Why programming a mandatory skill?

It is 2018 and technology is ubiquitous. If I want to go out and have a drink with my friends. I open my smartphone and within a few taps, I have an Uber or an Ola taxi in front of me. I get out of the car and at the bar we are taking selfies or uploading pictures on instagram or facebook. We get drunk and decide to go to Goa for the weekend and open up an app on the phone to look for flight tickets.

We are using technology and we are indirectly programming the device on a very high level. So this is not something new or something hard. There are a lot of things that are going to change in the future and there is a huge need for smart talented engineers and programming is the foundation for all of these requirements. Be it cloud computing, blockchain, machine learning or AI.

My suggestion to young students who are pursuing their masters or bachelors is to be proficient in any one programming language by the time they graduate. And if you are out of bachelors and are on the look out for a job, you still need to learn atleast one programming language. Once you are proficient in one, that means that it will be easier to pick up other languages when you working on projects. We have to be polyglots in this market to be valuable in the market. We have a bunch of options out there but as of April 2018 the following languages are dominating the market

Javascript – Node - React
Java
Python
Ruby
Solidity
C#

I highly recommend to watch this video over and over so that it is hardcoded in your mind that programming is simple and it is not complex as it is made out to be.

Keep coding and be happy!