Advice for beginner programmers | DHH and Lex Fridman

Advice for beginner programmers | DHH and Lex Fridman - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e43nmqegH4

We have so much critical infrastructure, for example, that still runs on Cobalt, that about five humans around the world really understand truly deeply that there's a lot it's possible for society to lose, a competence it still needs because it's chasing the future. Cobalt is still with us. This is one of the things I think about with, with programming. Ruby on Rails is at such a level now that in 50 years from now, it's extremely, exceedingly likely that there's still a ton of Ruby on Rail systems running around now. Very hard to predict what that exact world is going to be like. But yesterday's weather tells us that if there's still Cobalt code from the 70s Operating Social Security today, and we haven't figured out a clean way to convert that, let alone understand it, we should certainly be humble about predicting the future. I don't think any of the programmers who wrote that Cobalt code back in the 70s had any damn idea that in 2025 checks were still being cut off the business that they had encoded back then. But that just brings me to the conclusion on the question for what should a young programmer do? You're not going to be able to predict the future. No one's going to be able to predict the future. If you like programming, you should learn programming now. Is that going to be a career forever? I don't know. But what's going to be a career forever? Who knows? Like a second ago, we thought that it was the blue collar labor that was going to be abstracted. First it was the robots that were going to take over. Then Gen AI comes out and then all the artists suddenly look like, holy shit, is this gonna do all animation now? It's gonna do all music now they get real scared. And now I see the latest Tesla robot going like, oh, maybe we're back now to blue collar being in trouble. Because if it can dance like that, it can probably fix a toilet. So no one knows anything. And you have to then position yourself for the future in such a way that it doesn't matter that you pick a profession or path where if it turns out that you have to retool and reskill, you're not going to regret the path you took. That's a general life principle for me. How I look at all endeavors I involve myself in is I want to be content with all outcomes. When we start working on a new product at 37signals, I set up my mental model for its success and I go, do you know what? If no one wants this, I will have had another opportunity to write beautiful Ruby code to explore a greenfield domain, to learn something new, to build a system I want, even if no one else wants it. What a blessing. What a privilege. If a bunch of people want it, that's great. We can pay some salaries, we can keep the business running and if it's a blow weight success. Wonderful. I get to impact a bunch of people. Sam.