DON'T Learn to Code in 2026! It's POINTLESS Now?!

0:00This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast, smart move. Being financially savvy, smart move. Another smart move, having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto, bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Covered options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state. The Forget learning to code. It's not going to help your kids get a job in 2026. According to Ross Gerber, he just told parents to pull their kids from coding classes. Remember, everybody thought getting a college degree would guarantee you success. And then it was, OK, we'll get a degree learning to code. You can always fall back on that if your liberal arts degree doesn't, doesn't pan out for you. Well, that's going away too. And he's blaming AI.

1:01I think there's some other issues going on here. And a lot of kids want to get into coding because they want to break into the video game industry. And the AAA video game industry is collapsing. So it's like it's not going to take nearly as many people to make games going forward. And let's face it, I think a lot of these studios were like 75% bloat. We'll talk about some of the layoffs. We just have more layoffs today that a whole bunch of people got laid off at EA. Battlefield 6 developers got hit with layoffs. And the game was actually a pretty big hit, I guess. I'm not a huge battlefield fan. I don't really like FPS shooters. I just don't really care that much for them. But I guess it was a pretty big hit. And they still got laid off. So I don't think there's much of a future here, even if you do learn to code. So before we get into it, any further, please subscribe for more pop culture news views. And Rance, guys, go out to my ex. I'm going to give ex another shot. And basically again, the post articles over on ex.

2:03I have nothing to lose at this point because the whole blogosphere ecosystem has collapsed. So I still want to talk about a lot of stuff. I don't get a chance to talk about here on YouTube. So I think I'm going to do my personal ex account for now and see where it goes. And that would be at neon on ex. So check it out if you're so inclined. So this was Ross Gerber. He said, forget learning to code. It's not going to help your kids when game devs are losing their jobs in droves. Now, here's the original tweet. And he was actually talking about right games laying off people. And this was a couple of days ago, actually. Bad time for computer programmers, right games laying off 25% of staff. I've heard, pull your kids from coding class like learning Latin at this point. Basically a dead language. Put your kids on clawed and chat ASAP. Well, I don't know about that. I'd trust your kids with clawed. I don't know if I trust anybody with clawed at this point. Byron Briggs says, good time for senior computer programmers. I've been solo on Upwork for years.

3:04And this is the best I've ever done. Also, we don't call ourselves that software engineers. Exactly, AI engineers, et cetera, but run of the mill programmers are in trouble. Yeah, so this is what I want to talk about quickly because a lot of people are talking about the AI apocalypse and how it's going to take everybody's job. I don't think it's going to take everybody's job. It's going to let talented people do more with less. And what'll happen is they'll get rid of 90% of the staff but the 10% that are left are critical to the company and they will be given the AI tools to basically multiply themselves. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking. Maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home with agents who close twice as many deals. When you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it.

4:05Get started at redfin.com. Own the dream. Because AI can't be trusted without oversight. Again, see also Claude, I've been covering that too. Claude, if allowed to run a mock, it's absolute chaos. You need somebody to double check the work. You need somebody to point it in the right direction. I think that's always going to be the case, at least for the foreseeable future. But the vast majority of jobs, the grunt jobs, the bloat, that stuff's gone, just like art. The people they're freaking out the most about AI taking their jobs where people who frankly weren't talented enough to make it on their own in the first place, they had to be part of a team. A lot of times they're entry level, a lot of times they're not remarkably talented. They're definitely not entrepreneurial. They want to just go get a job somewhere and just park it there and retire. And in the white color sector, those days are over, man. Like you're going to have to learn

5:06to be a business person. You're going to have to learn to use tools to make yourself more valuable. And that's what's going to happen, right? And it's not that you shouldn't learn to code. I think it's that you shouldn't expect a job to be waiting there for you. And this was a lie, same with journalism, same with animation. These industries were propped up for years, probably a decade plus with some of its USAID money, USAID, USAID, I call it USAID. USAID money, some of its venture capital, but they were never really sustainable, right? These jobs were not real. They weren't a result of the company having profit and they wanted to reinvest the profit into employees. It was, they had mandates, they had to go forward, they had to hire a bunch of people. So you have a whole generation of college grads that think what you do is you just go to college, get out, get your degree and go park it at some software company or tech company or whatever

6:09and sponge off of the company. And we saw this with Jack Dorsey firing a bunch of people at square recently. It's gonna get back guys. I think the best thing you can do honestly is have a fallback for your fallback and just realize the days of going to work and working until you're 55, 65, whatever and getting that watch those days are over, man. They're over. And it was all, I think a hallucination to begin with. I don't think it was ever really sustainable, but I think we're going to see kind of a return to everybody having their own farmland to work. That's where I think we're going with this because remember guys, the whole notion of being an employee and working for some company and being one of just many, many people working for a company, that's been a fairly recent thing. It used to be that most people back in the day were owner operators, you ran your own business,

7:10whether it's a farm or a shop or whatever it is. And you might have some employees, but you didn't have these massive factories and stuff like we do now or tech companies. So I think, again, Darwinism is going to definitely do its thing and probably take a lot of people out that just aren't capable or qualified of doing it on their own and I'm sorry, but putting your kids in a coding class is not necessarily the way to go. This is coming from Benzinga. Benzinga, pull your kids from coding class, Ross Gerber warns at mid-gaming industry layoffs. He says it's like learning Latin now. Bad time for computer programmers. We went out and we saw the original tweet, pull your kids. Pull your kids out coding class. Gerber's point is simple, basic coding skills may no longer offer the same career security they once did. As AI tools grow more powerful, he believes one of the mill programmers are in trouble. Conversation quickly drew responses from working software engineers,

8:11one developer, Byron Briggs, pushback saying that senior engineers are actually thriving. Good time for senior computer programmers, he wrote. Gerber agreed that higher level roles may survive. Saying AI engineers, et cetera, will still be valuable. But he doubled down on his warning about mid-level and junior developers. The engineer went further. Mid and junior level SWEs are done for. He said, I can do what would have taken 10 people six months in a few hours now. Other white color will follow. He's not wrong. I know you don't want to hear it because white color workers, college educated white color workers thought they were immune to this. They thought they were above it. They used to lord it over people. They'd lord it over coal miners. Journalists lord it over coal miners. You should just learn to code. Well, so those people probably still gonna have jobs and you're not, okay? They're blue collar. If they're not mining coal, they probably know how to do other blue color work.

9:12They'll be fine. Journalists, you will not be fine. That view matches with what some leaders inside major AI labs are saying publicly for me personally. It's been 100% for two plus months now. I don't even make small ads by hand. The head of anthropics, quad code Boris churny recently set on X. I shipped 22 PRs yesterday in the 27. And 27 the day before each 100% written by quad. Company wide and anthropics says between 70 and 90% of its code is now AI generated. Yeah, Claude's gotten to scary. I gotta tell ya. Claude is, if any AI is gonna go rogue, I think it's gonna be Claude. Can you imagine that? How did the human race die out? Claude. Claude killed the human race. Claude set off the nukes. Anthropics CEO Dario Amote said he was a Modi or a Modi. Recently predicted the industry could be six to 12 months away from AI handling most software engineering tasks from start to finish.

10:12Gruber's comments also fit into a broader debate about how work is changing. AI tools don't eliminate jobs entirely, but change what the job looks like. See also graphic designers. I was there at the transition from like film and paste up to everything going digital. And a lot of people got left behind, but a lot of people found new work because they were willing to learn the tools, right? So typing out every line of code, developers now review edit and guide AI systems that makes higher level thinking more important than syntax. Gruber's also argued that AI tools are currently underpriced. It will not be $20 a month to use AI models for long. Yeah, that's what's gonna happen. Eventually it's gonna be, you need the AI to do your whatever. It's gonna be like $1,000 a month. And that's gonna be the barrier to entry, right? Once it gets so good that it can replace people, it's worth a hell of a lot more in $20 a month. So that's the truth.

11:13The core question remains, if AI can write most of the code, what happens to the traditional entry-level path into software development? Gruber's view teaching kids to code today is already outdated, whether that prediction proves right may depend on how quickly AI moves from assistant to replacement. Now, it's interesting though, because people go to college for one thing, they get out of school and the technology's already changed. And that's one thing you have to be, especially if you're working in any kind of digital field, you have to be flexible, you have to be willing to learn. You're gonna constantly be learning. And I ran into this as a web developer. I actually started building websites when like nobody else was building websites, and like the mid to late 90s. And I taught myself how to hand code very basic websites, but I could name my price. And then as soon as like Dreamweaver and these other tools came along, that was it, man. Like people could make sites a lot cheaper and a lot faster than I could, and I had to find something else. And rinse and repeat, this is, you know,

12:13this has happened to me on many, many different occasions. So the fact that people are being blindsided by AI, I mean granted AI happened a lot faster than I would have expected, but I feel like I'm personally kind of prepared for it, or at least my mindset is prepared for it, because this is my first rodeo. For a lot of people though, they went to college, they were promised a job and they're field, yada, yada, yada, yada, and all of a sudden everything's changed. And white color workers really truly thought they were immune to it. People working in the video game industry, because it's so huge, they really thought they were immune to layoffs. And we've seen record layoffs. I mean, it's absolutely insane. 2024, there were 15,000 layoffs. In 2025, there were nine to 10,000 layoffs. And just in 2026 alone, 7.5,000 layoffs. So over 66% of surveyed AAA Studio Professionals report layoffs. Now this is what's interesting. 70 is 75% of these layoffs occurred in North America and 50% were in California.

13:16It's almost like California is incredibly expensive, and the employees are incredibly expensive. But I'm hearing as well, like 30% of the video game industry has been laid off, and that's going to continue, right? Let's get to take fewer people to make games. The people that will stay in the game, no pun intended, are the, again, the higher level employees that do most of the thinking. And this is probably a good thing, I think, overall for the industry, because again, there's a lot of bloat and a lot of the people that are in the video game industry in these spaces right now are activists. Yeah, they're there because they just want to platform, and they want an easy job and an easy paycheck. And it's ending, man, it's ending. So best advice I can give you, as an old dog, is make sure you're willing to learn new tricks. Keep your resume updated. Do not look at any job as a permanent thing, as a destination. Your little one grew three inches overnight, adorable.

14:19Also expensive. Sell their pint-sized pieces on D-Pock and list them in minutes with no selling fees. Because somewhere, a dad refuses to pay full price for the clothes his kid will outgrow tomorrow. And he's ready to buy your son's entire wardrobe right now. Consider your future growth-bird budget secured. Start selling on D-Pock, where taste recognizes taste. Payment processing fees and boosting fees still apply. See website for details. Frankly, the destination is the grave. I mean, that's it. That's where it all goes. You need to keep yourself alive until it's time to know about of this world. And you're gonna go through a lot of different jobs. It's gonna be scary. You're gonna have to retrain. You might have to retrain in your 40s or 50s. I get it. I've been there. It can be done, right? It can be done. So good luck, but yeah, don't teach your kids. Don't teach your kids how to code because it's not. It's not gonna work out for them very well. I ask all these poor Twitter employees

15:20how that worked out for them. I'm gonna wrap it up. Please subscribe. We'll talk later. Good coffee creamers make every sip a good one. Two good coffee creamers. Real goodness in every sip. Find them at your local croaker in the creamer aisle.