I think anyone who wants to explore the world of programming should do so, but I don't agree with this article.
I fit the demographic that this article is talking about. I taught myself JavaScript for years, taught it to others and I currently work part time at a cloud technology start up and part time teaching online with another company. The reality is that contrary to the hype the truth is that it takes a long time for your mind to adapt to thinking in code. Learning programming is not something that most people can do in a year or even two. Basic programming? Yes, maybe. Basic Wordpress development? Maybe. But keep in mind for modern front-end development you are also talking about the DOM, async, frameworks like React and a hodge podge of things that can easily drown developers who have been working in the field for decades. I once had a bio-chem student who was extremely smart and had A's in his advanced math classes. No matter how much we tried to work through it he could not get his head around DOM programming. I went out of my way to try an help him but eventually he decided it just wasn't enjoyable and he dropped the course. I've also had many students that have assumptions about the attainability of this stuff that make my jaw drop. I've worked with online bootcamps that treat students soley as customers and instructors as pseudo-guru's that are expected to keep the student "happy". If the student complains because the instructor gave them a reality check - the onus is on the instructor. I do believe that most people can do more than what they perceive, but this article is not promoting a perception that I think is beneficial.
The next big blue collar job is coding (2017)
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Re: The next big blue collar job is coding (2017)
#92This topic recycles on HN pretty frequently. I don't believe it. I have many friends that aren't coders and it helps me remember how big the skill gap is. Unless you've done substantial training, code seems just as opaque as medicine, or law, or most fields of engineering. Any job that requires substantial training and trust not to royally screw everything up pays well. Perhaps 30% of the population has the creativit…
> If coding was going to be commoditised it would have happened decades ago I don't understand how coding would have been commoditised literally decades ago... when the reality is that not so long ago the demand has increased exponentially. Plus only now the supply is starting to pick up - remember you have countries (like China or India) pumping millions of programmers per year, and these numbers will increase - due…
The training materials and methods continues to evolve. How many remember those thick programming books that weighed 5 pounds. Chances are those who started learning in the past 5-10 years have never seen one. All of those learn programming websites and code challenge sites are a recent invention.
The internet only really hit mainstream adoption a short while ago. Decades ago the internet was twinkle in the eyes of hardcore nerds. A fad to everyone else.
Re: The next big blue collar job is coding (2017)
#93Tons of people in denial here. If you put up a job post for a software developer in NYC, you'll get 90% bootcamp graduates with less than 1 year of experience coding and no real passion for it.
The article is about workers, not applicants. Nobody is disputing that a lot of people have been bamboozled into going to these code bootcamps.
Re: The next big blue collar job is coding (2017)
#94Bootcamps I swear train cargo cult programmers. It may work for some, but in my experience they lack the understanding of why they are typing what they are typing. They can go through the motions of what they've been trained to do, but they get stuck extremely easily and have no idea how to help themselves. So then when you start explaining why their program does not work, their eyes glaze over when you start talking…
which is totally fine! the majority of software only needs that level of skill.
Re: The next big blue collar job is coding (2017)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. We had a 50% dropout rate in year 1 at my university. Most of those were in it for the money, but didn’t have enough personal interest in the subject to push through the combination of logic and tedium that makes up introductory computer science.
Over my 4 years in undergrad, ours was 90%. 300 in, 30 out.
Yeah. I didn't track the stats across all 4 years, but I suspect they'd line up with yours.
Re: The next big blue collar job is coding (2017)
#96I've seen this same thought expressed quite a bit through my ~20 year career. I think the earliest expression of this that I've found was a quote from the 1980s. So, people have been saying this for a long time.
In the early 2000s, I thought they were probably right, because a half-drunk baboon could put together a working application using VB6 (and later, if he sobered up, he could do the same with .NET WinForms). RAD was a real thing, and I thought it signaled the end of the high-salary programmer.
I was wrong.
Looking at modern tech stacks, none have productivity tools that are contextually equivalent to VB6 and .NET's WinForms. So, I think we're still wrong about this prognosis.
Re: The next big blue collar job is coding (2017)
#97This topic recycles on HN pretty frequently. I don't believe it. I have many friends that aren't coders and it helps me remember how big the skill gap is. Unless you've done substantial training, code seems just as opaque as medicine, or law, or most fields of engineering. Any job that requires substantial training and trust not to royally screw everything up pays well. Perhaps 30% of the population has the creativit…
> If coding was going to be commoditised it would have happened decades ago I don't understand how coding would have been commoditised literally decades ago... when the reality is that not so long ago the demand has increased exponentially. Plus only now the supply is starting to pick up - remember you have countries (like China or India) pumping millions of programmers per year, and these numbers will increase - due…
I learned my first few languages through the acid inpired O'Reilly tomes of early/mid 90's. Since then things are far more accessible but this effect is throughout society, not just programming.
You can teach yourself law or medicine these days online as well as engineering but it doesn't seem to have a commodity effect on any of these professions.
The main barrier remains. It's not easy to learn and requires a person with the "type". I believe the biggest barrier to highly skilled jobs isn't necessarily the skill but skill combined with interest.
Most people simply don't want these kinds of jobs regardless of the pay. Make 2-3x as much to do a job that requires endless learning and a lot of tedium, that only attracts a couple percent of the population that naturally enjoys this type of work or wants the money bad enough to put up with it
Re: The next big blue collar job is coding (2017)
#98This topic recycles on HN pretty frequently. I don't believe it. I have many friends that aren't coders and it helps me remember how big the skill gap is. Unless you've done substantial training, code seems just as opaque as medicine, or law, or most fields of engineering. Any job that requires substantial training and trust not to royally screw everything up pays well. Perhaps 30% of the population has the creativit…
That should be the first interview question. "Did you enjoy your math homework?". I find myself jealous of those who have some to do.
Yes. It should be "did you enjoy math homework or do you think it's worth getting paid 3x your salary to do math homework all day". Programming is mostly simple math but we've all been in the situation where SQL, data, and bugs combine into some unholy quagmire. The kind of thing that most humans honestly have no desire to deal with
Re: The next big blue collar job is coding (2017)
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
25 years is the blink of an eye.
My point is: frameworks (when they work) simply unlock the next level of complex problems for general "tackle-ability", and those problems require hard engineering to solve. We certainly haven't run out of complex computing/software engineering problems to tackle yet, and I simply do not see that slowing down.
The process of stratification is not driven by inherent complexity. You're absolutely right in that we still have, and will always have, hard problems to solve in software.
What I'm referring to is the fact that businesses do not have to solve all of these problems. And businesses are what ultimately drive the field. Think of all the other really complicated fields out there. Music, law, medicine. Still hard problems to solve in all of them.
Let's take music as the example at hand. We'll never reach the end of what's possible to accomplish with music. Yet there is an entire industry around it that commodifies musical services. You can spend an entire career focused on something exceedingly arcane like mid-sized arena acoustical materials.
We haven't gotten that way yet with information technology, not because we can't get there, but because the field is still so very very young. Music has been an industry for thousands of years. The modern arena builds on technologies developed for theatre in ancient Greece.
You're right, each advance makes for new problems to solve. But unless you can make a credible claim that this time it's different, the field we inhabit and make a good living exploiting will move the same way every single other engineering field throughout history has always moved.
Re: The next big blue collar job is coding (2017)
#100While I agree with the assessment that it might be the new blue collar job, I don’t think it’ll ever be understood very well by people without formal education, either through experience or study.
What about formal education is teaching it so well then? And what do you mean by "it"? Coding, software development, computer science?
All of the above.
You either get a head start with formal study, or you spend years developing a decent level of skill.
You may be effective after just a year or a boot camp and think yourself amazing, but your knowledge is really shallow.