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> The whole “learn 2 code” thing that was directed toward coal workers was exactly the wrong thing to do. Can somebody go into depth on this? Everyday I intera

> The whole “learn 2 code” thing that was directed toward coal workers was exactly the wrong thing to do. Can somebody go into depth on this? Everyday I interact with people who have jobs that suck way more than coding and pay way less. Why wouldn't people want to work 40 hours remotely with full benefits making decent wages?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
realbarack 7y ago
Any career change is non-trivial for a mid-career worker and it's probably unrealistic that a majority of blue-collar workers would be able to transition into software jobs. "Learn to code" is great advice in general and can change the lives of certain individuals but it's not a winning strategy for shifting a mid-career workforce from one career to another, at scale.
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  > Any career change is non-trivial for a mid-career worker and it's probably unrealistic that a majority of blue-collar workers would be able to transition into software jobs. Unrealistic in what sense? That most people are unable to learn managing state and code flow? I never hear anybody say "it is unrealistic for workers to learn Spanish/Russian/Mandarin/Japanese", yet I really feel basic programming is even easier to learn than a spoken language.
  - chillacy 7y ago
    I used to think that until I tried teaching people programming a few times, it's hard work, and a lot of people don't find it enjoyable. Additionally I heard people who do well in code school have prior programming experience as well, so it becomes more about selection and refining skills than actually making new programmers.
    - thephyber 7y ago
      I don't think the "hard work" excuse works when you are talking about people who used to work in coal mines and have a family to support. I think it's more likely that the basic math (algebra, geometry, etc) is missing when you look at men who started working in the mines before they finish high school. Without the math foundation, it's not "hard work", but a weak foundation which just causes frustration. That, and a 58 year old guy learning to code will soon have to compete against a 20-something with far more education + computer + social media experience, especially since coding can be done overseas.
      - natch 7y ago
        I think it’s even more basic than that. It’s basic logic skills. Boolean logic. I mean these are often people who blindly believe politicians they like are truthful, and ones they don’t like can’t be truthful. They seem to have no ability to examine facts and draw conclusions consistently. Oh and age by itself has nothing to do with it. There are old people who could pick it up because they have the right fundamentals. Sure there are some challenges that come with age, but let’s not sweep all old people into the category of “cannot enter a programming career.” I’m not saying that’s what you were doing. I think you were talking about age as a further factor compounding the difficulty on top of already lacking basic related skills.
      - MuffinFlavored 7y ago
        > I think it's more likely that the basic math (algebra, geometry, etc) I am a senior full stack developer and typically in the top 10% of the developers in my org wherever I've gone past 5 years. I do 0 algebra or geometry. I call APIs, I put stuff in databases. I store state. I really don't think it's "math"y at all. I transform data, I use libraries. I can't think of any algebraic examples of anything I've done in the past 5 years, let alone geometry.
        ThrowawayR2 7y ago
        > I do 0 algebra or geometry. I call APIs, I put stuff in databases. I store state. That's not something to be happy about, that's something to be terrified of. If nothing the average coder does requires any particular specialized skills beyond gluing together libraries built by experts, what do you think will happen when, like the coal miners, some technological or societal change comes along that reduces the need for average coders? Demand for coders isn't infinite.
  - mateo411 7y ago
    It's unrealistic for middle age blue collar workers in America to learn Spanish/Russian/Mandarin/Japanese, assuming that they have no prior experience or exposure to these languages. Learning a natural language is a lot harder than learning a programming language.
    - MuffinFlavored 7y ago
      The tone of the comments here at HackerNews are basically: middle age blue collar workers can't learn a natural language or a programming language I really have to ask, what makes us "programmers" so elite? I find it hard to believe that if your average person spent 90 months learning programming that they couldn't scrape by as a mid-level web developers. I have developers in my org who go weeks without committing and management seems to have no problem with that. If that's the quality accepted, why can't that be taught in 90 days?
ericmay 7y ago
A scenario would be something like you and your entire family live somewhere, and you make a good income that allows you to have a decent life, and now that income stream is gone and you’re expected to retrain after who knows how long to “learn 2 code” and then somehow get another high-paying job. What go back to college? A coding boot camp? Uproot you’re family to move to San Francisco and compete with 20 year old kids who have been writing code for years? Obviously some people could do that, but it’s incredibly tone deaf when someone seriously suggests that some coal worker learn to code. They might not even get it or literally be able to do that job. And while I think we should shut down every coal plant, from their perspective it’s the government coming in and destroying their way of life and then not even bothering to help, while those rich liberals keep getting rich and fly around in private jets. I got my haircut the other week and a lady was chatting with me about how she quit her job at a warehouse. While she was great at her job, she said the management let people do a crappy job and it made her angry. Recently that company changed management and asked her for seasonal help and knew she was a good worker. She told me she was thinking about it, and they were offering her the same rate she previously had. You know what never occurred to her? (Her words) it never occurred to her that she could negotiate a better pay rate. So had I not said anything, this lady may have never in her life considered asking for more money. My point isn’t that I’m a savior or something, it’s that when you come back and say “you don’t have to leave, work remote” you’re not even speaking the same language. I actually co-founded a non-profit to address this to the extent that I can with entreprenuership training in the Appalachian region. I think building up the area and creating successful businesses where people live is the way to go. I hope that what I said here makes sense. It’s based on my own work and experience, Thank you
- chillacy 7y ago
  Something like Venture for America?
  - ericmay 7y ago
    First time hearing about it. But we also target more than just students/recent graduates. I also don’t think they have a presence in our region, but I could be wrong.
Johnny555 7y ago
There are plenty of people that would rather work with their hands than work with their minds. My brother included - he owns a successful blue-collar business (selling accessories he installs on construction trucks), but no amount of handholding or sitting down with him has been successful at weaning himself off of his paper bookkeeping system. He spends hours every year at tax time, carefully collating his paper records onto a paper ledger that he shares with his accountant. If he'd enter the data into even the most basic of bookkeeping systems or even an Excel spreadsheet, tax time would take him a few minutes (and he wouldn't be paying his accountant so much to handle the paper). And he'd have a better handle on monthly expenses, revenue, etc. his system works for him, it's just labor intensive. But he still makes a good living at what he does, he just prefers to do it with a welder while climbing on a truck. Even if he were offered free coding classes, he wouldn't take it -- he can't understand how I can possibly sit in front of a computer all day long, stuck in an office.
klingonopera 7y ago
Because most people on this forum live in a bubble when it comes to computer literacy and the average population is really, really bad at it, you won't get them into coding when they're already failing at tasks you'd need for a basic white-collar job. Telling blue-collar workers to learn to code is in their analogy like telling them to be rocket-scientists. If they could, they probably wouldn't be blue-collar in the first place. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037674
- war1025 7y ago
  As a bit of a corollary, there are things that blue-collar workers take as absolutely basic "common knowledge" that would not be at all intuitive to people in the tech scene. It's all about what you've been exposed to.
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  > for a basic white-collar job. What are some basic white-collar jobs other than "go to meetings" and "Excel"?
natch 7y ago
There’s an entire learning curve before the learning curve we normally think of. Basic computer literacy, basic literacy even, communication skills, people skills, planning skills. And this isn’t even getting to things like typing or right clicking. Yes some computer scientists get by without typing skills but I think you’ll find they have basic literacy and analytic skills at least.
crankylinuxuser 7y ago
Spoken like a "Them", and not a "us". I've been on both coasts. I've been in big cities. The prosperity is there. The hope is there. The schooling and resources are there. My family came from the Appalachians. Hill country. they live off the land, cause the only money is from tourists. They used to work in the mines, but 'them environmentalists' ruined their livelihood and ended their bodily suffering so their kids could do better. But in doing so, the coastal elites destined those cities, those families to poverty. But this poverty is working in restaurants, working menial service jobs that pay $8/hr, no benefits, and no vacation. And remember that in the USA, your property tax is linked to school funds. Sure the feds pitch in a bit, but not that much. So you get: bad education, bad jobs, no upward mobility, low/no healthcare. You get poverty equal to what we'd call 'Third World'. So when I see a bunch of coastal elites say blasely, "Why cant the blue collar workers just learn programming and be rich?" It's about as tone deaf as Marie Antionette saying 'Why can't they just eat cake?' They don't have the prior education to learn programming. They don't have the free time due to working 50-60 hour weeks. Or they don't have the ability to afford computers or the know-how to use free and open source software effectively to learn. We need socialism, especially when policies end up destroying counties, towns, and cities founded in old paradigms we now kill for being bad. We can end dirty jobs - but we should never end the people. But that's what we're doing.
- danans 7y ago
  > So you get: bad education, bad jobs, no upward mobility, low/no healthcare. You get poverty equal to what we'd call 'Third World'. This is often the situation faced by the poor and working classes on the coasts, also. Even if they have different beliefs from you on, i.e. social issues, on economic fairness there is a lot of agreement. > We need socialism, especially when policies end up destroying counties, towns, and cities founded in old paradigms we now kill for being bad. We can end dirty jobs - but we should never end the people. But that's what we're doing. The fleeting, once in a generation chance to turn the country in the direction you propose (cleaner jobs, more support for people and communities) begins in the upcoming primary election. Arguably, how people vote in places like Appalachia and the Midwest will decide if we enter your hopeful future, or continue down the current path toward the greater concentration of wealth in fewer hands.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

realbarack 7y ago

Any career change is non-trivial for a mid-career worker and it's probably unrealistic that a majority of blue-collar workers would be able to transition into software jobs. "Learn to code" is great advice in general and can change the lives of certain individuals but it's not a winning strategy for shifting a mid-career workforce from one career to another, at scale.

MuffinFlavored 7y ago
> Any career change is non-trivial for a mid-career worker and it's probably unrealistic that a majority of blue-collar workers would be able to transition into software jobs. Unrealistic in what sense? That most people are unable to learn managing state and code flow? I never hear anybody say "it is unrealistic for workers to learn Spanish/Russian/Mandarin/Japanese", yet I really feel basic programming is even easier to learn than a spoken language.
- chillacy 7y ago
  I used to think that until I tried teaching people programming a few times, it's hard work, and a lot of people don't find it enjoyable. Additionally I heard people who do well in code school have prior programming experience as well, so it becomes more about selection and refining skills than actually making new programmers.
  - thephyber 7y ago
    I don't think the "hard work" excuse works when you are talking about people who used to work in coal mines and have a family to support. I think it's more likely that the basic math (algebra, geometry, etc) is missing when you look at men who started working in the mines before they finish high school. Without the math foundation, it's not "hard work", but a weak foundation which just causes frustration. That, and a 58 year old guy learning to code will soon have to compete against a 20-something with far more education + computer + social media experience, especially since coding can be done overseas.
    - natch 7y ago
      I think it’s even more basic than that. It’s basic logic skills. Boolean logic. I mean these are often people who blindly believe politicians they like are truthful, and ones they don’t like can’t be truthful. They seem to have no ability to examine facts and draw conclusions consistently. Oh and age by itself has nothing to do with it. There are old people who could pick it up because they have the right fundamentals. Sure there are some challenges that come with age, but let’s not sweep all old people into the category of “cannot enter a programming career.” I’m not saying that’s what you were doing. I think you were talking about age as a further factor compounding the difficulty on top of already lacking basic related skills.
    - MuffinFlavored 7y ago
      > I think it's more likely that the basic math (algebra, geometry, etc) I am a senior full stack developer and typically in the top 10% of the developers in my org wherever I've gone past 5 years. I do 0 algebra or geometry. I call APIs, I put stuff in databases. I store state. I really don't think it's "math"y at all. I transform data, I use libraries. I can't think of any algebraic examples of anything I've done in the past 5 years, let alone geometry.
      - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
        > I do 0 algebra or geometry. I call APIs, I put stuff in databases. I store state. That's not something to be happy about, that's something to be terrified of. If nothing the average coder does requires any particular specialized skills beyond gluing together libraries built by experts, what do you think will happen when, like the coal miners, some technological or societal change comes along that reduces the need for average coders? Demand for coders isn't infinite.
- mateo411 7y ago
  It's unrealistic for middle age blue collar workers in America to learn Spanish/Russian/Mandarin/Japanese, assuming that they have no prior experience or exposure to these languages. Learning a natural language is a lot harder than learning a programming language.
  - MuffinFlavored 7y ago
    The tone of the comments here at HackerNews are basically: middle age blue collar workers can't learn a natural language or a programming language I really have to ask, what makes us "programmers" so elite? I find it hard to believe that if your average person spent 90 months learning programming that they couldn't scrape by as a mid-level web developers. I have developers in my org who go weeks without committing and management seems to have no problem with that. If that's the quality accepted, why can't that be taught in 90 days?

ericmay 7y ago

A scenario would be something like you and your entire family live somewhere, and you make a good income that allows you to have a decent life, and now that income stream is gone and you’re expected to retrain after who knows how long to “learn 2 code” and then somehow get another high-paying job. What go back to college? A coding boot camp? Uproot you’re family to move to San Francisco and compete with 20 year old kids who have been writing code for years? Obviously some people could do that, but it’s incredibly tone deaf when someone seriously suggests that some coal worker learn to code. They might not even get it or literally be able to do that job. And while I think we should shut down every coal plant, from their perspective it’s the government coming in and destroying their way of life and then not even bothering to help, while those rich liberals keep getting rich and fly around in private jets. I got my haircut the other week and a lady was chatting with me about how she quit her job at a warehouse. While she was great at her job, she said the management let people do a crappy job and it made her angry. Recently that company changed management and asked her for seasonal help and knew she was a good worker. She told me she was thinking about it, and they were offering her the same rate she previously had. You know what never occurred to her? (Her words) it never occurred to her that she could negotiate a better pay rate. So had I not said anything, this lady may have never in her life considered asking for more money. My point isn’t that I’m a savior or something, it’s that when you come back and say “you don’t have to leave, work remote” you’re not even speaking the same language. I actually co-founded a non-profit to address this to the extent that I can with entreprenuership training in the Appalachian region. I think building up the area and creating successful businesses where people live is the way to go. I hope that what I said here makes sense. It’s based on my own work and experience, Thank you

chillacy 7y ago
Something like Venture for America?
- ericmay 7y ago
  First time hearing about it. But we also target more than just students/recent graduates. I also don’t think they have a presence in our region, but I could be wrong.

Johnny555 7y ago

There are plenty of people that would rather work with their hands than work with their minds. My brother included - he owns a successful blue-collar business (selling accessories he installs on construction trucks), but no amount of handholding or sitting down with him has been successful at weaning himself off of his paper bookkeeping system. He spends hours every year at tax time, carefully collating his paper records onto a paper ledger that he shares with his accountant. If he'd enter the data into even the most basic of bookkeeping systems or even an Excel spreadsheet, tax time would take him a few minutes (and he wouldn't be paying his accountant so much to handle the paper). And he'd have a better handle on monthly expenses, revenue, etc. his system works for him, it's just labor intensive. But he still makes a good living at what he does, he just prefers to do it with a welder while climbing on a truck. Even if he were offered free coding classes, he wouldn't take it -- he can't understand how I can possibly sit in front of a computer all day long, stuck in an office.

klingonopera 7y ago

Because most people on this forum live in a bubble when it comes to computer literacy and the average population is really, really bad at it, you won't get them into coding when they're already failing at tasks you'd need for a basic white-collar job. Telling blue-collar workers to learn to code is in their analogy like telling them to be rocket-scientists. If they could, they probably wouldn't be blue-collar in the first place. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037674

war1025 7y ago
As a bit of a corollary, there are things that blue-collar workers take as absolutely basic "common knowledge" that would not be at all intuitive to people in the tech scene. It's all about what you've been exposed to.
MuffinFlavored 7y ago
> for a basic white-collar job. What are some basic white-collar jobs other than "go to meetings" and "Excel"?

natch 7y ago

There’s an entire learning curve before the learning curve we normally think of. Basic computer literacy, basic literacy even, communication skills, people skills, planning skills. And this isn’t even getting to things like typing or right clicking. Yes some computer scientists get by without typing skills but I think you’ll find they have basic literacy and analytic skills at least.

crankylinuxuser 7y ago

Spoken like a "Them", and not a "us". I've been on both coasts. I've been in big cities. The prosperity is there. The hope is there. The schooling and resources are there. My family came from the Appalachians. Hill country. they live off the land, cause the only money is from tourists. They used to work in the mines, but 'them environmentalists' ruined their livelihood and ended their bodily suffering so their kids could do better. But in doing so, the coastal elites destined those cities, those families to poverty. But this poverty is working in restaurants, working menial service jobs that pay $8/hr, no benefits, and no vacation. And remember that in the USA, your property tax is linked to school funds. Sure the feds pitch in a bit, but not that much. So you get: bad education, bad jobs, no upward mobility, low/no healthcare. You get poverty equal to what we'd call 'Third World'. So when I see a bunch of coastal elites say blasely, "Why cant the blue collar workers just learn programming and be rich?" It's about as tone deaf as Marie Antionette saying 'Why can't they just eat cake?' They don't have the prior education to learn programming. They don't have the free time due to working 50-60 hour weeks. Or they don't have the ability to afford computers or the know-how to use free and open source software effectively to learn. We need socialism, especially when policies end up destroying counties, towns, and cities founded in old paradigms we now kill for being bad. We can end dirty jobs - but we should never end the people. But that's what we're doing.

danans 7y ago
> So you get: bad education, bad jobs, no upward mobility, low/no healthcare. You get poverty equal to what we'd call 'Third World'. This is often the situation faced by the poor and working classes on the coasts, also. Even if they have different beliefs from you on, i.e. social issues, on economic fairness there is a lot of agreement. > We need socialism, especially when policies end up destroying counties, towns, and cities founded in old paradigms we now kill for being bad. We can end dirty jobs - but we should never end the people. But that's what we're doing. The fleeting, once in a generation chance to turn the country in the direction you propose (cleaner jobs, more support for people and communities) begins in the upcoming primary election. Arguably, how people vote in places like Appalachia and the Midwest will decide if we enter your hopeful future, or continue down the current path toward the greater concentration of wealth in fewer hands.