For not having to repeat this again, I am documenting my reasons here so that I can share this page when necessary.

For you - coming back to the workforce after a break, for those wanting to upgrade their earning capacity, for those that want to build work around their preferred lifestyle, and for anyone else that just wants to do it for the heck of it:

LEARN TO CODE.

Reasons below

• In terms of earnings and job opportunities, the average software engineer is much better off than the average marketing person (speaking specifically to her previous work profile).
• Job portability goes up 100x if your previous job depended on living in a specific country, or speaking a particular language.

But learning to code is difficult…

It’s like saying all movies are bad because the only movie you watched was bad. You would be wise to try watching a few more, or switch genre, or even switch language.

Same for programing. Here are a few things to try.

Change your learning medium

Maybe you did not like the medium in which you were learning. Change the course, book or video you were learning from.

Change what you are trying to learn

Try not to start with anything that requires too much learning before you start to see what you can create. Instant gratification helps.

• Mobile apps using Swift or Kotlin: You to write a line of code and you can see a button on your phone screen.
• Try Ruby on Rails for building web apps. One person framework to learn and build web apps.

And ffs, use resources

You have youtube videos to teach you, and you can hear it in any accent you prefer. Like Indian accent, you have it. Like Russian accent, find another video.

(Yes, I know some people prefer to watch tutorial videos in a certain accent).

Chatgpt and a bunch of AI tools are free. You can 100 stupid questions, and maybe even do it all over again the same day, because you have a full-time explainer of things to yourself. Available anytime of the day.

But job prospects?

Learning to code in anything, allows you to break your barrier to entry.

Getting familiar with another language or framework might take another month. The third time you do it, it might take a week. The concepts are almost the same, with a bit of extra juice sprinkled in every new language. You will learn to learn.

First break your barrier to entry. You can then explore other stuf and switch to what you want to do. Maybe you want to build robots, or build another dating site. Who knows.

But I’m bad at math

Unless you get to building something that needs math, you don’t need math to learn to code.

When you start building something actually needs math, you can ask chatgpt to teach you math too.

But who uses Rails?

Shopify? Airbnb? You’ll find more if you look around.