I mostly agree with the gist of the video in that learning to program is empowering and can sometimes result in a job. However, the type perk-laden of working environments shown are unrealistic, and limited to large companies such as Google or Facebook.
Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code
111–120 of 234 posts
Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You don't need a CS degree to become a decent programmer. You need one to get a job, though. If not now, in twenty years when you're old in an ageist industry.
If you can learn to program on your own and become proficient in it, build great projects, and keep up to date with the languages, why does it matter what major you are? Granted I'm 20 and still in school, but just being a CS major doesn't make someone a great programmer. I like to think that employers care about projects you've worked on as that is the best way to see a true programmers talents.
I am not saying that a degree is not important! I'm just saying that just being a CS major does not make one a great programmer and likewise, a great programmer need not be a CS major. I believe a history major can become a great programmer...as said in the video, learning how to program just takes determination.
I was an econ major and learned html/css in a few short weeks pretty darn well. At least enough to land me a web developer position with a rising startup. I have decided to change my major to a more technical one purely because I enjoy learning both HOW to program and what I can do with it--which I'm learning is just about anything :)
Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code
#113This no-profit IMHO should focus on creating a free, cross-platform, awesome system similar to Codea iPad app [1], that is, the BASIC of 80s. Everything not in the same line is too boring.
I've a very very positive experience with load81 [2], something I wrote almost solely for my son. In the latest months and thanks to this program my son learned to write Lua code and we are having a lot of fun.
I don't think it would be possible without a system that makes drawing a circle or checking where the mouse pointer is trivial.
Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code
#114The gap between CS majors and software jobs is misleading. You don't need a CS degree to become a decent programmer. Still, if there's such a shortage of good programmers (and I agree that there probably is) then why aren't we playing this to our advantage? A senior engineer can't afford a house in the Bay Area or New York, and our status is low-- we still work for managers; we're a defeated tribe in this way. Most o…
Fred George is interesting on this - see Programmer Anarchy. My view (and yes I am working up a blog post) is 1. Coding is the equivalent of literacy after 1451 (Gutenberg). 2. in say, one generation, any company not having literate people at all levels of the organisation, and not having then changed how they work at a fundamental level to take advantage of these programmers/business people will be at as severe a co…
let me know when that blog post is finished!
Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code
#115The gap between CS majors and software jobs is misleading. You don't need a CS degree to become a decent programmer. Still, if there's such a shortage of good programmers (and I agree that there probably is) then why aren't we playing this to our advantage? A senior engineer can't afford a house in the Bay Area or New York, and our status is low-- we still work for managers; we're a defeated tribe in this way. Most o…
Can you explain to me what actual evidence there is that there's a shortage of good programmers? Good programmers still make less money than a good doctor or lawyer, indicating that those are even shorter in supply. Surely addressing that shortage would be a higher priority? Lots of people could use more legal services if the price was lower, and yet if someone wanted to hire a Harvard lawyer for $60k a year, we woul…
My identical-twin brother is a doctor, and I make far more than he does. The reason is that I don't call myself a programmer [1]. Instead, I've built-up enormous amounts of domain knowledge [2] in addition to my software engineering skills.
As for the career prospects of anyone fresh out of law school, the legal profession suffered a massive meltdown in 2008 and hasn't recovered.
[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...
[2] http://jacquesmattheij.com/domain-knowledge-or-a-lack-thereo...
Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet all of the glorious self learners can't describe when to use a hashmap, what a hash is, or even the difference between a list and set... I'm not talking even knowing the algorithms, I mean a guy that writes list.contains(condition) in a loop and it brings the server to a halt because every call to contains runs through the entire list, when a hashset.contains(condition) would run in milliseconds. * no I did n…
Yawn. I would say the same about the glorious PhD professors that attempted to teach me. Even the best professors, who were actually pretty knowledgeable, would never really code at all, pushing that off to the grad students. Some people just don't fit into the way academia works, and making silly judgments like yours about them does nothing but entrench the status quo.
I agree, but you still have to read the book. Coding can not be learned by copy and pasting other people's code. All I was trying to say is for every 20 people that say they are self-taught only one of them can write a feature from scratch from a blank slate and explain the trade offs of why they used a hashset vs a list. The other 19 may be able to get something working by copy and pasting another section and spending a week shoehorning it, but the competent person would bang out in a day without looking anywhere else.
Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain to me what actual evidence there is that there's a shortage of good programmers? Good programmers still make less money than a good doctor or lawyer, indicating that those are even shorter in supply. Surely addressing that shortage would be a higher priority? Lots of people could use more legal services if the price was lower, and yet if someone wanted to hire a Harvard lawyer for $60k a year, we woul…
My identical-twin brother is a doctor, and I make far more than he does. The reason is that I don't call myself a programmer [1]. Instead, I've built-up enormous amounts of domain knowledge [2] in addition to my software engineering skills. As for the career prospects of anyone fresh out of law school, the legal profession suffered a massive meltdown in 2008 and hasn't recovered. [1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/…
Your two data points don't mean much because we're talking about macro trends and whether a 'shortage' actually exists. Specifically I'm asking someone to justify the assertion that there is a shortage of good programmers with some numbers, and I pointed out that job openings is essentially just market 'bids' and therefore not a very good metric since all markets have lots of 'bids' at well below market price. For some reason in the world of programming we take those low bids more seriously than in other fields which is inconsistent. The best metric that I know of, market price, does not indicate a shortage relative to legal and medical work, since both doctors and lawyers both have higher averages, and yet you rarely hear about shortages in those fields and how we need to more aggressively train more. So your point about how you individually make a lot of money is a bit of non-sequitur.
As for legal work, the median starting salary for the top 14 schools (remember, there is a shortage of 'good' programmers) is still 160K+. How many good programmers start there? Sure lower-grade lawyers don't make much, but neither do lower-grade programmers. Facebook and Microsoft both have reasonably high hiring standards and are complaining about a shortage of people over their threshold. As for 'the rest of us', the average lawyer salary is higher than the average software engineer salary. There are a lot of low paid software engineers too, it's absurd to compare only the highest paid software engineers to all lawyers which it seems you tried to do.
The fact that you can see the average lawyer salary being higher than the average software engineer salary, and still claim there a meltdown in the former industry while the second is struggling for people, just shows how deeply ingrained our cultural perspective of what job markets and compensation for a given career 'should be', and how it skews our perspective away from the simple econ 101 supply and demand curves that tell the real story. Markets are a lot more honest than PR releases from billionare tech executives.
But on a side note I did like your blog post, I just think it's irrelevant to this conversation.
Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code
#118The gap between CS majors and software jobs is misleading. You don't need a CS degree to become a decent programmer. Still, if there's such a shortage of good programmers (and I agree that there probably is) then why aren't we playing this to our advantage? A senior engineer can't afford a house in the Bay Area or New York, and our status is low-- we still work for managers; we're a defeated tribe in this way. Most o…
Fred George is interesting on this - see Programmer Anarchy. My view (and yes I am working up a blog post) is 1. Coding is the equivalent of literacy after 1451 (Gutenberg). 2. in say, one generation, any company not having literate people at all levels of the organisation, and not having then changed how they work at a fundamental level to take advantage of these programmers/business people will be at as severe a co…
I humbly disagree.
Lets focus on one point.
Literacy facilitated efficient information exchange.
Likewise programming facilitated efficient information exchange.
But, not everybody needed to program the Internet for this advantage.
I think you are confusing a personal advantage and societal advantage. Certainly, we need programers but I am uncertain if everybody needs to be a programmer.
I work a full-time software job, and I can say that the software is the easiest part. I do big data HPC, C, C++, learning models and physics simulation. I need people to come up with models, Ontology and even vision. I think at the Hacker News Ivory Tower of software-for-software or software-for-programers, we often underestimates the value of domain specific knowledge.
Teaching kids is certainly rewarding and a CS degree is a bright future, but I am more worried about the lack of US PhD's then the lack of user facing javascript.
Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The gap between CS majors and software jobs is misleading. You don't need a CS degree to become a decent programmer. Conversely, you don't need to be a decent programmer to get a CS degree. It's a shame that in the age of the internet and self-directed learning, degrees are so heavily weighted in the job market.
And yet all of the glorious self learners can't describe when to use a hashmap, what a hash is, or even the difference between a list and set... I'm not talking even knowing the algorithms, I mean a guy that writes list.contains(condition) in a loop and it brings the server to a halt because every call to contains runs through the entire list, when a hashset.contains(condition) would run in milliseconds. * no I did n…
Do you really need a CS degree to make that kind of judgement? Even before I was college-aged I knew (and so did several of my programming friends) about hash tables and how much faster they were than just iterating through something and checking. I didn't know Big-O but I did have a loose understanding that told me iterating through EVERYTHING is slow, and that there are smarter ways to look up values.
This sounds like a case of a programmer using the wrong datatype, realizing it, and then being too lazy to fix it.
Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fred George is interesting on this - see Programmer Anarchy. My view (and yes I am working up a blog post) is 1. Coding is the equivalent of literacy after 1451 (Gutenberg). 2. in say, one generation, any company not having literate people at all levels of the organisation, and not having then changed how they work at a fundamental level to take advantage of these programmers/business people will be at as severe a co…
I humbly disagree. Lets focus on one point. Literacy facilitated efficient information exchange. Likewise programming facilitated efficient information exchange. But, not everybody needed to program the Internet for this advantage. I think you are confusing a personal advantage and societal advantage. Certainly, we need programers but I am uncertain if everybody needs to be a programmer. I work a full-time software j…
It's not about user facing JavaScript apps. It's about adding another tool to the mental toolbox.
Calculus, statistics, physics simulations - all of these will be of use in a persons career, yes, but like you I think that is not important. What is utterly important is that the most expressive and flexible tool in the mental toolbox for two hundred years is put in the hands of as many human beings as possible.
I want the next Einstein to be literate, able to use Lisp on her OLPC device and change the understanding of the universe from her school hut in Rwanda, circa 2039.
We live in a world of wonders, invented by the brightest few thousand humans who ever lived. Let's give ourselves the best chance of the next thousand adding their full worth too.