Why you should learn to program?

This time we will focus on positive aspects of programming and counterbalance negativity of a last article I have written. Of course there is a lot of good things about programming and these aspects are why people start learning to code in the first place. Everybody who became software developer and succeeded, most probably have a lot of good things to say about programming.

1. Money

This goes as a first one, for obvious reasons. There is no denying that a career of software developer is a lucrative one. Skilled developers earn much more than most of other people. There is high demand for people who code and it is growing, without signs of stopping. I won’t talk about exact sums that software developers earn (quick DuckDuckGo search is easy enough), but they are big.

2. Computer literacy

Even if you do not aspire to become full-time software developer, computer skills and knowing something more than Excel might come in handy. Knowing a thing or two about scripting might save you a lot of time also in non tech related jobs. There are countless things that making your own simple scripts, lets say in Python, can simplify your life. Want to download 100 videos from YouTube and extract audio from them? No problem. Convert 1000 photos to the format that will be accepted on page? You can achieve it without issues. Many tasks that you do by hand everyday, can be automated with simple scripts, leaving rest of your work time to pretend that you are working.

3. You want to be building your own websites and products.

This one is what motivated me at the beginning of my software developer journey. I wanted to build stuff and know how it all works. And since I was young and liked games at that time, first program I made was a mobile game, which taught me a lot about programming and let me gain skill that I managed to become a professional in, despite my studies being in a different area of expertise. There is a satisfaction in building your own software and being able to share it with others. When you know how to code, you can build programs, that bring you satisfaction and sometimes money.

4. Saving money.

Not only you can earn money, as a software developer. You can also save money, because you do not have to pay others to do things with your computer. Almost everything you will be able to fix either yourself or with help from documentation or forum.

5. You can work from anywhere in the world.

I am aware that more and more jobs are switching to being remote, but programming is one of the original ones that was remote before most, add to it fact, that it is a well paid job in most cases, and you can travel and work without problems. No more annoyances of stationary work. As a software developer, in my opinion, this should be your ultimate career goal, to be able to choose when and where you are working.

Conclusions

As you can see there is plenty of positive aspects of coding. Many people choose this route and many succeed, as market is still not saturated with enough of developers. I hope this post encourages you to learn programming, even if you do not want to become a developer, gaining some skills in that area, will almost certainly help you in other areas of your life.