I've Been Coding for 19 Years. Now I'm Telling You to Stop Focusing on It.
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After nearly two decades as a software engineer, mentoring devs, and leading and speaking at tech conferences, you start to see patterns. You see the same mistakes, the same questions, and the same fundamental misunderstandings about what it takes to succeed in this industry.
The most common one? An obsession with the act of writing code.
I was scrolling through my feed last days when I stumbled upon a provocative article on the German tech newspaper heise developer. The title, "Lern bloß nicht programmieren!"—which translates to "Just Don't Learn to Program!"—was pure clickbait, but it resonated so deeply with conversations I've been having for years that I had to click.
The author absolutely nailed a truth that I’ve struggled to articulate: our industry has sold you a lie. We've led you to believe that the path to becoming a great developer is paved with programming languages, frameworks, and syntax.
It isn't. And if you continue to believe that, you're building your career on a foundation of sand.
The Question That Tells Me Everything
As a mentor, the first question a new developer almost always asks me is,
"What language should I learn next? Should I do Java? Python? Am I falling behind if I don't know the latest JavaScript framework?"
I’ve seen firsthand how this mindset plays out. I’ve seen dozens of bootcamp graduates who can spin up an Angular app and talk your ear off about state management. They have the technical vocabulary. But when I give them a real-world, ambiguous business problem, they freeze. They are a carpenter who has memorized the names of all their tools but has never been taught how to actually build a house.
This isn't a knock on their talent or drive. It's a failure of an ecosystem that teaches the "how" but completely ignores the "why" and the "what."
The uncomfortable truth is that writing code is rapidly becoming the least valuable thing we do. It’s the last 10% of the job—the final, mechanical translation of a solution that has already been designed.
The real work—the 90% that separates a $70k coder from a $250k architect—happens long before you open your code editor.
The 90% Skillset: The Architect's Mindset
I've seen multi-million dollar projects that have succeeded and witnessed others that have failed spectacularly. The difference was never the elegance of the code. It was the quality of the thinking that preceded it.
The classic Standish Group CHAOS reports have shown for decades that a top reason for project failure isn't technical incompetence; it's poorly defined requirements and a lack of user involvement. That’s not a coding problem; it's a thinking problem.
The heise developers article crystallized this "90%" into three skills. To build software that matters, you must master:
1. Deep Listening:
I don't mean passively taking notes while a product manager talks. I mean the kind of listening where you become an archeologist of the problem. You ask why. Five times. You challenge assumptions. You dig until you uncover the messy, human reality underneath the feature request.
Example: Your client asks for a complex new dashboard. By listening deeply, you discover the real problem wasn't a lack of data; their entire workflow was broken. You scrape the dashboard, propose a simple automation, and save them six months of development time and hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s value.
2. Aggressive Abstraction:
This is about taking that messy reality and finding the signal in the noise. It’s about being a world-class editor. You must strip away irrelevant details, identify the core concepts, and build a clean, simple mental model of the problem domain.
Example: When you moved from giant monoliths to microservices, this skill became paramount. You couldn't just "add a feature"; you had to define the bounded context and the explicit contract for that service. That is abstraction in action.
3. Rigorous Modeling
Before you write a single line of code, you build the blueprint. This model—often just boxes and lines on a whiteboard—is the shared understanding between you, the business, and the rest of the team. It’s your source of truth.
If you get the model right, the code becomes almost trivial.
The classes, functions, and database tables are just the physical implementation of the well-structured ideas in your model. This is the heart of philosophies like Domain-Driven Design (DDD), an approach you can use to rescue more than one failing project.
The Future Belongs to the System Thinker
Look at the macro trends. The rise of AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, which already writes over 40% of code in some languages, proves that the "10%" is being commoditized. The explosion of the API economy and low-code platforms means we're building more than ever by integrating and composing existing systems, not by writing everything from scratch.
Your future value isn't in your ability to write a perfect algorithm from memory. It's in your ability to stand at a whiteboard and map out a complex system, to negotiate an API contract between two teams, to explain a technical trade-off to a non-technical CEO, and to ask the one question that reveals a fatal flaw in the project's logic.
So, what should you do?
Stop chasing the next hot framework. Instead, spend a month reading a book on Domain-Driven Design.
In addition to doing another coding tutorial, offer to sit in on user interviews with your product team and just listen.
Practice drawing system diagrams.
Learn about business strategy and financial modeling.
Build your 90% skillset.
The industry has more than enough coders. What it is desperately short on are true software developers—architects, problem-solvers, and system thinkers who can bridge the gap between human needs and technical solutions.
Master that, and you'll never have to worry about a machine—or another developer—taking your job.
Further Reading and Viewing
🎥 10 Essential Microservices Design Patterns You Need to Know
📖 5 Surprising Links Between Public Speaking, Mindset-Transformation, and Personal Growth
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Until next time—stay curious and keep learning!
Best,
Rakia
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