Why I Still Code (And Why You Should Double Down on Your Strengths)

I often write about staying up late coding, testing new AI tools, or just building for fun. (My average bedtime is about 2am — and my average wake-up time is about 9:30 am).

So naturally, I get this question a lot: "Why do you still code? Couldn't you hire people to do that?"

This week, I went on Rowan Cheung's (founder of The Rundown) podcast for an interview. During the conversation, I went on a mini “rant" about this fundamental flaw I see in a lot of businesses.

This is about a fundamental choice we all face: Do you spend your time fixing your weaknesses, or amplifying your strengths?

So in today’s post, I want to break down:

• Why amplifying strengths beats fixing weaknesses

• The weird double standard we have in business

• Why I code (and why you should keep doing your thing)

—@dharmesh

Note: Today’s post is less related to our usual AI and AI agent programming, but I hope it will be useful to many of you. If you have thoughts, I’d love to know in the poll below.

The Better Return on Investment

After 30+ years in business, here’s a lesson I've learned: We as humans have a tendency to say "here are our weaknesses, here are our strengths, and I'm gonna iterate on my weaknesses and make them less weak."

That's useful to some degree. But a much better return on calories spent is to actually amplify your strengths.

Because if you amplify your strengths -- the things you're already strong at -- the return on that will far overshadow the weaknesses. In fact, in many cases, the weaknesses won't matter.

I have lots of quirks and weirdness. For instance:

• I don't do phone calls at all. I have maybe four phone calls a year.

• I don't manage anyone. We have 9,000 people at HubSpot. I've never managed anyone because I'm very, very bad at it.

• I tell dad jokes even when speaking on stage with 10,000+ people in the audience.

There's a very limited number of things that I think I'm actually pretty good at. I just want to get better at those things.

And if I get good enough at those things, the rest of it won't matter. It won't matter that I can't manage people. It won't matter that I have all these faults and deficiencies.

Which brings me back to the coding thing…

The Weird Double Standard

It just so happens that the thing I'm good at is building software (aka coding). That's my thing.

I'm grateful that I found my purpose -- even though I learned it a little later in life than I would've liked (I didn't start coding until my twenties). But I think this general rule actually applies to most disciplines.

Here's the rant-y portion I mentioned earlier:

In most disciplines, we don't say "Hey, you're a bestselling author. You're Stephen King. What we want you to do is stop writing and manage this team of writers over here."

That would be silly.

We don't say "Oh, you're a world-class musician. You've trained your entire life to be a world-class musician. We're gonna have you stop actually playing music and start doing something else."

That doesn't make any sense.

But in business? We do this all the time.

I think part of why we do it in business is because we associate "business-y things" like coding as just another job function that you should eventually graduate from.

But that's not how it works for me. And I don't think that's how it should work for most people who are genuinely good at something.

Why I Code

The other question I get is: "Why do you work so hard?"

I'm not doing it for the money. I have enough of that and live well below my means.

It's because I love it. I want to get better and better at it. With the world of AI and AI agents, it’s rapidly changing and it's fun.

To be clear, I am not the smartest developer in the world. But I have a mix of skills that I've acquired over the fullness of time, of which coding is one of the pillars.

That combination of skills: business sense, technical ability, understanding of where technology is going, that's what creates value.

So if you're good at something -- whether it's writing, designing, coding, sales, whatever -- my advice is simple:

Get better at that thing. Don't let people convince you that the natural progression is to stop doing the thing you're good at in order to manage people who do that thing.

Yes, management is important. Yes, someone needs to do it. But it doesn't have to be you just because you happen to be good at the underlying skill.

Find the thing you're good at. The thing you love that energizes you rather than drains you.

Then double down on it.

The weaknesses won't matter if you're good enough at your strength.

—Dharmesh (@dharmesh)

P.S. Let me know if you found this type of post useful or if I should stick with AI and AI agent topics with the poll below. Would love to hear your thoughts.