People are in a rush to learn to program because they’re desperate to escape the financial situation that burdens them.

In 2024 when average housing costs are skyrocketing, food prices are untenable, and the overall cost of living far exceeds the worker making double minimum wage, people flock to the jobs they’ve heard make enough to live.

It took me about 10 years to learn to build software. But to learn to program? That’s an exercise of weeks of dedicated effort. In my opinion we all have a natural affinity for making and following instructions and that translates very well indeed to programming. Unfortunately there is so much more involved in the pursuit of making software.

Operating systems, languages, tooling, source control, continuous integration/deployment, documentation, architecture, unit testing, frameworks, third party packages, and so much more make up a developer’s repertoire.

Today we have excellent supplemental help for the act of programming with copilot and associated coding tools, but the other stuff requires knowledge and knowledge takes time.

There is no other job I know of that somebody can dedicate time alone to learning and then jump into a job making >$200k usd in reasonably short order than software, of course people are rushing to learn!