Learn to code, get a job as an engineer?

 I grew up coding. My dad is an engineer, so I guess it came with the territory. By the time I was a teenager, I had racked up hundreds if not thousands of hours in front of the computer, and I soon found myself at the top of my IT class. It probably seemed to everyone around me that getting a job as a software engineer would be the next logical step. But my path wasn’t nearly as straightforward as you might think.

Over the past 10 years or so, there have been innumerable news stories on the value of coding, many of them arguing that we need more software developers in order to thrive in an increasingly digital world. We hear all the time about the “how to become a computer engineer”, and there’s even an “everyone should code” movement, as well as an argument that coding should be considered a basic life skill. Though there’s some occasional skepticism (“Should everyone really learn to code?” asks WIRED) the message has always come across loud and clear: coding = good.