Learn to Code, It's Harder Than You Think

Historically for me, I'm sure that kind of attitude pushed my clueless bosses into thinking I'm some kind of semi-skilled lackey that can readily be replaced with outsourced staff or graduate hires. It's kind of a self feeding one, because if they do outsource it works for a while, until a kind of critical mass happens and it starts falling apart. The confirmation bias after making this call also makes it almost impossible to undo.

I'd disagree on one point - and that is that programmer is a synonym for software developer. It's one thing coding yourself up some scripts at home, another thing altogether building a reliable, scalable technical solution within a (possibly large) team. All software developers are programmers, but not all programmers are software developers.

But the "learn to code" efforts that are referenced serve the important purpose of exposing people who might have aptitude to the idea that they can realize that aptitude. I imagine that people without the prerequisite aptitude would just quit because it wouldn't interest them, and those who can cut it would continue on auto-didactically. I'm not trying to be too critical, but criticising those efforts with the idea that "it is hard, you probably can't do it" is unhelpful at best.

No such evidence, at least not in any respectful sources.

> will do nothing to help the skills shortage

Who said that this is the immediate goal of teaching as many people as possible to code?

> Given the skills shortage one would expect graduates from computer science courses to have very high employment rates.

This logic is broken on so many levels that it's even embarrassing to comment. Let's start with a trivial nitpicking that Computer Science education got nothing to do with the Software Engineering.

> there are two populations: one that finds programming a relatively painless and indeed enjoyable thing to learn and another that can’t learn no matter how good the teaching

It is really embarrassing that the guy who wrote it calls himself a programmer - i.e., someone who is supposed to be logical and rigorous.

There are far more categories that these two. And the most important category, targeted by all the programmes he's mocking, is the people who do no even know if they'll find programming enjoyable, because they never tried.

What an arrogant, false, and self-aggrandizing fiction. Stop over-valuing yourself -- coding isn't some ultra-difficult natural selection process equivalent to winning an NBA Championship.

Designing complex services, scaling and maintaining them on a server stack is hard. Developing, training, and shipping a useful deep-learning network and making it into a useful product is hard. Coding is not hard.

I get sad when engineers, especially ones who's tone seems vaguely threatened, start writing up these discouraging blog posts belittling 'noobs'. Its a pleasing fiction that software engineers are just 'naturally better' and therefor their jobs are ensured. I think that anyone who says this has likely not been in the industry for very long -- because they would have seen scores and scores of devs left behind due to not training up and getting beaten out by upstarts who teach themselves and do well.

Do they?

If your job is primarily about taking other people's work and writing code based on it then, in my opinion, you don't really build software. You write code. There's nothing whatsoever wrong with that, but it's definitely different. Building software is much more than writing code.

Software development is working out what a problem is, what the solution to the problem is, and how to implement that solution on a computer. There should be time spent talking to users, gathering requirements, writing specifications, designing a user experience, developing a test strategy, thinking about stuff, writing documentation, and, at the end, a bit of coding. The non-coding side of software development isn't especially different between specialisms. So, really, software development in the sense of everything necessary to make a piece of software does require approximately the same set of skills.

That said though, the knowledge required in any given part of the software industry is very different. A web developer needs to know very different things to someone doing graphics or embedded development.