“Is This a Good Plan to Become a Software Engineer?”: A Parent’s Practical Guide for Tech-Motivated Teens
The garlic bread was still steaming when Javi slid his Chromebook across the kitchen table, last night’s stats homework crumpled under the edge. “I don’t need to waste time on AP Lit next year,” he said, tapping a Google Doc titled SWE PLAN 2025 in all caps. “I got this mapped. Bootcamp the summer after graduation, three freelance projects by Christmas, job at a startup by spring. Six figures, no four-year debt. Is this a good plan to become a software engineer?”
Javi’s 16, my oldest, and up until three months ago his only career plan was to make paid Minecraft skins for other players. Then the TikTok algorithm picked up on the Python tutorials he watched after school, and his For You Page turned into a nonstop stream of 22-year-olds talking about skipping college, landing six-figure software jobs in six months, and retiring by 30. He started staying up till 11 most nights coding in a Discord server with other teen modders, built a little tool that auto-sorts player inventories for his friend group, and came home convinced the traditional school path was a scam for people too scared to take a shortcut.
I teach fourth grade, so I know teen development well and almost nothing about software jobs. I didn’t want to shoot down the first thing he’d been genuinely excited about in years, but I also wouldn’t sign off on him skipping core classes and dropping $12,000 on a bootcamp with no proof it would pay off. I texted my cousin’s husband Mike, an engineering manager at a mid-sized business software company, and asked him to review the plan over coffee.
Mike wiped foam off his flannel and read through the whole doc in two minutes. He didn’t call it stupid, and he didn’t call it genius. “The part where he’s already coding for fun every night after school? That’s better than 70% of the resumes I get,” he said. “The rest of it’s missing all the boring stuff no one posts about on TikTok.”
His original plan was straightforward: drop all non-STEM electives and AP Lit senior year to free up time for independent coding, complete a 12-week full-time bootcamp right after graduation, build three generic portfolio projects (a to-do list, coffee shop finder, Discord bot), then apply to 10 jobs a day that October, holding out for a $100,000 minimum starting salary. No internships, no community college, no backup.
The biggest red flag, Mike said, wasn’t skipping a four-year computer science degree. It was skipping the communication and writing practice Javi would get from classes like AP Lit. Most new engineers assume the job is 100% coding, he said, but on an average day he spends only three hours writing code. The rest goes to clear Slack updates, explaining why a feature will take three weeks instead of three days to non-technical teammates, parsing dense technical documentation for relevant details, and giving feedback on messy code without alienating the person who wrote it. AP Lit’s routine of pulling evidence from a text, structuring a clear argument, and writing something another person can easily follow is exactly that skill, just with poems instead of Python.
As for skipping college entirely? It’s possible to get a software job without a four-year degree, Mike said, but far harder if you don’t already have a foot in the door. Most large companies use automated resume filters that reject applicants without four-year degrees before a human ever sees the application; with 10,000 submissions per open role, it’s an easy way to cut the pile. For a kid like Javi, with no parent in tech and no stack of family friends who can hand him referrals, skipping school closes more doors than it opens. It doesn’t have to be an expensive private CS degree, either. Two years at community college transferring to our local state school, with summer internships, would leave him with less than $10,000 in debt and far more options.
I went home that night with carnitas tacos, sat on Javi’s bed while he tested a new mod, and didn’t open with “your plan is bad.” I told him Mike thought his consistent after-school coding was stronger than what he saw on most entry-level resumes, then walked through the notes one by one. He pushed back at first, citing all the TikTok creators who’d pulled off his exact planned path. We spent 45 minutes pulling up each creator’s public background, and the pattern was impossible to miss. Half had been coding since they were 12, not three months. A third had a parent in tech who got them their first internship. One of the most popular “skip college for six figures” creators had actually dropped out of Stanford after two years, not skipped higher education entirely.
We didn’t scrap the whole plan. We adjusted it in small, low-stakes ways that didn’t make him feel like he was giving up on his goal. He kept AP Lit, with an agreement he could drop it at semester break if the workload ate into too much coding time. He’s still doing the bootcamp, but part-time the fall after he starts community college, instead of full-time instead of school. Instead of three copy-paste tutorial projects for his portfolio, he’s building tools for people he actually knows: a volunteer sign-up app for his high school cross country team that the coach will use this fall, and a refreshed website for the local animal shelter he volunteers at once a month. He’s applying for every entry-level internship he can find next summer, even the ones that pay $15 an hour, instead of holding out for a six-figure full-time role immediately. Mike even offered to let him shadow his team for a day next month, to see what the actual day-to-day work looks like.
It’s not a perfect setup, and nothing’s guaranteed. Last month he spent three weeks building a Discord bot that broke the second Discord updated its platform rules, and he moped on the couch for two days saying he was too stupid to ever work in tech. He still pulls up the original all-caps Google Doc sometimes and argues that he could still quit school and move to Austin if his first internship goes well. He still complains about reading The Great Gatsby every Sunday night.
For other parents whose kids come to them with this exact question, you don’t have to choose between crushing their excitement and signing off on an untested plan. You don’t need to know how to code to help. If you don’t have a friend in tech, message two or three software engineers on LinkedIn who graduated from your kid’s high school; most will agree to a 15-minute Zoom call about their career path. Ask to see projects your kid built outside step-by-step tutorials, not just bullet points on their plan. Treat a low-cost college path as a safety net, not a punishment for ambition.
Last night I found him back at the kitchen table, his AP Lit book propped open next to his laptop, a half-eaten slice of garlic bread going cold beside him. He was muttering at his screen, because the cross country sign-up app kept double-counting volunteer shifts. When I set a glass of water down next to him, he looked up and said Mike was right about the documentation thing. He’d spent an hour reading through three pages of setup guides to fix the bug, and it felt exactly like analyzing a poem for lit class—annoying, but it worked.
I don’t know if he’ll still be a software engineer 10 years from now. He might switch to cybersecurity, or decide he hates sitting at a desk all day and go into park maintenance. The original all-or-nothing plan wasn’t a good one, but it wasn’t a waste, either. It got him started, and the version he has now has room to shift when he runs into the parts no one shows on TikTok. Right now, that’s good enough.
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