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Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code

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Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code

#131

Post by rozap »

acuozzo wrote: post #100
sreyaNotfilc wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say "bah-humbug" to job security. That means that you just don't know or care about your craft. If you were really "1337" job security would be the last thing on you mind. You would actually be running the show and working on amazing products/solutions. I'm a senior developer and I teach my methods to my colleagues all the time. It doesn't hurt me, but helps the team and the cause immensely. It makes going to work…

> I say "bah-humbug" to job security. That means that you just don't know or care about your craft. I'm twenty-five years old. My wife and I have four cats, a home, two cars, and more than six figures of combined student loan debt. I earn 75% of our total income as a Software Engineer. We can't survive on my wife's income alone and we don't have any family members to fall back on if times get tough. So you, a senior…

I think the parent comment is absolutely right, more competition in the industry can only be a good thing from a societal perspective, as the highest quality workers take the jobs from the poor performers. Obviously from your perspective it might be worrisome, especially (and I apologize for getting personal) with all that stuff coupled with student loans, but surely it's a net societal good.

Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code

#132

Post by acuozzo »

rozap wrote: post #131
acuozzo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I say "bah-humbug" to job security. That means that you just don't know or care about your craft. I'm twenty-five years old. My wife and I have four cats, a home, two cars, and more than six figures of combined student loan debt. I earn 75% of our total income as a Software Engineer. We can't survive on my wife's income alone and we don't have any family members to fall back on if times get tough. So you, a senior…

I think the parent comment is absolutely right, more competition in the industry can only be a good thing from a societal perspective, as the highest quality workers take the jobs from the poor performers. Obviously from your perspective it might be worrisome, especially (and I apologize for getting personal) with all that stuff coupled with student loans, but surely it's a net societal good.

I was responding to the specific portion of the parent comment I quoted, nothing more.

Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code

#133

Post by jurassic »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #75
obstacle1 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what you mean by your last sentence. Are you saying that your friends are too distracted by TV to learn coding?

I feel that if my peers would stop with the incessant stream TV, movie, and video games, they would have no problem fitting in the time to learn all manner of useful tricks, including picking up skills that would free them from the jobs they hate. I don't believe this is a collective personal shortcoming on their part-- it's probably just the way of the world-- but the idea that so many of them hate their jobs but ha…

I think people often use media to self-medicate and distract themselves from their problems. Many of your peers probably don't even enjoy a lot of the media they consume, but they keep consuming it because it is easier to to do that than think deeply about their situation and take the risks necessary to change it. If media is your coping mechanism for a bad situation, it's tough to put that aside even though it's rationally the obvious thing to do.

Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code

#134

Post by Swizec »

frozenport wrote: post #118
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #89

Earlier 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…

The problem is people don't even realise what types of problems can easily be solved by computers. It doesn't even cross their mind that something they do every day could be automated or made better.

That's why everyone needs to learn how to code (a bit). So they can go "Ah, I think software might improve this thingy here; let's call in an expert and ask"

Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code

#135

Post by rodolphoarruda »

I'm a manager. I can read code (PHP and C#) to some extent, but I can't code anything. I tried to learn it several times, but the syntax and all its curly braces were simply too complex to me. A bit frustrated, I decided to move one step up in the stack and tried to understand software at a "macro level", architecture, paradigms etc. I wanted to be able to make IT decisions based on concepts I found easier to grasp at that higher level. It was equally hard. But there is one thing I got from the learning process that I really liked and kept alive in my head for future use: the notions of abstraction and generalization. I'm thankful I learned this. I see value in applying it in my life. If the idea behind the widespread of teaching/learning how to code, involves concepts like those I mentioned, then I think it is super valid.

Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code

#136

Post by Dove »

frozenport wrote: post #118
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #89

Earlier 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…

Programming enables automation of your domain-specific knowledge. Animators who could program gave us CG movies. Musicians who could program gave us software music composition tools. Would garbage collectors who could program give us robots to do parts of their jobs? Or apps to communicate real-time problems? Or public education websites? I think it very likely.

Any field -- any field at all! -- that can benefit from information organization and retrieval, automation, scripting, robotics, internal wikis, private smartphone apps, information dissemination, etc., will benefit from people who have deep domain knowledge ALSO being programmers.

And I think that's just about all of them.

Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code

#137

Post by 10098 »

rimantas wrote: post #46
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #11

FOr me the reasoning is simple: * reading and writing code is basic literacy for the information age * One generation hence, any company that is literate (almost all employees write code, the use of code runs through all its processes) will have enormous competitve advantages. Or rather any company that is illiterate will have enormous competitive disadvantages * So Software will eat the world. * but in the process f…

> reading and writing code is basic literacy for the > information age No. Just like everyone being a car mechanic is not the basic literacy of the automotive age. "Everyone learns to code" is a pipe dream.

I wish I could up-vote you twice.

Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code

#138

Post by jes5199 »

base698 wrote: post #101
zwegner wrote: post #66

Earlier 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…

I've interviewed plenty of people with a degree or even a master's in CS that, while they can recite the definition of a hashmap, can't actually use one in a program.

Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code

#139

Post by michaelochurch »

droidist2 wrote: post #60
michaelochurch wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're off the mark, because you're always "working for someone else". Details change, but ultimately there's no difference between "mak[ing] something that is useful" and working for others. Sometimes the terms are great, and sometimes they're awful. The implicit assumption is that "working for an established organization" must imply "working with miserably low levels of autonomy". I'm not sure that I agree.…

Do you mean we should unionize?

The problem with unionization is that it works well when the work is a commodity, and software engineering isn't. The 10x (and 100x, and -25x) programmer phenomenon is real, but individual performance is nearly impossible to measure on a quarterly basis.

We need some traits of old-style professionalism: autonomy and the right of self-investment. A profession is a set of ethical rights and obligations that supersede managerial authority. That's what we need. http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/programmers-d...

Re: Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code

#140

Post by rdouble »

michaelochurch wrote: post #139
droidist2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean we should unionize?

The problem with unionization is that it works well when the work is a commodity, and software engineering isn't. The 10x (and 100x, and -25x) programmer phenomenon is real, but individual performance is nearly impossible to measure on a quarterly basis. We need some traits of old-style professionalism: autonomy and the right of self-investment. A profession is a set of ethical rights and obligations that supersede m…

Unionization works reasonably well for the entertainment industry.
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