Why Should I Become a Programmer?

Programming (which I will also refer to as software development throughout this book; even though they are not identical I will use them interchangeably), is a challenging, high-paying career. If you have up to date programming skills, jobs are abundant. Programming jobs often come with flexible hours, location flexibility (work from home, a coffee shop, or another city), and the hard skills you learn translate easily to new positions.

Jobs

According to the US Department of Labor, 8 of the 10 fastest growing occupations between 2000 and 2010 are computer related. It seems like every magazine career survey I see has multiple computer-related jobs in the top 10.
 And, of course, there’s the perpetual shortage of qualified programmers everyone has been talking about since the 1990s. The result? There are tons of programming jobs.
A search on Dice.com will show you the literally thousands of open programming jobs (as of this writing, over 20,000 nationwide using the term “Developer.”) In my entire career as a salaried employee, I never went a day without work.
 Of course, your mileage may vary, but if you live near a major city it is almost certain there are hundreds of job openings at any given time for experienced programmers. One example is a friend of mine who is a senior .NET developer in Los Angeles. He activated his resume on Dice a few months ago and received 40 phone calls in three days. There was so much interest he had to deactivate his resume to get any work done.

Hard Skills

When someone in marketing or sales looks for a job, it often takes months to land a position. When a developer with current skills looks for a job, they will often have an interview within a few days. This is in part due to the abundance of programming jobs, but also to the fact that programming is a “hard skill.” 

Hard skills are skills like programming, accounting, and engineering. Soft skills are skills like sales, marketing, people skills, etc… Both are valuable, but since hard skills are easier to communicate on a resume, and to test and quantify, the job hunting process is often much faster for programmers than for a product manager. 

I guarantee that if you posted your resume on any of the major job boards with Senior .NET Developer, Senior Java Developer, or Senior PHP Developer in the title (with the experience to back it up), you would receive your first phone call in a few hours.

High Paying

In my opinion, you should never take a job simply for the paycheck. But if you enjoy programming (or think you will enjoy it), and someone will pay you top dollar to do it…that’s not a bad way to go. Take a minute. 

Go to Salary.com, type in Programmer 1 and your zip code in the salary wizard and take a look around. Though it’s not the most common nomenclature, they use “Programmer 1” to represent a programmer with 0-3 years of experience. 

Programmer 2-5 represent more senior level developers. In my zip code (Boston), entry level programmers are listed between $46k and $75k, with the majority around $60k. Not bad for 0-3 years of experience. It’s not uncommon to make $125k-$150k as a senior developer in a major city. 

This would require 5-7 years of experience and senior-level knowledge of a specific technology. Since people with these skills are more difficult to find, it’s actually easier to land a senior developer position than an entry-level one.

Flexible

 I’ve worked from home 6 out of the last 10 years. The 4 years when I worked out of an office were when I was managing people, or when I worked from an office part of the week. 

A motivated programmer will get more done at home than at work because of the lack of interruptions. 

Progress is also fairly easy to measure, so managers tend to let programmers work from home, at least on an ad hoc basis. 

For 5 of those 6 years I lived in a different city than my employer/clients.

 Becoming a programmer has allowed me to move from Sacramento to Los Angeles to New Haven to Boston, and I never once left a job because of geography. All you need is high speed internet and a phone.

 I’ve written thousands of lines of code from coffee shops, the mountains, and even the beach. 

Challenging 

While the reasons I give above are appealing from an outsider’s perspective, once you become a programmer it’s all about loving your work. Some days you will sit in front of a computer for 10 hours, plugging away at a single web page…you have to love it or it will drive you nuts no matter how much money you’re making. If you know a programmer, ask if they enjoy their work. They will probably say some variation of the following:

“It’s challenging, and I’m constantly learning new things.” 

The challenge is in solving problems. Some problems are as simple as “How can we give this customer a new button on this page so they can print from here?” 

Others are as complex as “We have three years of code written in VB.NET and we want to transition to C#. What do we do?” 

But in the end, every person I know who loves programming loves solving problems. Programming truly is a new problem every day. 

The Act of Creation 

Forgive me, but I’m going to get a little philosophical on you. 

Some people won’t care about this reason, but it’s one of the primary reasons I like coding so much. There is a lot of discussion about whether programming is art or science. 

I believe it’s a bit of both, but that it doesn’t totally matter. 

What matters to me is the rush of endorphins I feel when I hammer out a bunch of code and demo something for the first time. 

The first time a page pulls records from a database and displays them, I’m filled with a huge sense of accomplishment. It sounds stupid, I realize, but the fact that I’ve created something tangible (i.e., a web site) is perhaps the biggest reason I have continued to write code for the past 10 years. Creating something from nothing is a great feeling. 

It’s Sometimes Cool

 Ok, programming is not usually considered cool. Many times you’ll be building an invoicing system for an internal application that only a few people will use. It’s not as boring as it sounds, but it’s no trip to Disneyland, either. 

Then there are times when you build the web site for the Sundance Film Festival (I did in 2003), or work for MySpace or YouTube on a high profile feature (like friends of mine have). Or a site you work on sells $17 million worth of product in a year (which has happened to me and a few friends). During those times it’s fun…and yes, maybe even cool to be a programmer.