Izzy Kiver quit his $36k software engineering job at Nectar in 2015 because the pay barely covered rent. He argues most business software like login systems and APIs already exist as open-source tools, making traditional coding increasingly redundant. He now advocates no-code platforms like Airtable to solve business problems without deep engineering expertise.
Let me tell you why I quit my job as a software Engineer back in 2015. I worked as a software engineer for a company called Nectar. Let me tell you like this, I was making shit money. It was 36k a year after taxes, of course. I was left with like, I don't know, 24. And my rent was just about all of that, plus whatever I had to pay to park my car at work. And I had maybe a couple hundred dollars left over for food. And that was it, breaking even. And I was like every other 21, 22 year old, I'm like, I'm doing it for the experience. You get the experience, you work this shit job and you kind of see where it takes you. Right? During my going away speech, I basically said that I think I've cracked the code. We were sitting there doing like marketing technology, doing online media stuff. I've realized that most of the technologies that we use in business systems, that we use in software engineering, most of the stuff has already been done. Most of the stuff that you're going to create, either someone's already created, either it's open source code or literally if someone actually let you borrow their code, it's already there. So whether we're talking about tools, we're talking about Systems, open source, APIs, all been done, there are very few things that haven't been done yet. How many times you have to redo a sign up button, how many times you have to redo a login system? So these are things that have been used and iterated over and over again. And yet we're training more and more front end developers, right? We're training these people who essentially are going into jobs that don't necessarily need to exist moving forward. And I think software engineering training is amazing. The way it teaches you how to think, the way engineers are able to problem solve, that is a talent. Okay, so I'm not saying anything against learning software engineering. I'm just saying there are better ways to do that. Hear me out. So there are softwares like airtable, right? Airtable technically when it started out was just a slightly better Excel or a slightly better Google Sheets, but that technology has been updating, right? Right now you can do front end facing websites based off of an airtable. If you think about it, an airtable is basically a dynamic database and everything in software engineering is based on databases. Whether you're in blockchain, you're talking about like a distributed ledger and distributed database, or whether you're talking about a more traditional server setting where you have all your data stored in SQL files and in rows and tables, right? Airtable. It teaches you some of that problem solving capacity, especially when you're trying to add logic functions, when you're trying to actually create a set of tables. And what you're doing really is you're organizing information to a definite end. Whether you're trying to organize a team and organize a project or like a project manager, right? Or whether you're trying to organize an organizational roadmap, right? Like a product manager, whatever it is you're doing, if you learn the problem solving algorithm, which is what software engineers do, they build algorithms in order to problem solve a set of steps to a definite end in order to solve a certain problem, you can use this software engineering thinking without having to learn all the nitty gritty details that don't necessarily make you a better problem solver. So what I'm getting at is that I by no means am trying to say don't be a software engineer, don't study software engineering. What I am saying though is if you are coming from a non technical background and you want to learn how to be more efficient in an organization, how to organize your own business better, whether you're entrepreneur, whether you've opened up your own mom and pop shop, or whether you're working inside of a company and you're trying to communicate better, you're trying to organize information better, you're trying to problem solve. There are better ways to do it than having to go through the aches and pains of someone that goes and study software engineering, just to study software engineering so they get a better job. What I'm saying is there are tools out there and I will gladly show them to you. I will show you every step of the way, teach you these tools, walk you through all these processes, no problem. I'll even organize a list of my favorite tools that are used in organizations where I work just Google Polygon. I work for the US government through a company called API. So I work with the best of the best. And I've seen how people have used these technologies and similar technologies, internal tools, right? Because we can't use outside tools like Airtable inside of Google. But we had our own version of that, something called tables, right? So I will show you how to organize information, how to use these tools to a definite end to problem solve. So you get all of the benefit without any of the drawbacks. Now one last time, I have good friends who are software engineers. They organize entire software teams. Wonderful people, they love to code. If you don't love to code and you're trying to make impact with technology there are other ways and that is something I learned many years ago and it took me this long to finally realize hey what if we taught more people and help more people figure out how to use technology various business tools and systems to indefinite end to indefinite purpose and what you do with that purpose we can do with that tech is actually make more money for your company, make more money for yourself and actually create solutions instead of adding more junk code or adding more software just aggravate the problem how many messaging apps do you really need? So that's my whole message my little psa, my rant. I've been Izzy Kiver in case you don't know me yet hopefully over the next couple of videos and as I release more content on a consistent basis you'll get to know me better but that's all I have to say. If you're looking to up level to upskill there are better ways. Peace out.
