Alumni Q&A: Updating His Code Literacy Helped LJ Be More Effective When Working with Technical Customers
LJ works at an internet services company where his clients are primarily technical founders of startups. Due to the nature of his career, LJ saw the value in learning the fundamentals of coding in order to bring more authenticity and effective communication to his client relationships.
We sat down with LJ to understand how his new ability to code has impacted his clients and how the community that First Step Coding fosters made it an ideal environment for him to learn.
1. As a leader within your company, you decided to join First Step Coding (FSC). How did you become interested in programming?*
Well, even early on in college I focused on engineering and worked in a multiple number of business courses so I had this hybrid mind between engineering and business. I was more talented on the business side as opposed to the engineering side even though I knew that engineering and technology was going to be a transformational innovation for my generation and for years to come so I always kept one of my feet in the technical side but most of my head was in the business side. Throughout my career, whether I was working on Wall Street, or working within the tech environment in New York, or even back here in Silicon Valley, engineering and coding was always operating in the background and now that I work closely with technical founders and developers it just made sense for me to improve my fluency around coding.
Working with First Step Coding is more about gaining a grasp around the concepts and then actually taking those concepts down another level by getting hands-on-keyboard experience. I can now empathize more with folks I’m working with like my customers, as well as take some of those ideas that I’ve been hearing in the zeitgeist of technology as well as every conversation that’s happening here in San Francisco to make it much more practical for me. It was more about getting a stronger understanding of the experience of being a coder and the experience of using technical platforms to build things at a much more intimate level.
2. What did your decision-making process look like for learning how to code and what ultimately led you to decide to do First Step Coding?*
I think we all have those experiences of reading an amazing blog post and then going on YouTube and looking at all these videos and maybe even taking an online course. Then, as most busy people experience, things happen in their lives where work pops up or family pops up and you just have to focus on certain things. So if you’re taking this online course and it’s self-paced and there are some things that become more of a higher priority, then often times the higher priority opportunities win and that online course, that we all probably have still sitting in our account, remains unfinished.
I’ve done that before and what intrigued me about the First Step Coding course is that there is a community. There’s a live community if you want to do more of the in-classroom sessions or an online community where you’re meeting multiple times a week and it’s a structured process. There’s a lot of homework that you have to do in order to learn but there’s also this human to human engagement which is very powerful, especially once you start learning more about the instructor and the folks in your own class. It becomes much more of an intimate experience and you want to show up not only for your classmates but you want to show up and be able to express what you learned in this very dynamic setting. I was looking more for, how can I learn in this community-based format, this team-based format, as opposed to a one-off thing. I do a lot of one-off things where I put my head down and get things done and focus but having that community to learn with and learn from was one of the biggest signals for me.
3. What kind of support did you receive from your company (if any) when you told them you were interested in learning how to code?*
My company is all about professional and personal development so they were all into it. We have a number of courses here that teach you how to code and a lot of it is self-paced. I work for an internet company so they realize that the more their employees are up to speed on what powers the company and powers most of the customers that work with us, the better. It was an easy simple conversation, I just showed my employer what the curriculum looks like, and shared that it’s quick, it’s focused, it’s specific, and it didn’t go too far out of bounds of things that are less practical. I mean, we have a professional training budget so it was easy for me to think through “Does this ROI make sense? Yes, it makes sense. Okay, let’s do it.”
4. Are you happy with your decision to have gone through First Step Coding? If so, what did you take away from the experience?*
I’m definitely satisfied with the experience. One of the takeaways for me was to learn things that I already knew about coding or computer science or tech, and then be able to apply it to a specific principle or a skill that we learned. Like understanding how abstraction works, for example, a principle in computer science that is actually applied in a lot of the applications that we use today, whether the application is Google Maps or Facebook or Instagram, and to know how the core principle applies to something that is useful every day. I think that was the biggest takeaway for me.
Also understanding that a lot of these concepts are not this alien concept that only computer scientists or PHDs can understand. It’s really approachable and practical for everyone. You just need to have a good guide or a good teacher to help you along the process, especially when you get stuck. I think that’s another one of the biggest benefits of FSC is that if you come to a point where you’re stuck or you need some assistance, you can reach out to an instructor and they’ll hop on zoom or hop on video chat and walk through it with you, or you can talk about it in your classroom as opposed to if you’re on your own and you’re kind of like fuming by yourself and trying to figure out the answer through YouTube or Stack Overflow or some other resource. The class gives you the capability to work through some of your challenges in real time, while you’ll also have some of the personal time to focus on it yourself.
5. Were you considering pursuing a career as a software engineer or did you always intend to continue in your current role?*
Oh no, absolutely not! I have a fundamental belief that there are some things you can learn and there are some things that you should be great at, especially as we trend towards this expert economy, so you need to be an expert in certain things and it’s not my focus to be an expert in coding.
Being able to communicate, I think that’s the biggest thing. Being able to see, understand, empathize, and place myself in the shoes of a coder or the shoes of someone who’s technical gives me the capability to be a better leader. I’m on the partnership side and it helps me do that much more effectively. Being a coder was never the goal nor do I wish it to be. I think there’s a lot of individuals who want to learn how to code which is great in order to be a software developer. I think that’s awesome especially as more jobs are moving more towards that digital area, we need more coders but my focus is much more on the business and leadership and product side.
6. How have the skills you learned from FSC helped you in your current job working with startups?*
So just to give you a little bit of background on what I do now, I work with startups and help them deploy their applications on our infrastructure. In order for me to do that, I engage with them directly or I engage with folks in the ecosystem, either investors or operators, who work with them and there’s nothing better than having the authenticity of having experienced some of the challenges that they’ve gone through. Going through FSC allowed me to experience some of those challenges but also take it a step further and open up the console myself and dive into our own product. Then I was able to really put myself into the seat of that founder or that developer and go through some of our tutorials and use our product in a way in which a developer would use our product. There are a lot of opportunities and scenarios where I was leveraging my experience with FSC and applying it directly to that exercise at work. Could I have done it without going through FSC? Potentially. Probably. But it would have been much more painful. Just having that understanding of these general concepts, how to move files over using the command line or understanding “ok this is how to debug this program” or “this is what the system is telling you” and where to look, even those basic things just give you a little more tools and resources to figure things out on your own and how they ultimately work. That’s what computer science and coding is, it’s this way of thinking about how to systematically solve problems and then if you come up to a problem you are able to say “okay lets use the same techniques you used in coding and apply it here” and I was able to do that. That gave me much more familiarity with the product that I’m working with, that I’m helping other startups use and then, more importantly, have that authenticity with the developer or the technical founder that I’m working with.
Ultimately it’s like, if I can do it, the person who doesn’t know how to code or didn’t go to school for computer science, and you are the technical founder or you are the developer you totally can do this. It just shows how simple and how easy our product is.
7. Do you feel that having a foundation in coding has made you more marketable for future career growth?*
Yes. I’m going to be in technology for the foreseeable future in some way, shape, or form so just having that mindset, not to code specifically but to think like a coder or to relate and have a common lexicon in order to explain things with someone who is an engineer or product manager or a frustrated customer and they’re trying to resolve some type of support issue and to be able to have more empathy with what they’re going through is extremely valuable.
8. So far, what has been your biggest challenge while learning to code?*
I think it’s juggling all the other things in your life. I think that’s the biggest thing. I’m thinking about the coding exercises when you’re trying to find additional resources to come up with ideas about how to solve a problem you see these other recommended articles or videos to watch and I think one of the videos that came up when I was on YouTube doing some research about a specific problem from FSC was about the #1 thing you could do to succeed as a coder or when learning how to program. This guy’s message about succeeding was basically focused on how long you’re able to endure pain and sit in front of a laptop and not leave until you find the answer. Ultimately I think that’s it.
You’ve got to just have the resiliency to be formidable and just mentally say that you’re going to overcome this challenge and you’re going to overcome this problem and you’ll find the answer. The more time you have to do that the better but then life happens and you have competing priorities so I think the biggest challenge for me, which again is why I chose FSC, was carving out that time to stay consistent on some of these tasks. When you have a start time and an end time and you know folks are counting on you and you know that you can be in that class and it’s going to be a better dialogue because you’re there, it gives you that added momentum to stay involved, to stay in the screen and increase that screen time to solve those problems. As with anything you have to put in the time to get good.
9. Do you have any other advice for people who are considering learning to code?*
Just do it. You never know, you could have an amazing talent and passion for it.
Explore an option that works well for you. Whether it’s going to a bootcamp or going to FSC or maybe you have the discipline in order to do your own self-paced course. I think the biggest thing is that you know yourself so put yourself in the best situation for you to succeed and just honor that and step into it and learn and grow.