Teaching foreign policy majors to code

Don't get me wrong. On paper it's attractive. Quite high salary. Casual dress. Often flexible hours. No heavy lifting. High demand for skilled workers.

On the other side: You have to concentrate to a level that most people can't even understand -- and you have to do it all day, every day. Nobody understands what you are doing and most people under appreciate the difficulty (which is actually a huge understatement). Many managers believe that the reason things are going more slowly than they would like is because you don't have enough stress in your life. Unfortunately, the reality is that while you don't have much day to day stress (unless you are are in dev ops), you have ridiculous long term stress. No matter what you are working on, you don't have enough information to do your job. As soon as you learn enough to do your job, the job changes. Your tools change on a yearly, if not monthly basis -- and the amount of learning necessary to get good at your new tools is a full time job in itself. On top of all that, the field is immature to the point that it is likely that every single person on your team has a different way to solve every problem. And they are all convinced that everybody else's solution is crap. And they are all correct (pause to let the implication sink in). You're going to get it wrong almost all the time, and it will take you something like 30 years (if I'm any measure) to realise it. But even when you finally figure something out, nobody will listen to you, because they all think you are wrong (and they are probably correct about that too).

It's a terrible job. Only do it if you really, really want to do it.

On the other hand, I've known a few people who are able to clock in and clock out, do a competent job, and not get too stressed about stuff. I'm still trying to figure out how they do it.

This may happen in other subjects as well. I taught college math as an adjunct for all of one semester, and discovered to my surprise:

1) None of my students knew the meaning of "show your work." Hint: It doesn't mean turning in your scratch paper along with the answers.

2) When I asked the math professors how to explain "show your work," some of them bluffed and blustered, but none of them could give me a straight answer. At worst, I got, "they should just know."

Sorry but, real world problems like foreign-policy practitioners have to encounter on the job don't respect _any_ boundaries, let alone boundaries about what topics one knows/doesn't-know/doesn't-have-to-know. For Christ's sake, these students were majoring in "Science, _Technology_ and International Affairs."

They had some coursework where they encountered a bit of programming and some hardware configuration, SO WHAT? It's good for them.

Now, if we can get computer science students to wet their feet in some public-policy...

You are teaching coding, not computer science and electrical engineering on Day 1.

Setting variables, printing things on the screen, creating loops, making your first functions- Thats day 1.

With that, I would assume most people become addicted to programming, when you make a function, you can feel the power of programming.

After that, I encourage people to solve a problem in their own life. Most of the time, you can rig it in python- but if they wanted to build an app, they are basically ready.

My objective is to give them instant gratification and feed into their personal goals.