Do you regret not learning to code?

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Why would you regret something you can pretty easily change? You can learn to code today. Will you become a SWE at a top tech company? Maybe not. But it’s definitely easier to pivot to SWE than it is to pivot to high finance once you enter early to mid career.

Definitely when I see my roommate in tech making $180K as a SWE working 20 hours a week while I work 80 and probably will get a shit bonus

No

No 1) Specialization is good. Finance is a critical skill set with tremendous value as is coding for innovative product development. Both actors need each to reach their full potential.

2) I much rather spend my time making connections with professionals and academics who made computer science, coding, and tech more broadly their specialization rather than trying to learn on the side haphazardly to be a mediocre coder at best.

3) There are basic coding skills you can learn today to make your finance / business day-to-day more efficient (Python / SQL etc.) I don’t get this weird circle jerk around tech being so much better than finance - do you want to spend all day writing code or being in excel? If you want to spend all day writing code pivot and grind for 5 years for a chance to catch up with your peers who have been studying the craft since college most likely. Newsflash, you’re gonna work the same hours trying to learn how to fucking code as you would being good at your finance job (Ie 20 hrs / week comes from knowing how to do your job…if you been writing code for 5 years of course it’ll take you less time)

Your life’s work should be at the intersection of what you’re good at, what you like to do, and who you want to help. You will trade off more of one for something of the other as there is no free lunch.

I’ve thought about trying to learn but it doesn’t interest me as much as finance.

Why would I learn to code, when I am doing gods work in banking, because of me the GDP of USA is 3x every year, without banking there is no economy simple , no need to code when we are the matrix

If you want to learn to code, learn to code. 

But I don’t see what use a base level of knowledge is going to do to help… 

Yes, my parents put me in coding camps when I was a kid. I enjoyed it, but gave up because I couldn’t type fast enough. I didn’t learn touch typing until I got to college. Not knowing a basic skill, has led me to working 90hrs a week.

it is easy to pick up coding. I was studying math in college, picked up coding 3rd year for modeling something and im now coding full time for my job (Im not in a finance role im in back office).

It takes 1-2 months of hard work to learn a programing language and 6 months of practice to be good at it. 

Opposing view here - Regret getting a CS degree because so many classes were useless for industry use, would have had a lot more fun in college with 1 less major. Writing big tech SWE-quality code is way easier than the math part of modeling and I should have learned more stats.

No interest at all.

yes. regret my finance major every day. the positive though is i have a 3.9+ gpa and my workload is about 25 hours/week (including class time and studying).

so broad code for what 

My group sometimes makes clickable buttons in excel...so we are pretty technical 

Not really. Sometimes I wonder if I should've focussed on maths more because I was always pretty good but not sure if I was genius level for quant. Plus I think I would get bored just sitting writing algorithms all day, which is why I don't regret not learning to code. I think its pretty boring to do for your whole life tbh - working on deals, models and building relationships with people is more interesting to me, plus finance feels more like a competitive game than what I'd imagine a FAANG is like (slower paced and people focussed on WLB). Plus the macro view of the work isn't really interesting, don't wanna spend my time working to make gmail 1.2% more streamlined. When I think about working in tech I'd much rather work in a PM, strategy or SWE manager role (and even then it seems slow paced so may as well just work in consulting at that point) rather than actually coding, so I'm clearly not interested in coding all day. 

I think I could have built my first few companies faster/better, but it's a pretty worthless skill once you can afford a good dev team. Also I've been using chat GPT to write basic SQL queries that im too lazy to write or assign out. I imagine this only compounds exponentially and coding is a pretty worthless skillset in ~5 years.

Definitely.

My mother is a primary school teacher, they now make basic computing school essential part of the curriculum.

Seems to also be coming an ever more present part of secondary school teachings.

Not to mention outside of education and the workplace, being able to code websites, tools and automated services can be a very profitable practice.

While I am very interested to code, and the resources to be a SWE grade programmer are probably out there for free, I honestly don't think I have to discipline to do such alongside my current position.

I am also quite passionate in pursuing further education at MSc and eventually MBA level, so my plan is to study MSc Computer Science at UCL after I hopefully secure my return offer this Summer.

Although I’m not interested in becoming a programmer and I’d like to re-enter banking. But I’d just be like to able to have a foundational understanding of that domain, enough to maybe fulfil a managerial position that oversees SWEs. Something I think the calibre of the UCL course could offer.

The course price seems reasonable for the brand of UCL (£18,000), if I already secure a return offer and make it through the Analyst Stint I think it could offer a better return than a MSc Fin from the same/similar school at a £42,000 asking price.

Let me know what you think of my plan.

End game for bankers is to be a high ticket salesman. 

Coding is not neccesary for the purpose of revenue generation in IB. 

Yeah, it's fun and a lot like learning a new language. It can be mentally stimulating which I like and you can automate a lot of mundane repetitious stuff. But I don't regret not learning about the math/algorithm side of things. The optimization stuff is best done by professionals, way more time efficient.

My father in law is an immigrant who taught himself how to code in his closet while working lower paying jobs. He just learned from books on the subject matter. You can do the exact same thing with the bonus of their being courses on the subject.

Not really, I can barely do calculus

Why not learn subjects you find interesting rather than just for a job

I regret not being born to a billionaire 😔

Honestly, no. I went on a coding binge a couple of years ago and took a few online courses and poured through a bunch of books and in the end, I realized it wasn't really going to move the needle with respect to allowing me to generate a high income and/or add anything meaningful to what I'm already making. There are more valuable skills to be acquired assuming time is limited on a daily/weekly basis.

You don’t need to code in IB / PE

Coding, in terms of just doing some pretty simple work and getting well paid for it, is pretty much over now with AI, so it doesn't matter anymore. I started in tech and slowly got pulled elsewhere... now I would say that the value of a software engineering background is the ability to think in terms of large decomposable components of complex systems .... but unfortunately, due to the mass influx of people getting into IT because their parents/whoever told them it was the way to make a quick buck, at this point most people in software can't think like that anyway, and those are who will be (and in many cases already have been) steamrolled by AI.

If you are a "systems thinker", you don't need to code to do it, it's also an extremely effective way to think of business, and you will learn that over time anyway if you're successful at it.