Should You... Keep Coding?

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]You probably spent years studying for this. Late nights, weird bugs, tutorials you watched three times before anything clicked. And if you're old like me, Stack Overflow at 2:00 a.m. And now every other headline is telling you AI is coming for your job. Companies are laying off thousands upon thousands of engineers. So I want to ask you something honestly. Should you even keep going? Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud. Most of us got into this because of a promise. Work hard, learn to code, and you'll always have good meaningful work with a good salary to match. So naturally, people followed that. I'll make that deal.

[00:00:35]How about you, you little You make that deal? I'll make that deal. I don't blame you. Damn good deal. They did the degree, the boot camp, the LeetCode grind at midnight, the portfolio projects nobody asked for, the hundreds of job applications sent into the void, and a whole generation of people followed that road map exactly.

[00:00:54]And now they're watching it get dismantled. And how can we forget vibe coding, which adds a whole other layer to this mess? You've probably seen it.

[00:01:01]Someone with zero technical background opens cursor or Claude code or whatever, describes what they want in plain English, and has something running in a couple hours at most. Something that would have taken you or me days in 2021.

[00:01:15]And you sit there thinking, "Okay, what was actually the point of everything I learned? Did I spend years memorizing things that are now completely irrelevant?" That question is uncomfortable, and most people in this field won't admit they've had it. But here's what I keep coming back to. A lot of these so-called AI layoffs aren't really about AI. Companies went on a massive hiring spree during the pandemic, burned through cash, disappointed investors, and now need a story that sounds like a bold strategic move instead of an embarrassing mistake.

[00:01:45]"We are restructuring for an AI-first future" lands very differently than "We hired too many people and we're panicking." AI is the cover. It's not always the cause. And the people paying the price for that are real engineers with real careers. The vibe coding thing also has a problem nobody talks about honestly. Someone who doesn't understand the code can't tell when it's wrong. And it is wrong more than people admit. Not immediately. It's wrong at 2:00 a.m.

[00:02:11]when something breaks in production, when a real user's data is affected, and the person who copy-pasted the AI output has absolutely no idea where to even start looking. The speed vibe coding provides is real, but the understanding gap it creates is just as real. And eventually, those two things collide.

[00:02:29]There's also this thing companies are doing to themselves. Every senior dev you respect was once a junior who made low-stakes mistakes, got mentored, and grew from it over years. When companies stop hiring juniors, they stop growing the people who become their senior engineers in 5 years. They're not being efficient, they're eating their own future. And you'll figure that out a few years too late. So be glad you aren't there to feel the weight of the fall.

[00:02:53]Now, genuinely, why did you start coding in the first place? Because I'd bet it wasn't for the stock options or the salary benchmarks. It was that moment where something you built actually worked. Maybe it was a dumb little game in Python. Maybe a script that automated something that was driving you crazy.

[00:03:09]Maybe just a simple HTNO webpage you showed your parents, weirdly proud of something they didn't fully understand.

[00:03:15]Nobody handed you that feeling. You sat with the confusion, figured it out, and made something real. No company can take that from you. And no market shift can make it not have happened. Here's what I actually think. You're not learning syntax when you code, you're learning how to think, how to stay calm when everything is broken, and trust that you'll find the problem. How to take something completely overwhelming and break it into pieces small enough to actually solve. That's not a coding skill that becomes obsolete. That's just how your brain works now, and it shows up everywhere. And if you still want to keep going despite the current state of affairs, then Coursera, the sponsor of today's video, is here to help. Coursera has thousands of coding courses, but three of them line up perfectly with everything we just talked about. First, Python for Everybody by the University of Michigan. Beginner-friendly, taught by an actual university professor, it teaches you Python's data structures, how to use it to access web data and databases. Once you've got your footing, the Unix at Work Bench by Johns Hopkins teaches you everything Unix, from command line basics to bash programming and Git and GitHub. And then, the Software Design and Architecture Specialization by the University of Alberta is a direct answer to the vibe coding problem. How to think about systems and structure code properly, since you'll be learning object-oriented design, design patterns, and even software and service-oriented architecture. All three courses are self-paced with certificates you can add straight to your LinkedIn. Use my link in the description for 40% off 3 months of Coursera Plus. Go check it out.