I hate coding. On the other hand, I’m a great believer in money.

Or maybe it’s the other way around. I like money, and I’m a great believer in the power of programming to get you untold riches. Or at least a spare buck or two.

I work as a software engineer, which means I get paid to do things like move a button four pixels to the right.

It’s excruciating work. No, really. Yeah, I’m not splitting logs like a lumberjack or writing Excel formulas like a CPA, but coding can be quite difficult.

Perhaps that’s why I have a love-hate relationship with programming. On the one hand, it doesn’t usually take much to change the background color of a page to “cream” instead of “off-white.”

On the other hand, when I have to create an authentication flow that securely prompts the user for their credit card information, I start to sweat buckets.

And so do the senior engineers who I convince (or force) to help me.

I used to tell everyone to “learn to code,” but now that the job market’s changed, I now say, “Learn to code. And use AI. And give your boss gifts without seeming like a suck-up. And… and… and…”

I don’t have a stammer. There’s just a lot we all have to learn in this economy.

This isn’t your grandfather’s job market. All of a sudden, being moderately good at one thing isn’t enough to have a career.

I used to think being snarky was something I could turn into money. I wrote humor columns for my school’s blog, which paid zilch. Then I wrote them for the Gettysburg Times, which paid zip. Then I wrote them for Cagle newspaper syndicate, which paid nada.

I bet you can see where I’m going with this.

No matter how far I moved up the ladder of snarkiness, I never got a dime. I did get some angry emails from readers who took me seriously, but that’s a risk of the job.

I still write humor, not just because I enjoy the process, but because I love knowing that I’ve made someone spit orange juice all over their computer because they happened to read my work during breakfast.

I also still write code, though I’m not so snarky doing that. Even so, I like to think I’m somewhat competent at programming.

Reading that, my boss probably snorted coffee all over his computer.

Okay, so maybe I’m not as competent as the brilliant engineers that are always 27 years ahead of me in programming even though they’ve only been coding for 5 years.

But I try to be like them. I study programming outside of work. I think about programming outside of work. I write humor columns about programming outside of work.

Let’s face it: I don’t even have an “outside of work.”

But I’m nervous about the future. There don’t seem to be many programming jobs out there for juniors like me.

So if you’re hiring software engineers with two or so years of experience, I’d like to throw my hat in your ring.

I don’t wear hats or jump in rings too often, but if that’s what’s needed to land a job these days, I’ll do it.

Then maybe my next column won’t be about my coding skills.

My boss will be able to drink his coffee in peace.

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Copyright 2026 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Alexandra Paskhaver is a software engineer and writer. Both jobs require knowing where to stick semicolons, but she’s never quite; figured; it; out. For more information, check out her website at https://apaskhaver.github.io.