Why I Am Learning To Code
By: Steven Oehley
Tags: Full Stack, Learning To Code, JavaScript, Coding, HTML

At some stage in everyone persons life they need to think about what they want to do for a living. For most of us this happens when we we are in matric, getting ready to leave school and move on to the next phase of our lives. This was true in my case. The problem though, I had no idea what I was passionate about.

It was something I had not given much thought as I believed that choosing a career meant looking at the traditional fields of study, like business, law and accounting and selecting one of these to pursue a steady job and climb a career ladder. There is nothing wrong with these careers, and if they are what you are passionate about you should go after them full steam ahead. My problem was I made the choice because I thought these were the options one was meant to choose, I made the choice for all the wrong reasons.

It seems ridiculous now, but this was how I thought the world worked. This was a problem for more than one reason. The first was it limited my choice set, narrowing it down from a wide range of careers, to only a handful because of what I thought was expected and “just how things worked”. The second problem was that it left me asking the wrong questions about my future. Instead of asking myself question like what do I enjoy, what would I find fulfilling and what would be challenging work? I rather asked myself questions like which one of the few choices were ones I would dislike the least and offered the best salary. There was no regard for my interests, passions or what I wanted to do to add value for others in a job.

Having such a poor view of what choosing a field of study and getting a career was supposed to be, I opted to go to university to study accounting. By half way through my first year it was obvious to me that there was absolutely no way I wanted to do what I was doing fore the rest of my life. What I did know was that I wanted to have a career that would impact and improve others lives. In the list of subjects that I was exposed to in my first year, I felt that Economics would be the best choice for this.

I thought that Economics would be the best choice for me as it meant you could have a hand in designing policies that would help the poor, improve efficiencies in state healthcare etc. I became intrigued by a particular subset of Economics known as Behavioral Economics, this is where all assumptions of a rational actors are dropped and you start to look to fields like psychology to understand behavior. Taking these lessons from psychology you incorporate these into mechanisms designed to facilitate transactions to reach better outcomes — such as sustaining trust in situations where agents tend to act dishonestly, improving organ donations, incentivizing the poor to think about saving and helping people make better future decisions about their health.

When leaving university after completing my honours degree, I took a job as a demand planner. Far off from what I had hoped or imagined to do with my knowledge in Economics. It was however the first job I was offered and the fear of being left without work meant that I accepted the offer. I worked managing a portfolio first in ladies accessories, shoes, bags and lingerie. All products I knew nothing about. Eventually, I moved on to manage a portfolio in cosmetics and fragrances.