NOTE: I’ve been informed by my lawyer that when talking about sensitive subjects like the following I need a disclaimer, here goes:
Everything you are about to read is merely hypothetical, and shouldn’t be taken as fact.
6 years ago I was desperate to get a job to provide for my wife and 2 little kids. My strategy was to figure out the hottest web development language and learn it.
My thinking was if the new hot framework had only been around a few years and didn’t have many people with much experience, they might give me a shot despite my lack of credentials.
Turns out my logic was solid and I learned Ruby on Rails and landed a junior dev job. Now though Javascript has eaten up the world, it’s what everyone is learning.
Richard Branson says: “Never do a business that you don’t love.”
I don’t enjoy JavaScript it changes so fast and a new JS framework is created every 5 minutes.
What to do???
I saw the market shifting in early 2014, I tried learning JavaScript and found it frustrating for many reasons and just not fun.
After the front end team got laid off from my first job, I had 8 final interviews each time they said they loved me but my JavaScript skills were too weak. They suggested I apply for their QA job.
With my severance running out I decided if I was offered a QA job again I would hop on it. My 9th final interview the same thing happened, this time I answered that I would absolutely LOVE to try a QA role! 
Long story short, I ended up liking the QA role as it was really a Test Automation role. It was the first time I learned about Selenium and how cool Automation was!
Learn to code yes, but don’t limit yourself to only being a developer. Most people who reach out to me want to be cool and have hip stickers on their Mac while drinking coffee.
The truth is learning to code and being a professional developer are worlds apart. They are as different as your grandma’s computer skills are to yours.
Yes, THAT different!
My common sense and strategic thinking is strong and I’ve found the next big thing, and I think you should check it out as another possible alternative to being a full-blown developer.
I have learned the basics of pen testing ( ethical hacking ), started learning data science but didn’t fall in love with them.
I loved outsmarting websites and scraping data and automating ways to win free things online. I always used Selenium or a headless version like phantomJS ( Poltergeist ) to be faster.
I would use some of my hacking skills to change the user agents and try to automate stuff that I probably technically shouldn’t have 
- that was the hacker in me, I thought it was fun.
Enter LinkedIn, they have one of THE hardest sites to automate, they change elements and totally disorients Selenium, Selenium acts like it's drunk and had no idea what is going on.
I spent a week in my free time trying all different types of tricks and ways to automate LinkedIn. Nothing worked. I stalked people on Quora who used to work at LinkedIn and read posts and learned some of the things they do to try and prevent automation and web scraping. I came back to my script and tried for 2 more days, no luck.
I love automation, I love web scraping and have done it at many companies for them professionally, but this defeat really discouraged me. I focused on my side businesses and left it alone for a month.
I looked into OCR and tools like Kantu and Sikuli. I got them to kind of work but they weren’t fun to use and felt brittle.
Fast forward 1 month.
Through luck and chance, I heard about RPA ( Robotic Process Automation ). I started Googling and started learning one of the top RPA tools who shall be nameless. Long story short I didn’t think tihe tool was very modern it felt old and clunky.
The ability to automate virtually anything was cool though! A friend told me to try out UiPath as he thought it was WAY better than the other RPA tool I had been using.
Oh, my gosh guys... BOOM! UiPath is AMAZING! It can automate literally anything without even breaking a sweat! I won’t say exactly WHAT I’ve automated, but where Selenium would fall over and get crushed, UiPath breezes through!
I use it for so many things that used to be hard and take a lot of skill to automate, now it’s actually easy.
I’m not paid to say any of this.
Guess what?
RPA is a hot new technology that I think will literally change the world. The barrier to entry is set really low and you don’t have to be a full-blown developer to use it. You just need to know the basics of coding!
Oh, and its income potential is on par or better than a developer. I absolutely love UiPath and am moving towards doing it full time. I suggest you check it, even if only to help automate tricky workflows.
People email me and want to know what I would do if I was starting today. Well, now you know. I never do what everyone else is doing or thinks is cool.
Learn RPA, it already has some AI being integrated into it. I recommend UiPath, but any tool is better than none.
Always be learning something new, never slow down always be hustling, and turn off Netflix 
