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The rationale for this rapid curricular renovation is economic. Teaching kids how to code will help them land good jobs, the argument goes. In an era of flat and falling incomes, programming provides a new path to the middle class – a skill so widely demanded that anyone who acquires it can command a livable, even lucrative, wage.
This narrative pervades policymaking at every level, from school boards to the government. Yet it rests on a fundamentally flawed premise. Contrary to public perception, the economy doesn't actually need that many more programmers. As a result, teaching millions of kids to code won't make them all middle-class. Rather, it will proletarianize the profession by flooding the market and forcing wages down – and that's precisely the point.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Sunday September 24 2017, @04:15PM (2 children)
As I understand it, the AMA doesn't want there to be more doctors, as you indicated. Also, becoming a doctor requires serious dedication. I think the field of programming or IT or whatever to call it needs something like an AMA or a bar association. We need some body that can certify that programmers know what they're doing (for example when working with dangerous things like null-terminated C-style strings, as opposed to strings where the length is separated from the character data in C++ (hooray for std::string)/C#/Java/etc).
Forming a licensing body like that, in addition to the inherent difficulty of herding cats^Whackers, would attract all kinds of fire and brimstone from the Misogynerd Narrative, because that licensing body will be telling a lot of cisfemales that they don't have what it takes (yet?) after a 3 week bootcamp to be a certified, licensed Professional Programmer. I feel we have some people on this board who could be described by cisgendered and female who would, in fact, be able to become licensed Professional Programmers.
(There be a lot of dragons with this proposal. May debuggers only be operated by professionally licensed Programmers? I sure as hell hope not. Is contributing to a free software project putting one's license on the line? I sure as hell hope not. Are we talking about unions? We don't need to be. I'm hoping to limit my pontifications to professional, gainful employment only.)
I also wanted to be in before male nurses. This is another area where we can see that the Programmer Shortage/Misogynerd Narrative is horseshit. Many nurses and others in caring professions (i.e. home health aide) recognize the need for diversity in these careers. There is a shortage. They know they need more men, especially male home health aides. This comes up often in a homecare newsletter I somehow wound subscribed to. There's a section every other newsletter or so highlighting male homecare professionals. So, it isn't that there isn't a shortage, and people on the ground aren't being blithely hypocritical here. What we don't see is a pervasive Misandronurse Narrative (or something) calling all assigned females in caring professions, regardless of body parts, frigid bitches who can't get laid. (Granted, the way the gender caste system works out, this wouldn't work anyway, because in the caste system, having a low “score” is a virtue for women, not a sign of failure as it is for men.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @11:16PM (1 child)
They're not really comparable, and we have enough of that already. It's entirely possible for anyone to self-educate and learn computer science if they have the aptitude for it, and many do.
The 'Everybody has to go to college'/'Everybody has to be certified' trends are, in general, unjust and counterproductive. Employers should be vetting candidates better in the fact place and not relying on degrees and certifications. Let's stop discriminating against people who know what they're doing just because they don't have some piece of paper, are 'overqualified', are too old, and so on.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Monday September 25 2017, @12:38AM
Certification is certainly lousy in tech. Does anybody even get certs any more? I got an A+ must have been 15 years ago, but I don't think I've ever had a job using those (specific) skills. Never bothered wasting time and money with another cert.
Employers still need some way to know who knows what they're doing. I hear you. It still floors me that there are all kinds of people running around with 4 year degrees that can't even write fizz buzz! I don't have a 4-year degree personally, but I understand that I'm expected to claim an associate's degree for the 2-year technical school I dual enrolled in during high school. It was me and another guy there who were beyond the teacher, so he let us do whatever the fuck we wanted to do for the last semester. We wound up studying for and acing the AP computer science AB exam.
I guess I don't have any concrete ideas other than this professional association would be directed by people who know what they're doing.
Though perhaps it is a pipe dream. Right now industry has too much of a stranglehold on the art to the point that I feel nobody in the general public recognizes that there is an art involved in tech (one of those “useful” arts). The general public sees it as yet another meaningless skill set that serves no other purpose than getting a paycheck.
Perhaps we should attempt to better define the nature of this art?