4 ms·

> It's not like we're going to retrain an oil driller to be software engineer. Why not? Equipment at that scale is complicated, and requires a lot of skill and

by donw 6y ago

> It's not like we're going to retrain an oil driller to be software engineer. Why not? Equipment at that scale is complicated, and requires a lot of skill and experience to operate. Not to mention responsibility. When you screw up, people die. Very likely including you.

chiefalchemist 6y ago
You're discounting a key variable in the equation: You can't teach people who are not motivated to learn; who don't have enough desire to learn; who literally can't afford a "life changing" transition. Given the pay rate of oil workers, few are going to plan ahead and switch careers to something paying less. Keep in mind, that new pay drops further as the supply (of devs) increases. In theory, I agree with you. However, the reality is inertia is a key force in life. My life. Your life. All our lives. And a magic wand - Poof! You're a software developer - has little proof of effectiveness to date under such circumstances. Yes, some success stories, but none the less limited. More software bootcamps are the answer? I'd like to see evidence of that. We're not going to solve real problems with fantasy based on disconnected from reality. If we could this conversation would not be necessary.
- donw 6y ago
  I think there's a lot of underlying assumptions here we need to unpack. First, you are correct, not everybody is just going to "learn to code", and that's not where I was going. The industrial revolution replaced, to a large degree, muscles with machines, but still required human minds to work those machines. This enabled an explosion of wealth across the entire world, giving everybody, in essence, access to the economic equivalence of an entire village's worth of labor. Goods which were once difficult to produce, and thus available only to the wealthy, became commonplace. You see this in design trends: ornate designs were favored until mass manufacturing rendered them trivial to reproduce, and then the world embraced Futurism and Bauhaus. In the information revolution, we are replacing minds with machines. We don't need as many muscles, nor do we need as many minds, and where we seem to be headed is a sort of neo-feudalism, as those that control the machines have all the power, and our societies are ill adapted for all the muscles and minds that find themselves no longer economically necessary. Nobody has a good answer to this. UBI, if implemented properly, may solve part of the problem, but human beings derive a great portion of their psychological nourishment from being valuable to their tribes. Just as how not everybody is going to learn to code, not everybody wants to be an artist or a musician, either. That's not even the ugliest problem. Two: There tends to be a very common assumption amongst the technorati, of which I suppose I am a member, that "lesser" folks, those who learned a trade instead of getting a computer science degree, can't learn how to code. I personally hate this attitude, and push back against it wherever I can. Yes, not everybody can be even a mediocre programmer; but, a great programmer can come from anywhere.

by donw 6y ago

chiefalchemist 6y ago

You're discounting a key variable in the equation: You can't teach people who are not motivated to learn; who don't have enough desire to learn; who literally can't afford a "life changing" transition. Given the pay rate of oil workers, few are going to plan ahead and switch careers to something paying less. Keep in mind, that new pay drops further as the supply (of devs) increases. In theory, I agree with you. However, the reality is inertia is a key force in life. My life. Your life. All our lives. And a magic wand - Poof! You're a software developer - has little proof of effectiveness to date under such circumstances. Yes, some success stories, but none the less limited. More software bootcamps are the answer? I'd like to see evidence of that. We're not going to solve real problems with fantasy based on disconnected from reality. If we could this conversation would not be necessary.

donw 6y ago
I think there's a lot of underlying assumptions here we need to unpack. First, you are correct, not everybody is just going to "learn to code", and that's not where I was going. The industrial revolution replaced, to a large degree, muscles with machines, but still required human minds to work those machines. This enabled an explosion of wealth across the entire world, giving everybody, in essence, access to the economic equivalence of an entire village's worth of labor. Goods which were once difficult to produce, and thus available only to the wealthy, became commonplace. You see this in design trends: ornate designs were favored until mass manufacturing rendered them trivial to reproduce, and then the world embraced Futurism and Bauhaus. In the information revolution, we are replacing minds with machines. We don't need as many muscles, nor do we need as many minds, and where we seem to be headed is a sort of neo-feudalism, as those that control the machines have all the power, and our societies are ill adapted for all the muscles and minds that find themselves no longer economically necessary. Nobody has a good answer to this. UBI, if implemented properly, may solve part of the problem, but human beings derive a great portion of their psychological nourishment from being valuable to their tribes. Just as how not everybody is going to learn to code, not everybody wants to be an artist or a musician, either. That's not even the ugliest problem. Two: There tends to be a very common assumption amongst the technorati, of which I suppose I am a member, that "lesser" folks, those who learned a trade instead of getting a computer science degree, can't learn how to code. I personally hate this attitude, and push back against it wherever I can. Yes, not everybody can be even a mediocre programmer; but, a great programmer can come from anywhere.