Good Jobs #53 👻

I'm back with Boise-area and remote jobs at Cradlepoint, Gravity Payments, Curious Media, Stoltz Marketing Group, Fitted, Classkick, Shopify, and more

Oct 22, 2021

You need to know how to code to get a job

You may or may not have noticed there wasn’t a newsletter two weeks ago. My family and I were in Moscow, Idaho. My second home. The place I met my wife. The place I got my college degree.

As I was strolling through the University of Idaho campus (this time pushing a stroller with a real live baby in it… my baby), I remembered how stressed I was way back then. Not stressed about anything related to school, but mainly about my inability… nah… interest in learning how to code.

Yes, really.

My senior year of college was made up of countless portfolio reviews, internship interviews, lectures, guest speakers, and articles—all of which had this blunt and recurring theme:

You need to know how to code to get a job.

I remember talking to a recruiter at Amazon. She clicked through my portfolio and the first thing she said was, “Nice… Do you know how to code?”

My heart sunk.

So I tried books and online classes and YouTube and in-person classes and Treehouse and Code School and and and…

…it just wasn’t for me.

And so for that, I was destined to be a failure. Un-hireable. Unnecessary.

**Fast forward a decade**

None of that actually came true. Quite the opposite.

I’ve worked in healthcare, real estate, children’s toys, agencies, startups, and fortune 500 companies as a UX/Product Designer. No coding required.

If I could travel back in time, I’d tell myself a few things:

Don’t force yourself into something you don’t enjoy doing. It’s not worth it.
Programming is great and all, but there is a lot more involved in building software. You’re going to love research, product management, and strategy. You should look into those.
Buy 100 Bitcoin.

If only I had known. I could have found something else to worry about instead.

Onward,

Loren Morris

P.S. – ZEN 👇

DEV

Engineering Manager - Cloud Infrastructure & DevOps at Cradlepoint

Boise | Full-time

Software Engineer (Backend) at Intuit

Eagle | Full-time

Senior Software Engineer at PlexTrac

Remote or Boise | Full-time

Senior Software Engineer at Truckstop

Remote or Boise | Full-time

From last time: Senior Frontend Engineer at Trust & Will

Remote | Full-time

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