12 ms·

This seems like a sensitive topic - but taking gender out of it - I do think the "teach people to code" movement has shown to be riddled with issues of premise.

by apsurd 2y ago

This seems like a sensitive topic - but taking gender out of it - I do think the "teach people to code" movement has shown to be riddled with issues of premise. Coding is a trade. We don't have plumbing bootcamps. I understand the tech literacy angle, but placing people in $200k developer jobs is very far away from tech literacy.

atleastoptimal 2y ago
> We don't have plumbing bootcamps There are apprenticeships and accredited training programs. Just because they're not called "bootcamps" doesn't mean they aren't the same thing.
- apsurd 2y ago
  That's just it; the "bootcamp" label is marketing. Sibling comment touches on this: the industry intentionally sells more-or-less get-rich-quick schemes. Learn coding in 10-weeks and get hired into a six-figure job. Maybe plumbing just has the advantage of time. Its lost any sexiness it once had, if ever. And plumbers make good money!
- strix_varius 2y ago
  But they aren't even vaguely the same thing. Apprentice plumbers (1) get paid and (2) typically spend years as an apprentice, not weeks or months. This is for a career averaging $60-80k. Contrast that with tech bootcamps that often approximate the cost of computer science degrees and promise (or intimate) that students will jump into six figure salaries. It's not the same at all.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    >Apprentice plumbers (1) get paid and (2) typically spend years as an apprentice, not weeks or months. This is for a career averaging $60-80k. Also important to note that if you get paid (a proper wage) while apprenticing, you're quite lucky already. There are plenty of occupations with apprenticeships where you do not get paid until you've got your foot firmly in the hallway past the door. For example, anything related to becoming a chef: You're going to start by washing dishes for months if not years and no you will not get paid beyond maybe minimum wage.
    - em-bee 2y ago
      i don't believe that washing dishes is the start of a cooks apprentice ship. the story from a dishwasher to the owner of a restaurant is not the average career of a cook. as far as i know you can start in a cooking school and then begin working as a line cook, and work yourself up from there. washing dishes is a minimum wage job for people without any training, and they are not learning to cook while washing dishes either.
    - parineum 2y ago
      > Also important to note that if you get paid (a proper wage) while apprenticing, you're quite lucky already. >There are plenty of occupations with apprenticeships where you do not get paid until you've got your foot firmly in the hallway past the door. For example, anything related A good friend of mine was an apprentice union welder when we were younger. His hourly wage was quite good at that time, easily comparable to my tech wage with around the same experience. However, because of the union seniority, whenever there were work shortages, he was the first one cut. He'd regularly spend 1/4 to 1/3 of the year unemployed.
  - atleastoptimal 2y ago
    Apprentice plumbers get paid because they do economically valuable work. As someone learning to code you're not doing anything valuable so you don't get paid. The reason why coding pays so well is because it's IQ-gated in a way that plumbing isn't. An 80 IQ person can be a competent plumber but couldn't do well in most coding jobs.
    - beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
      > The reason why coding pays so well is because it's IQ-gated in a way that plumbing isn't. Uh, what? I was with you until that part. Coding pays so well because the operating costs are low and the returns/profits are enormous for companies. Tech companies are "cheap" in a way other companies can't be. IQ doesn't really have much to do with it. I know plumbers who are technically brilliant and I know very well paid coders who regularly say things that make me question their intelligence.
      - nwiswell 2y ago
        > Coding pays so well because the operating costs are low and the returns/profits are enormous for companies. Unrelated. Coding pays well because of the tight labor supply compared to the demand. Companies NEVER direct excess value to labor. Extracting surplus value from labor is sorta the whole deal with capitalism. > I know plumbers who are technically brilliant Also not relevant. The argument is that it isn't necessary to be brilliant in order to be a competent plumber, not that it would actually preclude you. > I know very well paid coders who regularly say things that make me question their intelligence. Do you think that's actually a good measure of intelligence? How are you normalizing it against the population, people you don't work with, and/or plumbers generally? The question to ask is, "taking a random sample of persons having 80 IQ, half of whom intend to pursue a career in software and half who intend to pursue a career in plumbing, what is the relative success rate (for some reasonable measure of 'success')?"
    - strix_varius 2y ago
      "IQ-gated?" Please, let's not be so self congratulatory. The plumber who works on my house is easily as smart as I am. A successful software engineering career has brought me financial independence but I'm not particularly brilliant. Most of the folks I've worked with in FAANG aren't either. We're just normal people making a living during a very lucky period for a specific type of nerd.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
swatcoder 2y ago
Sort of. There are relatively short-term training programs that open the doors to many trades, but they're usually followed by some kind of ongoing and often years-long apprenticeship process where further skills are gradually developed on the job with the support (nominally) of responsible mentors. The issues with bootcamps in our industry was that there's not really a mature apprenticeship program to follow them up. Eight-week bootcampers who'd never seen a for loop before starting learn a few leetcode solutions and are invited into interviews alongside people with much more training and much more experience. And many parties, not the least of which being the leetcode-focused interviewers, are responsible for that dubious process taking shape.
- josephg 2y ago
  I really think our industry - and maybe culture at large - is plagued by a sort of anti-expertise philosophy at the moment. I’ve been learning the piano lately. In music it’s widely accepted that it takes years of practice to become skilled with an instrument. People talk about practice constantly. But it’s strange - nobody talks about that with programming. Instead we say “anyone can code!” “Just do some Python tutorials on YouTube!”. Nobody seems to want to talk about how much effort it takes to get good. We just don’t talk about practice like musicians do - and we should. Dismissing the work it takes is harmful. We relegate practice problems (advent of code, toy projects) into some silly side thing that you would only do for fun. But it’s only through practice that we build expertise. And we systematically dismiss people who are really skilled, and burn the bridge to get that good ourselves. Nobody seems interested in the answer of how Jeff Dean or Carmack gained their skill. When we devalue expertise, we burn the ladder we would need to climb to get there ourselves. I think we need to take seriously how hard it is to do good programming work. Algorithms, data structures, math, performance optimisation, distributed systems, graphics & shaders, large system design - any one of these skills takes years to properly master. Learning can be incredibly rewarding. But it doesn’t happen without work. We should talk about that work.
  - musicale 2y ago
    "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" https://www.norvig.com/21-days.html https://www.norvig.com/21-days.html
drjasonharrison 2y ago
I'm addition to the classes and apprenticeships, there are "how to fix it" videos, articles, books etc. Low income neighbourhoods used to have a higher use of the Hays manuals for car repair. (this is something I read long ago and and I don't know if the manuals are still being published.) Very few who learned to change their own oil and filters went on to become car mechanics.
- rufus_foreman 2y ago
  >> Low income neighbourhoods used to have a higher use of the Hays manuals for car repair I used to borrow them from the library when I was still working on my own car. I'm sure they were some of the most borrowed items.
- hot_gril 2y ago
  I'd never even heard of these manuals. Wish I bought this instead of looking at YouTube for wiring info: https://haynes.com/en-us/ford/crown-victoria/1992-2011 https://haynes.com/en-us/ford/crown-victoria/1992-2011
  - buescher 2y ago
    Factory service manuals are even better and not prohibitively expensive, especially used copies for popular models.
  - rpcope1 2y ago
    As the sibling comment mentions, the FSM will be a much better resource for this. It's worth having a Haynes or Chilton, since they're cheap and sometimes have different approaches, but the FSM is really the best source of truth (most of the time).
    - hot_gril 2y ago
      Thanks, I'll keep that in mind as I'll most likely have to figure out what that clunking noise is pretty soon.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
> We don't have plumbing bootcamps. If you are at all familiar with The Trades, you know that they have the apprenticeship system, which is a hell of a lot more intense than any bootcamp. My plumber has a nicer house than I do.
- apsurd 2y ago
  We're agreeing fwiw. Trades treated like trades are a value-add all around, but they take time, and they aren't necessarily sexy. The teach people to code movement, for whatever reason, portrays itself as being something everyone can and should "break into" in 10 weeks. edit: Just realized the conflation between "get hired as a software developer for six-figures" vs literally "make learning how to code accessible for all". The latter makes way more honest sense.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    I wasn't disagreeing. It's sort of "apples and oranges." I'm a big believer in the apprenticeship system, but I have found it to be profoundly unpopular, with software engineers (in the US), as can be noted by the reaction to my comment. I consider my software engineering to be as much craft, as it is, vocation, and I had some good mentors.
- ergocoder 2y ago
  Is that because they bought a house 10 years ago?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    I brought my house just before 9/11. He has his own business. He's a one-man shop, and damn good.
- jandrewrogers 2y ago
  There are several specialty domains in software development that would benefit immensely from a true multi-year apprenticeship program. That said, people tend to gravitate toward software that doesn’t require that level of commitment to make good money quickly. I don’t know that we actually know how to do apprenticeship in software, culturally. It is why we have chronic shortages of expertise in some software domains even though they are extremely well paid as specialties.
jltsiren 2y ago
Software development is a trade. Programming is a skill that can be useful in a wide range of jobs. I wouldn't be surprised if actual software developers turned out to be a minority among the people who write code as part of their jobs.
- sandspar 2y ago
  Adding programming to your toolbox doesn't require a $15,000 bootcamp. The unwritten agreement to these things is that you pay $15k now to get a $100k job once you graduate. The reality is that that rarely happens.
CapmCrackaWaka 2y ago
"Programming" as a career is in an interesting position right now. Due to demand and the job itself, you can make a lot of money, work remotely, in a medium-low stress job, without interacting with the public, solving puzzles. That's the dream right? It really doesn't get any better than that for most people. The problem is that there are two types of people: those that enjoy coding, and those that don't. The people that enjoy coding are living the dream. I know I am. I mean I have it fucking good. All the benefits above, to the max. The people that don't enjoy coding can still force themselves to do it... But they will find it lack luster. They are doing something they don't like, aren't too good at, for less money, at a job that took forever to find, etc etc. They won't have the same experience. There are enough people that enjoy coding to tell everyone else "yeah this fucking rocks", and that certainly draws people in, but a lot of people will be disappointed with it.
- alisonatwork 2y ago
  This implies that all people who don't enjoy coding are also not very good at it, which doesn't match my experience. There is a significant cohort of professional coders who enjoy the comfortable lifestyle who write very bad code. In fact, I'd venture to say there are far more of those than people who don't much enjoy the work but still do it well because they have other priorities and responsibilities in life that make it necessary to maintain a strong work ethic.
  - fpgamlirfanboy 2y ago
    > well because they have other priorities and responsibilities in life that make it necessary to maintain a strong work ethic. It's amazing how many people in tech can't imagine that the same people that can grind med school or IB or big4 accounting or white-shoe law somehow can't grind the same way in tech. Newsflash: the majority of people in FAANG are grinders not "passion coders". Personally I hate this job but I'm very good at it and it was either law school with my 98% LSAT or tech. I picked tech because reading and writing briefs all day seemed somehow worse.
    - 2y ago
hot_gril 2y ago
Not sure what you're saying. Do you mean the problem is these bootcamps promise a $200K job and don't deliver?
- apsurd 2y ago
  Yes. The way education makes big money is through job-placement, legal compliance (food safety, sexual harassment training etc) and promises of higher pay. Certifications, credentials, upskilling, the value proposition is you'll make more money at your job. It's not about learning. This isn't a moral argument btw, i'm making sure of it because I used to be really into edtech [1]. There's no money in education, only its commercial outcomes. Education for learning is a public good. bootcamps cannot deliver placement at scale because the premise is flawed. anyone and everyone cannot learn to be a professional coder in 10 weeks. Anyway, so the coding bootcamps spread like wildfire because they implicitly or otherwise promise high paying careers that anyone can do, all over the internet, in 10 weeks, for a fraction of college tuition. [1] https://words.nom.city/posts/jade-what-s-next https://words.nom.city/posts/jade-what-s-next
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    I agree that anything suggesting you'll get a high-paying job as a coder (or "SWE" to sound fancy) after a short bootcamp is misleading. I've seen those before. I really feel like a proper bachelor's comp-sci degree made a huge difference for me, even though I also had to self-teach a ton of stuff. Not sure if Women who Code made any such promises. There are plenty of lower-paying coding jobs or jobs that involve coding as a useful skill, and a bootcamp can help with that. Or, maybe someone has the CS background but not the practical skills.
bewaretheirs 2y ago
Plumbers (in the US at least) appear to have well established apprenticeship systems, often run by their local unions; I've seen advertisements in a major sports facility looking for people interested in working as plumbers/pipefitters.
non-chalad 2y ago
You could probably learn plumbing at ManCamp (1). Kids are taught welding, blacksmithing, and other handy skills. 1. https://www.bitchute.com/video/N1PDO9XulKU4/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/N1PDO9XulKU4/
julianeon 2y ago
But programming is tech literacy, realistically, in 2024.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  The difference between learning to read/write and make a living writing ?
rqtwteye 2y ago
I also think coding is not very suitable for a lot of people. It’s tedious and boring. I notice at my company there are quite a few young people who simply aren’t cut out for this. They probably got into it because it’s a well paid career but they don’t have the patience for problem solving.
- prewett 2y ago
  Those problems can be really tedious: - Writing a screen saver on Window NT 4. Starting the screen-saver blue-screens the computer. Rebooting + loading Visual Studio takes several minutes. After several days of this, it turned out I forgot to zero out the structure you pass into every Win32 Create function. - Was assigned to modify some old Fortran code (never claimed to know Fortran, just got the assignment) a long time ago. Got weird compile errors, couldn't figure it out, finally just started taking things out of the line until it worked. Found out it failed if I had a line of over 70 characters. What?! Turns out some of those old things of Fortran were still around... - Spent a week tracking down why my C++ code was my crashing, due to a variable magically changing values. I was using Curl, and one of the calls requires a pointer to long and I passed a pointer to int, and the compiler didn't complain. Got so frustrated I ended up stepping through the assembly code to see what was happening (which is how I discovered it). Not fun. (Also, the constant recompiling and dockerizing desoldered the nvidia chip on my 2012 MBP, so this bug cost me a lot of money for a new laptop, too.) - 3D meshing algorithm isn't working. Narrow it down to a small enough mesh to print out vertices before and after in a tractable quantity. Stare at changing outputs long enough to identify the problem. - Emscripten WASM wants to load async, but exported global function uses the WASM to do work and should not have to know the details of how the WASM gets loaded. Coerce that into working for the browser. Also needs to work on Node 20 (limitation of 3rd party package) which doesn't have fetch(). But webpack for the browser happens to convert modules that use a module with dynamic import to dynamic modules themselves, even if the import is never called due to a platform check, which leads to 'import { func } from "..." resulting in func = undefined. Aargh. That's not even counting the reverse-engineering of OS function requirements due to incomplete documentation, API functions due to almost no documentation, and problems due to causes you didn't even know existed.
sokoloff 2y ago
We do have plumbing boot camps. https://www.theplumbingacademy.com/online-classes#tier-classes-sign-up https://www.theplumbingacademy.com/online-classes#tier-class... Take an intro course of classroom/lecture, then sign on as a paid apprentice and continue your classroom-style education alongside the practical/on-the-job training until you’re fully licensed. Other trades have similar structures as well.
thefz 2y ago
To me, "coding" - I hate the term, it's "programming" - can't be separated from the study of computer science. Anyone can cobble together more or less working instructions, but doing so correctly, eh.
subjectsigma 2y ago
We should “gatekeep” more. Modern software is terrible. It’s slow, ugly, and full of security holes. Despite this programmers are paid ludicrous salaries. It really does seem like the majority of people don’t know how to program correctly and are making out like bandits.

by apsurd 2y ago

atleastoptimal 2y ago

> We don't have plumbing bootcamps There are apprenticeships and accredited training programs. Just because they're not called "bootcamps" doesn't mean they aren't the same thing.

apsurd 2y ago
That's just it; the "bootcamp" label is marketing. Sibling comment touches on this: the industry intentionally sells more-or-less get-rich-quick schemes. Learn coding in 10-weeks and get hired into a six-figure job. Maybe plumbing just has the advantage of time. Its lost any sexiness it once had, if ever. And plumbers make good money!
strix_varius 2y ago
But they aren't even vaguely the same thing. Apprentice plumbers (1) get paid and (2) typically spend years as an apprentice, not weeks or months. This is for a career averaging $60-80k. Contrast that with tech bootcamps that often approximate the cost of computer science degrees and promise (or intimate) that students will jump into six figure salaries. It's not the same at all.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >Apprentice plumbers (1) get paid and (2) typically spend years as an apprentice, not weeks or months. This is for a career averaging $60-80k. Also important to note that if you get paid (a proper wage) while apprenticing, you're quite lucky already. There are plenty of occupations with apprenticeships where you do not get paid until you've got your foot firmly in the hallway past the door. For example, anything related to becoming a chef: You're going to start by washing dishes for months if not years and no you will not get paid beyond maybe minimum wage.
  - em-bee 2y ago
    i don't believe that washing dishes is the start of a cooks apprentice ship. the story from a dishwasher to the owner of a restaurant is not the average career of a cook. as far as i know you can start in a cooking school and then begin working as a line cook, and work yourself up from there. washing dishes is a minimum wage job for people without any training, and they are not learning to cook while washing dishes either.
  - parineum 2y ago
    > Also important to note that if you get paid (a proper wage) while apprenticing, you're quite lucky already. >There are plenty of occupations with apprenticeships where you do not get paid until you've got your foot firmly in the hallway past the door. For example, anything related A good friend of mine was an apprentice union welder when we were younger. His hourly wage was quite good at that time, easily comparable to my tech wage with around the same experience. However, because of the union seniority, whenever there were work shortages, he was the first one cut. He'd regularly spend 1/4 to 1/3 of the year unemployed.
- atleastoptimal 2y ago
  Apprentice plumbers get paid because they do economically valuable work. As someone learning to code you're not doing anything valuable so you don't get paid. The reason why coding pays so well is because it's IQ-gated in a way that plumbing isn't. An 80 IQ person can be a competent plumber but couldn't do well in most coding jobs.
  - beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
    > The reason why coding pays so well is because it's IQ-gated in a way that plumbing isn't. Uh, what? I was with you until that part. Coding pays so well because the operating costs are low and the returns/profits are enormous for companies. Tech companies are "cheap" in a way other companies can't be. IQ doesn't really have much to do with it. I know plumbers who are technically brilliant and I know very well paid coders who regularly say things that make me question their intelligence.
    - nwiswell 2y ago
      > Coding pays so well because the operating costs are low and the returns/profits are enormous for companies. Unrelated. Coding pays well because of the tight labor supply compared to the demand. Companies NEVER direct excess value to labor. Extracting surplus value from labor is sorta the whole deal with capitalism. > I know plumbers who are technically brilliant Also not relevant. The argument is that it isn't necessary to be brilliant in order to be a competent plumber, not that it would actually preclude you. > I know very well paid coders who regularly say things that make me question their intelligence. Do you think that's actually a good measure of intelligence? How are you normalizing it against the population, people you don't work with, and/or plumbers generally? The question to ask is, "taking a random sample of persons having 80 IQ, half of whom intend to pursue a career in software and half who intend to pursue a career in plumbing, what is the relative success rate (for some reasonable measure of 'success')?"
  - strix_varius 2y ago
    "IQ-gated?" Please, let's not be so self congratulatory. The plumber who works on my house is easily as smart as I am. A successful software engineering career has brought me financial independence but I'm not particularly brilliant. Most of the folks I've worked with in FAANG aren't either. We're just normal people making a living during a very lucky period for a specific type of nerd.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

swatcoder 2y ago

Sort of. There are relatively short-term training programs that open the doors to many trades, but they're usually followed by some kind of ongoing and often years-long apprenticeship process where further skills are gradually developed on the job with the support (nominally) of responsible mentors. The issues with bootcamps in our industry was that there's not really a mature apprenticeship program to follow them up. Eight-week bootcampers who'd never seen a for loop before starting learn a few leetcode solutions and are invited into interviews alongside people with much more training and much more experience. And many parties, not the least of which being the leetcode-focused interviewers, are responsible for that dubious process taking shape.

josephg 2y ago
I really think our industry - and maybe culture at large - is plagued by a sort of anti-expertise philosophy at the moment. I’ve been learning the piano lately. In music it’s widely accepted that it takes years of practice to become skilled with an instrument. People talk about practice constantly. But it’s strange - nobody talks about that with programming. Instead we say “anyone can code!” “Just do some Python tutorials on YouTube!”. Nobody seems to want to talk about how much effort it takes to get good. We just don’t talk about practice like musicians do - and we should. Dismissing the work it takes is harmful. We relegate practice problems (advent of code, toy projects) into some silly side thing that you would only do for fun. But it’s only through practice that we build expertise. And we systematically dismiss people who are really skilled, and burn the bridge to get that good ourselves. Nobody seems interested in the answer of how Jeff Dean or Carmack gained their skill. When we devalue expertise, we burn the ladder we would need to climb to get there ourselves. I think we need to take seriously how hard it is to do good programming work. Algorithms, data structures, math, performance optimisation, distributed systems, graphics & shaders, large system design - any one of these skills takes years to properly master. Learning can be incredibly rewarding. But it doesn’t happen without work. We should talk about that work.
- musicale 2y ago
  "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" https://www.norvig.com/21-days.html https://www.norvig.com/21-days.html

drjasonharrison 2y ago

I'm addition to the classes and apprenticeships, there are "how to fix it" videos, articles, books etc. Low income neighbourhoods used to have a higher use of the Hays manuals for car repair. (this is something I read long ago and and I don't know if the manuals are still being published.) Very few who learned to change their own oil and filters went on to become car mechanics.

rufus_foreman 2y ago
>> Low income neighbourhoods used to have a higher use of the Hays manuals for car repair I used to borrow them from the library when I was still working on my own car. I'm sure they were some of the most borrowed items.
hot_gril 2y ago
I'd never even heard of these manuals. Wish I bought this instead of looking at YouTube for wiring info: https://haynes.com/en-us/ford/crown-victoria/1992-2011 https://haynes.com/en-us/ford/crown-victoria/1992-2011
- buescher 2y ago
  Factory service manuals are even better and not prohibitively expensive, especially used copies for popular models.
- rpcope1 2y ago
  As the sibling comment mentions, the FSM will be a much better resource for this. It's worth having a Haynes or Chilton, since they're cheap and sometimes have different approaches, but the FSM is really the best source of truth (most of the time).
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    Thanks, I'll keep that in mind as I'll most likely have to figure out what that clunking noise is pretty soon.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

> We don't have plumbing bootcamps. If you are at all familiar with The Trades, you know that they have the apprenticeship system, which is a hell of a lot more intense than any bootcamp. My plumber has a nicer house than I do.

apsurd 2y ago
We're agreeing fwiw. Trades treated like trades are a value-add all around, but they take time, and they aren't necessarily sexy. The teach people to code movement, for whatever reason, portrays itself as being something everyone can and should "break into" in 10 weeks. edit: Just realized the conflation between "get hired as a software developer for six-figures" vs literally "make learning how to code accessible for all". The latter makes way more honest sense.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  I wasn't disagreeing. It's sort of "apples and oranges." I'm a big believer in the apprenticeship system, but I have found it to be profoundly unpopular, with software engineers (in the US), as can be noted by the reaction to my comment. I consider my software engineering to be as much craft, as it is, vocation, and I had some good mentors.
ergocoder 2y ago
Is that because they bought a house 10 years ago?
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  I brought my house just before 9/11. He has his own business. He's a one-man shop, and damn good.
jandrewrogers 2y ago
There are several specialty domains in software development that would benefit immensely from a true multi-year apprenticeship program. That said, people tend to gravitate toward software that doesn’t require that level of commitment to make good money quickly. I don’t know that we actually know how to do apprenticeship in software, culturally. It is why we have chronic shortages of expertise in some software domains even though they are extremely well paid as specialties.

jltsiren 2y ago

Software development is a trade. Programming is a skill that can be useful in a wide range of jobs. I wouldn't be surprised if actual software developers turned out to be a minority among the people who write code as part of their jobs.

sandspar 2y ago
Adding programming to your toolbox doesn't require a $15,000 bootcamp. The unwritten agreement to these things is that you pay $15k now to get a $100k job once you graduate. The reality is that that rarely happens.

CapmCrackaWaka 2y ago

"Programming" as a career is in an interesting position right now. Due to demand and the job itself, you can make a lot of money, work remotely, in a medium-low stress job, without interacting with the public, solving puzzles. That's the dream right? It really doesn't get any better than that for most people. The problem is that there are two types of people: those that enjoy coding, and those that don't. The people that enjoy coding are living the dream. I know I am. I mean I have it fucking good. All the benefits above, to the max. The people that don't enjoy coding can still force themselves to do it... But they will find it lack luster. They are doing something they don't like, aren't too good at, for less money, at a job that took forever to find, etc etc. They won't have the same experience. There are enough people that enjoy coding to tell everyone else "yeah this fucking rocks", and that certainly draws people in, but a lot of people will be disappointed with it.

alisonatwork 2y ago
This implies that all people who don't enjoy coding are also not very good at it, which doesn't match my experience. There is a significant cohort of professional coders who enjoy the comfortable lifestyle who write very bad code. In fact, I'd venture to say there are far more of those than people who don't much enjoy the work but still do it well because they have other priorities and responsibilities in life that make it necessary to maintain a strong work ethic.
- fpgamlirfanboy 2y ago
  > well because they have other priorities and responsibilities in life that make it necessary to maintain a strong work ethic. It's amazing how many people in tech can't imagine that the same people that can grind med school or IB or big4 accounting or white-shoe law somehow can't grind the same way in tech. Newsflash: the majority of people in FAANG are grinders not "passion coders". Personally I hate this job but I'm very good at it and it was either law school with my 98% LSAT or tech. I picked tech because reading and writing briefs all day seemed somehow worse.
  - 2y ago

hot_gril 2y ago

Not sure what you're saying. Do you mean the problem is these bootcamps promise a $200K job and don't deliver?

apsurd 2y ago
Yes. The way education makes big money is through job-placement, legal compliance (food safety, sexual harassment training etc) and promises of higher pay. Certifications, credentials, upskilling, the value proposition is you'll make more money at your job. It's not about learning. This isn't a moral argument btw, i'm making sure of it because I used to be really into edtech [1]. There's no money in education, only its commercial outcomes. Education for learning is a public good. bootcamps cannot deliver placement at scale because the premise is flawed. anyone and everyone cannot learn to be a professional coder in 10 weeks. Anyway, so the coding bootcamps spread like wildfire because they implicitly or otherwise promise high paying careers that anyone can do, all over the internet, in 10 weeks, for a fraction of college tuition. [1] https://words.nom.city/posts/jade-what-s-next https://words.nom.city/posts/jade-what-s-next
- hot_gril 2y ago
  I agree that anything suggesting you'll get a high-paying job as a coder (or "SWE" to sound fancy) after a short bootcamp is misleading. I've seen those before. I really feel like a proper bachelor's comp-sci degree made a huge difference for me, even though I also had to self-teach a ton of stuff. Not sure if Women who Code made any such promises. There are plenty of lower-paying coding jobs or jobs that involve coding as a useful skill, and a bootcamp can help with that. Or, maybe someone has the CS background but not the practical skills.

bewaretheirs 2y ago

Plumbers (in the US at least) appear to have well established apprenticeship systems, often run by their local unions; I've seen advertisements in a major sports facility looking for people interested in working as plumbers/pipefitters.

non-chalad 2y ago

You could probably learn plumbing at ManCamp (1). Kids are taught welding, blacksmithing, and other handy skills. 1. https://www.bitchute.com/video/N1PDO9XulKU4/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/N1PDO9XulKU4/

julianeon 2y ago

But programming is tech literacy, realistically, in 2024.

BlueTemplar 2y ago
The difference between learning to read/write and make a living writing ?

rqtwteye 2y ago

I also think coding is not very suitable for a lot of people. It’s tedious and boring. I notice at my company there are quite a few young people who simply aren’t cut out for this. They probably got into it because it’s a well paid career but they don’t have the patience for problem solving.

prewett 2y ago
Those problems can be really tedious: - Writing a screen saver on Window NT 4. Starting the screen-saver blue-screens the computer. Rebooting + loading Visual Studio takes several minutes. After several days of this, it turned out I forgot to zero out the structure you pass into every Win32 Create function. - Was assigned to modify some old Fortran code (never claimed to know Fortran, just got the assignment) a long time ago. Got weird compile errors, couldn't figure it out, finally just started taking things out of the line until it worked. Found out it failed if I had a line of over 70 characters. What?! Turns out some of those old things of Fortran were still around... - Spent a week tracking down why my C++ code was my crashing, due to a variable magically changing values. I was using Curl, and one of the calls requires a pointer to long and I passed a pointer to int, and the compiler didn't complain. Got so frustrated I ended up stepping through the assembly code to see what was happening (which is how I discovered it). Not fun. (Also, the constant recompiling and dockerizing desoldered the nvidia chip on my 2012 MBP, so this bug cost me a lot of money for a new laptop, too.) - 3D meshing algorithm isn't working. Narrow it down to a small enough mesh to print out vertices before and after in a tractable quantity. Stare at changing outputs long enough to identify the problem. - Emscripten WASM wants to load async, but exported global function uses the WASM to do work and should not have to know the details of how the WASM gets loaded. Coerce that into working for the browser. Also needs to work on Node 20 (limitation of 3rd party package) which doesn't have fetch(). But webpack for the browser happens to convert modules that use a module with dynamic import to dynamic modules themselves, even if the import is never called due to a platform check, which leads to 'import { func } from "..." resulting in func = undefined. Aargh. That's not even counting the reverse-engineering of OS function requirements due to incomplete documentation, API functions due to almost no documentation, and problems due to causes you didn't even know existed.

sokoloff 2y ago

We do have plumbing boot camps. https://www.theplumbingacademy.com/online-classes#tier-classes-sign-up https://www.theplumbingacademy.com/online-classes#tier-class... Take an intro course of classroom/lecture, then sign on as a paid apprentice and continue your classroom-style education alongside the practical/on-the-job training until you’re fully licensed. Other trades have similar structures as well.

thefz 2y ago

To me, "coding" - I hate the term, it's "programming" - can't be separated from the study of computer science. Anyone can cobble together more or less working instructions, but doing so correctly, eh.

subjectsigma 2y ago

We should “gatekeep” more. Modern software is terrible. It’s slow, ugly, and full of security holes. Despite this programmers are paid ludicrous salaries. It really does seem like the majority of people don’t know how to program correctly and are making out like bandits.