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According to Cook, there are certain in-demand skills that students may not learn in college — namely, coding.
"And so to that end, as we've looked at the — sort of, the mismatch between the skills that are coming out of colleges and what the skills are that we believe we need in the future, and many other businesses do, we've identified coding as a very key one," Cook said during the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board meeting on Wednesday, during which President Trump met with the board's members, including Cook.
Cook also added that about half of Apple's US employment last year was made up of people who did not have a four-year degree.
The Apple CEO also said he believes that it should be a requirement for every kid in the U.S. to have some level of coding education before they graduate high school. Apple launched its Everyone Can Code program in 2016, a curriculum designed to help students from Kindergarten to college learn coding. There are 4,000 schools in the US using Apple's curriculum, according to Cook.
Save yourself the cost of college: Learn to Code?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday March 09 2019, @05:38PM (5 children)
I used to think a Bachelor of Arts degree was grossly inferior to a Bachelor of Science degree, but I had a change of heart. This presumes that an essential component of an arts degree includes the art of civilized behavior, especially the guts to defy abusive authority.
I've seen too many idiot savants, fools who know the technical details of a subject, but have little to no good sense. I've heard of people who have a Master of Science in Biology, yet believe in Creationism. The wage slaves at the bottom, the victims who, if they discern they're being exploited or bullied, don't know what to do about it, or they're convinced they're powerless when they are not. Think they can't afford to lose the job, and accept all kinds of abuse. Also have seen the opposite, the sociopathic lack of sense-- the people who know just enough technical details to fake it when among people who know even less, and who don't understand why they should not have cheated their way through school, and now have lied their way into a job they cannot handle, and on the rare occasions they are being honest, go about expressing their belief in a sophistry based on cheating. Most of the time they're too busy blowing smoke up everyone's asses, desperately trying to hide their own incompetence, and being loudmouths trying to drown out everyone else. If they can hog the floor at every meeting, they think they can keep the focus on others' supposed failures rather than their own. In the rare moments when they relax their defenses, they'll say that everyone cheats and lies, and it's all bull anyway, so what does it matter that they don't have the technical chops? Everyone else must be lying to some extent about their own competence. Bull makes the world go 'round, one of them once told me.
How so many can get through school believing such profoundly wrong sophistries is a huge problem. It's so bad, I think America needs other things more than another nutty plan to stuff kids full of yet more technical details. How else could America have ended up with such terrible leadership? Need more education and training in how to live like civilized people in a democracy, and not fatalistic or fanatic, brainwashed slaves in a fascist state. Training in how to spot bull, how to avoid becoming dependent and trapped, which includes that basic of maturity, postponement of gratification. In other words, don't live paycheck to paycheck. An expression I heard a long time ago was "kid, always keep some Fuck You money." What's Fuck You money? So you can tell your boss, "Fuck You".
Perhaps coding is an essential skill future generations will need. Literacy certainly is. But, literacy alone is not enough. Literacy is a tool, and it must be used, and used well, for the students to fully benefit from having gone to the trouble of learning it. The primary use of literacy is obtaining the learning that really counts, specifically, scientific philosophy so that we know better than to be afraid of superstitious nonsense and can detect and dismiss pseudoscience, and the understanding of our own natures, especially where we go wrong, so that we may improve ourselves, our societies, and our world.
Mr. Cook ought to explain how his stance isn't a totally self-serving plan to create a bunch of code monkeys and thereby drive down pay in a profession he uses. If, that is, Cook isn't one of those snobby, elitist lying propagandists intent on doing his part to turn America into a fascist dictatorship, thinks he's a superior human, and his employees are helpless children who'd starve to death if he wasn't so magnanimous as to allow them to work for him. I feel less and less inclined to give anyone of such power the benefit of the doubt on that point. Keep calling him out.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by exaeta on Saturday March 09 2019, @06:10PM (4 children)
I have been to college for "Computer Science". I have wrote some code too.
College, at least at the not amazing university of my program, was not teaching much. The skills are lacking, the depth is lacking, there's a lot of teaching about marketing and sophistry and little about anything worth learning.
When he says coders are in short supply, what he really means is the colleges put out bad coders. Posers, in other words. Or, maybe I should put it this way, programming noobs.
The smug elitists are the ones at university, who actually think themselves to be beyond noobs. Not so. My professors were noobs at the art of coding. They knew not what they spoke of.
The noobs that come with Computer Science degrees are worthless. They graduate by majority, in the "scripter" phase, unable to develop large complex programs with anything more difficult than python.
The noobs of university don't understand RAII, nor multithreading, nor undefined behavior, nor basic aspects of programming like the rules of the languages they're supposed to be coding in. A bit of math helps not when you lack the fundamentals of the discipline.
Degrees cover math, but math is not what we need. We need people who understand enough C++ to write programs that don't crash every 5 seconds. Does more math help with this? NO.
The smug university elites tell us C++ is terrible, and it's our fault for using it. Meanwhile the rest of the world continues to run on C++, and we ask "can you write C++ code without tripping over yourself?" and the answer is no.
We don't need a glut of more weak programmers who can code in script kiddie languages, nor haskell, we're running into a shortage of people who can develop infrastructure level code. We need people who can develop code which is both secure and fast.
More time complexity, more space complexity, more language theory of languages like C++. And we need to get rid of the myth that languages are interchangable, they aren't. You can't "pick up" another language in a few weeks. You'll be a noob, even if you can produce a buggy program that half works.
The people who oppose the improvement of teaching people how to code are themselves posers. They know they provide little value and don't want to see actual competition. They fear others doing better because it makes it harder for themselves to extort funds with their half assed "coding" skills. So be it, you corrupt greedy communist. But we will advance without you if you don't follow, now go learn to write code that isn't shit.
Academia opposes raising the bar because it exposes the professors for whag they are, noobs. Industry needs to push back and demand better than what academia provides. If we have to get people without degrees, so be it.
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday March 09 2019, @11:00PM (3 children)
Well, here's the easy initial test [codinghorror.com] to calibrate your candidates amongst the greater field.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday March 10 2019, @12:51AM (2 children)
The opposite side of that coin are HR people who can't tell a competent coder from a dead dog.
Or, they get weird and won't hire the best even when they have correctly identified them. Keep coming up with Kafkaesque reasons why an excellent coder will not do. Won't be a "good fit", is too independent, isn't desperate enough for money because no spouse and kids, is a flight risk, doesn't have 10 years of experience with Windows 10, or 5 years experience in each of 20 different technologies, is too smart, etc. And sometimes the real reason is "isn't the boss's nephew". They may be a sweatshop with a world view that in essence is that slaves are better workers than free people. Naturally, can't let in any subversive, rogue coders who might do something completely unacceptable like try to start a union.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 10 2019, @01:55AM
Ha, ha!
And the other (I would say more frequently encountered) side of the coin: the companies that only want young, single engineers.
The kind of employees who see no problem "living" at the office and doing uncompensated "research work" on weekends and travelling for weeks at a time on short notice.
All because they have no family waiting for them when the workday is done.
These people are slaves and DON'T EVEN KNOW IT.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday March 10 2019, @08:18AM
Shortly followed by, "job security in cleaning up the mess he left."