From Prison to Programming

I would be very curious how a doctor or nurse could use programming to improve their jobs. Aside from a conduit of fun brain teasers which may have some ancillary benefit...every doctor and nurse I know spends almost no time in front of a computer except for brief data entry. Actual real "medical" programming occurs by professional engineers in highly regulated environments (and for good reason).

Teachers I could possibly see but even then much of this has been optimized away. If you lower the bar of "learning to code" to learning excel I'd tend to agree with you. No reason to hack together a set of python scripts to grade papers, and the actual useful work of generating random test questions, etc has been automated away by software nearly every school uses.

The difference between reading, math, and programming is that reading and math are fundamental. Math teaches logical, methodical thinking. Reading teaches the ability to well...read. Programming on the other hand is a higher level abstraction of math. Mathematicians tend to become good programmers. To me, this would imply we simply need to teach more math. It's very simple to say "it should be a basic skill" but there are other, far more fundamental, skills we don't teach either. Why don't we teach machining or woodworking? For the average Joe these two would have infinitely more value both professionally and personally than learning how to fire up a terminal and write a basic python script.

The problem that "learn to code" has, and the problem your suggestion has, is that even getting someone to "get" how to code is non-trivial. Once you move beyond the formulaic "here's how to put these pieces together to make a website" suddenly everyone gets lost. I've seen this not only in people I've attempted to mentor, but also being an interviewer at a large tech company regularly seeing code camp graduates coming from fields like teaching, food, etc. These people miss the point of the exact thing you suggest: programming is a conduit for productivity in an underlying field and "learning to code" is a means to an end and not the goal.

There certainly are people "cut out to be programmers" and this societal shift to "everyone can be anything they want" has really disenfranchised a lot of people. We never want to talk about it because the idea life is fundamentally unfair is seen as taboo. But it is, and it is the reason code camps produce garbage in 80% of cases and the reason drop out rates in CS programs are so high. The high flying high school kid getting an $XXX,000 salary is an extreme edge cases promoted as a common case. The guy who automates half his job as a data entry clerk was probably fit for professional grade programming anyway. We are guilty of this perpetuation ourselves.

Prison to lawyer happens though.

> I have worked with charming psychopaths in the past as has anyone who has been in this business for some time, and you do get better at spotting certain things.

how many charming psychopaths have you worked with ? And what have you spotted? I seriously laughed out loud when I read that.

what is the point in your comment? To try and discredit me? what for? to harm underdog devs?

you cant expect me to take that analogy serious...you compare someone who actively seeks to cause harm with someone who made a terrible choice as a teenager, hasn't been in trouble in over 20 years, and spends his free time helping people for free?

Theres no way you can be serious. you know what I think....I think youre full of shit. I think you made that story up and I think you have some personal issue with me or underdog devs. Probably why youre using a burner.

at least you think im charming so theres that

Not all prison sentences are the same. I am in a trial case for possession of illegal pornography (yes, that..). My name came out in the media on the day of my arrest, and society has already concluded the trial years before it is scheduled to take place. Lost the tech-related job, had to move out, lost all social interactions, etc. I've had severe mental health issues and a very difficult past so I had always been searching for therapy without much success, but that made it even harder.

On the plus side, all these years I've put to some use in learning that if nobody can help you with therapy you can still build it back up yourself. Pick from all the toolsets of DBT, CBT, read with a critical mind zen or buddhist writings, use the time to figure out what healing and coping are and how to put it in practice at every moment, and moment-to-moment. And I've only done all of that because when all things fell apart a couple people still stood by me and I figured I couldn't trust myself a whole lot more than I could trust their hearts, so I put in the work.

Doesn't exactly matter though, because prison will hit like a truck even though I was socially sentenced years ago, and pretty much every single program I've ever heard of for people "from prison" would use murder as the paramount example, but nobody will touch my kind of conviction with a ten foot pole.

All the sexual offenders I've been in group therapy with were either leaning on secrecy (jobs that don't do background checks, their names having remained undisclosed to the public, etc) or they were at the end of their rope. I have a couple people in my life who love me and am thankful for their help, but I very much suspect I'll fall in the latter category when justice officially passes over me.

"Yes they still work here after everything we already know. What do we do?"