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: 4, Interesting) by lx on Sunday September 24 2017, @11:43AM (15 children)
Society doesn't *need* many accountants, but everyone at school is taught arithmetic.
Learning to program is a life skill. At the very least it partly demystifies the Magical Self Thinking Internet Machines for the masses even if they don't get any further than changing Hello World to printing out rude words.
These days teaching life skills is seen as a lefty-hobby on the order of theater and expressive dance so to get a budget approved you have to propose it in terms of job creation and a direct boost for the economy.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @12:01PM (2 children)
They are generally teaching specific programming skills rather than the fundamentals of it.
I had this same problem as a kind in the early 90s. The few classes on programming were mostly wrote programming exercises without either explanation of the theory of operation, order of operation, or details about the computer architecture which could interfere with implemented our expected operations. This hasn't changed almost 30 years later with the modern push to teach programming.
They are in fact trying to push out coding monkeys who won't really understand enough to become real programmers, assuming they have the drive and desire, but will act as a way to push down expected salaries by flooding the market with a glut of underperforming programmers they can use to show that supply outstrips demand when they go about hiring the qualified programmers for their jobs.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday September 24 2017, @12:56PM (1 child)
I can verify this, having kids gone thru this kind of stuff, the worst stuff tends toward obscure data entry, the best stuff is pretty facile.
I'd theorize that programming is a sport. There's rules to follow and motivation and random chance plays a big but not primary role, but the distribution of untrainable uneducable skills is very non-linear. You can, and should, train up a 98% programmer to a 99% programmer at extreme effort. And a 98% programmer has a hell of a lot to learn before maxing out at 98% much less leveling up to being a 99% programmer. But your average bubba who maxes out in programming skill somewhat below fizzbuzz is never going to benefit.
Something like no matter how much you pimp ultra marathon running in the media and how closely you tie it to progressive beliefs and no matter how much you signal about it, only a vanishingly small fraction of the population is ever going to be any good at the 100 mile track event. Personally I'm not sure I could ride a bicycle 100 miles in a mere 12 hours, but apparently people run it. The ultra marathon is something people can scale down to normal experience, I hiked a couple miles yesterday and I don't think I could have made it another 95 miles, so I can think rationally about ultramarathons. The closest analogy to programming is probably low to mid level home cooking (like, based solely on following recipes) or car mechanic work, or maybe electronic hobbies, which are not culturally cool nor respected (by dominant prog culture anyway) nor is most of the population skilled at performing.
Most "everybody must program" that I've observed my kids participating in, would be analogous to an ultra marathon kids day camp where its more a theme than an activity, lets crayon some coloring books, talk about it a lot, maybe pretend to run an ultra marathon by walking one lap on the track, maybe get the kids to recite some BS they probably don't understand and will forget in a week anyway... its more about making the parents feel good when they tweet about it on facebook than doing anything for the kids.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 25 2017, @08:35AM
jeez the political hatred oozes out of every pore with this prick, don't it?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday September 24 2017, @12:03PM (4 children)
Ahhh...mmm... yes, I can see how coding may fall on the same level as another "...eracy" alongside literacy and numeracy.
Beat me if I understand, though the next part:
How sees it this way? Who should approve a budget?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by lx on Sunday September 24 2017, @12:35PM (3 children)
Governments, school boards. In large parts of the world schooling is being subsidised. Those providing the money get to set the curriculum and want to see a direct return of investment. Having kids thrive and becoming informed well adjusted adults is seen as too vague a goal by those in power.
The result is another generation of alienated burn-outs which is a social as well as an economic problem, but by that time those responsible are retired and it's somebody else's problem.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday September 24 2017, @12:50PM (2 children)
Did you mean "socialized through taxes"?
If so, who is the actual "investor"?
Ah, "those in power". Now, this explains the confusion.
Thanks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @05:51PM (1 child)
I am, as are many others who know that an educated population is better for everyone.
(Score: 3, Touché) by khallow on Monday September 25 2017, @06:30AM
We are taught that.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Sunday September 24 2017, @12:08PM (4 children)
The premise is mostly bullshit. In order to put it in context you have to remember that The Guardian [startpage.com] receives a lot of money every year from Bill Gates as part of his reputation laudering. That's been going on for many years now. As a result anything they might try to publish regarding technology can be ignored or at best taken with a large grain of salt.
The point of having kids learn proper coding is so that they become technologically literate and can actually use the computers to do something, whether that something is be an accountant, a mechanic, a scientist, or whatever. That's fully at odds with a helpless and uninformed public which will blindly buy M$ products without question.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday September 24 2017, @06:52PM (3 children)
You are wrong. This is about corporate lobbying to drive wages down. I've been saying this for literally fucking years but you all dismissed me as a racist sexist.
Knowing how to code alone is not a reliable indicator of intelligence. As I posted in a more recent discussion, I used to love programming until I started doing it for a living and saw all the autistic retardism in the field.
I would say that being intelligent would go hand-in-hand with being well-rounded, and to have more well-rounded people we need to keep teaching art, music, history, political science, government, foreign languages -- all that stuff that Zuckerjew and his ilk would call a waste of time, because people like him only care about cheap labor. They want a China-style workforce consisting of soulless insectoid automatons who lack the critical thinking skills to realize that they are underpaid and their bosses are assholes.
Goddammit, I hate big software and everything about it. Cocksucking Jew-bastards!
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Sunday September 24 2017, @07:20PM (1 child)
I did not mention intelligence because it has little to do with coding in the context of technological literacy. Most jobs can still be done without coding -- for now. But if you can code at least a little, you can really use the computer as a multiplier for what intelligence and experience you actually do have. It's an extension but not a mechanical one rather one of intellect -- however little or much you start with, a computer when used correctly will effectively give you more. As the late Steve Jobs put it the computer is like a bicycle for the mind. Or at least it coud be...
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Monday September 25 2017, @02:01PM
That isn't enough. I have a few colleagues that can bang a couple bits together to make their own version of solitaire, but they don't have the creativity to apply that to their daily tasks to make their job easier. I once proposed taking a couple of weeks to make a database, GUI, and PDF generation to do 90% of the spare part & maintenance activity lookup stuff we have to do for our customers and salesmen (mostly data entry and relationship modeling). I was told no, because somebody from marketing might do that in a year to two--but no guaranties. But if I do decide to make it, build it as an excel macro. Okay, so I'm dealing with not only a lack of creativity at work, but also unfounded optimism, willful ignorance, and benign spite.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 3, Touché) by srobert on Sunday September 24 2017, @07:42PM
"...you all dismissed me as a racist sexist."
I don't remember ever dismissing you as either racist or sexist. But based on your last line, I can dismiss you as being anti-semitic.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @05:49PM
If you can't count then the chances of you earning enough to afford an accountant to count things for you are slim.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday September 26 2017, @12:53AM
Yup. Although I'd go a bit further and say that, while not being able to code might not lose you a job, knowing to code can certainly get and keep you one. No matter what that job is.
I've got one friend whose job literally involves counting the fish in a stream. Back when I was still on Facebook, she was always on there posting about some Python script or VB macro or whatever that she was using for her job. She had no formal education in coding, wasn't hired to do coding, but it sounds like she ended up coding for the whole damn office and became absolutely essential for their work.
Got another friend who got a second job doing bar trivia...and uses little Javascript functions to help come up with questions! Saves her a lot of prep time, which lets her questions be a bit more varied and complex than they would otherwise.
And a third friend works for an organization that helps low income folks deal with their utility bills. And he's working on a custom database front-end to help streamline their operations so they don't have to do data-entry off paper and pencil forms anymore. Which means their interns and volunteers can do something more useful than hours of data entry.
There's very few jobs that can't be improved with some good software skills. Of course, it also helps a lot if that education is broad rather than deep. It never ceases to amaze me how many *programmers* just don't understand how to use Microsoft Access/OOo Base, and will spend hours writing custom software for something they could do with one of those in five or ten minutes. Sometimes Javascript is actually a great choice if you just need a quick and dirty UI. If you're doing file processing, shell scripting is incredibly powerful. For more complex math, Python has some nice libraries. You don't need to know every detail of all of those environments, but you can't use them if you don't know they exist. So a program that spends two years teaching Java is great for future developers, but for everyone else that time would be better spent doing six months in four different systems.
But it's probably also good to actually avoid standardizing this kind of basic software literacy class too much. You can't teach everyone everything, so teach everyone something different so hopefully there's always a friend or coworker around who can suggest a different approach...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday September 24 2017, @12:34PM (8 children)
And then the author segues into a story about some non profit that helps coal miners find jobs. OK, no evidence there. Then there's an alleged oversupply of computer science majors by 50% which still doesn't show what the author wants it to show. The author then argues that it's to the advantage of employers to have cheaper employees. Ok, true as far as it goes.
That it would be to the benefit of these employers to have cheaper employees. Therefore that must be the reason. That's the extent of the evidence. What a remarkably shoddy article.
But let's not stop there. Even if we suppose the premise of the story is true, that certain high tech companies are deliberately educating/training new workers in order to increase the supply of programmers and keep the cost of their labor down, what exactly is supposed to be the problem? What's special about programming that we should protect high wages in this area and prevent additional people from enjoying the benefits of such jobs? Just because this is of benefit to employers, doesn't mean it is the only benefit possible. It's of benefit to the new worker who can have a good paying job. It's of benefit to end customers who can have the products of these programmers for a cheaper price.
What is missed here is that if these employers are working selfishly as claimed by the story, we then have a story of selfish business entities making self-interested decisions that happen to benefit all of society rather than just themselves. That is after all the key power of capitalism - that it provides avenues by which greed-based decisions can help rather than hinder society.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @02:54PM (3 children)
The onus of offering a better hypothesis is on you. In particular it has become clear that the 'STEM crisis' is a myth. [ieee.org] However it's certainly true that certain companies and government agencies have been pushing that myth that incredibly hard. So what is their motivation? This article offers a logical hypothesis that matches all the data and action we have. Nonetheless disagreement is perfectly reasonable. However, again the onus falls on you to offer a more viable explanation.
And this will certainly not benefit society. An overabundance of developers will collapse labor prices which benefits nobody except companies. They will, in turn, take the reduced labor costs and send that new "profit" straight onto shareholders and corporate executives which will result in greater wealth inequality and further accelerate our socioeconomic decline. Myopia is a chronic illness in corporate America today.
(Score: 5, Informative) by pvanhoof on Sunday September 24 2017, @03:09PM
> The onus of offering a better hypothesis is on you
No. That's simply not how it works. How it works is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Another must not assume any claims to be true, and the onus of offerint a better hypothesis is not on whoever should assume something to be true. The guy making extraordinary claims must provide extraordinary evidence. And that's it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 25 2017, @06:55AM
The "data and action" is ridiculously paltry. As I noted, not a single bit of evidence was provided aside from the observation that cheaper labor prices would theoretically benefit those who employ programmers. That's it.
Now let me provide a few pieces of contrary evidence. The first one is why should we have the expectation that this will work? As kurenai.tsubasa noted [soylentnews.org], one doesn't use marketing in isolation to get more entrants. They just pay more. The paying more is already happening and thus, we see an increase in programmers. Second, employers already have easy ways to hire cheap, foreign programmers and the supply of those is growing quite fast. And to anticipate a rebuttal here, why are the programmers gulled by marketing in the US going to be better programmers than their Indian counterparts?
Moving on, we have the investment horizon. Businesses are notorious for not thinking very far ahead in today's climate. So why are they going to put money into marketing programming jobs now just so they can have cheaper labor costs in twenty years? Not seeing it because it's past the next quarter.
Since you asked, here's my theory on the matter. This is just standard corporate status signaling via charity themes aligned with the business's markets. It may help dull criticism of H1-B games in US and similar attempts across the developed world to import developing world programmers or outsource to developing world destinations (a reasonable concern giving widespread immigration and outsourcing concerns among the developed world public).
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Monday September 25 2017, @07:50PM
Having more programmers out there can't help but drive up the quality of code that each of us uses every day. There will be more potential contributors to open source projects, so there will be more open source code, some of which will be good.
If that smacks of bullshit, how about the general trend of driving down cost, and thus price, for everything we use every day. More programmers will mean that more problems can be solved in software, so there is less need for an expensive hardware solution. Or, the feature set for a product can be expanded at the same price point.
Maybe, worst case, is all we (as a society) get out of a glut of programmers is a skinnable version of Flappy Bird. Don't overlook the small wins.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Sunday September 24 2017, @03:16PM (1 child)
But let's not stop there. Even if we suppose the premise of the story is true, that certain high tech companies are deliberately educating/training new workers in order to increase the supply of programmers and keep the cost of their labor down, what exactly is supposed to be the problem?
The problem is that they're lying about it, to everyone including the government, and pushing for programs to get more people to learn these skills to help drive wages down. Basically, they want to externalize their costs: it's not like these companies are volunteering to educate all these kids themselves, starting from grade school and going through college (or at least pay for all these costs themselves); they want the rest of society to take on that burden. Getting an education is a risk: someone has to pay for it, generally the taxpayer up through high school, and then a combination of the student (and family) and the taxpayer through college (state universities get certain subsidies), plus alumni donations. That cost is an investment in a career these days, but if it doesn't pan out, not only does the taxpayer lose, but the student (who generally shoulders most of the cost probably) gets stuck with a giant debt they can't repay any time soon and which can't be discharged in a bankruptcy. Why should employers get these free source of labor at almost no cost to themselves? The high salaries are compensation to the students for their investment and risk.
What's special about programming that we should protect high wages in this area and prevent additional people from enjoying the benefits of such jobs?
What's special about programming that we need to subsidize employers to help them reduce labor costs for this one profession? Why don't we do this for doctors or nurses? Or what about managers and CEOs?
It's of benefit to end customers who can have the products of these programmers for a cheaper price.
Programmer salaries are only a tiny portion of the cost of any product, since programming is part of NRE (non-recurring engineering). If you want to reduce costs, it'd be more effective to reduce management costs; that can be done with salary caps for executives. You could also reduce the costs of HR; those people don't do anything useful anyway, so why should they get paid more than minimum wage? There's lots of places in corporations where money is being wasted and people are being overpaid; why are you focused on programming?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday September 24 2017, @10:40PM
In other words, that their motives are impure. Why do we care?
Labor isn't free. They still have to pay for it in wages and benefits.
I'll note that this has been done for a long time with doctors and nurses. I've read of immigrant Indian medical professionals in the late 80s, IIRC. Education for managers and CEOs is in great oversupply. That's not the restriction on those careers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Sunday September 24 2017, @03:54PM (1 child)
I agree with what you've written for the most part. If tech companies need more workers, it makes sense for them to work with educators to create those workers. In my neck of the woods, there's a very real shortage of CNC operators. So, local factories created an initiative to work with community colleges to create CNC training programs. I've been looking at the one here in town. It's a full-time seven week course. There are also some other subjects this consortium has encouraged the community college to make available. Another one that caught my eye is “mechatronics,” which involves assembly line robot service/repair and retooling.
That's what it looks like when there's a real shortage. There are practical courses offered that do not pretend to take every jerk who can register for classes and turn her into the person with 20 years experience who can look at a CAD drawing, meditate on it for a few minutes, then fire up the CNC mill and produce a perfect prototype on the first try. Or hell, look at somebody's sketch, then work up the CAD drawing and take it from there. I don't really know the practical day-to-day of factory work (yet, maybe).
Additionally, there's a diversity of equipment they'll be teaching. I think after graduating the CNC program, I'd be qualified to at least have some clue what the hell I'm doing on CNC mills from about 8 different manufacturers.
I also take a look at the marketing for the course, and it's very minimal. I don't see a diverse cast of smiling faces. There's just the odd regular joe operating a CNC mill. There's nothing exciting or hyped about it. We have factories here, and they need CNC operators. Plain and simple.
Also note the lack of Narratives with CNC operators. There is no Narrative in the media that we need more CNC operators. There is no Narrative in the media that only cisfemales need apply for these new CNC operator positions. Finally, there is no Narrative that, when the cisfemale CNC operators fail to precipitate out of the æther, that it must needs be the fault (blame to create divisiveness) of all assigned males regardless of body parts who have been operating CNC mills since they were kids and have a love of CNC mill operation. The Narrative would tell us that every assigned male CNC operator is collectively and severally accountable for some culture of pervasive sexual harassment, even though the only examples this Narrative could find are in the boardroom and not on the factory floor.
With programming, we see something a bit different. We have 3 week bootcamps. It will take me 7 weeks at the local college before they can turn me loose on a CNC mill, and nobody's promising me that I'll be a rockstar CNC operator. However, I'm supposed to believe that all it takes is 3 weeks in a bootcamp or maybe just an hour of code before somebody who's never used a command prompt before will have the same level of skill it's taken me decades to achieve.
Then there's the sexual harassment. Obviously, we have a programmer shortage because all those misogynerds who can't get laid are chasing these cisfemales who are chomping at the bit to learn the secret voodoo to open a command prompt out of the field! The whole thing is contrived horseshit.
Finally, one way I can really tell there's a CNC operator shortage and not a programmer shortage is that if I decide to take that 7 week course, I will probably be making $5/$10/even $15 more per hour in a year or two (assuming I'm any good at CNC operation) than I make now!
Why are programmer wages not going up? I only have a 101 level understanding of economics, but I'm fairly certain that if there's a shortage of some good or service and demand is increasing, the price of that good or service goes up!
Disclaimer: Keeping with tradition, I did not read TFA. It could very well be a crap article.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 25 2017, @03:51AM
I did read the article, and yes, it could well be a crap article. ;-)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday September 24 2017, @12:36PM
First, it's a piece of opinion, not something I saw proposed by a political figure of the present.
Second, it's based on the "there aren't enough jobs for coders". Which is debatable. In my mind, that's akin IBM's "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." of the old.
Software is not a material product, to say "the software market is saturated" is like to saying "music is in oversupply" or "there are simply too many painters in this world"
So, please somebody tell me, why is this on the "politics" nexus? Yes, I know humans are political animals and whatnot, but if we'd accept this as a justification, why not cram everything under "politics"? Why the "main page"/"techonomics" was not good enough, what's the specific difference that made this speculative opinion a "political" piece?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @12:41PM (7 children)
Why not push for more doctors? This is an occupation that commands high pay and (in some cases) may even collude to keep the supply short (by controlling med school acceptance and internships). Going to a doctor ~100 years ago was iffy, in many cases there wasn't much they could do, but now that has all changed.
(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?
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Sunday September 24 2017, @09:00PM (3 children)
Exactly. Why not push for more doctors? At the very least, a basic understanding of human biology is interesting and useful. We also need research biologists. Pathologists. Nutrition experts and researchers for new and less costly food sources.
But no. Huge political push to teach coding. Strange, isn't it?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 25 2017, @03:55AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 25 2017, @04:12AM (1 child)
In concert with more medical practitioners (doctors, nurses, aides), we also need Less hospital admins and management, and Less layers of expensive managers at insurance companies.... USA health care is a mess for many reasons, how do we make wasteful jobs less attractive?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 25 2017, @06:57AM
Make the enterprises that rely on them less profitable.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Sunday September 24 2017, @01:31PM (4 children)
Training coders will drive wages down. Obviously, the same applies to any other career choice. Maybe we should just revolt, and stop allowing ourselves to be educated? Just say "NO!" to teachers. "No, I won't learn to spell!" "No, I won't learn to multiply!" Actually, that's a pretty late start for revolution. Tell your mama, "No, I won't be potty-trained! I'll poo wherever I want to!"
That seems a self defeating strategy, doesn't it? One that only hurts the revolutionary, and doesn't faze those he is revolting against.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @02:58PM
So, you support Ms Davos's charter school plan, then?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @03:07PM (1 child)
The point is that they're having to coerce people into pursuing programming who are not otherwise interested.
It would be analagous to rounding up artists and trying to coerce them into becoming accountants because 'we know what's good for you.' And there is no real justification for this coercion other than companies wanting to drive wages down all while executives remain safe since their positions are often decided not on merit but on nepotism, cronyism, and connections that start as early as day 1 of their life. When your uncle's friend is the CEO, you're already 9/10ths of the way to becoming a VP. If executive and board level positions were decided on merit, it'd be rather amusing to see the response to 'Every single person needs to learn to be an executive, because reasons!'
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Sunday September 24 2017, @04:32PM
What's even worse is what this Narrative does to women on the ground. It gives them the idea that the skills I demonstrate on a daily basis (my “magic” as it's called—jeebus, it's not magic, it's dedication, practice, education, and experience over decades!) can be learned in a 3 week bootcamp or maybe a month of 1 hour weekly training sessions on the job.
When we get into the nuts and bolts of programming, it turns out that it's much more difficult than the woman wanting to be a “programmer” had thought. This causes endless frustration. It also encourages belief in the Misogynerd Narrative. I've been told to my face on multiple occasions that I'm hiding some secret knowledge and refusing to teach it to women because I must just hate women. These are not healthy attitudes, and they do not help anybody share in a love for programming.
I think the worst part of the Misogynerd Narrative is how self-defeating it is. Feminism seems hell-bound creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that there are no cisfemale programmers. Feminism tells girls not to go into programming careers because all the big bad misogynerds will stare at your boobs and sexually harass you day in day out! So, of course, girls don't take classes in high school that would help, and they don't select majors in college that would give them the foundation for learning the skills I have. Then, they demand that all assigned males, regardless of body parts (in spite of the fucking obvious in my case), make cisfemale programmers precipitate out of the æther, and they demand that all assigned males do it and do it NOW!
Even if they were being helpful and encouraging girls to specialize in maths and technology beginning around 5th grade maybe, it would still take a decade for her to complete her education, become a woman, and enter the workforce! They have no intention of allow time for this to happen, and I think it's because they're having more fun calling the sexuality, character, and sexual performance of all assigned males into question rather than doing something constructive.
(It would be nice if there were another girl to talk shop with. As it is, though, the Misogynerd Narrative and the Guardians of the Caste System have spoken. They say that the only reason I could possibly want to talk shop with another girl is because I want to rape her. They can all go fuck themselves.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Sunday September 24 2017, @05:17PM
Roger Waters said it better, albeit in a longer form.
And it ends with "Break down the wall"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @03:19PM
save your "save the working man's wage" bullshit for your communist meetings. The whole fucking point of learning to program should be that you can be free from the slave colony. what kind of stupid fuck says "i want to learn programming so i can find some big, slow, dumb, abusive company to work for that will have me write soul sucking code for shit wages", instead of writing their own software and cutting out the middle man? if you're a better programmer than me, and you aren't working for yourself, you're a dumb fuck and you deserve to get treated as such.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @03:43PM
rent-duh-k0d3rz have been around since before the intertubez0rz became popular for the general public. hence the name 'rent-duh-k0d3rz'. US$5.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @03:48PM (2 children)
I remember meeting another developer one time, he had created an API and I had created an application on top of it. I was impressed with his work, and he was clearly impressed with mine. He asked me how I learned to program, and while I had taken plenty of formal technology in school, my programming skills were all largely self taught. Turns out that he was a self taught programmer too, and then proceeded to tell me that all of the really good programmers he'd ever met were all self taught.
To be really good at it, takes someone who is genuinely interested in programming. The programming is it's own reward. Doing it just for the pay-cheque would be about as satisfying as digging ditches.
Can I assume everyone here is familiar with "The Tao of Programming" http://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html [mit.edu]
6.4
A manager went to his programmers and told them: "As regards to your work hours: you are going to have to come in at nine in the morning and leave at five in the afternoon." At this, all of them became angry and several resigned on the spot.
So the manager said: "All right, in that case you may set your own working hours, as long as you finish your projects on schedule." The programmers, now satisfied, began to come in at noon and work to the wee hours of the morning.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by crafoo on Sunday September 24 2017, @09:04PM (1 child)
I'm an engineer in a weird, niche field but I love programming. I think I'd like to write some useful utility or opengl/math-heavy tool and sell support for a living instead of engineering. I like all aspects of it. Not sure why. It's always been that way. It just feels good solving little puzzles and building something at least semi-useful. I'd probably be a carpenter or metalsmith in a previous age.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 25 2017, @09:20AM
Is that all? Pray won't you tell us the remainder of your life story?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RamiK on Sunday September 24 2017, @06:27PM (1 child)
Back during the early days of the Qing dynasty, Hong Taiji gotten himself into a real pickle. Whenever he conquered a city, he couldn't run the place the way he wanted! Most of the previous officials were disloyal Ming nobles and they were the only people who could read and write.
So, Hong decided to do the unthinkable: He taught his Han soldiers reading, writing and basic math while structuring government in a way that distributed authority to different ministries. In fact, he came up with quite the modern government and even went on to re-appropriate lands to these loyal soldiers.
Of course, this is a repeating pattern. Western kings fought the hold of the Church over education by financing the Academy and translating \ adopting the translations of the Latin scriptures into the common languages. And when they got tired with the nobility's hold on the bureaucracy, they started financing public education. Similarity, when Russia went red, public education was soon to follow.
So while it's true that teaching kids to program is all about cutting wages, that's not to say the general public won't benefit from this. After all, you can't have a democracy when your entire economy depends on the personal abilities and accomplishments of a tiny minority.
compiling...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @07:37PM
On the other hand reading is a skill that has a pretty limited learning curve. You learn to read - and well, you're good to go. Writing and wordsmithing can have artistry and skill involved but it's more flourish than necessity. Programming is not like this. My university was ranked 7th overall for CS when I graduated, and the vast majority of my peers were completely incompetent. That's after 4 years at one of the premier institutions for the field.
Pretending that people can any meaningful level of competence with 'coding camps' or grade level courses is a very cruel lie. In many ways programming is more like a sport than a vocation. There is an enormous difference in quality between people, even when they receive identical training and both try their hardest. And while many will view it as just a 'thing', for others its immediately immersive - and draws them in. I love programming. I do it for a living and then on the weekends when I'm looking for something do - I do more programming. And I'm far from abnormal. People that want to get into programming, to any meaningful level, will be competing against people like me. And they're going to lose. For that matter, employers also implicitly expect people to behave like this because so many naturally do. In particular the tools of the trade are constantly changing. If you're not spending your time off playing with technologies, then in a decade (if not 5 years), you'll be obsolete.
And that threat of obsolescence is real and something unlike any other industry (except again.. oddly enough, sports). Most top companies start to consider people 'over the hill' once they hit 30. The median age at a company like Google is currently 29 [computerworld.com]. You have to keep up, or get chewed up and spit out. I would never in a million years encourage anybody to take on this job, unless they absolutely love development - in which case, nothing I could ever say would change their mind anyhow!
So yes, I do not think equating development to basic literacy is appropriate.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday September 24 2017, @09:33PM (1 child)
There may well be no shortage of programmers.
There is a shortage of competent programmers.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Sunday September 24 2017, @09:57PM
The only problem is that big business puts no value on programming. It is a chore that they must do and as such try to send it to the lowest bidder and depress wages. They pay the low wages of the incompetent, not the wages necessary to get the job done right.
This is why Equifax had multiple hacks against it for months without realizing it or properly applying patches.
This is why Adobe had its security team tweet its private key.
This is why a Fortune 500 company I used to work for started to encrypt credit card numbers only after a PCI audit found them deficient and was starting to fine them. I was on the development team that did the work and they refused to allow us to encrypt SSNs in the same database at the same time. (because SSNs were not in the budget and they were only being fined for credit card numbers not SSNs.)
And believe me, the stories I have with other companies are just as bad... and a lot of it comes down to profit. They will do the bare minimum at the cheapest price as long as they are not held accountable. And which will be cheaper? the symbolic slap on the wrist that Equifax will receive, or the price to hire competent people and build a system the right way with the security it should have? Even when adding the "campaign contributions" to the money equation we all know the answer.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P