Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code

venturebeat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 41 posts

Re: Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code

#31

Post by jarrett »

BryanB55 wrote: post #5
nudge wrote: post #3

Earlier 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.

Just a quick datapoint. I've used 3dsmax casually (free, academic version), and I managed to produce some images of which I was quite proud. They weren't magnificently detailed scenes, but they were photorealistic representations of the objects I was modeling. So no, it definitely doesn't take 10 years to get to the point where you can make something meaningful in 3dsmax.

It does, however, take grit, because there's a ton of documentation to read, particularly concerning rendering settings.

Re: Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code

#33

Post by deedub »

MSM wrote: post #25
deedub wrote: post #17

All 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.

I think that's equivalent to asking everyone to go to chef's school and describing the upside as 'People will realize that peeling potatoes can be done in a quarter the time they're doing it now!' It's just... why? These people aren't going to be doing any programming daily. Why don't you take all that money, and all that time and let each non-programmer go to a deep dive conference of their choice for whatever their…

MSM, I know it can be hard to see for many people but sometimes diving deeper into your box is the wrong approach. Your example is perfect. Someone went and took classes that were a "waste of time" and ended up 75% more efficient because they looked at something from a different view...even though they didn't become a chef. This is exactly how people need to be leading their companies.

Re: Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code

#34

Post by mcherm »

dan_yall wrote: post #14

Maybe next year all the programmers can learn accounting.

Actually...

Making all programmers experts on accounting is a hopeless task. But what if we taught everyone (including the programmers) enough about accounting to understand why we would care that some of their time qualifies as "capitalizable" and some doesn't and what difference it makes? I think that basic level of understanding would be beneficial to everyone.

Re: Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code

#35

Post by MaysonL »

arijo wrote: post #8
BryanB55 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you find the 10 year rule absurd, take a look at this paper: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/D...

Then again, there's no speed limit: http://sivers.org/kimo

Re: Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code

#37

Post by jordanb »

capkutay wrote: post #2

I'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 think it depends on the person. There's the "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" type person, where the acquisition of some terminology and the creation of some toy programs leads the person to believe that they've mastered the domain and can start telling people what to do.

In my opinion that type of person is not going to be a good boss no matter how much or little they know.

I think for a more humble person though, the ability to create small programs is empowering and makes them far more effective in any job involving computers. And going through the debugging process, and dealing with the growth in complexity in their programs, helps them understand the problem software engineering seeks to solve.

The ideal organization purges itself of the former type of person and teaches the latter how to code.

Re: Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code

#38

Post by pjin »

tlrobinson wrote: post #30

A lot of people seem to be offended by this, or think it's a waste of time. I think you need to realize there's a difference between learning to code and being a professional programmer. I see "programming" as a skill like "writing" or "basic math" that everyone should know something about. We all know how to write and do some math but we don't call ourselves "writers" or "mathematicians". But you'd never claim it's…

A lot of people do claim it's worthless to learn math or, at an extreme, writing correctly. That's part of the problem.

Re: Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code

#39

Post by tikhonj »

MSM wrote: post #25
deedub wrote: post #17

All 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.

I think that's equivalent to asking everyone to go to chef's school and describing the upside as 'People will realize that peeling potatoes can be done in a quarter the time they're doing it now!' It's just... why? These people aren't going to be doing any programming daily. Why don't you take all that money, and all that time and let each non-programmer go to a deep dive conference of their choice for whatever their…

If you do a lot of cooking, it would be a great deal!

These people may not be doing much programming daily, granted. But programming is just the means, not the end: the end is to work with information. And everyone in an office setting works with information. Becoming even a little more efficient with large amounts of information is a great benefit, and only requires a tiny bit of programming aptitude.

You can think of it like learning to touch-type: invaluable even if you only do typing tangentially to your real job.

Post reply on HN