Can anyone learn to code?
If you’re asking yourself, you surely realized that mastering those new skills will open up opportunities to jump into entrepreneurship or allow you to become more independent — but you may still doubt your capacity to acquire them. Now keep calm and remember: a few years ago we were still wondering if anyone could learn to read.
The short answer is yes, anyone can learn to code. It might be easier for a few of us, and it does require a few critical skills to get there. It’s definitely not easy, and a true challenge. It sometimes require a complete “rewiring” of the brain. And obviously, this takes time. But it is an attainable goal for anyone who’s ready to put in the hours and focus on it seriously.
Are we all equal when learning to code?
The learning experience will be different for every single person, but there is no typical profile to get started. Over five sessions at Le Wagon Tokyo, we’ve welcomed all kinds of people with various backgrounds: some designers and marketing managers, but also English teachers, finance professionals, a tech journalist, a med school graduate, and… a PhD in Physics.
Contrary to popular belief, code and mathematics are worlds apart: code is based mostly on logic. Obviously, a previous experience based on the same kind of logic will help when learning to code. For instance, if you previously studied similar topics or were using analytical skills in your past job, you’ll have an edge when it comes to understanding programming languages. On the other hand, some people will be much more comfortable with the creative side of code, front-end development for example. Letting your artistic side express itself to build visually attractive web products, that too is code. We regularly see back-end masters struggling or getting extremely frustrated when time comes to align elements on a landing page or move a box by 1px.
The bottomline is, anyone can learn to code with the right amount of motivation. More specifically during the first few weeks, when you will need to deeply understand one concept before moving to the next one. Each person will have their own way, go at their own pace, and as with any new piece of knowledge you want to acquire, the main challenge is to identify how you learn best. That said, we’ve identified a few common traits among our successful students, and it’s mostly about soft skills.
Learning to code: 4 key soft skills
We’ve seen people struggle for weeks and suddenly understand everything. What did all these people have in common? Here are four soft skills that we think are crucial for anyone wanting to dive into code.
Motivation
Call it grit or hustle, this is the main point we want to figure out during each Le Wagon enrolment interview: What is your motivation? Why do you want to learn to code? The reason is quite simple: the first few weeks with us can be very demanding, and you may find yourself “lost in translation”. At that moment, your motivation will be the make or break factor. Spend only one day to wonder “What am I doing here?”, and you will lose track of what is going on. At Le Wagon we are also coaching future entrepreneurs, and grit is conveniently the key factor that will define the future success of a company. Unlike some other skills (think learning Japanese), code has the benefit of being really rewarding when difficulty level is well balanced, and that can greatly fuel your early motivation.
Curiosity
One thing we tell our students from day one is “write code, test and repeat”. That’s when curiosity kicks in: within our curriculum, there are very few lines of code you can write in Sublime Text that will completely break your computer (worst case probably being infinite loops), and the learning process also goes through experimentation. Curious students won’t be worried they might make a mistake. They will write code, test, see the result and learn from it. They will also be the ones going one step further, often by figuring out different ways to make their code work.
“Write code, test and repeat”
Open-mindedness
What we call the “open-mindedness” trait might be the trickiest to identify for yourself (“No, I am not stubborn”). It’s also the most difficult to acquire, since it’s exactly what you normally don’t learn at school: the ability to accept constructive criticism, acknowledging that you don’t know everything, and being ready to ask “stupid” questions. Those traits will basically put you in a “ready to learn” mode. It often comes along with a final skill: not comparing yourself to others.
Socialness
The cliché of a geeky developer wearing coke-bottle glasses and working alone in his basement dies hard. After you learn programming, whether you decide to become a developer, product manager or entrepreneur, you will have to interact with people. A lot of sutdents we enroll also specifically point out that “learning code alone is hard”, and it’s acknowledged that step 2 of understanding a concept (code or else) is being able to explain it to someone else. Lastly, we noticed over our five sessions that teams ending up with the best final projects were not necessarily formed by the most technically advanced students: they were the ones who knew how to work together.
Do you actually enjoy it?
There is a very simple way to find out by yourself: try it. Codecademy is a good place to start, but basically any online resource will do the trick.
Our best (and last) piece of advice when you start learning is to pay attention to your own behavior. If after a coding session you look at your watch and realize the last four hours felt like 10 minutes, you’ve probably been bitten by the programming bug!
