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Instead of Learn to Code, learn to hack sh** together
Should you learn to code? I used to always answer with an emphatic yes. Now I’m like 80/20 no. Here’s why.
Last week, I was advising a group of smart folks, scientists actually, who were leading the build of their first digital product. They had funding and traction, and they had hired an outside team to professionally develop the product.
We were talking about how to integrate Agile and product management when one of them asked — “I know we’re not going to write code, but to keep up with this outside team, should we learn to code?”
Fair question. And like I said, my muscle memory told me to say yes.
Real Quick: What is Learn To Code?
Learn to Code, for context’s sake, is shorthand for a movement that believes everyone — in our case, every entrepreneur — no matter their role or background or experience, can and should learn to code, at least a little.
Learn to Code is built on the premise that over the last few years, coding tools have simplified greatly, and coding instruction has become both plentiful and affordable. Thus, anyone with the will and the free time can indeed pick up enough code to Hello World in any language pretty quickly, and then on to core functionality, data handling, and interfaces not long after that.
And that’s true.
But the catch is, and always will be: Time.
Lack of time is the obvious argument against Learn To Code, and honestly, it’s the only valid one. I wrote a piece last week on when an entrepreneur should move from vaporware to actually hiring a developer, but if we’ve already got access to developers, we should let them code while we do the thing we’re good at. We’ll still need to manage our development team and ask a lot of questions and read between the lines — whether we know a little Python or not.
So in my story above, the answer was no, don’t learn to code. Do your science, talk to your customers, harden your requirements, sell your software, and just manage this outside development team that you have the luxury to afford.
Which begs the obvious question:
