So when I was in college I did a writing requirement course called The Hero in Literature and in it I suggested something like that one Russian author's book wa

So when I was in college I did a writing requirement course called The Hero in Literature and in it I suggested something like that one Russian author's book was a direct response to another Russian author's book that I had read previously: I made a strong case about dates, thematic overlap, how you could view this speech over here as a rebuttal of that speech over there. Feedback for the first revision: whoa there, that is a very serious charge you are making, and even if all of those things are true it might just be that Russian authors happen to like similar subject matter, kind of like how existentialists seem to orbit around the paradoxical freedom of a young man facing the potential tragedy of a life sentence in prison. If you want to prove it, they said, go do research and find letters from the one author discussing the other author's work, analyze those. For high school, yeah, being all "this guy was copying that guy with a twist!" is a very interesting paper, but for college we expect you to realize that that's a very serious claim and it needs to be backed up with some very serious research. I feel very similarly here: yeah there is a case to be made that this is a "long con" of trying to saturate a labor market with fresh talent, but if you want to prove that, really, I need to see leaked internal letters and strategy presentations that indicate that someone at Google or Microsoft is consciously trying to change the labor market. Because it could also just be that Google has a lot of programmers who think programming is easy to learn and incredibly powerful as a modern-world skill, and so they have a lot of people pushing for educational initiatives. You can't tell the difference between those by the outside act of supporting the educational initiatives but only by looking at the internal communications. For what it's worth, if that is Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon's strategy, it is likely to be very difficult and enterprisey in ways that they likely don't want to be -- all at least pay lip service to some high-minded ideals of innovation and revolution, no? But if you're looking for those "black swan" successes, you face the problem that achievement is not normal but log-normal[1]: it depends on the multiplication of independent factors, and not their summation. Coding bootcamps and mass coding education only target one of those factors, but without the rest you don't have a highly performant individual. Like, if that's their goal, one would imagine them also having "emotional intelligence bootcamps" and "how to take conscientious personal ownership of the work you do bootcamps" and so forth to try to increase the number of people who have several of these skills, not to fixate on just one of them when those other ones will set a maximum capacity for the employee. [1]: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/09/29/achievement-is-log-normal/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/09/29/achievement-is-log...