fake jobs or jobs that were not, that did not made a lot of sense for the economy, right? And this is an invitation for you to get better. And I remember this quote that always we always tell our students, it's, you know, don't wish things were easier. Wish you were better. On to point number three, which is job insecurity. And I don't blame people.

We've seen a lot of layoffs, all the things that we mentioned. The AI, more competition, companies hiring then kicking off people. A lot of developers at their taxes, you know, they had jobs that, you know, they get a job, then they stay there about three months, then the project it's over. They get another gig, it's like six months. And a job that used to be a cornerstone, I remember five years ago, developer was like the safe job.

You would, you know, get a job and stay there forever, get a mortgage, and your family would be fine. Right now, we do not know what the future holds. At any point you could get laid off and you don't know if you're going to find a job. So, job insecurity, it's one of the reasons that's pushing developers away. And I don't blame them. It is true that the environment is a bit more unstable. Layoffs have been happening to sales people first, if we look at the number of layoffs in San Francisco and all over the world, you'll see that the first people to get laid off were not the engineers.

So, the job insecurity aspect, when the economy is not doing that well, it's something that affects everybody, not only software devs. So, it's not a reason for you to throw in the towel and say, I'm done with this because whatever you'll do next, we'll also have job insecurity. Job insecurity. was there for very long long time for developers. And it was in the shape of well, what if all my skills are obsolete tomorrow?

What if the framework of choice is not relevant tomorrow? And now it's in the form of AI. Now what if AI can write code or it used to be the boot camps, right? What if all these boot camp people, you know, are going to come in and then there's no more job. So it's a bit of a scarcity thinking. Yes, you should be worried to certain healthy level about your security. But the only security you have, it's your skills, your ability to deliver and, you know, your professional image.

That's your resume and your LinkedIn profile nowadays. You don't need open source. You don't need portfolios. Seniors don't need that. And so the only security you get is hey, if I lose my job tomorrow, I have enough time, you know, I can find another one in a reasonable times. And you should always we have the saying the senior dev that only the paranoid survive. So a certain amount of fear, it's healthy.

Now that fear shouldn't paralyze you. You should put your energy into becoming better and into selling yourself better. Now, do not be worried, be prepared. Right, turn that worry into preparation and keep an eye on the market at all times. Right, do your homework. Reason number four, developers are living software development, it's crappy jobs. Bad jobs, shitty jobs. I've seen it with many developers this days, they get something happens, they get laid off or a company, you know, they choose to leave a company.

And then they get another job and it turns out to not be any better than the last one, right? They face all all the hard stuff developers have to deal with, right? One developer I was chatting with told me that he's got a new job and for the first six months, he's been spending a lot of time on the weekends, he had a newborn, newborn son, couldn't spend time with with a baby, couldn't be there for his family.

Just for him to deliver at work, right? And what happened at the end? He got fired anyway. And that right there made him made him question altogether if this is the career for him. And I see a lot of developers are getting this heightened by the amount of crappy software jobs that they are being offered. I don't blame them. I mean, to be very honest, the best jobs are reserved for the for the top 20% in any market.

And if you go to you mentioned doctors before, I think what is it? Like 80% of doctors are burning out because of the nature of the sector. Go talk to the lawyers, the top ones. To make the best out of a developer job, it takes uh a lot of skills. It takes uh confidence, you know, skills and they will, you know, they're the part of the business that would try to in the word, I don't like the word, but squeeze you out.

Uh in terms of, you know, putting more hours, putting longer hours. I've been there myself. I had one of those, or at least two of those in the past where uh you know, the tech stack wasn't great and we would have to put up with extra hours because we didn't have monitoring in place, CSD wasn't working. And so you got to understand that um you got to use everything to get better. again, uh and then use the fact that you do have income to keep preparing and never stop chasing that better job.

But what I saw a lot of developers we work with and they've been in those shitty jobs, they just think this is it. This is software dev. It's just, you know, it just sucks, it's just uh a lot of long hours and they then really know why. And the the reality is first of all know that there are good places out there. There are places where you have what time live balance, there are places where you don't have to build 100 features that nobody will use and put, you know, extra time for that.

So, don't give up and don't think this is it. So don't get, don't get the job you don't like. Like those jobs exist because someone is willing to to do them, man. If they won't find anybody, they will try to offer better conditions. Onto point number five, mediocre pay and no raises. A big big point in the last few years, a lot of people were afraid of how the market is, all the things that we already chatted about.

And a lot of developers are staying put. They're not interviewing, they're not going out there, they're not taking chances because hey, take no risks. I'm stable here. What's happening? managers know that and they're taking advantage of the situation. By not putting a lot on the table, like they're not offering them promotions and as long as they cannot leave the company, they're like, okay, you get, you know, this is what you get. See you next year, right?

We're not doing great and uh, you know, why pay a developer more when they can do the same job for the same money? Right? This is one reason why people are like, hey, you know, I'm not progressing in my life. It's been five years, I'm almost at the same pay, I haven't got the promotion in years. And I don't blame them, but I think again, the antidote to this is not quitting. If whatever obstacle you find in your career and life, your strategy is to quit.

to run away from that, you'll never feel equals problem. Right? So what you have to do instead and what a lot of developers should do instead is to say, hey, you know, enough's enough. Let me do something about it. I cannot expect my boss. I cannot expect my company to take care of me. I need to, you know, what do I need to do? Is it my skills? Is it my resume? I need to go out there to the market and I need to provide for myself.

And this is a mindset. And I can tell you, Michaela, I used to expect a lot. Personally, I was to expect the company to pay me for my training, my my my testing. I remember I was always begging my boss to pay for a testing course. Uh they never did that. And then I had to pay it myself. But for the beginning of my career, I was really expecting the world to do things for me. And we have to get back to a point of and really understand that the world will not the the world is not there to provide you for you and it it it owes you nothing.

So if you want something, you got to go get it. You have to go for it. Bagan, what would you add on the mediocre pay? What we do know from the last four years working with developer is that the average you gain, if you get very lucky, it's no more than 5% of your gross annual pay. Whereas people switching jobs usually go get over 20 to 30%. Of course, switching jobs, it's always a risk. But it's unfortunate that in this sector, you sometimes have to switch to get a race. That's the reality of it of it.

And what we see a lot of people doing is, you know, they look at the market, they look at AI and they get very scared and they play defense and they're like, well, I'm just gonna stay put. You cannot stay put into their job market. You have to play offense. You have to play the game trying to win, trying to get better. And you cannot be afraid as you mentioned, you know, you cannot expect your company to provide that race or that career plan that you had in mind.

Or what you should be into years, you got to take ownership of that. And you can say, okay, what can we do? Uh every year that you coast and you just, you know, stay put, it's a year you lose because if you're not getting better, you're getting worse. Exactly, Bogdan. On to point number six, burnout and mental health. If I were to identify the the emotion that most developers I talk to these days have, it's anxiety, then burnout, and then just a negative look about the future.

And we will talk about this in point number seven. Bado future. But what do we do about burnout? What do we do about mental health? Bogdan, in this situation. So, it definitely comes as a result of everything we mentioned before. You have this job insecurity combined with not being happy at your current job. Combined with, I don't know if I can actually switch. Combined with oh if my is getting laid off and I can code.

And all that, uh makes people go around with just anxiety and uh and that will. You know, you cannot last too long, like how how long can you go on with uh with all this in your head. This is usually the symptom, but it's not the sickness. And so you want to find out okay, from everything we said before, what is causing the burnout? Is it the lack of progress? Is it, you know, you've been, you know, if you're job switching, you're much more prone to burnout.

Job seekers are, you know, it's a constant burnout. Sometimes, and I know it sounds very cheesy, you just got to have to push through it because until you solve the cause of that, you'll feel a bit burned out. Sometimes we see people that are too focus on the negative, uh they have a negative mindset where they're weighty, competitive, or they eliminated everything in their life that's not their career.

It's usually a bad strategy. That's the thing, mental health and burnout, you need a holistic solution for this. Like said, you need to identify what's the cause, it can be many different things. But as a rule of thumb, what we see right now it's people have no balance in their life, they have nothing else, just just their career and if, you know, a failure, a professional failure, like getting fired means it's the end of my life, that's all my what as a software engineer, as a person.

And the other thing would be there's a lot of anxiety. So if I were to give you one advice, it's just limit your exposure to all this, you know, Twitter, all the stuff on YouTube. A lot of it is just these influencers, they're just repeating what other people are saying, uh there's a lot of talking, but not a lot of doing. So if you feel like you have anxiety, you know, go into nature, limit your time with a computer, do something outside and take a break, okay, if you really want to, just a quick tip to to get back in the game.

On to final point, number seven, why developers are quitting software engineering, is because they have no clear path forward, right? So I see people and they're they're lost. They a lot of software engineers, and I'm not talking about the juniors, because in the past it would be like the fresh graduates that, you know, you can't blame them. They don't have they haven't seen a lot in the industry.

They don't know what's going on, they don't know what's possible. But now I see like senior level engineers. that are very much lost. They cannot plan for the future. They're like, I don't know, maybe, yeah, I. People are like the average job security when I'm asking them, that dating they have, you know, you ask people, hey, how confident you feel that you'll still be with the company you are at right now?

And the average is six months to a year. Right, they don't trust the market, they don't uh they don't know what's going to happen, they don't know if AI will take their job or not. So I think this is the main problem, the main issue why people quit. Because if you have nothing to go for, if there's no future in the sector, then why be here? It's just bad for you, right? Bargan, what would you tell developers to feel like, you know, there's no clear path forward for them and they are thinking to do something else.

What we've seen over the years and we've been doing this again for like 11 years now, I've seen people taking a sabbatical, opening the coffee shop and then coming back to software dev two years later with their skills are slightly worse than when they left. And the reality is you got into this because of a reason, you're probably good at it, but you need to persist. And even the people, you know, in our mentorship program, even myself, there were always several points when I talked about quitting, I talked, you know, the average McDonald's employee has a better life than me.

There were many points when this happened along the journey. Uh and that's okay. That's part of the journey, but you should never quit. Because you made, you know, you're going to lose all the investment you put so far. Again, the world moves from software, we're moving towards more remote. I do not think there's anything you can do without software. And if you need software, you need promise. Yes, AI can write code, building software, it's a lot more than writing code, even if building software would be dragon drop.

You'd still need an engineer. Okay, like imagine we will do just weeks and WordPress plugins. It will get so complex. Right, that's why you need uh you need developers even in Salesforce where they try to do everything Dragon Drop. And it's a disaster and it didn't work out. Don't quit, then go and, you know, follow a sabbatical because we've seen so many people just coming back to it two years later.

One thing I would tell to people that feel last and feel like they they don't have no clear path forward. In the industry, developers that feel like the industry doesn't have a future, developers that they don't have a future in the industry. It's really it takes some time. It's beginning of the year. 15 January 2025. Take some time and ride down. Right. think about the future. Think about what will it take to be there.

Dare to dream a bit. We do this exercise every quarter with uh and almost every year with the with the software engineers we coach. But the most important is that you have a vision, something to to go for. Because if not, the job everything is just too hard to wake up. Why not just watch Netflix? Why not just fall into complacency and procrastination? It's easy to be influenced by other people and by all the noise on the internet when you don't have a clear path forward for what for yourself.

With that being said, folks, keep up the good work. We're going to be here for you for the whole year. Right, the senior dev will be here. We do have a a very clear path forward. We're not worried about the market. We are working every day for you to become better, for our students to become better, and for us to become better. If you are looking for some tangible recesses for you to get better at software engineer, check out the comments, you're going to see the free think assessment that we put together, and you will see tons of helpful videos in this channel if you are interviewing right now as a software engineer or if you are simply looking to get better.