Knowing how to code is important, but I don't want to learn coding for the sake of learning. Also, if I want to build a technical product I may be able to find a technical co-founder. Then what are the reasons to learn coding?

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I’ve seen many people try to get into coding, helped many of them out. One person I helped just got fired from his first coding job. (they grow up so fast! *tear*)

I have never seen someone with your attitude actually build a business with a software product. It took me a long time to figure out why. In the process I had to discover why I haven’t built my own software product, at least not yet.

Anybody who codes for a living will be a connoisseur of ideas, in the same way that someone who has a ton of money becomes a connoisseur of wannabe businessmen. Success draws them out of the woodwork. You have no idea how many times I’ve had the experience of telling people what I do for a living, and then having to sit through an impromptu pitch to be their “technical cofounder.”

The sad and ugly reality of it is that building a business is a lot of work. People with your mindset are looking for easy ways out. The easy way to make money is to not start a business, but rather to just conduct a career just like everyone else.

That person I mentioned earlier that I helped learn how to code? He has not (yet) started his software business. He spitballs ideas all the time, but it’s all talk and no action. Been that way as long as I’ve known him. He wants other people to do the hard work while he does the easy job of thinking up ideas for the people doing the work to do, while he presumably gets paid for his obviously difficult task.

What he is doing, what I am doing, is taking the easy, lazy way out. Work for someone else who wasn’t too lazy to start a business at some point in the past.

Your question specifically asks, “what’s the point of learning how to code.” I would like to deconstruct the logic behind this question. When I was learning how to code, I didn’t ask a reason. I saw BASIC coding books on the school library shelves in the fourth grade, and since they looked interesting I picked them up and so began my life-long love affair with technology and software systems. I wasn’t trying to get from point A to point B. I didn’t know what getting rich even was back then.

Mine isn’t the only mindset you can learn to code with and get a career with or even start a business with. Anybody can find their motivation anywhere. But think about this for a second, why do people still continue to believe that ideas matter even when they know that execution is by far the greater factor in the success of an enterprise? Why don’t they just pick up any random idea and go for it? Why do people choose software rather than carpet cleaning?

It’s not because they like software, it’s because they hate the idea of doing work. You start asking them “why software” and they spin you a yarn about how software gives you superpowers. Sure software can be pretty powerful, but economics are still economics and those are the important factors in starting a business, not the technical ones. The idea you choose matters not because you think it’ll have more legs than a different idea, but because the idea you pick determines how you’re going to spend the lion’s share of your time for the next 5 years or so.

If you hate the idea of doing work, coding is not for you. Entrepreneurship is not for you. If you haven’t been coding since you were 7 like me and want to start now, learning to code will not be easy for you. There’s a ridiculous amount of stuff to learn.

Do something, anything, else with your time.