The geek elite? What is this, 1990?
The 1990s had the "Digerati" (term coined in '92).
What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
21–30 of 34 posts
Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if we ignored division of labor and asked everyone to be mildly capable at everything? Well, that sounds terrible.
It sure does! On the other hand, having some mild programming capability gives a lot of people a lot more agency in their job and is a good thing. It's just that once they've proved out their idea and it is ready to be a real thing, they are overwhelmingly going to prefer to hand it off to the "experts". I think there is a lot of opportunity in a no-code product that believes that this is how it works. I've just not…
I once knew of a person who needed to quickly come up with a report supporting a course of action some C-suite person wanted to do.
The report required access to some institutional financial data, which of course is "open" because this is a large non profit.
This clever person taught themselves enough code to ping the server for the data (read-only, of course). Note, this data is available to the business teams. The report was well done.
All hell broke loose organizationally, since they wanted strict access controls for security etc. The business team felt (perhaps justifiably) side-stepped (and perhaps unjustifiably threatened). Communications lines had been crossed! Access controls overcome! It was anarchy!
As a side note. Shame and ignorance-based access controls are a critical part of most orgs' fire-walling, I bet.
Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
#23Having taught at a coding bootcamp, I can tell you that some people will never in their lives be capable of writing functional software. People exist, with college degrees, who cannot in months of lessons, understand the idea of a variable. Not every person in the world needs to or is capable of writing software. Probably a majority are given the right exposure but there's a big difference between being able to write…
> People exist, with college degrees, who cannot in months of lessons, understand the idea of a variable.
They were probably exposed to SICP and prefer functional programming. Lambda calculus, memory safe, concurrency safe :)
Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
#24My experience is that most office workers are perfectly capable of writing software, especially if they have access to some basic training material and documentation. However, most office workers would rather not write software and think that the whole pay-someone-else-to-do-it paradigm is great.
In my experience even IT people are not capable of doing that,sounds harsh but this is reality for me. IMHO.
Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
#25Archived: https://archive.ph/FtdBG
Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
#26My experience is that most office workers are perfectly capable of writing software, especially if they have access to some basic training material and documentation. However, most office workers would rather not write software and think that the whole pay-someone-else-to-do-it paradigm is great.
I'd say many, not most, are capable of writing small scripts that save them time at work for small tasks.
It all falls apart when they try to turn it into software that does multiple things, has a GUI, is useful for anyone not using their specific machine setup a particular way, has error handling instead of checking the work output manually, etc.
Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
#27Quite a few "non-programmer" workers do indeed write software already, and have been doing so for decades now. The only trouble is that said software exists in the form of Excel spreadsheets and Access databases ;)
It'd be interesting to see such "programming-but-it-doesn't-really-feel-like-programming" environments get generalized a bit into something that can produce proper general-purpose applications (preferably in a form that's actually friendly to sensible version control systems).
Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
#28So long as they support and maintain their own code and accept responsibility for it.
If the software does the right thing for the person or organisation then it's time for the pros to come in and rewrite it all pretty and snappy.
Discovering of what software should do is like half of the development. I don't mind it being written by the people who are closer to the matter at hand.
Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
#29Assuming you want to use Python or JavaScript why not ? It's much safer than working on your own car. Hell it's even safer than fixing a bike. I would never impose this on people though. Many people just don't want to do it.
It depends what outputs you drive with your JS or Python code.
Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stuff they don't teach at bootcamps: Algorithmic complexity. "Don't roll out your own data structures" and "just use a library" works until it doesn't. Operating System fundamentals is another one. It seems a lot of bootcamps teach with rote, rather than by looking at the underlying concepts. My favorite example is git. I've seen bootcamp grads claim they can use git, but what it really meant is that they memorized a…
Interesting, thanks for the information. So it seems bootcamps are not really the same type of quality signal that you would get from a degree and GPA. This assuages my fears somewhat. As an aside, I always considered git to be in the category of "Easily Google-able Technologies". In that whatever I am trying to do in git, it is generally very easy to find a resource online that tells me exactly what to do. For this…
You should learn the basics of the git object model. It's really very simple and can help you understand better what some of the commands are actually doing. Lots of git stuff is just stored as plain text file inside the .git folder - the magic 'HEAD' ref is just a textfile that contains the hash of the HEAD commit.
http://shafiul.github.io/gitbook/1_the_git_object_model.html