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> Coding is as critical as literacy for the next 20 years... I think this is an absurd and tired meme. Most shops who employ coders also employ about 75% non-c

> Coding is as critical as literacy for the next 20 years... I think this is an absurd and tired meme. Most shops who employ coders also employ about 75% non-coders. You need sales, marketing, accounting, management, HR, legal - and even the IT guys often truck along fine with little to no coding skills. If you need code written to perform your task that usually just means the UI of your application isn't powerful enough. So get a coder to add that feature to the UI. You don't need to become a coder yourself. Here's why we really need "more coders" all the time: - the web frontend is getting reinvented every year - the latest trends in infrastructure design ("terascale micro-micro-micro-services as a service") need attention - the latest devices and platform SDKs need to be dealt with - the insane amount of technical debt accumulated through all this churn needs to be paid off Which is all fine only as long as the money keeps rolling in.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> > Coding is as critical as literacy for the next 20 years... > I think this is an absurd and tired meme. Most shops who employ coders also employ about 75% non-coders It would be absurd if coding skill were only useful to people whose job title and central role is “coder” (just as viewing literacy as central would be absurd if measured by the number of people employed as “writers”.)
jimbokun 8y ago
Jessica made a really good point, that female founders without any coding knowledge can't even assess whether a coder is any good before hiring him or her. Getting the fundamentals in an intense summer course will not only enable someone to develop a prototype on their own, but also assess who is a good potential hire and who is just good at bullshitting.
- gridlockd 8y ago
  > Jessica made a really good point, female founders without any coding knowledge can't even assess whether a coder is any good before hiring him or her. If I followed this line of reasoning, then I couldn't hire a lawyer without knowing law, I couldn't hire a marketing person without knowing marketing, I couldn't hire a sales person without knowing sales, and so on and so forth. I would argue that knowledge in law, sales and marketing are far more important to a founder, yet people obsess over coding. > Getting the fundamentals in an intense summer course will not only enable someone to develop a prototype on their own, but also assess who is a good potential hire and who is just good at bullshitting. I don't think that's true. To accurately judge someone else's competence, you have to be at least on their level. Secondly, it's credentials like work experience and education that you go by when hiring. I'm aware that a lot of software developers are often forced to pass lots of silly programming tests, but that's known to not result in better hiring. If you are a founder and non-technical, you shouldn't hire a random developer anyway. You should have a technical co-founder that you can trust and you should focus on literally everything else. You'll need to do a thousand things, but writing code isn't really one of them.
  - filoleg 8y ago
    >To accurately judge someone else's competence, you have to be at least on their level If you want to be as accurate as possible, then yes. But there is a whole spectrum of accuracy in-between those two options, and being "somewhat ok" (which is what this program, I assume, is supposed to help the attendees achieve) is better than "completely guessing, because I have zero relevant knowledge"
danso 8y ago
Charlemagne reportedly ruled his empire despite being illiterate [0]. Christians were able to worship before they could read or even have access to printed Bibles. Literacy allows for creation and understanding beyond what can be attained via delegating the ability to read and write. It’s the same with coding, and I think you aren’t seeing how coding — or rather, being able to think the way code requires — is an ability that goes beyond building a web app. Here’s a good write up from author Clive Thompson about how he learned to code, and how it helped him, when he was writing a book: https://tim.blog/2019/03/21/learn-to-code/ https://tim.blog/2019/03/21/learn-to-code/ 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_litteris_colendis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_litteris_colendis
- gridlockd 8y ago
  > Literacy allows for creation and understanding beyond what can be attained via delegating the ability to read and write. It’s the same with coding, and I think you aren’t seeing how coding — or rather, being able to think the way code requires — is an ability that goes beyond building a web app. Yeah I've heard the meme that "coding teaches you how to think". I don't buy it. I could make the same unsubstantiated claim about playing chess or some other mental gymnastics. > Here’s a good write up from author Clive Thompson about how he learned to code, and how it helped him, when he was writing a book He doesn't really give very convincing examples that it helped him professionally, but the time investment was substantial. That's called a hobby.
  - danso 8y ago
    Yes, you could try to make that same unsubstantiated claim about chess, except that programming is not only its own, large and profitable profession, but one that actually intersects with a majority of today's industries and actual work.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> > Coding is as critical as literacy for the next 20 years... > I think this is an absurd and tired meme. Most shops who employ coders also employ about 75% non-coders It would be absurd if coding skill were only useful to people whose job title and central role is “coder” (just as viewing literacy as central would be absurd if measured by the number of people employed as “writers”.)

jimbokun 8y ago

Jessica made a really good point, that female founders without any coding knowledge can't even assess whether a coder is any good before hiring him or her. Getting the fundamentals in an intense summer course will not only enable someone to develop a prototype on their own, but also assess who is a good potential hire and who is just good at bullshitting.

gridlockd 8y ago
> Jessica made a really good point, female founders without any coding knowledge can't even assess whether a coder is any good before hiring him or her. If I followed this line of reasoning, then I couldn't hire a lawyer without knowing law, I couldn't hire a marketing person without knowing marketing, I couldn't hire a sales person without knowing sales, and so on and so forth. I would argue that knowledge in law, sales and marketing are far more important to a founder, yet people obsess over coding. > Getting the fundamentals in an intense summer course will not only enable someone to develop a prototype on their own, but also assess who is a good potential hire and who is just good at bullshitting. I don't think that's true. To accurately judge someone else's competence, you have to be at least on their level. Secondly, it's credentials like work experience and education that you go by when hiring. I'm aware that a lot of software developers are often forced to pass lots of silly programming tests, but that's known to not result in better hiring. If you are a founder and non-technical, you shouldn't hire a random developer anyway. You should have a technical co-founder that you can trust and you should focus on literally everything else. You'll need to do a thousand things, but writing code isn't really one of them.
- filoleg 8y ago
  >To accurately judge someone else's competence, you have to be at least on their level If you want to be as accurate as possible, then yes. But there is a whole spectrum of accuracy in-between those two options, and being "somewhat ok" (which is what this program, I assume, is supposed to help the attendees achieve) is better than "completely guessing, because I have zero relevant knowledge"

danso 8y ago

Charlemagne reportedly ruled his empire despite being illiterate [0]. Christians were able to worship before they could read or even have access to printed Bibles. Literacy allows for creation and understanding beyond what can be attained via delegating the ability to read and write. It’s the same with coding, and I think you aren’t seeing how coding — or rather, being able to think the way code requires — is an ability that goes beyond building a web app. Here’s a good write up from author Clive Thompson about how he learned to code, and how it helped him, when he was writing a book: https://tim.blog/2019/03/21/learn-to-code/ https://tim.blog/2019/03/21/learn-to-code/ 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_litteris_colendis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_litteris_colendis

gridlockd 8y ago
> Literacy allows for creation and understanding beyond what can be attained via delegating the ability to read and write. It’s the same with coding, and I think you aren’t seeing how coding — or rather, being able to think the way code requires — is an ability that goes beyond building a web app. Yeah I've heard the meme that "coding teaches you how to think". I don't buy it. I could make the same unsubstantiated claim about playing chess or some other mental gymnastics. > Here’s a good write up from author Clive Thompson about how he learned to code, and how it helped him, when he was writing a book He doesn't really give very convincing examples that it helped him professionally, but the time investment was substantial. That's called a hobby.
- danso 8y ago
  Yes, you could try to make that same unsubstantiated claim about chess, except that programming is not only its own, large and profitable profession, but one that actually intersects with a majority of today's industries and actual work.