What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
#2I'm semi-technical & worked mostly in non dev roles. I've been coding apps all the time in my previous jobs. Mostly this was done in JIRA or Excel - creating a workflow, validating new data that comes in. Easy repetitive things that frustrated everyone on the team & myself the most. Now I am helping other to do this as the co-founder of a no-code SaaS (Chartmat). the amount of people who love to build without depending on devs is mind-blowing. I'm looking forward to this next decade in which building websites, dashboards and apps becomes more of a commodity that everyone can do and devs move on to more complex and critical functions such as writing smart contract & scaling apps.
Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
#3The geek elite? What is this, 1990?
Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
#4So long as they support and maintain their own code and accept responsibility for it.
Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
#5Having 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 any piece of code and creating business value with code.
Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
#6My 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.
Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
#7Having 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…
I TA'd a lot of comp-sci classes in school - the double hump is real.
Even in a class designed to teach people basic, fundamental steps, some folks just will not engage with a computer in a meaningful way.
Not sure what it is, but intro CS classes will almost always show two bell curves at the end of the year - The double hump. The group that "got it" and the group that "did not".
Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
#8Having 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…
Its not like most people want to write software, but many people have to write software to keep the lights up in their home. Blame market of supply and demands that people are compelled to switch their jobs.
Many of my friends wanted to study physics, but due to no scope in employement, they are currently doing computer jobs and some excel related thing.
Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
#9Assuming 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.
Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?
#10I caught an interesting podcast this morning, about an artist who set out to create her own AI chatbot, with zero programming experience. She went to "a magical place called Github", where the software was provided along with a fair bit of assistance. The input was conversations with her family, which were presumably transcribed somehow. It's unclear how much programming she learned, but she did say that she spent 18 months "tweaking the algorithm".
She did figure out, one way or another, how to cobble together a microphone, speaker, and computer to make a talking chatbot. (Along with a 3D printed case to hold it.)
It wasn't especially good, but I found it remarkable that she was able to put all that together. I'm a professional programmer and that project would take me a while to pull off, just because I'd have to learn the specific technologies. I've actually wanted to do a Shakespeare-generating bot for a while, which should be an introductory project but is rather daunting to begin.
I really like the idea of more people programming. Most of what I do isn't difficult. In particular, I want to see less of a gap between "the programmers" and "the people who actually do stuff". As a programmer, perhaps my greatest skill is not the languages and frameworks and debugging tactics, but my ability to talk to the people who need stuff and quickly learn enough of their needs to help. It would be even better if they could do a lot of it themselves, and bring me in for the hard parts.