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I've tried to get a few friends into development who aren't developers. These are people working at $8-10/hr, often upward of 50 hours a week. Even moving up to

by tibbon 14y ago

I've tried to get a few friends into development who aren't developers. These are people working at $8-10/hr, often upward of 50 hours a week. Even moving up to $25/hr would be a massive life change for them, and given hiring trends in tech I thought it would be a great move for them, even if they weren't great at it for a few years. Its been a miserable failure. I've come to the conclusion that programming is hard, and I've been incredibly privileged by having a computer since I was 2 (C64!) and I have so much built in knowledge that I don't even realize I have. Also, this stuff just isn't fun for a lot of people. Sometimes its downright painful for them and they just can't push themselves through the tough parts motivation-wise. I can imagine it being a bit like doing Crossfit (or any exercise). I know I'd be a lot healthier if I did it for a year. But the upfront expense, the pain, and being incredibly bad at it for the first few months just makes it so I don't even try- even though I know the benefits could be life changing. I bought a copy of Agile Development on Rails and gave it to such a friend. He didn't know how to pull up a command prompt, and I realized that he didn't know what a text editor was. Or that you'd run things from the terminal, and type them in the text editor. I helped him get past that, but he never focused in on it and never saw the beautiful and amazing parts of it. Another friend got a little farther. But I soon realized how much 'background' knowledge he was missing. I pointed him toward some free online CS courses, which helped. But life got in the way and it just wasn't the #1 thing for him, so he got distracted and quit when he moved to a new (small) city. Another friend wanted help getting started. He was motivated, but we hit a major problem. He's a student with an older iBook. We had huge issues setting up Ruby due to various environmental problems. I didn't have the time to really redo his entire system, but I wasn't able to get Ruby installed easily since he was on 10.3 or something ancient. Just telling people that there are boatloads of money to be had, and that there are tons of resources out there doesn't always work. They really have to love it to get through that first painful year or so. Now perhaps having more jobs (these knowledge factories) that will give people an environment to work in, the tools, the training, etc... might help. But otherwise, I've just seen that I have personally been a complete and utter failure at helping friends get into programming. I'm thankful that I have a background that makes it easy for me to do and learn, but many just don't have that background and I don't know how to help them get past that.

tsotha 14y ago
Programming is one of those things some people just don't have the knack for, and no matter how long they stay with it and how hard they try they'll never be more than barely productive. The industry is already full of those kinds of people shuffling from one three month contracting gig to another. We're not going to retrain blue collar workers to do IT as it's done now, and the factory model doesn't work - consulting companies have been trying to do this for decades with no success (well, aside from billing a whole lot of hours). If we want to deal with high unemployment on the lower rungs of the job ladder we need to stop the flood of illegal immigrants. Any small gains we try to make by bringing people up the ladder will be washed away in short order.
- jfarmer 14y ago
  I think this is easy to say, but hard to prove. It's certainly the conventional wisdom among software engineers.
  - tsotha 14y ago
    It's an observation. I'm not sure what other proof I need.
- dizzystar 14y ago
  The other element missing from the post you responded to is that self-learning is very effing hard. I would say that fewer than 1/50 people can teach themselves anything of value to the job market. I also have to point out that, as an ex-blue-collar worker myself, that blue-collar workers in generally really don't care about education or any intellectual pursuits. Sorry, but the glove of doing programming doesn't fit everyone, and it shouldn't fit everyone. The world is interesting because we all have our unique abilities.
- Retric 14y ago
  I work for a fairly large 20,000+ mostly non IT consulting firm that has a solid reputation for getting things done. Most programmers make on the lower end of ~60-110k and code quality tends to sit just above terrible. However, what works for us is simply focusing on solving problems not meeting specks which is the antithesis of the factory model. Granted, if they knew who to higher and what problems they needed to solve they would get by at 1/3 of our what we charge. But, most people and organisations are unbelievably incompetent. PS: As to immigration a lot of the work done by immigrants would simply disappear without immigrant labor because it's just not worth minimum wage and or could just as easily be done outside the country. However, when it comes to the upper ends of the work force we are far better off with them than without. Don't forget Sergey Brin was born in Russia and I don't think we would be better off without Google.

by tibbon 14y ago

tsotha 14y ago

Programming is one of those things some people just don't have the knack for, and no matter how long they stay with it and how hard they try they'll never be more than barely productive. The industry is already full of those kinds of people shuffling from one three month contracting gig to another. We're not going to retrain blue collar workers to do IT as it's done now, and the factory model doesn't work - consulting companies have been trying to do this for decades with no success (well, aside from billing a whole lot of hours). If we want to deal with high unemployment on the lower rungs of the job ladder we need to stop the flood of illegal immigrants. Any small gains we try to make by bringing people up the ladder will be washed away in short order.

jfarmer 14y ago
I think this is easy to say, but hard to prove. It's certainly the conventional wisdom among software engineers.
- tsotha 14y ago
  It's an observation. I'm not sure what other proof I need.
dizzystar 14y ago
The other element missing from the post you responded to is that self-learning is very effing hard. I would say that fewer than 1/50 people can teach themselves anything of value to the job market. I also have to point out that, as an ex-blue-collar worker myself, that blue-collar workers in generally really don't care about education or any intellectual pursuits. Sorry, but the glove of doing programming doesn't fit everyone, and it shouldn't fit everyone. The world is interesting because we all have our unique abilities.
Retric 14y ago
I work for a fairly large 20,000+ mostly non IT consulting firm that has a solid reputation for getting things done. Most programmers make on the lower end of ~60-110k and code quality tends to sit just above terrible. However, what works for us is simply focusing on solving problems not meeting specks which is the antithesis of the factory model. Granted, if they knew who to higher and what problems they needed to solve they would get by at 1/3 of our what we charge. But, most people and organisations are unbelievably incompetent. PS: As to immigration a lot of the work done by immigrants would simply disappear without immigrant labor because it's just not worth minimum wage and or could just as easily be done outside the country. However, when it comes to the upper ends of the work force we are far better off with them than without. Don't forget Sergey Brin was born in Russia and I don't think we would be better off without Google.