#157 Getting a developer job in 2025 with Lane Wagner
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But most people listening to this are underestimating how good you really probably should be to really succeed as a developer. Like if you really, in my mind, it's like, if you want to be a developer, why not shoot for being a top 10% developer? There's nothing stopping you. But then that also are way underestimating how much actual free time.

Welcome back to the Free Code Camp Podcast, your source for raw, unedited interviews with developers. This week's musical intro with yours truly on the drums, guitar, bass, and keyboard. We're going all the way back to 1990, Ninja Gaiden 2, and we're going all the way back to 1990.

Overdrive.

♪♪♪

Welcome back to the Free Code Camp Podcast. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of FreeCodeCamp.org.

Each week, we're bringing you insight from developers, founders, and ambitious people in tech. This week, we're talking with Lane Wagner. He's a software engineer and prolific contributor to Free Code Camp. And he's the founder of Boot.dev, an online learning platform.

Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out of the box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at wixstudio.com.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, you're somebody whom I've admired for a long time, and I just want to start by thanking you for the many books, full-length books you've contributed to Free Code Camp and to the community. I have links in the show notes, many, many links to different books that Lane has written and, of course, several video courses as

that Lane has created on, I think, SQL. Gosh, getting a developer job. And then you have a course also on HTTP networking protocols. Very cool stuff. And thanks again for making those freely available.

Absolutely. And one on Go. Can't forget Go. Yes. And we're going to talk a lot about Go because that is, dare I say, your favorite programming language right now? Yes. It has been for a while. Yeah.

Yeah. Awesome. So I'm excited to learn a little bit about the job market for developers specifically. Let's start talking about that because people really want to know what is the job market actually like? There's always doom and gloom on the streets. There are always people that are applying for hundreds of developer jobs and not getting callbacks. But...

are things fundamentally different today as we head into 2025 than they were in say, you know, I think 2001, when did you graduate from university? No, I grew up. I'm not that old. Uh, I graduated. Yeah. Sorry. I misspoke. 2021 was when you found a boot dev, right? Uh, yeah, it was a side project in 2021. I went full time in at the end of 2022. So this actually hasn't been all that long. Um,

I started programming professionally in 2016. 2016, okay. Which was also when I graduated college. So 2016, obviously pretty far away from the Great Recession of 2009, pretty far away from the COVID pandemic. So you were kind of like equidistant from those big shocks. What was it like applying for jobs there as a... It's worth noting that you have a computer science degree.

And it's not from a prestigious, well-known school, but it is from a good... It's from Utah Tech. Utah Tech University. Yeah. They used to be called Dixie State University. It's essentially like... It was a community college that just a couple of years earlier had kind of graduated to university status. Yeah. And what was it like getting out of that program and applying for jobs? Yeah. So there were...

Almost no jobs in St. George, Utah, which is where I went to school, where I grew up. It's a very small town, southern Utah, about an hour and a half outside of Las Vegas. There was like three companies at the time that employed programmers. And the biggest one maybe employed like 30 programmers. And then the other two maybe employed like five. So there really just weren't many options. When I was a senior, I was super... I was like...

shoulder to the grindstone trying to apply for internships and part-time jobs when I was a senior in college, so my last year. And I was lucky enough about...

five months. No, actually it was longer than that. It was actually the end of my junior year. Uh, I was able to land a part-time programming job. I was able to put in about 30 hours a week at this programming job. I was still full-time in school. Um, it was like crazy busy part of my life. Still not as crazy busy as having kids, but it was very busy. Uh, and that was for a company local that was not a tech company. It was not like a software company. It was actually a hardware company and they just needed someone that could like write scripts for

for their raspberry pies and little hardware components so they could accurately read sensor data, which was something I never did in school. So I kind of had to self-teach a little bit. But that was awesome because I got a year of experience on my resume so that when I graduated, or I should say as graduation was coming up, I was applying like crazy online, knowing that I'd probably have to leave St. George because again, there's just no jobs here. And at that time, remote work

like wasn't common and certainly wasn't common for junior developers. Um, so I always assumed I'd have to move. Um, and I would characterize it as, you know, I think over the last two years, people have really looked at the job market as it being like really, really, really hard. And I think that's true.

But it wasn't that easy in 2015, 2016, 2017 if your reference point is still 2020. It's easy to forget that 2020 and 2021 were crazy in terms of just every company hiring like mad with low interest rates. So I would characterize it as it was tough, but it was definitely probably a little easier than middle of 2023. Yeah.

Yeah, and even then, you were relatively young. You had a computer science degree, which I always tell people, a CS degree is a CS degree. Obviously, if you have a CS degree from like...

MIT or from Caltech or something like that, that is going to stand out a lot more. But, you know, a computer science degree is still somewhat standardized, right? Like they're probably going to assume, you know, you know, at least one or two programming languages. You probably know how to use SQL. You probably maybe know version control, right?

I think pretty much every computer science degree program is hopefully teaching those now. Um, and then you, you might know some Linux, you might know a little bit of algorithms and data structures and things like that. So, so it's, it's kind of like the nutrition label. Like people just want to see that you check that box, right? Uh, that, that you don't have like trans fats essentially. So, so, uh,

Given that given that you did already have a bit of an advantage on the job market Let's so we're gonna do apples to apples comparisons Yeah, you and I probably know many CS grads who are finishing their degree program And I just want to be very clear that we're gonna talk a lot about self-taught software development later But for the purpose of doing an apples to apples comparison now, let's roleplay You're graduating

in 2024. And maybe you're graduating in 2025 and you're starting to apply for jobs in the tail end of 2024. Maybe you have an internship under your belt. How is this going to be different from when you were looking back in like 2015 through 2017?

It's definitely different. I do have one interesting anecdote is that I have two younger brothers that also got CS degrees. The one just younger than me graduated in 2020.

uh, ish. And so, and he like grabbed a job immediately. Uh, my next younger brother actually has not quite graduated yet. He's on track to graduate next year. Um, and he already secured a job here in town, which again, same place, St. George, Utah. Uh, it wasn't easy. He had to look for like, you know, three months or so, but that's about the same amount of time I looked. Um, so I, I guess like the anecdote is just like, it's still possible. Right. Um, I,

It's always hard to say in the aggregate because all you can really do is look at high-level data and it's based on geographic region. I do think there's one unique challenge in that

The way people look for jobs has changed a lot in the last eight years. Um, and the way people post jobs has changed a lot. Like when I graduated, it wasn't that weird to just like go to a office that you knew was hiring and like talk to the front desk. You're like, Hey, like I heard you guys are hiring. Is there anyone I can talk to? Like there were, it wasn't so weird to do these other things that were more in person and more, you know, kind of a way to kick down the front door. Um,

now everything's online. I have a bunch of theories about maybe problems that that's created, but, uh, the problem of just getting your foot in the door, I think is a bigger problem, even if, and I'm not saying that this is the case, but even if the like supply and demand in 2024 is the same as it was in 2017, I think the, the, um,

the number of connections between people looking for jobs and people offering jobs has proliferated. There's more connections. And so even if it's the same number of jobs, it's like the same 100 people have all applied to the same 100 jobs, right? So it means every single one of those jobs has 100 applicants. Even though it's the same supply and demand, maybe before it would have been the same 10 people applied to the same 10 jobs. I don't know if that's making sense why that would make it harder to get your foot in the door.

So when you use, I'd love to hear your theories on this. You mentioned you have some additional theories as to why things have moved to online form completion. Of course, when I got my first job, which you may have read my book because you referenced it in your article, like it was just me going to a Ruby on rails meetup and

and a bunch of people were from the same company. And then they, uh, they were looking for a developer. And back when I was looking for a job back in the early 2010s, uh, that was just the best way. Like everybody was like, yeah, don't use web forms. Like don't waste your time with that stuff. Like everybody would just go and try to meet people and like have lunches and put themselves, go to conferences, go to hackathons, all those things. Uh, and, uh,

I mean, as far as I can tell, there's still lots of hackathons going on. There's still lots of meetups. I'm, you know, keynoting like a conference this weekend, and then I'm going to be judging several hackathons later in the year and stuff like that. So, so I know that they're still happening and I imagine that's still a good path to do it. But, but you said that a lot more is moving online. And I guess my question would be, why is that? And is there anything job applicants can do to resist that?

that being shoved into that kind of like course of applying for jobs online and doing that hundreds of times. Of course, I talked with Logan Kilpatrick, who works at OpenAI, and he said he did like

He said he did like 500 job applications. It wasn't even a big deal. He just sat down and cranked them out because he knew that was what you had to do. But is that still what you had to do? Or is there still like a meat space equivalent of just being able to walk up and talk to people and build relationships that way and find jobs? The first thing I'll say is like, do you still have to do that? I would say you still should do that even if you also have other strategies. Like

I talk to a lot of people that are in the middle of trying to get a new job and they're like, yeah, you know, I apply to a couple jobs a day online, haven't done any meetups. And the only thing I can say is like, you're just not doing nearly enough. Like, let's not even worry too much about the strategy yet. You just need to be spending way more time.

on a daily basis applying for jobs. Like in 2016, when I was applying to my first and second jobs, it was like, I would spend a few hours a day just filling out applications, looking for different things that I could actually go to different ways. I can get in contact with people. Um, it doesn't mean you need to like sit down for eight hours or anything like, but you can get a lot done in a couple hours of like, you know, every day sitting down and working on this, um, to, to answer your question of like moving online, um,

I remember when I graduated high school and I got a job as a server at a local restaurant, my friend and I, we just graduated. Um, I'd been doing like college classes in my last year of high school. So I hadn't been working a job and it was like, okay, I graduated last week. Time to go get a job. Um,

And it didn't even cross our minds to go online to look for jobs or job openings. Like we just like got in my car together and drove around town and like walked into places. We're like, Oh, are you hiring? Can you like, is there a form I can fill out? And we like just literally did that for like two days, like two afternoons. Uh, and we got, we got jobs at these, at these, at this restaurant together. Um,

The point I'm trying to make is just like, I think the cultural mindset of like how you would get a job has really shifted over the last 10 years where it's like, no, obviously you go now, now you like go do a Google search and you look. But I don't think anything has fundamentally changed in the sense that like, well, you could, you could go walk in and see if they're hiring. And I would bet that in most cases, at least you're going to get a,

through the front door better that way. Yeah. Because you actually showed up, they saw your face, they were able to talk to you for a second. Um, and you get noticed. It doesn't mean it's going to work every time, but at least you get noticed. Um, the, why it's shifted online, I, I would imagine has to be a combination of two things. Um,

Younger generations are trained to do everything online because we've moved everything online. That's how the internet works. I mean, it was our fault as developers, right? We moved everything online. And so if you're younger, you're just used to doing anything that has to do with information. You're doing it online. And then COVID. I mean, obviously, COVID pushed so much stuff online. Yeah. I mean, COVID was an accelerator of a lot of

sociological trends. Of course, remote work, which I'm like a huge fan of. Free Code Camp has always been all remote. I don't know. You all are, are you all remote too? Yeah. Yeah. And like, frankly, like,

I don't see the hype around working in person. Like, uh, I've worked in person. I used to be a school director and like literally shared like an office with my staff and interacted with every single person who I managed every single day. Right. And now I have like meetings with some of my team members every day.

every few months, maybe just like a quick, you know, video chat, um, to see how things are going and everything else. I can just like follow, you know, the get repo and stuff like that and see what's going on. Uh, and, um, so that was one thing that was accelerated by COVID for sure. Um, companies are of course pulling people back into the office, which is sad. I just read a statistic, uh,

that it used to be like one in seven jobs were remote, and now it's like one in 11. So it is decreasing. And a lot of friends have had to move because their company is like, all right, come into the office or you're fired, basically. And it's sad to see managers not learning the lesson of if you need to supervise people...

and put them under a microscope, like frankly, you're not hiring the right people is what I would tell you. If you don't trust your people, then you're not hiring the right people. And that's a you problem. That's not a process problem. But anyway, I digress. So to talk about the phenomenon of people applying online,

I do want to bring up the fact that I know lots of people who are not Zoomers, as they're called, like the really young people, but are in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s that are applying for jobs and are experiencing similar pushback and similar difficulty obtaining a job. Yeah.

You can go, you know, in a way back machine, you can go anywhere and you can look at any article ever written about getting a job and you can see people complaining that it's just impossible to get a job right now. Maybe you couldn't find that in 2020, which was like, uh, you know, the best buyers market or sellers market ever for, uh,

people that had developer skills. And, you know, it, it will be interesting to see whether that we're, whether we ever experienced a boom like that again, where companies like Microsoft, uh, companies like Google, uh, we're just like hiring every developer they could and just putting them in a war chest just in case they had a use for them later because zero interest rates. Right.

It'll be interesting to see if that happens again. But there are a lot of people who swear that it was never like this before, who are maybe even senior developers who are lamenting that it's so hard to get a job. Like, how would you reconcile kind of like young people being culturally trained to just do everything online versus like people that are, you know, my age, I'm 43 and your age, you're in your mid thirties, I presume, right?

No, I just turned 30. Oh, congratulations on starting your fourth decade of life. I'm just unhealthy. Yeah. Okay. Well, with your accomplishments, I figured you were in your 30s, but I shouldn't be so presumptive. So how would you reconcile that? What is it that more experienced people are feeling when they're publicly venting? And keep in mind, a lot of people...

We're Americans, especially we've got this, you know, Puritan work ethic and like we're conditioned to not complain about things. Right. Complaining doesn't get you far in America. People don't want to hear it. It's true. But people are still complaining. And that says something that it's like really a problem if people are actually, you know, coming out and saying like, this is this job market is ridiculous. Like, what do you think is going on there? Yeah. So.

There is a problem, clearly. And again, I would argue like it's not as bad. So just to give everyone kind of a reference or like put you in my headspace of my perception of the world. And this is just, this is not me asserting. This is how it is. This is my perception of what the job market seems to be based on all the students I talk to every day and the data that I look at on like layoffs.fyi and stuff.

It's like, okay, we had a kind of boom in software starting in 2010 with Ruby on Rails. You had this boom in almost indie hacker software as a service startups.

that really started to gain traction. They hired a bunch of developers. Again, Rails was really popular during this time. Node was starting to gain traction, Go a little bit later. And it just kind of ramped up over the 2010s. It wasn't like gangbusters, everyone's getting hired, but there was a massive shortage in developers. So it was like the number of jobs were growing fairly quickly,

we weren't producing new CS graduates or bootcamp graduates at a rate that could keep up with jobs. And so all the news over like all the 2010s was like, we just don't have enough programmers. Like we just need more programmers. We got to have more programmers. I'm sure this is the time when you founded free code camp was like early in that cycle. Right. Um,

2020 hits. It's like peak that it's like, we just do not have enough programmers. Uh, everything's gone online. Zoom has to hire like crazy, right? Google has to hire. Everyone's making money hand over fist interest rates are at 0%. Like we can, if you're a software company, you can just take out $5 million in debt with almost no interest rate, hire a bunch of programmers. Everything's looking good. Um,

2022 happens and like two things happen. It's like all the stuff that went online is now going back to in person. And so these, these companies just aren't making as much money as they were and interest rates spike. So like both things that made a company like really wants to just like air on the side of hiring too many developers, too,

Now they don't want that risk. Uh, and, and so I would argue in, in 2022, 2023, we really hit kind of a low in terms of supply and demand. A lot of people got laid off. And now my perception is in 2024, we've been making a recovery. Um, it's, it's not comparable to 2020, 2021. We may never have like a disparity that great again, or maybe, maybe not in the next decade. Uh, but it's starting to get back to what I would consider normal. Um,

And what that means is in a normal market for, think about what the job of a programmer is. Like I actually had some guilt when I started working as a programmer. It's like, holy cow, I'm making like three to four times as much as I was making as a server. I love my job. I sit in an air conditioned room all day. I get to work on like fun brain teasers.

Um, like I look outside, I see construction workers like having a terrible time, probably not making as much money as me. Like what gives? And like, I know it's hard to be a programmer, but it's not like that hard. And especially considering at that time, like half of my coworkers didn't have CS degrees. They'd gone to bootcamps. Um,

So like something seemed a little strange. And I think that they're like in a, in a more normal market, what you get is people taking advantage of that fact, right? Like you can learn to code and that, that increases the supply. So I guess what I'm getting at is in today's market,

you just have to be, you just have to be better. Like programmers that are in the top 10% of their cohort for whatever like pay band they're looking for, like junior developers, midlife. If you're like the top 10%, like you're getting jobs. Um,

Now, I will say there's an important caveat that you need to be top 10% technically, and you also need to be able to communicate that you're in the top 10% technically. Because I've met a lot of people that have technical chops but do a terrible job presenting themselves, and so it doesn't work.

There's a really good saying. I wish I could remember who I'm quoting where it's like, if you're an eight out of 10 technical skills, but a two out of 10 communication skills, you're going to communicate that you're a two out of 10 in your technical skills, which is like, it's super true. And so the, the, the fundamental best advice is if you've been at this for, I would say more than three months, like really at it, like applying to jobs, going to meetups, doing everything you can, and you're not getting any bites in today's market, like,

I would say it's time to look at your skill set and your communication skills and like fundamentally work on those. Like maybe, maybe you're not as good as programming as you thought you were, or maybe you're not as good at presenting how good you are at programming as you thought you were. Um, because after, after three months of really grinding, I think in today's market, it's definitely doable. Yeah. Yeah.

And communication skills are something that I'll trumpet. Like I tell everybody, like focus on making sure your English is really good. If you're applying for jobs at like a multinational corporation or if you're applying for jobs in the U S a lot of people think their English is good enough and it's not necessarily good.

People will be very polite, but if you have a very heavy accent that is difficult for North Americans to understand and you're applying for jobs in North America, they won't say that's why they're rejecting you, but that could be a cause. Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, he was giving a talk at TechCrunch Disrupt.

This was like maybe 2010, 2011. Like I was on the main stage presenting at the hackathon and we got to go first. It was a disaster. They rushed us off stage because they were trying to like make an example that they were going to stick very closely to the time schedule. So the first of 300 plus people who presented at TechCrunch

crunch disrupt, uh, the hackathon. But Paul Graham was giving the talk there and he said very clearly, he said like most people who think that they have like decent programmer chops probably do have decent programmer chops, but what's probably holding them back is their command of English. I know even native English speakers who grew up in Oklahoma city where I grew up, uh, who's English, frankly, like they don't know how to use English grammar very well. They just get by with communicating and, you know, uh,

Like, I don't know, elementary school English. And it does make a difference. Like if you can string together coherent thoughts and you can express yourself well and you can do it without using a lot of stop words and things like that, like ums and uhs, which I still struggle with, then people will be much more likely to project upon you intelligence. Right.

And at the end of the day, like even if you're just sitting in a cubicle writing code and almost all of your communication is through written text, you still need to be able to speak eloquently and you need to be sufficiently articulate for people to be able to understand what you're saying, especially if you're going to like a whiteboard and you're trying to communicate some big, you know, sweeping design change.

or something like that, you need to be able to actually articulate it. And I meet lots of people from South Asia, for example, who grew up speaking English and used English as their primary language in school who don't yet have sufficient command of the language because they're not necessarily using it outside of an academic setting and they haven't really put in the time to tech up their English and also to some extent,

or standardize their English. There is like a standard South Asian English that is just as valid an English dialect as, you know, British English or Canadian English or Australian English. And, you know, Americans will generally understand that. But if you're speaking kind of like just English

local variant that is relatively unknown to people that you're working with, that is going to be a challenge. So one thing I consider doing is like, you know, there's like accent kind of a reduction in like a lot of Europeans have to do this because if you listen to people from Germany, best English education system in the world, a lot of them still struggle with being able to enunciate in a way that like

Us North Americans will understand easily if people are having to put a lot of effort into trying to figure out what words you're saying, it's going to take their brain power away from processing the actual meaning of those words that you're saying. So, um, yeah, so, so I'm right there with you. And, uh, I just want to emphasize that it is worth the time and energy to normalize and standardize your English. I do not talk like a typical person from Oklahoma city, uh,

Because I spent a whole lot of time trying to talk more like somebody from Los Angeles because that is – everybody watches Hollywood movies and they're used to hearing people talk like that. And it makes it easier for them to understand what I'm saying. So I don't consider that like betraying my Oklahoma heritage or anything like that. It's a very pragmatic decision to just talk in as standard a way as possible and speak kind of the lingua franca of the people around me. So –

Again, just to stop waxing poetically about what you just said, but communication skills are everything. And you can be a mediocre developer who has very good communication skills, and you can probably still make a career for yourself. There are probably limits to how far you can go as a mediocre developer, but the limits to how far you can go as an excellent developer who has trouble communicating with people...

are going to be much more profound. The other thing is, you know, written English is not a given. Like, plenty of people can talk and then you ask them to sit down in front of a computer and really, like, write out what they're thinking and write out, like, a clear, detailed pull request or GitHub issue or something like that and they struggle with that. That is...

Uh, that indicates that you need to spend more time practicing your English. A lot of people just take for granted. I grew up speaking English. I'm an English speaker. It's good enough. Let's move on to other things. But really it is worth spending a lot of time.

revisiting that and improving that. Especially if you're looking at remote or mostly remote jobs, that written part gets way more important. And just one final, I'm going to harp on it again, but from a different angle, communication skills don't just make it easier to get the job and communicate that you are a good developer. They actually make you a much better developer, especially

in 2024, think back to like the two thousands or maybe even like the nineties. It was like, if you wanted to be a great developer and you were like struggling with technical problem, you probably, your only recourse was like maybe a programmer that you actually knew, uh,

IRC chat channel or a physical book to like figure out what's going on in 2024 your resources to figure out a technical problem are Vast and endless you've got chat GPT. You've got Google right like you can figure out the technical problems a lot easier today And hard technical problems. Oh, you don't know how to implement a binary search tree great You can go copy paste one from online in whatever language you want, right? um

I'm not saying it's not valuable to learn those things. We'll maybe talk about that later, but it's easier to solve those problems. What is not any easier to solve is how to communicate to your, the rest of your team, what your code is supposed to do. Right? So like you can be really good at hacking on your own solo project and solving problems. And you don't even realize that the code that you're writing is incredibly hard to read and understand hard for other people to maintain and extend. Um,

Good communication skills aren't just good written English skills. They're also good code writing skills. You have, you, you're better able to, to format the code in a way that a team will appreciate how you structure your code. They'll be able to work with it better. And it shows in interviews and it shows on how your code looks on GitHub when you're looking for a job. Yeah. Yeah. And I always like in programming to essentially trying to communicate with the computer. You're just being incredibly literal and,

because computers don't have the inductive skills of a human being. They can't kind of like infer what you're trying to tell them. Obviously, programming languages get more and more declarative as time passes, and we don't have to be quite as precise. And in the future, we'll just

Talk to a computer and it will be able to interpret what we're trying to say. Just like if you use the latest versions of LLMs, they're getting better and better at trying to understand your poorly stated prompt and figure out what it is they think you want. And I do think that'll improve. But what you said about just having that clarity and being able to think in a structured way, let's transition to that because communication skills...

are just how you're articulating the thoughts that are already in your head. In terms of actually thinking like a programmer, I suspect you've spent a great deal of time thinking about thinking and thinking, you know, critical thinking, reasoning, things like that. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the challenges that people face when they're trying to think in a structured way to why it's so hard to learn formal topics like math and programming.

I'm going to like misquote someone again. I don't, uh, the, the idea of what I'm trying to quote is, is something like, um, clear thinking leads to clear writing, which leads to clearer thinking. So like you get in this virtual, this virtuous cycle of like, if you're thinking clearly, you can write clearly and then you can, it'll,

that clear writing will actually help you think clearly again. It's, it's almost the same concept as like, if you can teach a concept to someone, you learn something in the process of teaching. It helps you refine your thought process around things. Maybe there was like, you know, some words that in your head you were using to describe something, but they weren't quite actually like, you weren't quite using them in the precise way. And now that you're teaching it to someone, you have to like look up the actual precise definitions. Now you're able to explain your thoughts more clearly. So, um,

What I would say is like, you just want to get into that virtuous cycle and you want to be mindful of it as, as you're doing it. Right. So as you're thinking about a program, it's not just about how do I get past this error? How do I get past this error? Like, what can I insert into this code to get past this error? Right. How can I get the behavior that I need? Like, I've seen a lot of code where people will like add superfluous lines of code and then like, you know, maybe three lines down, they do something that just undoes the operation, like four lines before. So you've got like code on line three, right?

does something code on line six undoes that exact same thing. And they only got themselves into that state because they were trying stuff to get it to work. And now that it's done, there's actually like, you know, you're essentially adding line, adding three to a online three and removing three from a online six. And you've got this convoluted mess of,

And it's not because you're a bad programmer. It's because you weren't being mindful about what everything's doing. You're just trying to get it to work. And so... And that's okay, especially when you're just starting out. But if you really want to improve...

It's like, you need to be thinking about what everything does. You really want to be refining your understanding of fundamentally what's happening, especially if you're, this is something I don't encourage, but a lot of people do it anyways. And, and, and people do have success. I don't want to like outright say it's a bad idea. It's just not my preferred way of learning, but people will jump into a framework really early and, you know, use lots of APIs and not fundamentally understand underneath the hood, like what those, like, for example, react APIs are actually doing. Um,

why, you know, hooks work the way that they work. And the more that you can continue to iterate on that understanding, um, the clearer you will think and your, your code will be better for it. Yeah. But it's just reps. It's just reps. Like I, I have no advice other than like put in the reps and keep, um,

consuming content that talks about it, right? There's a lot of great podcasts out there that talk about this kind of stuff, how to organize code, how to structure code. Um, but at the end of the day, it is really just a lot, a lot of reps. Yeah. And I, to what extent would you, uh, attribute, uh, just the power of reps and practice in the human mind's ability to assimilate skills? Cause you would think like if you just had like some program, let's imagine you have like some cyborg mind, like you've got data from Star Trek, um,

And you can just basically give them this giant logic table. You can say, if this, then that, and you can teach them how to play like, uh, you know, perfect poker, right there. There's like, I can't remember the term for it, but basically you can play perfect poker perfectly, uh,

Uh, with like all the statistics and everything like incorporated into all your decision making and stuff like that. So if you were to give a powerful cyborg like data, uh, uh, is he a cyborg? He's not cybernetic cause he's not an organ. He's just an Android. Okay. So data, by the way, Star Trek, the next generation, best show ever. If you haven't watched it, it does hold up. It's got kind of some of that eighties hokiness, but it's so fun. Um, anyway, uh,

When I refer to data, I refer to the... If you've ever watched our trick, it's the guy with the gray skin with the slick back hair who always wears the yellow jumper. But, I mean, in theory, you could just give him a flowchart, essentially. I mean, that's basically what a program is. It's just like the control flow, right? Of what to do. And then he can sit down and he can play perfect poker. But humans don't work like that. Humans have to...

kind of gradually like etch in all the different wrinkles in our brain. I don't think that's literally how it works, but, uh, we have to gradually through our associative network, like figure out what works, what doesn't. And, uh, you know, develop heuristics and other, uh,

tools essentially to kind of like subconsciously get things done so that like a lot of decision making can be pushed down to the subconscious and instinctual so that we can still have bandwidth to process like the more

fine considerations of the situation, right? And keep in mind, I am not like a brain scientist. I'm speaking in extremely lay people terms. If you happen to be a brain scientist and you want to come on and talk about like how practice works, let me know. But like to what would you attribute

and that human, like the reps, everybody talks about the reps. You talk about the reps, the primogen, who is our mutual friend. Uh, you've interviewed him. I've interviewed him. Uh, I enjoy watching his channel. Um, there are a lot of developers out there. I mean, if you go in, you talk to the, the old guard, you know, uh, of programming, right? Like all the people that wrote books, uh, in the nineties and stuff, or even going back farther, people just espouse the role of practice, uh,

Why do you think practice is so important? So the first thing I'll say is just...

One of the reasons I started boot dev was out of frustration of the boot camps I was seeing at the time. And I started as a side project in 2020. So I'm kind of referring to like my perception of the boot camps from like 2018, 2019, where the marketing was like, learn to code in an obscenely short amount of time, right? Like six weeks, 12 weeks, 18 weeks, like very, very short, like go from knowing nothing about code to being employable as a programmer in a

crazy low amounts of time. And what that in my mind translates to is crazy low amounts of reps, crazy low amounts of exposure to problems that you're going to run into as a developer. And so one of my big goals with boot dev was like, no, no, no. I want to build a platform that's all about

putting in tons and tons and tons of reps and actually learning all the fundamentals. Um, so that's like kind of my, my, the philosophy, uh, where I'm coming from, why practice matters. I think actually like to use your analogy of data from Star Trek, it actually does have something fundamentally to do with how we work as humans. I'm also not a neuroscientist though. Maybe you should get Sam Harris on or something, uh, to talk about this. Uh,

We learn, we practice, and that changes the neural pathways in our brain. That's as biologically technical as I can get about it. But that's just how we work as humans. And that's also kind of how the neural networks that we've built work. We've built them to model our own styles of learning. But they get reps automatically because we're feeding examples through their neural pathways at insanely high rates. But for humans...

Until we can put Neuralink in your brain and download different neural pathways directly into your cerebrum, I think we're stuck with just getting a lot of exposure and rewiring our brains the hard way. So even if I can't expound on why that is, in my experience in 2024, the best way to do it is still just to get...

get lots of practice in yeah i don't know if that's the answer you're looking for i like that expression rewiring your brain the hard way yeah because the easy way is just science fiction and it may remain science fiction for a very long time um may not we'll see uh i'm an optimist uh i would love to just be able to learn how to fly a helicopter by blinking my eyes a bunch real quick um i will say there are better and worse types of reps like i have seen a lot of

programmers that I would argue probably aren't learning the most effective way. But I mean, at the end of the day, putting in reps is better than not. Okay. Let's talk about that. So what would you consider to be like an ideal rep? Let's say hypothetically, this is the perennial question. Like if you had to do it all over again, how would you do it? Yeah.

So there's this term used in like education science. I was introduced to it when I was working at a startup called LALTAL. Zone Approximal Development? That's the one. Zone Approximal Development, which I've only heard of it. So I can't really cite research or anything. But the basic idea seems pretty sound to me, which is like,

You just want to be in this space where you're struggling with what you're doing. Um, but it's not so hard that you're like completely hitting a wall and not able to progress. And you kind of want to bounce around in that, that,

that zone of proximal development, not doing things that are too easy. Like examples of things that are too easy would be, I've seen developers that just like keep rebuilding portfolio websites, right? Um, just, just keep doing new designs with HTML and CSS. And it's like, if you want to be a designer, like maybe that's a good way to get better at that. But like, if you want to be a developer, it's probably not, you're probably not pushing yourself hard enough to like solve technical problems. Um,

And then of course there's, there's, there's people that go too far and get stuck and discouraged, which is just, you know, you're tackling projects that are, you're not ready for yet. You haven't learned the fundamentals. And so you spend a lot more time than you should have to, um, going straight to the hardest parts. And so getting yourself into this zone of proximal development and staying there and putting in your reps there is where you should be moving the fastest.

Okay. So if I had to like kind of reiterate or recapitulate what you just said, it's kind of like this Goldilocks zone of learning. It's not too easy. It's not too hard. And you do feel some degree of discomfort. And yes, there's this sense of ambiguity and ambiguity is like the enemy in the sense that like it makes it difficult.

unclear whether we're moving in the right direction and what the next step is. And I always tell people, just use a, you know, a curriculum developed by educators who know what they're talking about. Just use a good textbook, use a fixed curriculum like the free code camp curriculum or the boot.dev curriculum. And, uh,

trust in that it's going to kind of like it's designed from an instructional design perspective to keep you in that kind of zone of proximal development. And, and also a lot of people are like, but what about spaced repetition? Like we incorporate spaced repetition. We are educators. We know about all these things that work and they are very well encoded in the, uh, the flow of a free code camp. And if you just Google around and you're like, does free code camp even work? Like I feel like I'm not learning anything that that is normal. It is totally normal. Um,

to feel like you've plateaued and to feel like you're not moving as fast as you used to move. And that progress can be invisible. But a lot of it is just you're bumping up against ambiguity and you're not sure which way is forward and you're not sure whether what you're doing makes any sense. So like the Karate Kid...

Great movie from the 80s. He has to learn waxing on and waxing off. Mr. Miyagi is giving Daniel-san lots of different tasks to do. And put the jacket on the hanger. Now take it off. What Daniel-san doesn't realize is he's developing all the muscle memory, all the reps and stuff, to be really good at karate. But...

Mr. Miyagi could have made the entire thing a lot less dramatic and a lot more like if it were real, it wouldn't be like an exciting 80s movie because you'd just be like, oh, I understand. So I'm learning all I'm committing to muscle memory, all the different like things I need to be able to parry attacks and stuff like that.

But no, he doesn't do that. So Daniel's son is incredibly frustrated and he's just like, oh, I don't understand. Why am I not, when am I actually going to learn karate? The whole movie, he's just like, okay, now my competition is coming up. Mr. Miyagi, will you please teach me karate, right? And so Free Code Camp's curriculum is developed in that way where you are doing all those things, but we also try to be intentional about reminding you, hey, this is why you're learning what you're learning. And we're actually in the process of like,

The Christmas relaunch of the full-stack development certification is going to incorporate a lot more theory because people were just too focused on getting reps. We gave them too many reps and too little context. My mind is like it's easy to delude yourself into making yourself feel like you're making progress by watching YouTube videos and by reading books and not actually spending enough time pounding the keyboard constantly.

getting code done. Right. So, uh, so, so that is kind of, there's, there's this mix between like keeping people actually doing the work because they can easily delude themselves. It doesn't feel like I'm learning as fast as if I just go watch this Twitch streamer who knows exactly what they're doing and they're doing all this stuff. And I feel like I'm,

I feel like I'm the best programmer in the world, but then you kind of realize, well, I'm not actually programming. It's just this kind of phenomenon where I feel like I'm programming because I'm watching is the same thing. If you watch somebody who's really good at a video game and it feels so satisfying to watch, but you're not actually getting better at the video game. Maybe you're getting a little bit better by being exposed to like how they approach the game. Maybe they're talking out loud and talking about different heuristics they use and stuff like that. But,

At the end of the day, you actually have to practice and it needs to be deliberate practice and it needs to be in that zone of proximal development. Otherwise, you're just redoing the same thing over and over, which may have some value, right? Like there is marginal value in building your portfolio page and redesigning it for the 10th time. But maybe you want to build a compiler or something like that. It's going to push you in a completely different direction and expand your skills, right? It's something like...

There's like an 80-20 or a 90-10 rule here when it comes to actually writing code versus watching or reading or listening about code. Where it's like the 80 or the 90 should be you writing code. And the 20 or the 10% should be you consuming content about writing code. And I actually think that that 10-20% is really valuable. Like...

It's a lot better to be 80-20 or 90-10 than 100% writing code. It'll save you from a lot of mistakes. Like you said, you'll see... You'll get to hear a lot of things that make you think about how you write code differently. But 80% watching and listening and reading about code and 20% writing is so far in the wrong direction. You'll make progress. It'll be really, really slow. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you could look at it as like some...

mixture of jet fuel right like jet fuel is going to involve many different ingredients and if you get the Process wrong the jets gonna blow up But like learning learning is a little bit different, right? But but you know, there is an optimal mixture and I would encourage people so one thing that like of course you have a podcast Free cooking we have a podcast back in banter good podcast. I know you're on break right now, and I hope it comes back but

That is something where you can kind of jam a little bit of learning into your day. So you're going for a run or you're washing the dishes or something like that. That's kind of incidental learning that you can kind of use to fill in the cracks in your day. If you think about it, you could fill a sink with lots of dishes and then you could also pour a bunch of water and dish soap in there. So the total volume of the day is filled by...

And there are big chunky things like sitting at a computer and doing a code session, which frankly you could do like quick bites, you know, kind of like information grazing and quick challenges and free code camp set up that way. I think a boot. Dev is as well where you can just go in and do a couple coding challenges and you can make some progress that way. But where the real learning happens in my humble opinion is when you can sit down for like an hour or two uninterrupted and just

really stretch your brain on a coding challenge. But because these resources are useful, like you can just open up YouTube and you can just watch something on YouTube while you're driving to work or something like don't watch it while you're driving. But because...

This is so convenient because we have these little devices in our pocket that are more powerful than the most powerful computers in the world. 20 years ago, um, we can easily access all this information. So I do think it's very useful. Um,

But like what I would recommend personally, and I'd be interested in hearing whether you agree with this and you don't have to just agree because this is my show. But like I would say if you actually have a laptop in front of you, prioritize coding. Like you should never be watching YouTube on a laptop. You should always be like doing a coding exercise and then, you know, listening to YouTube or watching it while you're away from your actual keyboard. How do you feel about that?

So I listened to, in fact, I was going to say, I think my first introduction to you might have been, I mean, I knew about FreeCodeCamp for a long time, but my first introduction to you personally might have been your first interview with Cortland Allen on the IndieHackers podcast. I listened to a lot of podcasts, like probably two hours a day on average, sometimes more, sometimes a little less. And it doesn't take a single minute of my time.

Because I only listen to it when I'm in the car. I only listen to it when I'm at the gym or when I'm on a walk or when I'm doing something else that I would be doing anyways. I never am listening to a podcast, again, where I'm sitting in front of my computer and I could be getting work done. And I think a lot of people don't take advantage. I think a lot of people either don't take advantage of all that dead time in their life because we all have it. We all have time where we're standing in line, where we're in the car, where we're at the gym, whatever. Right.

Um, either they don't take advantage of it or they're using it for entertainment. So you're listening to music and you're listening to, you know, funny game videos or whatever. And not that you should never do that, but like, if you're really serious about wanting to get good fast, um,

then switch it to educational stuff. Like you'll just improve that much faster. I think a lot of people don't do that. And a lot of people, you kind of make this excuse like, Oh, I don't have any time in my day to like sit down and watch something for. So yeah, that to me is like an easy win. And I've been doing that for like eight years. If for the first four years of my career, it was all coding stuff in the last four years, it's been more like business and, and, uh, entrepreneurship stuff, but, um, I'm always doing it. Uh, so that was thing number one.

Uh, thing number two about the coding is, yeah, I just, I just agree. It's like, if you're, if you're in front of a computer, you should be doing something that's a lot more high intent than passively consuming. Um, and I say this in the start of all my free code camp videos. It's like, uh, you know, if you're, if you're watching this thing, like you actually should have code up in the other window and you should be like actively pausing and starting and typing and you're, you're wasting time if you're just kind of kicked back with a bag of popcorn, like watching me code. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. I love what you said there. Uh,

I listen to two hours of podcasts a day and it doesn't take for a minute of my time. That is, man, way to be like, so I encourage everybody. Like I also listen to a ton of podcasts. I'm always very vocal about the fact that like, uh, I think it's, it's practically a free lunch. Like practically everybody, uh,

in 2025 is going to have access to some sort of smartphone or even like a Raspberry Pi or something that can at least play these, you know, 100 megabyte audio files, right? Like that's the thing about audio that is so beautiful is you can just syndicate it through RSS and people can listen to it wherever they want and they can listen to it under whatever circumstances. And it's just, it's great. And text, like, so when I was...

In college, one of the things that really pushed me ahead of my peers was making good use of all of my time. So this was before smartphones. This was like 1999 or 2000, I think, is when I started college. And like you, I went to a pretty small local school that is barely more than a community college. And I would just...

flashcards. I had like this, I'd ordered these packs of like 500 flashcards and I just use a pencil and I just fill them all up with different things. Like that could be like English vocabulary words that I'd been exposed to whenever I read like the New York times or something. I'd look at, I'd look it up and I'd write it down. Or that could be foreign language words. Cause I was studying Japanese and Chinese at the time. I still am 20 years in. I still feel like I'm a noob, but yeah,

But just never having like an empty moment in the day. And some people might be saying, oh, there's, you know, but you got to reflect. You got to, you know, spend time like thinking about life and stuff like that.

I actually do that a lot too, but I do that in a text editor instead of just standing there thinking about life. I think about, I structure my thoughts in a text editor, uh, precisely for what you said earlier is like thinking and then putting your thoughts to paper. Uh, that's great. And then I just delete the text at the end. The text is merely there to serve as a canvas upon which I can kind of like structure my thinking and lay out my ideas and, and then like reread and question my assumptions and things like that. So, uh,

A lot of people may say, Oh, stop and enjoy the roses, smell the roses, do all this. So we're not saying don't do that. Don't ever listen to music. Don't ever watch a video game related video. Like, like, but,

If you really want to compete, know that me and Lane and a whole bunch of other people, probably every single guest I've ever had on the Free Code Camp Podcast, is learning constantly. And they are not content to merely just sit there at the DMV. I'll go to the DMV. Back when I lived in California, I had to go all the time for some reason. And...

I'll just sit there and I'll look at all the people. And most of the people are just sitting there like looking at the clock and like tapping their foot and stuff like that. And I'm like, you all are missing a huge opportunity. And I'll just be like riffling through my flashcards. Or nowadays I'll have my headphones on. I'll be listening to like podcasts in foreign languages and stuff like that. But there are so many opportunities to listen. And I think a lot of people mix this up with like hustle culture.

Right? Like people, people are like, Oh, you've got to wake up at 5am and you've got to like immediately hit the gym and you've got to take cold showers and do all that. Like, no, there is a happy medium, right?

It's not like be a total slouch or be some super person who's burning themselves out. You don't start your day with meditations by Marcus Aurelius at 6 a.m. followed by a cold plunge? Yeah, a lot of people do that. Yeah, I know. And to be clear, I've tried that sort of stuff. A lot of what is espoused in stoicism and stuff like that is really just pop psychology and it's not actually related to the actual stoicism that was practiced. Yeah.

in the day, you know, but, but people kind of use that as like a, like a productivity tool and it feels like you're making progress doing that. And,

Hats off to anybody who's reading Marcus Aurelius or reading any document from your and trying to like, you know, projected upon contemporary living. Like I don't want to bash any of that stuff. I think all curiosity should be rewarded and celebrated. But what I'm saying, I just want to be clear because there's always somebody in the comments who's like, okay, just like that.

you know, we have kids, you have kids. I have kids. I just saw your kid come in. If anybody's watching the video, it's like, Oh, I forgot to lock the door. Yeah. Like we have busy lives. You're working as a dev. You're also running boot. Dev. Uh, I'm working as a dev. I'm also running free code camp. Uh, and I'm, I'm doing my best as a parent to, to be there for my kids and, and to be there for, you know, like help out with the chores, like mow the lawn and stuff like that. And, uh,

I still find time for this stuff. And I'm not saying that everybody has this luxury, but I am saying that if you have this luxury and if you have any time to yourself, there are people who are working poor who spend an hour and a half commuting to work on a crappy bus system or something like that out in a city with bad mass transit. And there are people that are struggling to just basically...

apply for like different things that they can use to be able to get food to provide for their family because their jobs aren't paying them enough to be able to survive and things like that. Like I am not sending this message to those people necessarily because I realized that they are probably so swamped that it's very hard for them to necessarily make time if they're able to make time. I certainly encourage that. But for people who are listening, who can find a few like little pieces of time that they can squirrel away some learning, like, um,

I encourage you to do so. It's been a huge unlock for me, uh, over the last 20 plus years that I've been doing it. Cause I used to just kind of sit around and look at the clock and be bored and stuff and not intellectually curious. And it didn't get me very far. Like I, I am very vocal about the fact that I used to be pretty dumb, uh,

And I was, you know, like the dumb stoner kid that like dropped out of high school and stuff like that. And I didn't have big expectations for me. Nobody had big expectations for me. And there was a transformation that happened. And it was mostly just due to intellectual curiosity and putting in the time and energy. So anyway, this is an interview of when Quincy's...

personal history hour, but I did want to take a moment to reflect on the profundity of what you said and to endorse it. Yeah, yeah. I want to follow up on that just real quick, which is obviously we can't speak to any individual. We don't know your life situation. We don't know what specific struggles you have. There are plenty of people

in the real world that are far more busy than I am. But I would also argue there are many, many people that are not more busy than I am. And so I want to just push and be a little bit more aggressive because like by the numbers, the amount of time that people spend on social media, just like scrolling feeds is astronomical. It's like, it's really sad. I, I, I wish I had the numbers in front of me, but it's like, it's more than three hours a day. It's like four or five and it's gone way up in the last five years. Um,

So I do think that most people can, not everyone, not, not you necessarily listening to this, but most people listening to this, um, are underestimating, uh,

how good you really probably should be to really succeed as a developer. Like if you really, in my mind, it's like, if you want to be a developer, why not shoot for being a top 10% developer? There's nothing stopping you. There's plenty of top 10%, top 1% developers that don't have academic credentials. So I'd argue you should be shooting higher, but then that also are way underestimating how much actual free time

They have in their day to do stuff. If you start cutting out a lot of the crap that we become addicted to, I'm addicted to my phone. I need to like start uninstalling a lot of apps. It's become a huge problem. Um, but like, I think a lot of us underestimate truly how much time we have to do stuff that, you know, you just haven't built the habit of it yet.

Yeah. And it's hard work. It's very hard for me. Like every night I'll be totally tired. I've worked all day and I need to spend, you know, an hour playing bass and guitar. And, and like, I just have to sit there and go through, you know, my, my drum rudiments and all. And I know you're a drum drummer as well. And like, you have to put in the time if you want to make incremental progress. And then I have to do my, my languages. Uh, and, and that's another hour of me like, you know, sitting there doing that. And what has happened? Well, I spent, uh,

Basically zero time on social media. Like I think people have sent me Twitter DMs. I just opened up Twitter for the first time in like a week and I had like tons of DMs that I have to respond to. And I just basically treat it as an inbox and try to get inbox zero and then get out of there. And maybe like I'll tweet like some musical composition or something like that. But like for me, I spend basically effectively zero time scrolling through what other people are doing. And I feel bad about it because I'm putting stuff out and I'm not looking at what other people are doing. But like I need to be defensive of my time. Yeah.

There's plenty of other people looking, I swear. It's fine. They've got you covered. Yeah. Yeah. And so what, you know, we have so much to talk about, but I do want to, I mean, you're somebody who gets a lot of things done, right? I was just reading your state of learning to code and reading about like all the work you're doing, like to analyze and, you know, Free Code Camp does all this stuff. But just like laying it all out in a single article just shows just the great

amount of thought and attention and effort that goes into what you're, uh, what you've endeavored to do through boot.dev. So I am very interested in kind of understanding your productivity as, you know, a working dad and, uh, you know, how you go about your day. Like, like, yeah, I want to, I want to glean as many productivity tips as we can from lane.

So when I started boot dev, it was a side project and my life was basically, I worked 40 hours a week. My wife worked 40 hours a week. She was an x-ray tech at a hospital. And this is like, I guess just one more thing I'll say about that. Like I believe if you're, if you're, if you're single with essentially no other responsibilities, I shouldn't say single. If you have like no real other responsibilities besides work, which was where I was at in my life.

40 hours a week isn't that much. Like, holy cow. I had so much extra time in my day. Like, I'd go to work at 8. I'd leave at 5. There's a lot of... If you only sleep for 8 hours a day, like, there's another 8 hours in the day. So, like, I was spending 2 or 3 of those hours...

building what has now become Boot.dev, that's still like five hours of free time every day. I was playing Dota 2. I'm a big gamer. I was getting several hours of Dota 2 in. I was spending time with my wife. We'd go out to eat a couple times a week. We'd watch movies together. So I know that I was probably working 60 hours a week, but it really, to me, didn't feel...

overworked. I didn't feel burnout, nothing like that. So that was like the first year. And then, um, had my daughter in 2021. Um, and then like that really, like the kids are a lot of work. I like that, that really changed everything for me. Um, and so now like there's a lot less gaming. I get a

But most of my time now is working on boot dev or spending time with the kids, helping with the kids, doing chores, stuff like that. I am lucky enough that my wife was able to quit after we had our first kid. And so that made it way easier. I know that two working parents makes it a lot harder. But...

it, you re for me, it really is about getting super aggressive with your time and being as intentional as you can be with your time. Like I almost never sit down on the couch and like scroll social media. Um,

it's, it's just not a thing that I do. And like I said, I'm never in the car at the gym without a podcast going. Um, if I'm going to sit down at my computer and I've been working remote, like I had a job up until the middle of 2022, I was working as an engineering manager, um, full time building boot dev on the side. Uh,

If I was at my computer, I was getting stuff done. I was working remote, right? It's not like I had a camera pointed at me checking if I'm sitting down. If I'm sitting down, I'm focused. I'm going. If I'm taking a break, I'm taking a good break. I'm going on a walk. I'm doing something with the kids. To me, that was it. It's just being as intentional as I can be with basically every moment of my day. Yeah, I like that. If I'm taking a break, I'm taking a good break.

Like scrolling through social media is not like a rewarding, like break, right? Information grazing is not a rewarding break. Being able to take my kids over to the park and watch them climb trees and stuff like that. Uh, that's like a good break. Yeah.

And I will say it sounds, I might make it sound like it's just this grind. It's exhausting, but it's really like, it's really not. It's really just, again, it's intentionality. It's mindfulness. It's thinking about what you're doing at the start of every day, making sure you're spending your time actually the way that you want to. Because I think a lot of us spend time in certain ways, not necessarily because it's what we want to do. It's just like the habits that we have. Yeah. Right. And so it's really just about,

almost mindfulness about it. Yeah. Yeah. And I totally hear how like a lot of people would hear this as like almost dystopian. That word is so overused, but basically like, like, wow, even like people that are like at the very top are working so hard to keep up, you know, it's a rat race. Uh, and, um, to that, I say, I say, I, I can understand, uh,

where you're coming from, but like the world is not going to suddenly get easier. Like there's this ratcheting effect, this phenomenon. We have, you know, millions of engineers graduating from universities in China every year. We have more than a million in India. These are good engineers coming from good schools. They have the same fundamental knowledge that Americans do. Like, yeah,

I'm sorry, but like the era when you could just, you know, uh, do, you know, serve in the war, come back and just have like a, Oh, kind of like a white collar office job, like the Madman era. I always like to point to Madman because it was an aberration in time when America was like the only game in town. And, uh, basically Europe was completely decimated. Uh, you know, places like Japan were literally rebuilding from nothing. Korea later rebuilt from nothing. Uh, and, and,

to some extent like America was the only country really left standing after world war two. And I think a lot of people look to the aberration that was kind of like the baby boomer generation, uh, people that, that could, you know, work as a secretary and still get brand new cars and still, you know, buy a house and all those things. Like, I don't know if that's ever going to come back. Like,

I wish the technology promised abundance. And it's not worth really speculating on, right? It's going to come back whether or not me or you believes. That's a good point. Or I should say, it's going to come back or not whether or not you or I believes it will. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, but it doesn't look like it's coming back soon. Yeah. I wouldn't count on it in the next year. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess what I'm trying to say is...

It may look like we're working very hard and I do consider myself a hard worker and I try to get plenty of sleep and I try to get plenty of exercise, but then I try to sit down and get a whole lot of stuff done because there are millions of people out there who would love to be in the position that I'm in right now. Probably millions of people that would love to be in the position you're in right now. Uh, and, uh,

And most of the reason why they're not in that position is they were born with the wrong passport. They even have a passport, right? Like a lot of Americans don't even have a passport. They were born into circumstances where they didn't necessarily have, they weren't necessarily pushed to work really hard. And they realized later in life, oh, damn, I got to get busy. And so the fact that Lane is working as hard as he is and the fact that I'm working as hard as I am and everybody whom I've had on this podcast is working as hard as they are.

Like we want to be in that top percent of devs, right? We want to be in that top percent of people who can perform and, and,

When there's so much competition, you just have to accept that that's how it is, right? This is not going to be the Jetsons where you show up and you press a button and your job is literally to press the button to be the human in the loop that gets the entire plant running, right? Like that was the future we were promised, but that's not the future we're likely to have. The future we're likely to have is one of further ratcheting competition and the need for humans to compete.

perform and push performance higher and higher and develop more and more of a tolerance for discomfort and ambiguity and change. Frankly, things are changing very quickly. How do you feel about that? Like, do you, do you feel like there could be a breakthrough in the near future? I know you said that like it's beyond our control, but let's, let's just say hypothetically we were putting on our predictive cap, our magical thinking cap. And, and we're thinking like what would need to happen for us,

you know, multilateral disarmament to where people don't have to work so hard. Yeah. There's, there's like, there's the economic question of it. And then there's also the political question of it and the question of incentives. Cause like, for example, you could argue that like,

Just imagine a world where we automated away a bunch of current jobs. And like, we could, we could, we could as a society decide that we're okay with like living in this homeostasis where like, we don't really make progress anymore. We kind of just like, like maybe we descend into like this idiocracy thing where like everybody has food. Everybody has like a little apartment. Everybody has like 16 hours of Netflix that they can consume every day. And we can just like go and everyone can survive.

And maybe not that many people actually have to work every day to make that a reality. But we're not progressing as a society. And there's a lot of assumptions about human psychology that get taken into account there. Of like, well, are the few people that are working actually going to be okay with being the only few people that are working? And everybody else kind of just hanging out and doing stuff and not spending that much time. So it's like...

There's like the economic problem of it and the human culture problem of it, which is like in order for everyone to be incentivized to do something, there needs to be an incentive to do it. And there will always be people that when they have an incentive to do it are going to do it a lot. Right. Like we give people gems for doing lessons on boot dev. Like some people do a lot of lessons. Like some people do a lot of lessons. Um,

And so, yeah, I have a really hard time, but my hope is just that as a society, we don't stop progressing and making our lives better, inventing new things, uh,

exploring space, whatever, you know, I really want to hoverboard. If anyone can make that happen, that'd be really cool. I hope that keeps happening, but that, you know, we do it in a sane way where like the, uh, essentially the floor of how low you can go keeps right. I say keeps rising. I shouldn't say that always has been rising consistently, but like my hope is that it does and that, uh, but that there's always incentive for people to go above and beyond and go hard and invent things and build really cool stuff. Yeah.

Yeah, well, I mean, this is not a politics or economics podcast, so I won't venture too far into it. But I will say it is telling that food prices continue to go up even as agriculture is largely automated, as production is largely – like distribution is largely automated. Like why is food getting more expensive? Well, it's because –

It can be more expensive. So I'm not sure that we're ever going to arrive at a point where there's not some rent-seeking person figuring out ways to make us work harder and harder. But anyway, I want to end on a positive note on that subject and move to the next subject. So you mentioned gamification. Okay, so I don't have a positive note to end on that. Let's just move over to gamification. Okay.

So you mentioned that you use gems, and you've come up with all these cool mechanics within boot.dev. And Free Code Camp has used these types of things. We had the streak, had points, and things like that. And over the years, we've kind of pulled some of that out just because we're like, this incentivizes kind of grinding as opposed to what we really want, which is like, okay, I'll tell you my platonic solid ideal of somebody who would...

you know, fall from the sky and sit down and use free code camp and get a job within two years. And I think two years is a reasonable timeline, maybe three years, depending on like how, how many hours a week you're, you're learning. But,

They would work for like an hour a day and then they would like, no matter how hard they were working, they'd stop. They go to other stuff and then they just come back. And my thinking, at least with like language learning and learning instruments and stuff like that is there is diminishing. There are diminishing returns to effort and the brain needs time to soak in and absorb things and get a good night's sleep. And then you come back and then almost miraculously you're like marginally better. And then you compound that across two years and,

of doing something and you become really good at, um, you know, like getting 10,000 hours. That, that the whole thing is like a myth. There's no scientific foundation that like doing something for 10,000 hours will make you an expert at it, but, but it's a popular notion. But I do believe there's a grain of truth in that is you're just doing a whole lot of it. You're getting a whole lot of reps, but at the same time, your reps might be doing 10 hours on a weekend and then not doing it all for the rest of the week or burning out and stopping because you did so much of it.

coming back. And so it could be this herky-jerky kind of start-stop thing. So what have you all observed over at boot.dev as you tweak this gamification system to encourage people to do the right amount of learning and to learn in the right way and not just chase having a high score or getting on a leaderboard? How have you stricken those balances, struck those balances? Yeah, yeah.

So it's certainly not perfect. We've made a lot of changes over the years based on feedback and exactly like you said, behaviors that we've observed. Let me give you a couple failure stories and I'll give you some success stories of some of the mechanics. So very early on in boot dev, there were kind of three mechanics or three types of achievements. One was milestone. You'd just get...

bigger badges as you completed more lessons. That one still exists. Very straightforward, right? Just like as you get farther in the curriculum, you get more badges. That seems to work really well. The big failure was we had a speed achievements, which was like get a certain number of lessons done in a certain timeframe. And those were an absolute disaster. People were writing really sloppy code. They were incentivized to rush and not soak in like

why their code worked. We want them to review. We want them to look at the instructor solution. Um, we want them to chat with boots like after they've done the lessons. Yeah. And boots is your LLM tool. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Which is, like, I mean, fairly new. It didn't ship with the original boot dev because I shipped it before, you know, ChatGPT came out. But, yeah, like, it's an incredible, incredible tool that, like, you know, you've got to spend some time and we've, like, fine-tuned how he works so that he won't give you solutions. He'll just try to use the Socratic method to, like, ask you more deeper questions about your code so that you can, like, keep trying to understand what it does. Yeah.

But anyway, so speed achievement, huge disaster. That was really bad. Um,

Let me give you an example of one that was bad and we've been iterating on it and now it's in a pretty good place. So we have this concept called potions. So you can, as you do lessons on boot dev, you gain XP and XP is kind of the like Holy grail of the gamification. As you gain XP, you, yep, you level up, you get new roles, roles, unlock channels in the discord. When you hit arc majors, the highest role, you get like a coin sent to you in the mail. So it's like, it's really like the goal. Let's get XP. I mean, obviously the goal is to learn, but like, it's like the main gamification goal.

potions, you can activate a potion. And for what it was, was for 30 minutes, you'd gain 50% bonus XP. And the problem is creating a lot of pressure on people because 50% is a lot of bonus XP and 30 minutes. Isn't that long? Like sometimes, I mean, there's some hard lessons in boot dev where it's almost like a mini project and you can easily be spending an hour or two hours on that lesson. And, um,

That's really demotivating when you like activate the potion, you're grinding and you don't even finish one lesson to where you're able to get the XP. So like a recent change we just made was it's only plus 25% XP and it's an hour long. It's like we've been making a ton of these kind of tweaks and really like the psychological reason for potions because we've had other suggestions like, well, maybe you should make potions just count for a certain number of lessons so I don't feel any time pressure.

The purpose of potions actually was to create some amount of time pressure because we're using it as like a study timer or a Pomodoro. It's like a gamified Pomodoro clock. Yeah, Pomodoro is the 25 minutes on, five minutes off. It means tomato in Italian. We don't call it the Pomodoro timer on Free Code Camp because it's trademarked.

We go to 25 plus one, 25 plus five. Maybe I need to take it out of the description. We, in our description of potions, Hey, this is like designed to be like a Pomodoro timer. Yeah. I don't know. Like they never proactively. We're a small charity. We don't want to get sued. We, we're defensive in our intellectual property usage. Maybe I need to not reference it, but anyways, the point is it's,

We found that 30 minutes was just not long enough and was creating too much time pressure. So we're extending it and playing with it. But every mechanic that we ship, we have not shipped a single game mechanic on BootDev that we did just because we thought it was fun.

Every game mechanic we ship, we do because we've kind of come up with an underlying psychological reason that we think, and it's always testing and iterating, but we think will help people stay more engaged with their learning in a healthy way. Because as you mentioned, we don't want people to go overboard.

Yeah, that makes sense. Um, are there any like crazy, like perverse incentives that you've discovered? Like, uh, just through like trial and error, like, Oh my goodness, we were never doing this again. I mean, you mentioned like, uh, some of them might like, uh, I think you mentioned the, uh, the speed, uh, like getting people to speed run essentially, uh,

Speed was bad. Speedrun free code camp. I think it's cool. If you already know what you're doing, but it's a horrible way to learn where you're trying to learn and trying to get back. Take your time, right? Yeah. Speed achievement was bad. Another one that we had to heavily rework was Sharpshooter.

So there's a sharpshooter achievement where, okay, so on boot dev, you have two buttons. You have run and you have submit. And run is there to kind of be your debugging tool. You can almost think of it like it's the analogy of you're working as a professional developer on your local machine. There's no penalty to just like, you know, making changes and testing it. That's the run button.

There's also a submit button. This is the button you're supposed to use when you're like, okay, I've got it right. I think I've got it right. Right. It's, it's passing the subset of the tests that I'm allowed to test against. Now let's see if I really caught all the edge cases. Um,

If you get that button wrong, you lose your sharpshooter spree. So it like builds up as you go, right? Like three lessons correct in a row, four lessons correct in a row. The way it used to work was it would just grow infinitely. So you could get to like a 300 sharpshooter spree. And on that 301st, you know, you miss an edge case and boom, back down to zero, which is like,

Just devastating. When you've been going for like a month and a half and you lose your sharpshooter spree all the way back down to zero. And you get like an XP bonus for having a higher spree. So is it a multiplier? Like we're getting like hundreds of times. It caps, but it did go up. Um, but so our, our solution to that was, okay, we're going to make the spree a

counter go up infinitely, but you only get a count every 15 correct in a row. So in other words, like you do 15 correct in a row, boom, you get like one sharpshooter spree locked in. And now you start a new one, one, two, three. If you lose it, you just go back down to zero on that, on that instance of a spree.

So you're still incentivized to like try. Cause like what we're trying to do with this whole run, submit and, and sharpshooter thing is to like make you more cognizant about what you're like shipping to users, right? Like at some point as a developer, it's not just local testing anymore. You have to deploy and you have to be mindful of how your code works and what the edge cases are. And that's like what we're trying to instill in students. Um,

But we didn't want it to be this devastating thing. And that's worked really well so far. It's been in production for about a year. Regarding tests, so you said that you have visible tests and then you also have hidden tests in the test suite? Yeah, well, kind of. They're not necessarily hidden, but you can't run against them. So there will be three or four tests that...

your code runs through when you click the run button and you can always add like print debugging statements and stuff to like test other edge cases or like see what's going on in your code. Um, but yeah, there, there's like a few hidden test cases that usually have like a couple edge cases in there. Like for example, the list input is empty, uh, or whatever. Uh,

That only run when you hit the submit button. Interesting. So people will still know what the failing test is, but they won't know it until they've submitted it already. And at that point, can they still revise it? Is there any penalty to revising, or do they just have to move on? Well, kind of. So, sorry. They can't run against it at all using the run button. So when they hit, like, they basically see, like, a score or something like...

Does it show them the test that failed? Or do they just not progress? Can you progress without getting all the tests to pass? I'll just walk kind of through it chronologically. So you start writing some code. You click the run button. Maybe it says one out of four tests pass. You keep sitting there and iterating on it, just using the run button. Eventually, you get to four out of four tests pass. Now you hit submit. Let's say that you had missed an edge case. It

if now the maximum number of tests is say six and you get five out of six tests pass, boom, you lose your sharpshooter spree unless you had bought an armor, which is another game mechanic that we have, um, that which would save it. But, um, so like if you're, if you're gaming correctly on boot dev, you should always have a few armors. Um, but yeah,

At that point, you'd lose your sharpshooter spree. That's actually the only penalty. So you'll still get full XP for the lesson. So yeah, you'd fix your code. You'd still submit. You'd get XP. It just is that sharpshooter mechanic. So you'd kind of lose your bonus XP buff. Every sharpshooter spree, you get a chest, which gives you items and gems. So you're going to have to work a little longer to get that. So it's not so punishing. So it's like graduating from Harvard versus graduating from Harvard with honors. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, okay. So it's kind of like icing on the cake. So if I didn't care about the gamification mechanics, which I generally disregard, even on Freeco Camp, I just kind of disregard. I turn them off in every other...

You'd be amazed how many people say that on boot dev. And then like two chapters in, they're like, all right, you know what? I need to get some gems. Yeah. I think it's just human nature. Like I look at the leaderboards on some of the language learning tools I use, um, which is not duolingo. I use a bunch of other ones, but, um, but I do look at the leaderboards and I see people that just like, I would literally have to spend like hours a day trying to match them. And so to some extent, like leaderboards were demotivating for me in that regard. Uh,

How do you identify gamification mechanisms that could actually be demotivated? You talked about the fear of losing the sharpshooter bonus. The good thing is that people let us know. So we have a crazy active Discord server for our size. So many of our students join the Discord server, and we have feedback channels in there, and we monitor them, and we get many messages a day.

And that's honestly as simple as it is. We just listen to our students every single day and we get a lot of ideas and we'd write them down and we tweak things. I think so. That's another point of weakness. I would say currently our leaderboard system is not where I'd like it to be. It's useful to a very small number of students who are hyper competitive. We have a big change coming that I think will really, really,

make it all there will still be people that just aren't interested in the competitive side and so that's totally fine like we're going to keep the leaderboard out of your face um but i think we can make it you know useful to basically anyone who's interested in any type of competition make it feel a lot better so that's like a change that we have planned um oh man i was gonna say something about the about the well if you think of it later you can mention it let's

One of the things I want to talk about is community management. You said you've got this very active Discord server. A lot of people, whether they're streaming, live coding, or whether they're just trying to build up an audience for their programming articles, a lot of people who listen to this may also have a podcast of their own, right? And they are trying to figure out a place to...

Get the people that care about whatever it is they're doing to congregate and you all have chosen discord We free cocaine has a discord as well. You said it's crazy active Based on the number of people in there. It's just like the average person is like super duper engaged It sounds like what have you learned about the community? management aspect of it being the founder of a community and

Yeah. Um, the biggest, so we've heavily integrated boot dev with discord. Like I would be devastated if like the API got taken away or something. Like we have so many custom integrations built between the two platforms. Like, like I said, as you level up, you gain access to more and more channels in the discord, which is kind of cool because you get to have essentially like higher, um,

levels of discourse almost right. Like you're, now you're only chatting with people that have reached, you know, level 70 on the platform, which means they put in a lot of time and a lot of work. They understand this base amount of, of, of technical stuff and they want to talk about it. Um, it's like, that's, that, that alone has been really great. Um,

This makes me sound like a gatekeeper and I swear it's, it's not like gatekeeping the sense that I want to keep people out. Um, but I do want to keep bad actors out. And one of the best, I mean, discord is full of bad actors. Like you got spammers joining all the time, just joining the server, dropping a link to a porn site or a crypto scam and leaving essentially. Um, and it's just, it plagues a lot of servers. We've made it so that you can really only interact with the server. If you actually have a boot dev account and you've linked it to your discord account, um,

And like overnight that got rid of almost ever. Cause like no, no spammer is willing to like go to that level of friction to actually create a boot dev account and link it to their, their discord account and then join the server. Um, that's been super, uh, super helpful from a, from a community management point. But then the other thing I'll just say is this is probably the biggest one. So many like YouTubers and communities, uh,

online start a discord server as a place for their audience to hang out. And they mostly don't hang out there themselves. Right. So you'll have like a big YouTuber has a discord is almost never there chatting with their fans, especially if they're like a larger YouTuber. Um,

And those communities, in my experience, just aren't very good. Like even if they have like, you know, a community moderator or something, like it's just not that interesting. You're there to hang out with the people that are doing the thing. And so me and the entire boot dev team, our internal communications, we don't use Slack. We just have like private internal discord channels.

channels in our community server. That's where all of our work happens. There's nine of us and we all are on discord, like all day long chatting with students. And so it's just like, you know, we get this direct exposure to everyone that's on the platform, which I think is, is, has been another reason why it's, it's, it's been so great. Yeah, that's really cool. I mean, it's like a big single point of failure. Like we've had a lot of experience, like we experimented with Slack, we experimented with Gitter, uh, which was, you know, acquired and like, you know,

a lot of turnover in the different places we've gone. We were right now we're on like Google teams cause charities get it for free. And, uh, because it's like good enough, uh, Google chat. Uh,

and we don't have to pay for it. Like we're, we're extremely thrifty as a charity. You can imagine like we don't spend money on anything basically other than century, which is not, this is not sponsored by century, but century is one of the few things that we actually spend like 30 bucks a month on or whatever. Uh, we have an open AI account. Like we use GPT a lot, uh, a lot. Um, but, uh, my point is, um, is,

it is kind of like scary to think like, what if discord did remove API access or what if discord did start charging based on the number of people in your group or in the case of free code camp, what if you hit like this big invisible limit to the size that a discord can be? Now, I don't think that there is such a limit because I believe he's going to do it first. Yeah. Mid journey. Yeah. And mid journey will never hit that because it's like such a prominent discord server that I'm sure the discord engineering team will make sure that like,

They are essentially granted infinite growth even if they do cap other servers. But yeah, we did actually hit an invisible limit. And they told us, oh, we can't have any more people join your Slack.

And we were the first people to ever hit that. And that was devastating. We had to move off Slack. That was very crazy. So, you know, hoping that nothing like that ever happens. But it is. Yeah. I think it's really cool that you all are like hanging out with the actual community because I do sometimes feel like we're in our own server and we're

you know, a lot of that is because of the security communication and stuff like that. Like Google, uh, has very clear permissions and, and like the likelihood of Google getting breached is extremely low compared to, you know, other, uh, things like, uh, I, I just think because like governments use Google and stuff like that, there's probably a lot more security and stuff like that. But I, I think for what you're doing, it sounds like a really cool approach. Uh, and I, I,

I want to join the discord as well, just so I can like say hi and kind of like explore it a little bit. And I do want to say that we have been exploring getting back into gamifying free code camp. And, and it's, it's great to hear insight from you because like, I'm always trying to like learn from a lot of other people that are at the Vanguard there. Like you entered a lot later than we did. And so as a result, you know, there's like,

It's almost kind of like landlines versus cell phones. Like all the countries that never had landlines don't need to build landlines anymore. They kind of like leapfrogged that technology. And I feel like you creating your community several years after free code camp started, like you were able to just look around and see a lot of things that didn't pan out and just not even go down those blind alleys. And so I'm, I'm very excited to learn more from you and to, you know, feed that back in and incorporate that into how we're, how we're doing free code camp.

let me tell you that one thing that I forgot that I think will be particularly interesting about the gamification in particular. Okay. So this was an interesting one where we noticed a problem when there was no gamification in this area and then we added it and it got a lot better. So, um,

Every lesson on boot dev has essentially... Now there's actually three different levels of help that you can get. Four if you count the Discord. But let's just at the time focus on the ones that are gamified. So you can view the solution from the instructor, which is essentially like a full cheat. You can just see what the correct answer is, copy-paste it, whatever. Or in the case of multiple files, copy-paste a few times and pass the lesson. And then there's boots, the AI chatbot who's been...

pre-prompted with the full context of the lesson and the solution. So he like knows all the things you're supposed to do. Um, but he's also been prompted not to give you the solution. So you like ask him questions and he kind of like points out flaws in your reasoning. That's the, that's the idea. Yeah.

People were doing that stuff way too much, particularly viewing solutions, right? Boot dev is hard. We take a foundation's first approach. We do not shy away from teaching computer science education, right? We take you through functional programming, object oriented programming, data structures, algorithms, advanced algorithms. Like we do all that stuff.

And it's hard. And sometimes people, when it gets hard, if the solution's right there, one click away, I'll just peek the solution and move on. And that gets you into this rut of, you're not doing mastery-based learning at that point. You're not mastering each concept before moving on. That's really bad for learning. Sal Khan has a great talk on this mastery-based learning stuff. It's like what we try to do is get you to master concepts before moving on.

Yeah. And just a quick note on that. I absolutely want to let you finish, but one of the foundational things to Sal Khan, another person I've learned a lot from over the years, from looking at the different experiments that he's done, of course, Conmigo, who is like their AI chatbot. And FreeCodeCamp does not currently have an AI chatbot. We've come to the conclusion that we'd rather have people interact on the forum and help one another on the forum right now. We are exploring it, but I am concerned because the forum is incredibly popular. Like,

millions of people visiting it every month. And I don't want to disrupt that by just putting a chatbot where the introverted people like myself can just go talk to a robot without bothering people. I want people to get in the practice of bothering people because I think it's a virtuous circle. But sorry, to close that tangent about Conmigo and Boots and to get back to mastery learning, this is the notion that you should not be able to move on on Khan Academy if you're doing math.

you get 10 math problems. Like they teach you a concept and then you solve 10 math problems. And if you get even one of those wrong, you should do it again because there must be some sort of gap in your understanding of that. And a con Academy is not comfortable with you moving on until you get everything right. Um, and, and so I can 100% see how having a cheat button to allow people to kind of skip ahead when they're not actually ready to go ahead would undermine the

Yeah. The whole notion of mastered learning. So please continue what you were saying, but I just want to give people context into what mastery learning means and how it was articulated by Sal Khan back in like 2010 or something like that when he was first talking about this and it was just coming on the scene. That was one of the big differentiators was that actually he really wanted, he was very dogmatic about making sure people understood things before they moved on.

Yeah. It was like, C's shouldn't pass. Like A's should pass. Yeah. Um, and it's a great Ted talk. If anyone wants to go dig it up, um, just Sal Khan mastery-based learning. I'm sure you can find it. Um, show notes. Yeah, there we go. Um, and we couldn't take the solution button away because I mean, partially because we want it there as insurance. It's not, it's not like our lessons are broken very often or almost never. Now that we have such a large team and we stay on top of it, but like

We want to protect ourselves against the fact that we could write the lesson poorly, right? And at least if you have the solution, you can see how we did it in the case that you really get stuck. So we can't take the solution button away. And then with Boots, same thing. It's like, we want you to be able to chat with Boots, but it's really a red flag if you have to chat with him every time before you've completed the lesson yourself. So we've introduced two game mechanics. If you peak solution before you get the lesson right yourself, you lose 100% of XP for the lesson.

Unless you pay with a seer stone, which is a fairly expensive item. And so we like tweak the prices because the whole, the whole point of these game mechanics is to encourage you to do it like the quote unquote right amount. It's okay to use a solution, but it should be very rare that you use the solution before you figured out yourself. And if you're doing that too often, it's a good sign that you should like reset the course and start again and maybe go slower this time.

And then with boots, same thing. If you chat with boots before you complete the lesson successfully, you lose 50% of the XP.

Uh, because we'd rather you chat with boots than just look at the solution. You will learn more that way. Um, there'll be forced to actually think through the problem. Um, and then of course, also there's an item like that you can feed boots and do it for free, but that's a resource that you're now losing. Essentially you're losing XP on cause you could have spent it on a potion. So it's tweaking the resources of the game, so to speak, to encourage the right amount of AI chat bot use and solution peaking use. And we've been tweaking those numbers, but like it's looking, it's looking a lot better now.

Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. So just to recapitulate what you said, rare consumable that still enables that behavior for situations where you just really need another solution. You really are completely stumped because the alternative would be just rage quitting for the day. Yeah.

And frankly, that happens all the time at Free Code Camp. We go through and we look at exactly the average time it takes to complete a given challenge, and we've identified lots of different points where we need to break challenges down into smaller bits or re-clarify or completely re-contextualize the problem at hand. But that doesn't help the people that were stuck there that helped generate the data to highlight the problem, right? The canary still dies, right? That's true. It doesn't help the canary. It just helps the miners. Yeah.

So giving them this potion kind of is a way for them to not dialogue the way. And then you can just look at how many people are actually using the potion there instead of how many corpses there are in that room.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. We have a dashboard with like all this usage graphs like every day and we kind of monitor it, see if it's spiking in a weird way and tweak the numbers based on that. That's really cool, man. Uh, and I know we're at time. Do you, do you still have a few minutes or do you need to run? Yeah, I can go over. I don't have anything. Let's talk a little bit more. So, uh,

You mentioned dashboard. What kind of information is on that dashboard? What metrics are you looking at every day to determine the health of the community and to determine the health or efficacy of the curriculum? And you talk a lot about this. I talk a lot. Every educational designer talks a lot about smooth learning curves and not having... Learning the code is hard. Learning computer science is hard. Anybody who tells you something...

Otherwise, it's trying to sell you something, right? Yeah. And it's probably not something that's like $50 a month. It's probably something that costs thousands of dollars up front, right? Yeah. Yeah. And we can absolutely talk a little bit about higher education and your thoughts on the current situation with higher education. But let's talk about that dashboard. What is on that dashboard and what metrics do you care about? Yeah. Yeah.

So I think, I always think it's important when you're, when you've got a small team working towards a common goal, you want to have like a North star metric. And then you can have all these other metrics that are also kind of important. Our North star metric is just number of lessons completed. Like we just want people to complete as many of our lessons as possible. And that's like a really blunt instrument for like, if that number is going up, then we're doing something right. Um, people are getting farther into the curriculum, right? So that's the North star. Um,

Aside from that, probably the most important thing is consistency. We want to see daily active users staying high. We don't want people coding once a month or once a week. We want to see people in there three or four times a week, session lengths longer than 15 minutes. If people are in there three to four times a week for at least an hour, that's really good. That's probably our biggest secondary metric.

Okay. So, uh, daily active users being secondary to challenge completions. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. That makes a lot of sense. Like we just use time on site. It's just a general metric that we care about. Like how much time are people spending on free code camp each day? Because like use can us usefulness, uh,

and our thinking is they could be doing a lot of different things because free cooking is multimodal. We've got video. We've got books and stuff like that. But I see the merit in focusing on challenge completions and just having that single kind of KPI, key performance indicator, that you're caring about over time. Although it could open up incentives to make challenges shorter or to break challenges down into smaller bits that are easier but also result in more challenge completions.

So there can be perverse incentives there, I guess. That's true. We haven't really ran into that yet, but it's certainly possible. I imagine especially as the team grows and maybe incentives aren't so holistic, where everyone kind of gets the main goal, you need to make sure that your incentives don't drift from the underlying goal. Yeah, and time on site. So what everybody has probably experienced, I'll just take a moment to talk about Google. Okay.

And the fact that people are not Googling as much as they used to, and that it's got these kind of AI slop, you know, algorithmic answers at the top summarizing, you know, what free code camp article would have come in place if there wasn't this giant AI overview at the top of the page that people read and then don't click through to our articles. Uh, but what we've observed is, uh,

because, um, the, um, volume of people like using reference articles and things like that have been dropping. Well, that just means that, um, we need to like adapt in other ways. And there are going to be challenges in terms of how are we going to get people to learn on free code camp? Uh, because it was historically, a lot of people are not authenticated and they're just driving by and they're, they're not even authenticating. They're just coming in and looking at that article. And, um,

the main challenge with Google, uh, not people not Googling as much is like, how do you help people when it's, you know, potentially just an LLM answer. And that LLM answer could very well be wrong. Uh,

Are you all thinking about that? Like, how do you approach the notion of reference? Do you all have like a wiki or something internally that people can reference when they need to look something up so they don't necessarily have to go to Google and get taken away to some other site? Like, because one of the biggest challenges we're going to face over the coming years with the decline of Google search and the rise of LLMs is how do we still provide good reference to

and not have people just getting completely distracted. Yeah.

So we just shipped this feature like two weeks ago that we were super, super excited about. And the early metrics are making it look really good. The feedback from users was really good, which doesn't happen. I'm not saying that like, oh, we're so great. That doesn't happen with everything we release. Sometimes we release something, we got to tear it down because it's actually not good. But I'm really excited about this one. So we call these spell books. So now in the bottom left of the kind of learning panel on boot dev where boots used to be, he's still there. There's now a toggle where you can switch from boots to your spell book.

And there's no penalty for using your spell book, unlike boots. And basically, as you go through lessons on boot dev, you unlock pages in your spell book. So say you do a lesson on loops in Python, it introduces you to the syntax, you do a little challenge.

When you finish that challenge, you add a page to your spell book, which is, you know, loops in Python. And it's just a very condensed, almost like encyclopedia version of that lesson. It's just a couple of coding. It's just a couple of examples of syntax, a couple of links to documentation, good documentation, not a SERP that has AI slop in it, but you know, like maybe MDN or the Python documentation. And at any point while you're on the site, now you can use the keyboard command or you can go click on your spell book and

So,

So it's kind of like in a lot of video games, the manual almost gets built out. You don't start with all the moves unlocked when you're playing Yakuza or something like that, right? You have to actually use your yen to buy the moves. And then once you buy them, then they get added to your moves roster. And then you find out kind of exactly how they work, stuff like that. So there's a progression not just in actually progressing through the curriculum, but also building out your own little wiki as you progress. Yeah.

Yeah. And like a lot of the feedback was around, part of it was about this, like, I need documentation reference. Part of it was also like, oh, I wish I had cheat sheets. I was like, oh, this is a cheat sheet. It's also like, I want to take notes. Where can I take notes? Like, oh, you don't actually need to take notes unless you like really like typing it out yourself. Like we, we made the notes. You just, you unlocked them. Yeah. So.

That's cool. Well, I want to talk a little bit about university. So you and I both went to university. I didn't study computer science like you and your two brothers did. I studied English and journalism as my undergrad. And then I went and did a graduate degree. But...

What do you think is going on with, like if, if we just step back like 35,000 foot. Oh, and I wanted to find a SERP at a search engine result page. If you heard that acronym earlier, I just want to make sure people don't feel like we're like using a bunch of industry jargon and intentionally trying to obfuscate things like a lot of marketers do. Okay. So what do you think is going on with college? Uh,

just to put things in context for people that outside of the United States college, by the way is university. We just call university and college the same thing, even though technically there are colleges and there are universities. Americans are lazy and we just say college or school. Right. And when we say school, we are generally referring to higher education in the United States. So, um,

There are a lot of universities that are going out of business right now. Um, there are a lot of private for profit universities that are not diploma mills. That's something completely different where they're literally giving you a diploma for not doing anything. These are actual universities, many of which are accredited, but they're private for profit and their intention is to absorb as much GI bill funding or as much, uh, you know, Pell grant, like federal student loan, anything that they can get basically. And you know,

they're trying to make money. So universities are a for-profit endeavor in that case. But in fact, most universities in the United States are nonprofit, like owned by churches, for example, is usually the main organization that will own a university or they're owned by the state. Like the school you went to, was it a public state school? It was public, yeah. And same here. I went to a public state school. So just to put that in context, we're talking about a very broad organization

Assortment of higher education Options here in the United States But I think In almost every case things are getting a lot More expensive and Quality is not necessarily moving in Lockstep with price there's not Commensurate improvements in the Gains and the expected value of going To university may be plateauing as well

What are your thoughts about this? I realized I just totally loaded the question by kind of sharing a lot of the negative things. So much about this. I could, I could spend like three hours talking about it. I'll try to condense the important bits quickly. Um,

My thoughts have changed a lot on this and I want to be very clear that I like, I'm not prescribing behavior. I'm just giving my personal view with a very incomplete amount of information that I have. Granted, I'd say it's, it's a good amount of information, but it's, but it is very incomplete. Um,

I think that if you are 18 in the United States and you can go to a state school and you can either work while you're in college so that you don't have to take out student loans or you can get a scholarship or a grant or something, then it still makes perfect sense to go to school and get a degree that actually has good career prospects. Computer science, I believe, is still one of the best degrees to get of the allotment if you're looking at working in tech. Yeah.

Even if you want to go work in, you know, some other part of tech, like computer science degree is still one of the great, like hard skills that you can pick up. Um, I think most STEM STEM fields are that way. Um,

our STEM degrees are that way. I think there's a, there's a lot of degree slop. Like, I think there's a lot of degrees that really have very little impact on your earning potential. And like, I would go so far as to say like more than 50% of them probably have very little impact on your earning potential. Um, and I just wouldn't even, I wouldn't even go to college if like that, those are the kinds of fields you're thinking about going into. You can go into those fields. I just, I don't know why you'd spend four years. Um,

And then there's people that are later in life. And our demographic at Budev is a little older. The average age is actually like 30. People that are later in life...

thinking about getting into tech or programming and they're thinking about going back to school. And this is where I think, again, I'm not going to prescribe you should never do this, but I think it's, you need to be way more careful here. Like going back to school later in life, taking out loans, quitting a job to go to school, um, to get a CS degree. I think this is where it really starts to not be as good of a default. You should go do that. Um, it's incredibly expensive. Um,

everything you learn in a CS degree can be learned online. In fact, there's a lot of stuff that you won't learn in a CS degree that you'd need to learn online anyway. For me, it was Git. I didn't learn Git at all in school. I wasn't even introduced to the concept until my senior year, and I wasn't taught it. It was just like, oh, maybe there's this thing that we use that you maybe should check out. So there's still going to be a lot of self-learning anyways.

If I saw opine on like what has happened, like in the eighties, I feel like it was the seventies, eighties. It was such good advice to just, if you could go to school, if you could go to school, very few people were graduating like as a percentage of the population with a college degree. So it really did set you apart. Even if you didn't work in that exact field, just having a degree was the thing that set you apart. The percentage of the population in the United States, at least that has a degree is

again, as a percentage of the total people has gone way up. So it's like way less of a differentiator, um, than it used to be. And so companies tend to care about it less. Um, there's just more people with these pieces of paper. Um, but the cost, so it's like, it's like the, the, the uniqueness, the like unicorn value that it gave you for getting a degree, like, and this is all like, let's just ignore the, the educational component of it completely for a second. Um,

How unique and special you were for having a degree has gone down over time, say over the last 30, 40 years. The cost has gone up astronomically, and most of those costs have gone to either paying interest on loans or the actual cost, what the loan is being used for is mostly administration. Schools have bloated their administration faculty. And

you could argue it actually hasn't had that much of an impact on the value of, of, of learning or the quality of learning going up in a proportional, in a proportional way. So it's like, you're just getting hit on both sides. Uh, and that's not to say that you should never get, go to school these days. I really, again, if you're 18, I think it definitely, definitely makes sense. Especially if it's like paid for, like my situation, I would still go to school again. Like I was 18. I had a full ride scholarship to a state school, cheap school, uh,

I had four years. I was only 18. Like I do it again for sure. Um, but not everyone's in that exact. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's pretty big deal to get a full ride. How'd you get that by the way?

It was just academic scholarship from high school, basically. I did a bunch of concurrent enrollment type of stuff. So I did a lot of college classes while I was in high school, and then just GPA, ACT score stuff. For people who are listening who have a kid who's in high school, I realize this is way back, or if you're in high school and you're listening to this, first of all, kudos to you for being so precocious and listening to people in the

In their 30s and 40s, talk at a very high level about education and software engineering and the labor market and things like that. I definitely wouldn't be listening to this when I was in high school, but I didn't get a full ride. I just went to a really cheap state school. I think I paid $1,000 a semester for tuition and fees. And I didn't buy the books. I just photocopied them.

But, um, books are like $300 a pop. It's insane. Yeah. Yeah. Or you just borrow your friends and you take it and you photocopy it. And for like, you know, 20 bucks at Kinko's, you could have like a bound copy. And I realized that's piracy. And, uh,

Yeah, sorry. Giant education conglomerate that makes textbooks cost a fortune. By the way, if you need a good enough textbook, it's called OpenStax. S-T-A-X.

You can get free peer-reviewed, like PhD-written textbooks that are Creative Commons 3 licensed. Oh, cool. And you can use those if you don't want to pay for books and you refuse to be a pirate and photocopy your friend's textbooks. So there are plenty of alternatives. I digress. So...

So let's say hypothetically somebody is in high school and they're listening to this or they're a parent and they have a kid who's going to high school. Like what advice would you give? You're a parent, but your kids are young, like even younger than mine. Um, what advice would you give them knowing what you know about the way the labor market works, knowing what you know about having gone to school, uh, just being able to look back, uh,

What would you say to those people and how should they approach high school if they want to also potentially get a free ride to a state school? The market more than ever hires for hard skills.

um, demons demonstrable hard skills. So it's like, it's not just that you need the skills. I want to be very clear. You do need to demonstrate them. It's just that like the degree itself is not so much a demonstration as it used to be. It's more about like portfolio. When I hire a video editor, I want to see what videos, like I've never asked a video editor if they had a film degree. It's like, I just want to see all the videos you've edited, like just send them to me and I'll watch them. And that's the only, that's, that's the only thing that happens pre interview. Um,

I think so many fields are moving that way. And I mean, trades have always basically been that way. You'd like do an apprenticeship. Um, so my couple of pieces of like general advice would be first go into school with a, a, a much more, I think we've prescribed do what you love way too much. Like,

Go to school, explore, do what you love. Um, that's fun. If like your parents are super rich and you have no pressure in your life to like, you know, get into your twenties and be able to earn and support yourself. Um, if you're a more coming from like a more standard, uh, middle-class family, um,

And you'd have to pay for your, and especially if you'd have to pay for your own school or you'd have to take out loans to do it. It's like going with a return on investment mindset. I'm going to spend this amount of money and I'm going to spend this amount of time

At the end of that, what am I getting out of it? Sometimes that will shake out. Like I said, if I was 18 again and I could go to school for free again at a state school, get a CS degree, I'd do it again. The ROI, the return on investment makes sense. Well, it's infinite for you. I mean, it's not truly infinite. Well, it's four years. But you're still investing your time. You're probably having to pay, I don't know, do they give you like a dorm fee?

to live in and everything? I just had tuition. Um, so I paid for my own rent. I was actually working, like I worked like 30 hours a week still while I was in school. Um, but like, you know, I was actually, I was able to save a little bit every month. Like,

But yeah, it was for me, it was exactly, it was just a time calculus of I'm spending four years. Um, so I would just say like, whatever you're going to go to school for, I would be very much in that mindset of like, what am I putting in? What am I getting out? And if I do want to do something different, like I can learn what I love, um,

not taking out student loans to do so. Like that's like learning what you love to do is not something that costs, you know, $5,000 a semester with interest. Like you can do that on your own. Uh, so I'm not saying not to do and explore what you love. Um, but there's, there's cheaper, more effective ways to do it. Absolutely. Like, you know, I've learned music,

without ever formally paying anybody for a lesson or anything, just watching videos on YouTube and reading books and stuff like that. And you, you, I don't know if, uh, obviously music is a comparably deep thing where there's a whole lot of theory and there's a whole lot of practice and there's, you know, uh, just a Canon of work that you need to assimilate if you want to be a,

a good musician and all this stuff. And, and I'm just using that as an example, but it's certainly possible. Like even when I have the means in theory, I could go to like a nearby university. I've got university of North Texas. One of the best music programs in the United States is, you know, like a 30 minute drive from here. And I could be going over there and getting classes from some of the students there and stuff. But I've opted instead to just take the self-teaching route because I'm

I like being able to empathize with learners who don't have resources at their disposal because free code camp is designed for people who don't have resources at their disposal and who need to like make things work. Uh, and you know, I definitely think that,

Do like learn what you love. Like there are so many film school grads who are lucky if they can get like a key grip type position. And maybe that is a gross mischaracterization, but I've talked with lots of people who studied film or literature or other things like that. And they're not necessarily able to find good jobs in, in industry. Video game development is probably the most,

agrees this example because they just abuse you because like, Oh, you want to work in games, huh? Death March time. You know, like, yeah, like game developers get paid a fraction of what you get paid. If you're working at like, you know, one of these API SAS companies or something like that, right? Like go get a job at Twilio and you'll make like three X what you'd make it like blizzard or something like that. Right. So, um, but anyway, I, I'm just trying to like break down some of your, your wisdom that you're dropping here. Um, it sounds like,

School is great if you can afford it. And my whole philosophy on school, like people who bash university and talk like university is not necessary and stuff like that, I do believe that there is – like if you just made university free, then a lot of those people would shut up and they'd just choose the university, right? Because they'd realize there was value. And I think it's so cool that you were able to – that you had the –

the presence of mind and you put in the hard work and your, your parents like encourage you and everything like that. Like all, all the things that you had, you were able to conjure out of nothing, the funds to go to school. I think that's amazing. And, uh, anybody who's listening, who's been able to do that, like that is a huge thing. If you, if you can get even like a substantial scholarship to school, uh, and I salute you for being able to do that. Um,

If somebody does not have the means to go to school, what do you think they should do? Like, what would your advice be to somebody who is like not even middle class? Like, like everybody kind of likes to think they're middle class. Right. But like, if you're one of the many, many working poor, you know, there are millions of people in the United States who literally rely on some sort of government.

because their parents died or their parents are disabled or mentally ill or any number of different things. They wouldn't necessarily be in a situation where they would be able to go to school. School might just be like,

Like it doesn't even occur to them that going to college is an option and they're just hoping to get a job at, you know, the proverbial steel mill, whatever the steel mill is for 2025 because it's not steel mills as much as the US likes to try to keep the steel industry alive. So when you see, if you ever have seen boot dev marketing, so like our landing page, for example, one thing we don't ever say that, you know, maybe some other boot camps will say is like,

It's going to be fast and it's going to be easy. That's just something I'm vehemently opposed to ever saying about getting into coding. I think it's fun. Like a lot of the stuff that we talk about is like how fun it can be, how enjoyable it can be. You know, the perks of like living a developer lifestyle. I think all that's true. We also don't talk that much about how lucrative it is. It can be lucrative. That fluctuates. But like...

I'm going to be honest. Like I think trades like plumbing construction, like they pay pretty well right now. Have you noticed that houses are prohibitively expensive? Part of that is that labor for home building is getting more and more expensive. Those wages have been spiking in the last few years. Um, it's like if you're, if you're down to work hard, like,

And you don't want to go to school or you don't want to pick up a, like a hard skill, like, uh, you know, computer, uh, computer programming. I personally would, would have been pretty into that. Like I'd much rather work, uh, as a plumber or an electrician or something than, you know, working fast food, for example. Um, personal taste. Yeah. Um, just cause it, yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't, but I get listened to podcasts all day. Are you kidding me? Okay. Podcasts and working on pipes. Uh,

I think the reason to become a programmer these days has to come from a desire to become a programmer. At some level, you have to actually be into it. There was a lot of people in 2020 and 2021 that wanted to become a programmer, not because they enjoyed coding or even because they enjoyed computers. It was just the idea of making a lot of money and doing very little effort.

That's a bad reason. You're probably going to fail because you're competing with people that actually do like to code. So, um, you, you should enjoy it at some level. Um, if, if getting into programming makes sense now to answer your question about like, what do I do if I can't go to school? Um, I would absolutely start with online learning. It's insane. If you don't start with online learning, like,

It's free at FreeCodeCamp. It's free at BootDev. By the way, we haven't covered this. It's not always obvious to people. All the content on BootDev is free. That's part of the reason why we're totally down to record our full courses and put them up on FreeCodeCamp's YouTube channel. I'd like to eventually have all of our courses up for free on YouTube. It's just the interactivity and the gamification is like our profit model.

Um, you can learn so much for free or for very little. Um, if you do want that enhanced experience and it's like, that's so low risk, it's basically just your time. So, and there's also no reason to wait until you graduate high school. Like when my kids are like in sophomore, junior, senior year, I'm going to be pushing them to figure out what they like to do. And like, let's go learn about that. Like how, how does that work? Let's go. Maybe, maybe it's something you can do like programming. Obviously you can just, you can just do it when you're in high school. I did it in high school. Yeah. Um,

A lot of things are like that, where you can learn a lot about it before you graduate and get a little bit of a head start. Yeah. So online learning, very low risk, very convenient. Like most learning resources are self-paced. There was a big push initially, like we're going to have MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, and everybody's going to do like, and we'll do a week by week, and it'll be just like a university class. And that very quickly fell apart because they realized people are busy and they, you

you know, don't want to be on this kind of treadmill. They want to be able to just do it whenever they have time. So everything has become self paced and everything like that. And so, you know, not only is it freely available, but it's asynchronous and all you need is an internet connection. And a lot of times you don't even need a particularly strong internet connection. Like when you're writing code, like do you all do transpilation or like you use Wasm or anything like that in, um, like when you're doing like go challenges and stuff, do you,

do you do that in the browser and are you able to like, uh, transpile that into, uh, JavaScript or something so you can actually evaluate it? Yeah, we, we use Wasm for go and actually for Python. So, um, the Python, you actually download the Python interpreter into your browser. We use this open source project called Piedad. Um, so you actually get like a little Python interpreter in your browser. It's running in web assembly. Uh, with go, we ship the, your go code to our backend. We compile it to web assembly, ship it back. Right.

running web assembly. Yeah. So it's not even that much data is what I'm saying. Like, like even if you have a limited data plan,

When you're moving code around, it's not like we're moving like, you know, 1080p video from YouTube or something like that. Like it is very data light and you can do these things on a phone. Um, free code camp has a course on how to learn to code, how to actually write code like their editors and stuff you can use on your phone. So I definitely think that like learning has never been more accessible. It's just that people need to realize that it's there and then they need to actually stop scrolling through Tik TOK or whatever and actually start learning. To me it is insane.

to start a computer science degree or a bootcamp as like step one. It is insane. It's like you can, you could spend at least a couple weeks doing free code camp or boot dev or something to figure out if you like this thing before dropping 10,000 plus dollars on it. And for two or four years or however long it's going to be, it's like give your toe in the water and see if you enjoy it. What you said about like a lot of people getting into coding back in the day because it's

of the money. Like I very distinctly remember cause I was in, you know, Silicon Valley, uh, and San Francisco, I was living in the Bay area during the early days of free co-camp. And I meet these people that would be going to bootcamps that have, like most of them I think have been like acquired, uh, and a lot of times shut down. Uh, but like people that are going to like,

What was the big one? Dev Boot Camp and Hack Reactor and places like that. And those were pretty good programs. There's nothing wrong, but they over-promised, in my humble opinion. I don't think people can realistically learn things well in that short time horizon, as you pointed out. But it would be a lot of people coming from Wall Street.

Like they'd be like, oh, I can make more as a developer than I can as a financial analyst. So let's move. And I wonder how those people are doing if they didn't actually care about programming. They were just doing it because it paid better right now because it doesn't necessarily pay better right now. That actually brings up one interesting point, which I do want to make.

while the like classic web developer software engineer is definitely in a slump from 2020, 2021, this is just a, this is again, personal guests like do not take this as gospel. I think there's a good chance that in the next five years, having good, having developer skills will be extremely useful in a lot of non-developer jobs. So like financial analysts that can use SQL and Python, right? Um,

marketers that know how to marketers that know how to use i mean sql super useful javascript understand how events are triggering on the website like i i think with like ai push giving people in some ways superpowers to solve more of their own problems having fundamental understanding of how this stuff works will make you even more useful given the ai assistant um

So it's just a personal guess. Like I think these skills are going to be even more useful outside of explicit developer jobs.

Yeah. Uh, and I would 100% concur. And, uh, I have to point out like the adoption of spreadsheets and word processors and PowerPoint type slide, like Microsoft office just kind of exploded on the scene in the nineties and nobody knew how to use it. And 10 years later, it's like, you don't even point out that you know that on your resume because it makes you look like an amateur, right? Like it's just taken for granted that everybody knows how to use Excel. Yeah.

Uh, it's taken for granted that everybody knows how to make like a PowerPoint or even use Microsoft access or something like that. And I do believe like with that ratcheting of expectation of skills that people have that, you know, 20 years from now, it'll be weird if you don't know sequel and you're like working as like a knowledge worker type job.

So, um, I, I definitely want to, um, endorse, uh, what you just said there. And yeah, I think there will probably be a transition period where it'll be like developer skills will be like a nice to have, and it'll give you a head over the other, you know, financial analysts or lawyers or whatever knowledge worker type job we're talking about here. If you know those things and then, um,

gradually like all the people who didn't know those skills or didn't learn those skills will transition out of those employers. And like pretty much everybody will know and use those skills every day because they're so damn useful. Like it, it is like a no brainer to learn sequel in my mind. It's a no brainer to learn how, you know, how to do cron jobs with like bash scripting and things like that. Right. I genuinely think that, uh, companies, uh,

are going to figure out ways to like automate and, and digitize. There's so much stuff that's still being done by paper or fax machines or people emailing, you know, spreadsheets to one another and stuff like that. And that is going to gradually get moved to software layers. And it will be required that you know how those software layers work, maybe like several layers of abstraction down, uh, so that you can be able to, you know,

work just your day-to-day job at those companies. So I don't think there's any risk in learning these skills that you all are teaching or that we're teaching. And yeah. How do you feel about AI assistance and the value that they're going to potentially unlock? I mean, you mentioned, you said, here, I'm going to quote you because I've been taking detailed notes. I've got 190 lines in my sublime text. You said, marketers, or you said,

With AI giving people superpowers to solve more of the problems, that will make them even more useful given the presence of an AI assistant. So even with AI assistants becoming more and more powerful, the people who know how to use those

There could be a leveraging effect where AI only gets like 20% more powerful, but like humans get like 60% more powerful as a result of that 20% improvement and knowing how to get leverage out of that. Do you think that that phenomenon could happen and we could have like breakaway productivity gains? Yeah. So I have personally noticed myself Googling…

a lot less. And like you said, you noticed this. I've noticed this on our, like the SEO, the search engine traffic to our site. You've probably noticed this on your site as well, I would imagine. Like the amount that people are using Google to look up like precise information, like very...

You know, explanations of very widely known concepts is probably the way I define it has really has been moving a lot to LLMs. Um, because I mean, these things have encoded in them a lot of very fundamental knowledge. They hallucinate, they get stuff wrong, but they have approximate knowledge of many things. Right. Um, for example, one thing that was really weird the other day was like, I needed to know something very esoteric about the Google analytics API.

And the documentation from Google was dog water. It was terrible. I spent like half an hour searching for it. I asked the LLM and it was like, it's this. I'm like, well, I don't know that it's that. And so if I wasn't a programmer, what I might have done was taken it at face value and be like, it's that. And I'll put it, I'll take that syntax, put it into my code and ship it. And maybe it works. Terrifying. I am a developer. So I look at it and I go, does that even make sense? You know, I could see them doing it that way. All right. Tell you what.

Open up my HTTP client. Let's test it out. See if it's where it worked right now. I have the confidence to ship it. No risk of hallucination, essentially screwing me over. Right? So it's like you still need the skills, right? It's,

Chad Jippity vomits out a giant SQL query at you. You need to be able to look at it and be like, what is this going to do if I run it against my production database? But it can give you the syntax that you need it. It's like, oh, wait, how did I join three tables again with these specific keys? Can I double check my syntax again? It's going to give people a lot of superpowers, but it does not at least...

And even if it gets twice as good as it is now, in my opinion, we're still not at a point where you can just take what it gives you wholesale. You're still going to need to be able to verify it, fact check it. Um, so I think, I think every knowledge worker is going to have, if they don't already have access to an AI assistant, they're going to have one. It'd be kind of, it'd be like not giving your knowledge workers access to Google in like, you know, 2005. Yeah. Um,

but it actually makes the knowledge that you do have even more valuable because now you can move even faster. Three years ago, I would have been stuck on that Google Analytics problem for three days. I got unstuck almost instantly. Yeah, and the discerning ability of a developer who actually understands how things work as to what could be dangerous if it's wrong or what could be easily tested. Like you just open up your network tab in your browser and basically just run some quick tests of,

personally verify that the information is accurate. Right. And that in my mind is like so much better than like a stack overflow thread where people are like, Oh, I think it's this. And then you, you know, you're at, you're, you're taking somebody else's word, uh,

instead of your own empirical skills of running a quick experiment. You know how to run the experiments, right? And I think the intuition you're going to build up by actually spending time to learn how the world works, how technology works, is going to give you a framework for evaluating those kinds of things. And it's not just evaluating stuff that you're getting from LLMs because your peers can make all kinds of mistakes too. And nothing should be taken at face value if it can be quickly and easily tested.

I mean, we live in an era when literally anybody can put some garbage on the internet and Google might think it's gold and have it ranked very highly. And some of my own articles that have done really well, like people have come... Like I've seen on Reddit, like, hey, he made a typo here. And I'm like, oh, damn, I need to go and fix that. But Google didn't care that there was a typo in my article. It was sending everybody to the article anyway. And that's scary, right? So I do think like...

As the world gets more complicated, like these, these kind of first principles we're going to develop and these skills that we're going to develop by actually spending time learning foundational knowledge and learning kind of like developing a mental model of how these different technologies work together. Uh, that's going to be invaluable, especially if you're doing something like working as an engineer, like, uh,

As a web dev, maybe you like wipe the database or something like with your bad SQL query that you just, you know, naively paste it in and ran that, you know, GPT doesn't care. GPT is just trying to predict the next token. Right.

Yeah, yeah. Maybe that's pretty catastrophic and like, oh, damn, we've got to do a rollback. And worst case scenario, the GitLab thing where they lost an entire eight or ten hours worth of data or something like that. And it's just permanent data loss. But let's say you're riding a driver that runs on a truck, like this giant truck that's barreling down the road. And other people are on the road. Or Boeing, obviously, being a very...

example of why you need to be very careful and have really good people doing quality assurance and things like that. Like if you're a lawyer and you're like literally writing a contract, you need to be very confident that there's plenty of case law that supports the way that you phrase it or something like that. Like I think there's going to be this Cambrian explosion of people who have kind of, they think they have expertise and they think that what they're getting out of the model is sufficient and everything like that. And then,

maybe it'll be years disconnected from when they actually signed the contract that they realized that there was some fundamental flaw in the contract that this old version of GPT that is long since deprecated sped out and immortalized in this signed contract. I do think that

People who think that we're going to get to the Jetsons where you literally press a button. I know I mentioned that earlier. His job, George Jetson's job, is literally to press a button and the machine's taken from there. And he's just there so he can be blamed if everything fails. I don't think we're anywhere near that. And I think people greatly overestimate the progress. But at the same time, they're missing the point that...

that you can just get things done so much more effectively if you actually know what you're doing. There has never been a better time to pick up a skill online than now. And it's not close in my opinion, like watching some of our more dedicated students on boot dev, like sailing through the curriculum, using boots, like getting unstuck. Like it's just, it's, it's the learning is way better than it used to be. Um, and I think there's a lot of fear about like, Oh, is it really valuable? Um,

You should be learning something. Like I, I'm always learning something to me. It's never a question of, should I be learning or should I not? It's what should I be learning? Yeah. It's just prioritization. Cause I mean like, yeah, if given enough time, I'm sure I'd love to work through the complete works of William Shakespeare, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure I'd love, I'd love to do like lots of things. Uh, but yeah,

What is the highest EV expected value thing to do at any given time? And I think you and I would both agree that...

Okay, let's say hypothetically, people aren't going to use Free Code Camp. They're not going to use Boot.dev. They're going to build their own curriculum because everybody loves to do that. Everybody loves to roll their own curriculum and customize everything and treat the internet like a salad bar. And there's nothing wrong with that. But I do think you'll learn a lot more effectively if you're working with an actual curriculum than just scouring resources and cobbling them together. But what do you think are the highest value unlock skills that you can be learning in 2025? Okay.

Let's say that you're literally just going to go to the library and get up books. Anything. Anything. Oh, man.

Okay, number one, and it's not close, is communication, which is hilarious because I think communication is a terrible degree to get. But I think the skill of communication is arguably the best skill you can pick up. How to speak, how to write clearly and effectively. You can just blog, right? You can just blog. You can just tweet. You can just do whatever. Get feedback on your writing. And the reason I... That's the one I'm most...

uh, confident to prescribe to everyone is every knowledge worker, uh, will can, can 10 X their earning potential by being an incredible communicator. Um, there, there's not developer marketer, uh, business, uh, business development, uh, sales, like all, no matter what you do in knowledge work, if you're an incredible communicator, that's the thing to do. If I had to narrow it down. So that's a soft skill. Um, if I had to narrow it down to hard skills, um,

I'm really biased. I'm really having a hard time not saying programming. It's programming. I don't know. I do those other things. I'm a business owner now. I do a lot of marketing. I do some sales. I do programming. Programming is the one that I use everywhere. I script stuff. Yesterday, I had to send out a bunch of gifts. We had a Black Friday sale and we had to manually send gifts to 3,000 people, digital gifts.

wiring that up through no code would have been through like no code solutions would have been a nightmare bordering on impossible. Um, it took me like half an hour to like write a little, little script to just pull the data I needed from the database, hook it up to the stripe API, the send grid API, boom, everything's sent. Um, I, I, I would feel crippled if I didn't have my programming skills. Yeah. Awesome. Well, that's quite an endorsement for programming skills. I think it's a great place to leave it for today. Um,

Lane, it's been an absolute blast gleaning as much insight as you can from you. Again, this is like a completely unedited conversation with Lane. And he didn't know really what we were going to talk about going into this. I didn't really know that much about it. I, of course, spend a lot of time doing research and just ingesting basically every episode. Not every episode. I listen to like five or ten episodes of Back in Banter and watch your video that you publish. That's a lot. They're long. Yeah. Yeah. And...

I hope I did a good job of teasing as much insight as you can, as I could out of you. Um, I'm going to encourage everybody to check out the courses that I'm linking below. Uh, and, uh, also I did find that Khan Academy talk. Uh, I found the Wikipedia article on the zone of proximal development. If you want to do some dry Wikipedia reading, but there is plenty more to learn here. And, uh, we're going to keep these interviews coming each week. Uh, thanks again for coming on, man.

Yeah. So glad you're doing a season. This is season two of the podcast, right? If you want to call it season two, we did it for like, we did like, uh, like, I don't know, 60 episodes and we completely stopped. Then we came back and we've done like another hundred episodes or something. So, um, so yeah, just like keeping it going. Like my intention is to never stop.

Keep finding interesting people to talk to and grilling them. And, and just like, this is for me, I'm learning so much because it's like a real time podcast. Uh, like I, it's like an interactive podcast. Cause like you, I listened to two plus hours of podcasts every day. And it's just like, if you had just like one insight about learning that you wanted to leave people with, like, like something that they could take home, they can like kind of reflect on. I know I'm putting you on the spot, but like,

What is something that people could kind of chew on when they're turning this podcast off? If they've listened to the end, two hours, 20 minutes, kudos to you for having the, I guess, working memory to be able to keep all this in there and the patience. We are trained by algorithms and stuff to basically be information grazers and to have the short attention span. There's always some...

really alluring thumbnail for some video over in the corner when you're watching on YouTube or there's always some real life situation that's trying to pull you away from listening and completing like a long conversation. But this is how knowledge gets shared. Like lectures are like one hour long at university by design. But I mean, if you go back to like the ancient Greeks and stuff, they'd sit and they'd talk to Socrates all day. Yeah. There was nothing to distract you back then. Yeah. So pretend there's nothing to distract you. Yeah.

But like, is there any sort of like zinger type insight you would, you want to drop on people so they can have something to think about while they're like when they're not listening to a podcast? Yeah. I kind of said it earlier, but I'm going to say it again in different words and with different emphasis. You should be, you should be producing as you consume. So let's, let's take like like entrepreneurship is something I've been like trying to learn over the last four years.

I can listen to like, you know, a startup podcast like Indie Hackers. I love that podcast before it stopped. If I just listened to the 200 episodes without ever doing anything, it's, I'll forget everything. Reading a book while you're doing the thing will give you so many different insights than reading the book while you're not doing the thing. It doesn't mean you can't read the book while you're not doing the thing, but I've actually found there have been examples of where I read a book and I wasn't doing the thing.

And then I did the thing and I read the book again and it was like I was reading a whole new book because it's being applied to what you're doing. So if you're trying to become a better writer, you should be writing. If you're trying to become a better coder, you should be coding. You should be consuming content, again, maybe like 20% of the time, but you need to be actively doing the thing and then the consuming of the content will have much different perspective and application to what you're doing and you're

That's the one piece of advice. That's the one thing. If you just do that, you're going to do well, no matter what it is you're studying. So do as you learn. Thank you again, Lane. Everybody tune in. Until next week, happy coding.