6 ms·

Why Learning to Code Won't Save Your Job

39 points by walterclifford 11y ago

nodejsdev543 11y ago
You could have a great job until you hit about 37. At that point no one will hire you because your now officially an old fart. My company is guilty of this as well. We had a guy come in the other day and interview for a NodeJS position. He was about 40 - 50 years old. Everyone was wondering why this guy is even still in the game. At a certain point software developers are expected to move into management or more of a architect role. Software development is a young man's game.
burritofanatic 11y ago
I didn't expect the India argument anymore. But going down that route..., British India was from 1612–1947, and English speakers there today probably have skills comparable to most of ours here in the States. Yet, I still pay a few bucks, and trade my clicks and ad space to read articles like these originating from here (New Yorker, Times, etc.). So if the author happened to have farmed out work on article from Indians on Upwork, then maybe he'd be onto something.
RamshackleJ 11y ago
Nice bait title. The author knows how to stay employed working in new media.
- imtringued 11y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if someone trained a neural network to turn sensible headlines into clickbait jargon to increase ad revenue.
  - nickik 11y ago
    Ad networks are more likely to creat skynet then everything else
    - sitkack 11y ago
      No I think high speed trading bots that use sentiment analysis based on news articles is more likely to create skynet.
dasil003 11y ago
The article seems to be more hand-wringing over declining employment than any specific commentary on learning to code. Actually learning to code and discovering that you're good at it is probably one of the safest career moves you could make today. The elephant in the room is that not everyone is good at it, and furthermore no one starts out good at it, so most of the time one has to put in some number of years before ones potential becomes apparent. I think probably anyone of average intelligence or higher can learn enough code to pass a bootcamp but that the bar for guaranteed employability is significantly higher. The issue is that a well-architected system can eat all the value of poorly architected ad-hoc systems. Consider that 10 years ago I was churning out websites for $5k-$10k a pop, and today for 90% of those clients I just recommend Squarespace. There's probably some equilibrium where the top x percent of programmers are employable to work on the best of breed systems, but the bottom end won't stay as democratic as it has been through the first stage of the computer revolution. I suppose the end game would be the singularity, but I'm skeptical that our society is stable enough to reach that point.
- monk_e_boy 11y ago
  > most of the time one has to put in some number of years before ones potential becomes apparent How do you pay for those years being a student (self taught maybe) ... I think this is where basic income really shines. We need a flexible workforce who can change jobs and careers with help from a kind government.
- cinquemb 11y ago
  >I suppose the end game would be the singularity, but I'm skeptical that our society is stable enough to reach that point. Stable singularities? That's one I never thought to see asked for.
  - dasil003 11y ago
    Not sure how you are parsing that meaning out of my sentence. My point is that our resource utilization as a species is a house of cards that we have to stack much higher to get to the singularity.
Matumio 11y ago
In this century we should stop worrying so much about job safety and workers and instead care more about humans (regardless of their employment status). We will never run out of useful work. But we should get used to the idea that work is no longer a necessity for bare survival. And that useful work is not always paid for. It's a political problem, and I'm thinking UBI here (unconditional basic income). Don't let existential fears stop anyone from working on the real problems of our time.
- monk_e_boy 11y ago
  The problem is peoples perception and they think that jobs can be created and that this will solve all their problems. See Trump vs Sanders.
- javajosh 11y ago
  Totally agreed. The really nice thing about being the first generation to implement UBI is that we'll be able to reap some excellent one-time benefits by being able to dismantle so many specialized programs rendered redundant by UBI. The net effect would be a discount on the UBI -- e.g. people would get $20k but it would only cost $5k more than what the USG currently spends on entitlements. I'd like to see a flat-tax too, but that's just me. :)
- scottLobster 11y ago
  Unfortunately it's not as simple as a UBI. Give the average person money without structure, instruction or necessity and they cease to be productive in any sense of the word. We'd ironically have less equality, with a minority of motivated individuals at the top doing meaningful work, and a large majority of entitled "dolists" with little dignity at the bottom. Instead I'd propose guaranteed civil service that paid a basic livable salary, such as publicly funded infrastructure projects. But whatever the method, resources should be tied to productivity in some manner. Otherwise we just create a bunch of lottery winners, and many lottery winners sadly don't have the wherewithal to keep their winnings for long.
  - c22 11y ago
    > Give the average person money without structure, instruction or necessity and they cease to be productive in any sense of the word. Is there research that backs this assertion? It doesn't match my (anecdotal) observations.
henrik_w 11y ago
Programmers will be the last to be automated out of a job in my opinion. Also, as far as I can tell, the more we do with programs, the more we want to do, which increases demand. Outsourcing seemed like a problem, by my experience is that demand for local programmers has increased (in Stockholm, Sweden, at least), not decreased, despite the option to outsource. All of this (and more) is the reasons I still think SW developer is a great career choice: http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software-developer-is-a-great-career-choice/ http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software-dev...
- kough 11y ago
  Maybe one of the reasons demand for local programmers has increased is the strong protectionism exhibited by the Swedish department of labor. My application for a work visa for a summer internship in Stockholm was just denied because I'm "not experienced enough", although I have three years of relevant experience in the field and a year and a half of university education under my belt. For a three month internship.
- javajosh 11y ago
  I think that entertainers and therapists will be the absolute last. Ironically I think 'CEO' is going to be one of the first (although the biz dev and product design might still be human). Manufacturing with motor skills may also be in high demand for a very long time, because the human hand is a miracle. In fact I can see AIs and humans being quite symbiotic: they mine the asteroid belt, and build habitats for us, and in return we build them new and better bodies. Seems fair.
- andyidsinga 11y ago
  agreed it's a great career choice especially if a career is what's being chosen. simply "learn to code" as "literacy" is where things seem to get shaky. but here's a counterpoint (I'm just thinking out loud here) : to an artist making street art using coding skills to build out pieces of the scene, coding is a tool. or maybe coding is part of the medium. but it's not a career in that case.
drcode 11y ago
This article is pretty wrong-headed: The argument is essentially that programmers are so productive that only a few of them will be needed to write all the software in the world, causing demand for developers to go down after the current uptick. I guess it never occurred to the author that software in the future might become more complex and require larger teams.
lostcolony 11y ago
Ugh, there is so much wrong with this article. First, the statement "More and more, "learn to code" is looking like bad advice." Okay, in the context of "it will guarantee you employment", yeah, true. Except that that's a straw man. Nothing will guarantee you employment. Will it make you more employable? Yeah, in pretty much any profession that doesn't entail pure physical labor, since even if your job description entails no coding, having learned to code will let you automate some things your competitors (including coworkers), are doing by hand. "This trend is bound to increase" with regard to outsourcing: is it? Outsourcing as an economic model is based upon trade agreements and tax law. That can fluctuate. But even aside from that, more and more companies are learning that outsourcing is actually a bad idea; having development taking place in isolation from the business introduces new challenges. A different culture, different values, different schedules...outsourcing takes all the difficulties of working with a consulting company, and all the difficulties of remote work, and adds in even more. As this person even indicates, projects are just getting more complex. Those obstacles will add up. Finally, as others have noted, automation can reduce the need of far more jobs than it provides. This is not a bad thing. What's bad is our perception that people must work to earn. -That- has to change (as others have indicated).
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  So long as we're all obsessed with job security, technological progress will slow to a crawl. I know a few people who've successfully outsourced things, mainly factory work. But they designed their process around outsourcing to capture part of the subsidy offered for it. Those who tried to offshore existing systems weren't so lucky. I've read of cases where it's worked out, though.
freyr 11y ago
> However, as coding becomes more commonplace, particularly in developing nations like India, we find a lot of that work is being assigned piecemeal by computerized services such as Upwork to low-paid workers in digital sweatshops. In the 1990s and 2000s, when I was about to choose a career path, doom-and-gloom journalists predicted complete offshoring of software development and the end of programming as a viable profession. As an impressionable youth, I bought into this narrative and enrolled in a major I enjoyed much less, thinking I was making the right long-term choice for my career. Fast forward fifteen years, and I was in a dead-end job in a declining field while my former CS major schoolmates were earning multiples of my salary. My point being, read articles like this with a grain of salt. The future is unpredictable, and Douglas Rushkoff doesn't have a crystal ball. If you do something you love, you'll likely be good at it. And if you're good at something, you'll likely have opportunities to be rewarded for it. Increasing your skill set won't hurt you.
- bfstein 11y ago
  Whenever I see an article like this, I think of Michael Crichton's "Why Speculate." [1] It's a fantastic read, and really helps put speculative pieces like this in perspective. [1] http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/ http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  I'm nominally a software engineer, but what I really do is form proper questions. Coding is just how the answers to those questions are written down, and sometimes how they are answered. But my cost is a drop in the bucket compared to the things I work on. If you're doing software and said software is not strategic and it's not tactical, then it's nothing but cost and you're a target. And to be fair, programming as a career got oversold between 1990 and 2000. At least my experience in the 1980s was that instructors were careful to signal the downside of it as an activity. Adam Curtis documentaries are pretty careful to express skepticism about technocratic Utopianism and I don't think he's wrong. I lacked the resources ( and probably the talent, frankly ) to obtain a PhD in applied mathematics but I knew that's what I should have striven for. It's still true, probably.
- 11y ago
dreamcompiler 11y ago
This isn't really the point of the article, but I don't like the title or its implication that simply "learning to code" should be enough to save one's job. Few people seem to think that basic Boy Scout first aid skills qualifies one to be a surgeon, but lots of lay people (and many managers) seem to think that writing a couple of working computer programs qualifies one to be a software developer.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  People see what they want to see. Work in a few ... dying companies and the truth comes out. As they say, when the tide goes out, you can then see who's wearing a bathing suit.
dreamdu5t 11y ago
All evidence to the contrary. Software is eating the world, and continues to at a rapid pace. Transportation, medicine, and finance have only begun to be eaten. This trend is far from over and when it's done, there will only be programmers and their machines. Programming will be the only job. It's the most inclusive industry. It's the only industry where people are going to trade-schools for mere months and then getting jobs with 2-3x their previous salary.
- kwhitefoot 11y ago
  > It's the most inclusive industry. Doesn't look like that from where I'm sitting. A lot of companies demand degrees in relevant subjects, quite a few of my younger colleagues (well those under 35 anyway, almost all of them are younger now that I am sixty :-) ) have computer science degrees. Very few of them are black, or South American, or ${your-favourite-minority}, and there seem to be fewer women every year.
TheLogothete 11y ago
What a shite article. Can somebody who upvoted explain his or hers reasoning for doingot?
afrancis 11y ago
"Although I certainly believe that any member of our highly digital society should be familiar with how these platforms work, universal code literacy won’t solve our employment crisis any more than the universal ability to read and write would result in a full-employment economy of book publishing." I read the article. I have seen similar arguments made by Nicholas Carr in "Peak Code" (http://www.roughtype.com/?p=5594 http://www.roughtype.com/?p=5594) Perhaps learning to code and universal code literacy (for now, lets not argue exactly what literacy means) may, or may not save individual jobs. I sense as software development as a discipline matures, at the level of the firm, software developer wages as percent of a software project's budget, may shrink. At a macro level, software development as percent of GNP may rise but the software developer employment may look like the numbers involved in manufacturing, or farming. The point I feel Ruskoff misses is that coding literacy may not save an individual's job. Or having a sizable chunk of the U.S economy (or any sophisticated modern economy's) GDP coming from software development. However a critical mass of the population programming, like universal literacy, will most likely translate into vast productivity gains and ability to create new opportunities. An example. The idea behind "software carpentry"http://software-carpentry.org http://software-carpentry.org) is about teaching scientists just enough programming, so they can write tools be productive at their main activities, instead of doing things by hand, or hiring programmers. As a whole, research immensely benefits. It is easy to extend these ideas to the populate in general (and yes, I, like chef Gusteau, believe anyone can program). When I come to think about it, maybe this is what the BBC Microbit is about. I feel fields like home automation would explode once a critical mass of the population are code literate. To get back to Ruskoff's analogy, book publishing would be a much smaller industry if universal literacy did not create the supply of writers and demand in the form of readers.

You could have a great job until you hit about 37. At that point no one will hire you because your now officially an old fart. My company is guilty of this as well. We had a guy come in the other day and interview for a NodeJS position. He was about 40 - 50 years old. Everyone was wondering why this guy is even still in the game. At a certain point software developers are expected to move into management or more of a architect role. Software development is a young man's game.

burritofanatic 11y ago

I didn't expect the India argument anymore. But going down that route..., British India was from 1612–1947, and English speakers there today probably have skills comparable to most of ours here in the States. Yet, I still pay a few bucks, and trade my clicks and ad space to read articles like these originating from here (New Yorker, Times, etc.). So if the author happened to have farmed out work on article from Indians on Upwork, then maybe he'd be onto something.

RamshackleJ 11y ago

Nice bait title. The author knows how to stay employed working in new media.

imtringued 11y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if someone trained a neural network to turn sensible headlines into clickbait jargon to increase ad revenue.
- nickik 11y ago
  Ad networks are more likely to creat skynet then everything else
  - sitkack 11y ago
    No I think high speed trading bots that use sentiment analysis based on news articles is more likely to create skynet.

dasil003 11y ago

The article seems to be more hand-wringing over declining employment than any specific commentary on learning to code. Actually learning to code and discovering that you're good at it is probably one of the safest career moves you could make today. The elephant in the room is that not everyone is good at it, and furthermore no one starts out good at it, so most of the time one has to put in some number of years before ones potential becomes apparent. I think probably anyone of average intelligence or higher can learn enough code to pass a bootcamp but that the bar for guaranteed employability is significantly higher. The issue is that a well-architected system can eat all the value of poorly architected ad-hoc systems. Consider that 10 years ago I was churning out websites for $5k-$10k a pop, and today for 90% of those clients I just recommend Squarespace. There's probably some equilibrium where the top x percent of programmers are employable to work on the best of breed systems, but the bottom end won't stay as democratic as it has been through the first stage of the computer revolution. I suppose the end game would be the singularity, but I'm skeptical that our society is stable enough to reach that point.

monk_e_boy 11y ago
> most of the time one has to put in some number of years before ones potential becomes apparent How do you pay for those years being a student (self taught maybe) ... I think this is where basic income really shines. We need a flexible workforce who can change jobs and careers with help from a kind government.
cinquemb 11y ago
>I suppose the end game would be the singularity, but I'm skeptical that our society is stable enough to reach that point. Stable singularities? That's one I never thought to see asked for.
- dasil003 11y ago
  Not sure how you are parsing that meaning out of my sentence. My point is that our resource utilization as a species is a house of cards that we have to stack much higher to get to the singularity.

Matumio 11y ago

In this century we should stop worrying so much about job safety and workers and instead care more about humans (regardless of their employment status). We will never run out of useful work. But we should get used to the idea that work is no longer a necessity for bare survival. And that useful work is not always paid for. It's a political problem, and I'm thinking UBI here (unconditional basic income). Don't let existential fears stop anyone from working on the real problems of our time.

monk_e_boy 11y ago
The problem is peoples perception and they think that jobs can be created and that this will solve all their problems. See Trump vs Sanders.
javajosh 11y ago
Totally agreed. The really nice thing about being the first generation to implement UBI is that we'll be able to reap some excellent one-time benefits by being able to dismantle so many specialized programs rendered redundant by UBI. The net effect would be a discount on the UBI -- e.g. people would get $20k but it would only cost $5k more than what the USG currently spends on entitlements. I'd like to see a flat-tax too, but that's just me. :)
scottLobster 11y ago
Unfortunately it's not as simple as a UBI. Give the average person money without structure, instruction or necessity and they cease to be productive in any sense of the word. We'd ironically have less equality, with a minority of motivated individuals at the top doing meaningful work, and a large majority of entitled "dolists" with little dignity at the bottom. Instead I'd propose guaranteed civil service that paid a basic livable salary, such as publicly funded infrastructure projects. But whatever the method, resources should be tied to productivity in some manner. Otherwise we just create a bunch of lottery winners, and many lottery winners sadly don't have the wherewithal to keep their winnings for long.
- c22 11y ago
  > Give the average person money without structure, instruction or necessity and they cease to be productive in any sense of the word. Is there research that backs this assertion? It doesn't match my (anecdotal) observations.

henrik_w 11y ago

Programmers will be the last to be automated out of a job in my opinion. Also, as far as I can tell, the more we do with programs, the more we want to do, which increases demand. Outsourcing seemed like a problem, by my experience is that demand for local programmers has increased (in Stockholm, Sweden, at least), not decreased, despite the option to outsource. All of this (and more) is the reasons I still think SW developer is a great career choice: http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software-developer-is-a-great-career-choice/ http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software-dev...

kough 11y ago
Maybe one of the reasons demand for local programmers has increased is the strong protectionism exhibited by the Swedish department of labor. My application for a work visa for a summer internship in Stockholm was just denied because I'm "not experienced enough", although I have three years of relevant experience in the field and a year and a half of university education under my belt. For a three month internship.
javajosh 11y ago
I think that entertainers and therapists will be the absolute last. Ironically I think 'CEO' is going to be one of the first (although the biz dev and product design might still be human). Manufacturing with motor skills may also be in high demand for a very long time, because the human hand is a miracle. In fact I can see AIs and humans being quite symbiotic: they mine the asteroid belt, and build habitats for us, and in return we build them new and better bodies. Seems fair.
andyidsinga 11y ago
agreed it's a great career choice especially if a career is what's being chosen. simply "learn to code" as "literacy" is where things seem to get shaky. but here's a counterpoint (I'm just thinking out loud here) : to an artist making street art using coding skills to build out pieces of the scene, coding is a tool. or maybe coding is part of the medium. but it's not a career in that case.

drcode 11y ago

This article is pretty wrong-headed: The argument is essentially that programmers are so productive that only a few of them will be needed to write all the software in the world, causing demand for developers to go down after the current uptick. I guess it never occurred to the author that software in the future might become more complex and require larger teams.

lostcolony 11y ago

Ugh, there is so much wrong with this article. First, the statement "More and more, "learn to code" is looking like bad advice." Okay, in the context of "it will guarantee you employment", yeah, true. Except that that's a straw man. Nothing will guarantee you employment. Will it make you more employable? Yeah, in pretty much any profession that doesn't entail pure physical labor, since even if your job description entails no coding, having learned to code will let you automate some things your competitors (including coworkers), are doing by hand. "This trend is bound to increase" with regard to outsourcing: is it? Outsourcing as an economic model is based upon trade agreements and tax law. That can fluctuate. But even aside from that, more and more companies are learning that outsourcing is actually a bad idea; having development taking place in isolation from the business introduces new challenges. A different culture, different values, different schedules...outsourcing takes all the difficulties of working with a consulting company, and all the difficulties of remote work, and adds in even more. As this person even indicates, projects are just getting more complex. Those obstacles will add up. Finally, as others have noted, automation can reduce the need of far more jobs than it provides. This is not a bad thing. What's bad is our perception that people must work to earn. -That- has to change (as others have indicated).

ArkyBeagle 11y ago
So long as we're all obsessed with job security, technological progress will slow to a crawl. I know a few people who've successfully outsourced things, mainly factory work. But they designed their process around outsourcing to capture part of the subsidy offered for it. Those who tried to offshore existing systems weren't so lucky. I've read of cases where it's worked out, though.

freyr 11y ago

> However, as coding becomes more commonplace, particularly in developing nations like India, we find a lot of that work is being assigned piecemeal by computerized services such as Upwork to low-paid workers in digital sweatshops. In the 1990s and 2000s, when I was about to choose a career path, doom-and-gloom journalists predicted complete offshoring of software development and the end of programming as a viable profession. As an impressionable youth, I bought into this narrative and enrolled in a major I enjoyed much less, thinking I was making the right long-term choice for my career. Fast forward fifteen years, and I was in a dead-end job in a declining field while my former CS major schoolmates were earning multiples of my salary. My point being, read articles like this with a grain of salt. The future is unpredictable, and Douglas Rushkoff doesn't have a crystal ball. If you do something you love, you'll likely be good at it. And if you're good at something, you'll likely have opportunities to be rewarded for it. Increasing your skill set won't hurt you.

bfstein 11y ago
Whenever I see an article like this, I think of Michael Crichton's "Why Speculate." [1] It's a fantastic read, and really helps put speculative pieces like this in perspective. [1] http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/ http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
I'm nominally a software engineer, but what I really do is form proper questions. Coding is just how the answers to those questions are written down, and sometimes how they are answered. But my cost is a drop in the bucket compared to the things I work on. If you're doing software and said software is not strategic and it's not tactical, then it's nothing but cost and you're a target. And to be fair, programming as a career got oversold between 1990 and 2000. At least my experience in the 1980s was that instructors were careful to signal the downside of it as an activity. Adam Curtis documentaries are pretty careful to express skepticism about technocratic Utopianism and I don't think he's wrong. I lacked the resources ( and probably the talent, frankly ) to obtain a PhD in applied mathematics but I knew that's what I should have striven for. It's still true, probably.
11y ago

dreamcompiler 11y ago

This isn't really the point of the article, but I don't like the title or its implication that simply "learning to code" should be enough to save one's job. Few people seem to think that basic Boy Scout first aid skills qualifies one to be a surgeon, but lots of lay people (and many managers) seem to think that writing a couple of working computer programs qualifies one to be a software developer.

ArkyBeagle 11y ago
People see what they want to see. Work in a few ... dying companies and the truth comes out. As they say, when the tide goes out, you can then see who's wearing a bathing suit.

dreamdu5t 11y ago

All evidence to the contrary. Software is eating the world, and continues to at a rapid pace. Transportation, medicine, and finance have only begun to be eaten. This trend is far from over and when it's done, there will only be programmers and their machines. Programming will be the only job. It's the most inclusive industry. It's the only industry where people are going to trade-schools for mere months and then getting jobs with 2-3x their previous salary.

kwhitefoot 11y ago
> It's the most inclusive industry. Doesn't look like that from where I'm sitting. A lot of companies demand degrees in relevant subjects, quite a few of my younger colleagues (well those under 35 anyway, almost all of them are younger now that I am sixty :-) ) have computer science degrees. Very few of them are black, or South American, or ${your-favourite-minority}, and there seem to be fewer women every year.

TheLogothete 11y ago

What a shite article. Can somebody who upvoted explain his or hers reasoning for doingot?

afrancis 11y ago

"Although I certainly believe that any member of our highly digital society should be familiar with how these platforms work, universal code literacy won’t solve our employment crisis any more than the universal ability to read and write would result in a full-employment economy of book publishing." I read the article. I have seen similar arguments made by Nicholas Carr in "Peak Code" (http://www.roughtype.com/?p=5594 http://www.roughtype.com/?p=5594) Perhaps learning to code and universal code literacy (for now, lets not argue exactly what literacy means) may, or may not save individual jobs. I sense as software development as a discipline matures, at the level of the firm, software developer wages as percent of a software project's budget, may shrink. At a macro level, software development as percent of GNP may rise but the software developer employment may look like the numbers involved in manufacturing, or farming. The point I feel Ruskoff misses is that coding literacy may not save an individual's job. Or having a sizable chunk of the U.S economy (or any sophisticated modern economy's) GDP coming from software development. However a critical mass of the population programming, like universal literacy, will most likely translate into vast productivity gains and ability to create new opportunities. An example. The idea behind "software carpentry"http://software-carpentry.org http://software-carpentry.org) is about teaching scientists just enough programming, so they can write tools be productive at their main activities, instead of doing things by hand, or hiring programmers. As a whole, research immensely benefits. It is easy to extend these ideas to the populate in general (and yes, I, like chef Gusteau, believe anyone can program). When I come to think about it, maybe this is what the BBC Microbit is about. I feel fields like home automation would explode once a critical mass of the population are code literate. To get back to Ruskoff's analogy, book publishing would be a much smaller industry if universal literacy did not create the supply of writers and demand in the form of readers.