I Thought Coding Was The Job

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Genuinely appreciate you sharing this as the growth from "snob" labels to owning your voice is real and earned.

I'd push back gently on one thing: there's a difference between developing communication skills (which is genuinely valuable) and being forced to perform visibility on platforms constantly, and I think this framing blurs both.

When we say "if you don't post, you're invisible" ,we're not describing a law of nature. We're describing rules written by companies whose entire business model depends on us feeling exactly that pressure. The hard truth here isn't really about human connection. It's about accepting a system where our output, attention, and vulnerability become someone else's revenue.

Shyness as a weakness?? Fair conversation. Chronic online presence as the price of being "someone"? That's a much more loaded premise worth questioning, especially when the ones truly profiting from that belief aren't us.

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• Jun 1

I actually agree with a lot of this.

I don't think constant posting, personal branding, or living online should be a requirement for being valuable. And you're right that some platforms absolutely benefit from making people feel like they need to be perpetually visible.

The distinction I was trying to make is closer to communication than content creation.

For example, being able to explain your work, ask questions, build relationships, share ideas, collaborate, or advocate for yourself when opportunities arise.

Those things existed long before social media and would still matter if LinkedIn disappeared tomorrow 😭

That said, I do think it's healthy to question where the line is between genuine connection and performative visibility. That's probably a conversation more people should be having.

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• May 30

I think one thing I've slowly realized is that communication isn't just about talking more, it's about reducing friction between yourself and other people.

Whether that's asking for help, sharing ideas, building relationships, writing posts, explaining decisions, or even just making yourself visible enough that opportunities can find you.

And yeah, the "people will judge anyway" realization is oddly freeing...

Might as well build, share, learn, and let people think what they want.

Glad you figured it out when you did.

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• May 30

Problem with „reducing friction between yourself and other people" is that you may end up working much harder than you should, to make everyone happy.

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• May 30

That's a really good point actually.

I think there's a fine line between reducing friction and people-pleasing.

The way I'm starting to think about it is: reducing friction should help communication, understanding, and collaboration move more smoothly. It shouldn't require constantly sacrificing your own boundaries, priorities, or well-being to keep everyone happy.

Honestly, that's another lesson I'm still figuring out in real time 😅

Learning how to work well with people is one thing.
Learning where to draw the line is probably just as important.

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• May 28 • Edited on May 28 • Edited

Communication is BIG. It wouldn't make any sense to have without communication.

This is a philosophical thing. For example, if you learn everything about oranges like what is suppose to taste like and it's chemistry, do you know what it taste like? No.

The only way to know is to eat the orange.

What I am getting at is you have to experience the coding job to get the full experience than looking at other people doing the job. This is why it is dangerous to look at "life as a software engineering" videos you see because it only captures on what you see, not what they are feeling.

Good work Aryan!

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• May 30

Thank you Francis 😄

The orange analogy is actually a really good way of describing it.

I think that's what surprised me most. Before entering these environments, I could intellectually understand that communication mattered. But understanding it conceptually and actually experiencing it are two completely different things.

It's like reading about swimming versus getting thrown into the pool 😭

And yeah, I agree about those "day in the life" videos. They're useful, but they mostly capture the visible layer. The feelings, uncertainty, awkward conversations, and learning curves underneath are much harder to see.

Really appreciate you reading as always 🙏

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• May 28

Yes, coding looks like 100% of a developer’s work from the outside, but in reality it’s more like 33% documentation, 33% coding, and 33% testing, with communication involved in all parts. Also, when it comes to developing personally, marketing becomes quite important since no one notices you. That’s me. 😅

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• May 30

Honestly the marketing point is exactly what pushed me toward writing this 😭

The more things I try, the more I notice the same pattern repeating:

The visible thing gets all the attention.
The invisible thing is where most of the work happens.

People see the app.
Not the communication.

People see the post.
Not the positioning.

People see the result.
Not the coordination underneath.

And yes... as someone currently learning marketing, getting people to notice something you've built is an entirely different skill tree LOL.

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• May 31

Ah! Maybe I need to learn a little marketing to get more attention!🤔

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• May 29

At the end of the day we are humans behind the code. Arguably now that building has accelerated with AI assistance, the bottleneck is more distribution and communications. Investing in soft skills such as communication is a good time investment.

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• May 30

That's a really interesting way of looking at it.

The AI point especially stands out to me because if implementation keeps getting faster, then things like communication, alignment, trust, distribution, and decision-making start becoming a larger percentage of the overall challenge.

The bottleneck shifts.

Which is funny because younger me thought becoming a better engineer was mostly about learning more technical things.

Now it feels more like learning how technical systems and human systems interact 😭

Always appreciate your insights Julien 🙏

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• May 28

The interesting part is that companies still mostly reward visible output.

Closed tickets.
Fast delivery.
Quick fixes.

But some of the most valuable engineers I've worked with looked "slower" because they were reducing future pain instead of generating present-looking velocity.

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• May 30

This is such a good observation.

Some of the most valuable work I've seen people do lately doesn't necessarily look productive in the short term.

Preventing future problems, reducing confusion, documenting context, helping others understand a system, making better decisions... none of those create immediate-looking velocity, but they compound over time.

It's almost like there's a difference between creating output and creating leverage.

And from the outside, those can look very different.

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• May 30

Yes, exactly as @codingwithjiro said, start small and eventually one day you will reach a point where looking back you'll think "what was I even bothered about...". You don't have to overcome it all in a day, just start with simple things, baby steps, stack small wins and I am sure you will be able to talk to anyone anytime surely.

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• May 30

spent my first year thinking the hard part was technical. wrong. the calls where scope quietly doubled were the ones that actually cost me.

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• May 30

"The calls where scope quietly doubled" is such a painfully relatable sentence

What's funny is that when I was learning, I imagined the hardest problems would be technical ones.

Now I'm starting to realize that ambiguity, changing requirements, communication gaps, and alignment issues can create far more work than the code itself.

The code usually does exactly what you tell it to do.

Humans are a bit more complicated.

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• May 30

right on the re-order of hard problems — but i'd push back slightly: most of the ambiguity i've hit was downstream of technical gaps. undocumented APIs, missing types, unclear ownership. the soft problems surface loudest when the hard infrastructure is already weak.

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• May 31

That's a really good point.

Now that I think about it, a lot of the ambiguity I've seen recently comes from missing context more than difficult people.

The communication problem is usually the visible part. The root cause is often buried somewhere in the system itself 😭

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• May 31

exactly — and the trap is treating it as a people problem because that is the fix you can actually point to. system-level missing context is harder to name, easier to route around, and never gets the postmortem.

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• May 31

This hits hard and is a massive realization most developers only hit after a few years in the trenches.

We spend so much time mastering languages and frameworks, only to realize that code is just the tool, not the destination. The real job is understanding the business problem, collaborating with people who don't speak tech, and building something that actually adds value. It's a tough pill to swallow initially, but once your mindset shifts from "how do I write this code" to "why am I building this," the entire job changes for the better. Great read.

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• May 31

Thank you Syed!

The "code is the tool, not the destination" part really resonates with me.

I think one of the biggest surprises for me was realizing how much of professional work happens before a single line of code is written. Understanding the problem, aligning people, clarifying requirements, communicating tradeoffs, all of that shapes the final outcome.

As a student, I thought the challenge was mostly technical. Lately, I've been realizing that knowing what to build and why can be just as important as knowing how to build it 😄

Glad the post resonated!

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Eljay-Adobe

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• May 30

Half of software development is coding, building, testing, debugging, documenting.

The other half is social: meetings, interactions, discussions, assisting, asking for assistance, mentoring, onboarding, coordinating, presenting.

I think the two most important things I've learned in my career are these:

the company doesn't care if you work 50, 60, 70, 80, 90+ hours per week; work your solid 40 and go home; if they want you to work overtime during crunch time they'll ask
the company does not pay you to code; the company pays you to ship product

I wish I had known those two important things at the beginning of my career. But I learned, eventually.

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• May 30

That second point really hits.

"The company pays you to ship product" feels obvious when you read it, but I don't think I truly understood it until I started working.

As a student, it's easy to think the value is in writing code. Then you enter a real environment and realize the value is in solving problems, delivering outcomes, and helping the team move forward.

And yeah, the overtime point is something I'm still learning too. It's surprisingly easy to fall into the trap of measuring dedication by hours instead of effectiveness.

Really appreciate you sharing these. Feels like the kind of lessons that sound simple but usually come from experience.

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Eljay-Adobe

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• May 30

Here's one of my replies to an older conversation about working overtime. Fits in with my first point, but with more blah blah.

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• Jun 2

Every developer enters freelancing thinking:

"Finally, I get paid to code."

Then 3 weeks later you’re doing therapy, project management, sales, negotiation, and decoding vague messages like:

"Can we make it more modern?"

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• Jun 2

😭😭😭

The amount of information hidden inside the sentence "Can we make it more modern?" is truly immeasurable

I feel like every freelancer eventually discovers they're also part project manager, part consultant, part negotiator, and occasionally part therapist.

The coding ends up being the easy part.

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