Partaking in expensive management fads is, perhaps, God's way of telling you you've got more funding than you need.
Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code
#12I'm really uncomfortable with the term 'learning to code', because when I read it makes me think that the company wants its employees to know in what circumstances you should and shouldn't use semicolons in Javascript, or what methods are available to strings in Python. I don't think those things are useful unless you're actually writing code. What is useful is understanding how software (and, for a lot of people, we…
I hear you, but to take your apt analogy, I think the only way to understand software development is to go through the door of writing working code in some particular language. The goals may be bigger, but for people to get to them and understand them, they have to start by writing something, even if it's just "alert('hello world!')".
Re: Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you feel the same way about learning to speak foreign languages and play musical instruments? Is it obnoxious for a person to teach introductory French night classes, when fluency will take years and may never be possible for the students given their other commitments? What if it is not even likely that they will ever have French-language conversations "of value"? Does the very act of proposing learning this new s…
Exactly. I don't know why I've been hearing this so much lately. I've been researching about learning to use 3D software (3dsmax) and I get the same responses that I hear about learning to code: "oh it is very difficult and it will takes at least 5-10 years to be able to build anything of quality" Personally, I think if it takes you 10 years to become decent at anything, then you are doing it wrong.
I don't know. I think some things can legitimately take some people ten years to learn, even if they are doing it right. However, my disagreement is that sometimes learning something at a cursory level, even if it doesn't allow you to do quality work, can be worthwhile. It can give you insight and appreciation of the discipline and help you work more effectively with the people that really do it. It can also be fun and make people feel proud to just be able to do it a little.
Re: Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code
#14Maybe next year all the programmers can learn accounting.
Re: Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code
#15I'm really uncomfortable with the term 'learning to code', because when I read it makes me think that the company wants its employees to know in what circumstances you should and shouldn't use semicolons in Javascript, or what methods are available to strings in Python. I don't think those things are useful unless you're actually writing code. What is useful is understanding how software (and, for a lot of people, we…
You would hope in the long term it would mean that everyone could write code that is relevant to their job, and automate tasks where possible.
I suspect this company is just trying to spread awareness throughout the company of what the coders do. But there must be countless efficiencies available in business, especially non-tech businesses, if people were able to automate.
If it were up to me, the aim would be to have secretaries and receptionists, sales staff and (non-software) engineers all able to write scripts to aid their work, in whatever language or environment was most relevant. Even if you start them off with Python tutorials so everyone can learn the basics together.
Re: Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code
#16Maybe next year all the programmers can learn accounting.
Yeap. And marketing staff can learn HR rules.
Re: Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code
#17All these comments about "no value" are hilarious.
Honestly I dont think "serious programming" even matters. It's people learning, for example, that the 30 min daily process they do in excel can actually be a script that takes one second to run. The company is already seeing benefits to the culture and soon people will be thinking differently. That's a win.
Re: Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code
#18I'm having trouble understanding what "learn to code" means for most people. It's almost obnoxious when business types propose "learning to code" in a nonchalant manner as though people don't spend decades developing their programming skills. Yes, you may take codecademy tutorials and have a slight understanding of js syntax...but I wouldn't expect you to build anything of value.
Do you feel the same way about learning to speak foreign languages and play musical instruments? Is it obnoxious for a person to teach introductory French night classes, when fluency will take years and may never be possible for the students given their other commitments? What if it is not even likely that they will ever have French-language conversations "of value"? Does the very act of proposing learning this new s…
I don't know... but I've had coworkers who are not professional programmers, but who wind up "helping out" with programming on the job, and I desperately wished that instead, they didn't know a thing.
Instead of them respecting my job more, they come to respect it less because they think they can do it just as well as I can. They think they're perfectly capable of forming time estimates because they insist "they" could do x task quickly, despite the fact that they're clueless about architecture, refactoring, documentation, testing, etc. They have no conception of why spaghetti code is bad, or what it even is.
Of course, this is all probably due more to management problems than anything else, but it is a very good example of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."
And as for the French analogy: I've known people who claim to speak French and then get themselves into hairy situations due to misunderstandings because they greatly over-estimate their skills and are overconfident in what they "think" they understood. It's equally infuriating.
Re: Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code
#19Re: Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code
#20I'm having trouble understanding what "learn to code" means for most people. It's almost obnoxious when business types propose "learning to code" in a nonchalant manner as though people don't spend decades developing their programming skills. Yes, you may take codecademy tutorials and have a slight understanding of js syntax...but I wouldn't expect you to build anything of value.
I've been hearing this argument a lot lately. Are you suggesting that if I wanted to learn to code it would take me decades to be able to build anything of value? To me learning to code is just like learning any other skill. Sure you wont be good at it the first few months you start but that is what practice is for. I don't see why in a year or two you wouldn't be able to build something of value. If it really took 1…
Umm... piano? violin? lawyer? doctor? mathematician? I could go on...
After a year or two of learning to code, you can build things of minimal value. If they're of any reasonable complexity, though, they'll probably be terribly structured and difficult to maintain. To truly become effective, it really does take many years, with lots of things that can really only be learned by experience.