Is Your Teen’s Plan to Become a Software Engineer Good? A Parent’s No-Hype Practical Guide
The pepperoni on Javi’s third pizza slice congealed a little while he pushed his crumpled high school course selection sheet across the kitchen table. It was 8:30 on a Sunday, the dishwasher thumping through its final cycle, and he’d just laid out what he called his “full, no-BS plan” to become a software engineer, no unnecessary detours.
I wiped a smudge of tomato sauce off the edge and read his scrawled bullet points. Drop AP Lit and AP Bio next year to fit both upper-level computer science classes the district offers. Do 45 minutes of free web development tutorials every night after homework. Graduate a semester early, do a 12-week in-person coding bootcamp downtown the following spring, skip four-year university entirely, and apply for junior developer jobs by 19. His friend’s cousin did it, he said, makes $75,000 a year right out the gate, no student debt.
My first instinct was to say absolutely not. I work in elementary school administration, my partner installs HVAC, and neither of us knows a single person who writes code for a living. My only frame of reference was the headlines I scroll past: big tech layoffs, scam bootcamps that leave graduates $15,000 in debt with no offers, entry-level postings that demand three years experience for an entry role. I’d spent 18 months nudging him to keep his grades up for the state university’s CS program, the “safe” path I’d mapped out from 9th grade, when he first started messing around building Discord servers.
But I held my tongue. Two months earlier, I’d pushed him to stick with AP Bio against his complaints it had nothing to do with anything he cared about; he dragged through the unit, turned in half the labs late, and walked away with a C. He didn’t need me shutting this down before he’d thought it through. I told him I wouldn’t sign the course sheet until we’d talked to three people who actually do this job for a living, not just short-form clips and his friend’s cousin. He agreed, and that’s how we spent last week: coffee after school with a front-end engineer, porch drinks with a bootcamp grad who lives two streets over, and a 20-minute meeting with his high school CS teacher during advisory.
Lila, 28, who got a traditional four-year CS degree and works for a mid-sized outdoor gear e-commerce brand, cleared up the first big gap in Javi’s plan right away. Like a lot of teens interested in coding, he’d only seen the highlight reel: flexible hours, good pay, building cool stuff from your bedroom. Lila laughed when he said that and told him she spends roughly 10 hours a week in meetings, another five writing documentation explaining why she built a feature a certain way, and a third of her time fixing messy old code written by people who left three years ago. Writing code is maybe half the job, she said. The other half is figuring out what people who don’t know code actually need, and explaining your work clearly.
On the degree question, she didn’t write off the bootcamp path entirely—her company dropped the formal CS degree requirement last year—but she said they still hire 80% bachelor’s graduates, because when 400 applications hit one opening, a degree is an easy first filter. Bootcamp grads who get hired almost always have a thick portfolio of actual working projects they built on their own, not just certificates for finishing tutorial modules.
Moe, 24, the bootcamp grad from down the street, did exactly what Javi wants to do: skipped four-year school, did the 12-week program straight after high school, got a job three months later. He makes more than most of his college-educated friends, he told us while his rescue terrier chewed our porch rail, but it wasn’t as easy as bootcamp sales made it sound. Their “job placement support” was mostly a list of LinkedIn links anyone can find. He got his first offer through a guy he met at a free local coding meetup, and spent 20 hours a week outside class building extra projects the first year just to keep up with his degreed coworkers. He’s now in school part-time for his bachelor’s, because two higher-paying roles turned him down outright for lack of a degree, even with three years experience. The people in his bootcamp who only did assigned work, who didn’t tinker on their own time, never got jobs at all.
Our meeting with Ms. Henderson, the high school CS teacher, drove that last point home. She looked at Javi’s plan and said dropping AP Bio was fine if he didn’t need it for graduation, but ditching rigorous English to make more coding time was a terrible call. The kids who struggle most in her advanced classes aren’t the ones bad at math, she said. They’re the ones who can’t write a clear explanation of what their code does, or can’t read a messy project brief and pick out what actually matters. Software engineering is mostly problem-solving and communication, not typing syntax. She also pointed out the framework he’s learning now will probably be outdated in three years. If he doesn’t actually enjoy messing with broken code and figuring out why it doesn’t work, he’ll burn out fast.
By the end of the week, we landed on a low-stakes test that doesn’t require locking anything in at 16. For the rest of this school year, he’ll stick to 45 minutes of coding five nights a week, even when he has tests or wants to hang at the skate park after his shift. By June, he has to build one working small project that isn’t a step-by-step tutorial copy—right now he’s planning an inventory tracker for the local skate shop he works at on weekends. If he follows through, we’ll let him swap AP Bio for the second advanced CS class next year, but he takes regular senior English instead of a study hall, no arguments.
After graduation, we’re not ruling out bootcamp, but we’re starting with free community college classes through our state’s tuition promise program. He can get his associate’s degree in two years with no debt, build his portfolio, then choose: transfer to state for his bachelor’s, or do the bootcamp if he still wants to get to work faster. He won’t bet his $12,000 in college savings on a 12-week program at 18, with nothing to fall back on if it doesn’t stick.
Last night I walked past his room at 9:45, and he was leaning into his screen, muttering at a line of code that wouldn’t run. Ten minutes later he banged open the door, grabbed a glass of water, and said he’d found the problem: one missing comma. He was grinning, not frustrated. That’s a good sign, but it’s not a guarantee. Six months ago he was dead set on being an automotive mechanic, and before that an architect. That’s what being 16 is for.
We don’t know if this plan will end with him working as a software engineer long term. What we do know is that taking it seriously enough to test it, instead of dismissing it out of hand or letting him bet everything on a single viral success story, feels far more useful than forcing him onto a path he doesn’t want. The tools will change, and his mind might too. That’s not a failed plan. That’s just how figuring out work goes.
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