Career Choices: Herd Mentality or Personal Motivation?

“A career is not just about earning an income. It is about pursuing the essence of your life” — Terry Mante

The ripe age of 12–16 is the time when a child’s mind gets impacted by societal pressure the most. You see your friends and seniors pursuing something and excelling or having the time of their lives. It makes one desire that life in their upcoming years. As we grow up, we realize that we must build a career to stand on our own feet in the world. Amongst all this, a very rudimentary question comes to my mind. What is a career?

There is no right answer to it and there are multitudes of definition for a career across the world. Some think of career as way to earn money and settle down in lives. For some people, career is following their passion while others look at career as a means to serve people. There are politicians, sportspersons, artists and coders and coders and coders across the world.

There are over 24.3 million coders in the world today and the growth rate of coders is on a juggernaut trend. There has been a 20% growth from mid 2020 in this domain of work. I am sure most of us follow our passion to pursue our career, but there are a lot of factors to influence one’s career direction. Getting a job in the coding domain is not easy. It requires a combination of great skills, practice and extreme power of logical reasoning.

However, the world runs of logic. Every business is built via logic and not luck. The inception of digital age is calling for a need for more and more people in the domain of software. Does the demand for coders justify the large number of students heading towards the field of software development?

The lucrative monetary benefits that come in this line of work by sitting in the confines of our home/offices with a laptop make a lot of people pursue coding. The ease of concepts and advancements that are continuous happening makes one intrigued by the opportunities that are present across softwares. All you need is clarity in concepts of programming, a laptop and good sense of logic to prevail. You can see mechanical engineers becoming game coders and matching a core computer science engineer for every line of code. This brings a very important question into perspective

Are the other fields of study simply a route to coding?

Students crack multiple entrance exams to pursue an engineering degree to ultimately code and build programs. This is diluting the core fields and making it less attractive in the industry. Gone are the days when one would vouch for a role in Mercedes as a mechanical engineer or an electric engineer look for a role in Schneider or Alstom. Everyone aspires to be working at FAANG (now better known as MAANG 😊) irrespective of the field of study they are pursuing. The prospects for growth and need for society approval is leading the young turks to head for this line of work.

Some people develop passion for the same, while majority of the prospective coders end up following the herd to be recognized in a respectable job and look for exit options even if they do not land up in their dream job in the 1st attempt. The whole cycle of career growth revolves around money, recognition, growth, and passion. Majority of the people across the world end up falling in the vicious trap of following the herd. Any field has potential for growth (personally and monetarily) if it is combined with passion.

The herd mentality has creeped within a lot of us, and any new domain related to digitization is enabling the selection of career options amongst people irrespective of their specialization in their bachelor’s degree or master’s degree. With the advent of startup culture, the inclination has increased even further. Every startup needs an application, CRM or a website to sustain itself on top of their tremendous business models which is leading budding aeronautical engineers, budding commerce enthusiasts, budding politicians towards software development.

To ensure that personal motivation gets a higher weight in career options, every career line needs to be promoted in an equal proportion to generate awareness and then allow people to explore the right option for them based on what motivates them. You can’t stop the people from becoming coders, but you can make an effort to show them that grass is greener on the other side as well.