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I mean that's the point. The difference between someone that ends up as a janitor and someone that ends up as a software engineer has a lot more to do with thei

I mean that's the point. The difference between someone that ends up as a janitor and someone that ends up as a software engineer has a lot more to do with their parent's money and the color of their skin than any variation in intelligence. Pretending differently just leads you to the comforting arms of the "just world fallacy".

dsacco 9y ago
I think your position needs to be defended just as much as the position you're arguing against, and right now you're not doing a convincing job of defending it.
monktastic1 9y ago
As someone above asked: have you spent significant time teaching / tutoring? There are enormous differences in how quickly people learn mathematical concepts, even given varied teaching methods. Becoming a software engineer requires both intelligence and luck (though one might also argue that intelligence, being the result of genes and environment, is also primarily luck).
- lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
  I'm not a professional educator no. And I do think there's a whole separate discussion to be had about how generally awful most software education is that Im not going to get into. However, small sample size notwithstanding, I have been involved with mentoring in an outreach program targeted at people with little to no CS experience. And these students were coding circles around "CS" grads in under 6 weeks. Sure the theoretical foundations aren't there yet, but, do you really need that much math to stand up an app, build a website, or do any of the work expected of a junior dev? I 100% agree with you in that most people don't have the aptitude to become the next John Carmack, but, at least in my experience, that's not where the jobs are anyway. You don't need to be Linus to generate business value using Linux, and you don't need to be James Gosling to working Java enterprise apps. The jobs of the future need an army of people to modernize infrastructure and build using existing tools. These are the middle class anchors of the 21st century; I'd say look no farther than the "analyst" pipelines of the American finance industry to see this happening.

dsacco 9y ago

I think your position needs to be defended just as much as the position you're arguing against, and right now you're not doing a convincing job of defending it.

monktastic1 9y ago

As someone above asked: have you spent significant time teaching / tutoring? There are enormous differences in how quickly people learn mathematical concepts, even given varied teaching methods. Becoming a software engineer requires both intelligence and luck (though one might also argue that intelligence, being the result of genes and environment, is also primarily luck).

lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
I'm not a professional educator no. And I do think there's a whole separate discussion to be had about how generally awful most software education is that Im not going to get into. However, small sample size notwithstanding, I have been involved with mentoring in an outreach program targeted at people with little to no CS experience. And these students were coding circles around "CS" grads in under 6 weeks. Sure the theoretical foundations aren't there yet, but, do you really need that much math to stand up an app, build a website, or do any of the work expected of a junior dev? I 100% agree with you in that most people don't have the aptitude to become the next John Carmack, but, at least in my experience, that's not where the jobs are anyway. You don't need to be Linus to generate business value using Linux, and you don't need to be James Gosling to working Java enterprise apps. The jobs of the future need an army of people to modernize infrastructure and build using existing tools. These are the middle class anchors of the 21st century; I'd say look no farther than the "analyst" pipelines of the American finance industry to see this happening.