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> I think its important to note the distance between "knowing how to code" and "becoming a programmer." Sure, except we talk all the time about how bad hiring

> I think its important to note the distance between "knowing how to code" and "becoming a programmer." Sure, except we talk all the time about how bad hiring practices are in our industry, how bad we all are at discerning talent. So I don't really see this being a positive thing for existing developers (increasing supply and pushing wages down), though who's to say we deserve the situation we're in presently? Large employers in this company would like to have labor costs reduced, especially for costly positions like software development. I'm not saying that is necessarily a sinister thing, but things like this should be thought of in the context of reducing labor costs. That's all it is, I think --as opposed to fancy notions about democratizing technology and so forth.

theseoafs 13y ago
> Sure, except we talk all the time about how bad hiring practices are in our industry, how bad we all are at discerning talent. So I don't really see this being a positive thing for existing developers (increasing supply and pushing wages down), though who's to say we deserve the situation we're in presently? In what way does high school kids learning to write simple Python scripts affect your career as a software developer? We're talking about giving students a baseline knowledge of programming here.
- badman_ting 13y ago
  If you agree that teaching people to code will result in more professional software developers, which seems reasonable to me, we'll have more of them and the cost of any one of them will be reduced. And again, the skill thing is diminished because we all suck at figuring out who the talented developers are. I'm not saying we should hoard the coding knowledge or whatever -- that cat is already out of the bag. But if the president is saying nice things about coders, maybe think about what reasons he could have for that besides the goodness of his heart.
  - theseoafs 13y ago
    > If you agree that teaching people to code will result in more professional software developers, which seems reasonable to me, we'll have more of them and the cost of any one of them will be reduced. I'm not sure I can agree with that, though. The barrier to entry is already really damn low -- the kids who are seriously interested in programming are already learning to program anyway, because it only costs them their time. The net effect will probably just be that the average student will become a bit more knowledgeable about how software works, which is pretty undisputably a good thing. If you go into a high school district and make a home economics class mandatory, are half of your graduates going to become chefs? Of course not -- only a few are going to do that, and they were probably going to do it before you even made the class mandatory. The only difference is that now everyone knows how to cook for themselves. > And again, the skill thing is diminished because we all suck at figuring out who the talented developers are. On the contrary, I think giving everybody a baseline knowledge of programming could have the opposite effect. If you study English at a liberal arts college and blast through the Codecademy Javascript tutorial over the weekend, you can see why you might think that a career as a programmer would be good for you -- you don't have any technical friends to talk to about what you've learned, and Codecademy says you learned everything there is to know about Javascript, so obviously you must be ready for a web development position, right? You have to know what you don't know, and the problem with unqualified developers is that they don't know what they don't know. If everyone learns how to write functions in high school, then you're acutely aware that there's a whole world of stuff you won't know unless you study independently. > I'm not saying we should hoard the coding knowledge or whatever -- that cat is already out of the bag. To be honest, most of the objections to the "everyone should learn to code" suggestion sound like that. It seems like everyone is extremely concerned with protecting the value of their own education, no matter what the cost. > But if the president is saying nice things about coders, maybe think about what reasons he could have for that besides the goodness of his heart. What are you suggesting here? The president has an evil plan to destroy your livelihood?
  - bpyne 13y ago
    I doubt President Obama came up with the campaign on his own and I very much doubt "pushing down labor costs for software development" is even on the list of reasons. Labor costs may ultimately come down, but it won't be due to some devious collusion between the IT industry and him. It's more likely that this campaign to encourage programming is aimed at multiple problems from a better understanding of the tools necessary in the 21st century to making young students interested in the field again. Just possibly there is a long term hope in him that the USA can cut down its reliance on foreign help for software development, thereby, keeping jobs in the country. If I was in his shoes, I would be concerned that the USA seems to be relying on foreign graduate students for its research in technology. Until domestic students are interested in the field again, the reliance cannot be reduced.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - gaius 13y ago
      Most likely his motivation is the ACA website debacle. What he fails to grasp tho' is that it's not a technical problem.
  - Sakes 13y ago
    I think you will find more people applying to be CS majors, not necessarily graduating with CS degrees. The weed out classes at the better colleges will put an end to anyone striving for a CS degree that shouldn't have one. What I would expect is that the myth of just get some high school kid to do it would finally end if everyone had an idea of how high the skill cap is for coding/design. Plus it'd be a lot easier for me to talk to people, which would be nice. It seems the only people that really get along with me these days are technically informed.
  - tejay 13y ago
    > If you agree that teaching people to code will result in more professional software developers, which seems reasonable to me, we'll have more of them and the cost of any one of them will be reduced. If I may disagree - you're assuming that the 'demand' for software developers is fixed. But, we know that it isn't. In fact, more software developers working on software may actually increase the demand for software talent, particularly if these developers go on to start companies themselves =).
  - mlangdon 13y ago
    This assumes a constant supply of programming work, which is simply laughable. We probably only ever need, e.g., so many lawyers as a proportion of the population, but the demand for programmers relative to supply is accelerating. Failing to train more people now risks either simply not being able to do the work, or an opening of the immigration floodgates in which case present demand could theoretically be met and wages could be depressed. But doing this slowly through educational initiatives would be a minimal risk to salary status quo. Keep in mind, there is virtually no one available to teach everyone to code. Many US states regard computer science as a high school elective and thereby disincentivize schools from offering it. Then take someone like me who really likes the idea of teaching programming, but would need about three more years of college to qualify and then would see my wages cut in half, with minimal job security (initially) or advancement in salary (forever) and all the attendant disrespect that our society bestows on teachers. Being able to teach all our kids to code would be a good problem to have.
scythe 13y ago
>Sure, except we talk all the time about how bad hiring practices are in our industry, how bad we all are at discerning talent. So I don't really see this being a positive thing for existing developers This only applies if there's no way hiring practices could possibly improve, which given the existence of some data on the subject seems unlikely. In particular, it's not too far-fetched that people with some coding literacy may make better hiring decisions than Muggles. >Large employers in this company would like to have labor costs reduced, especially for costly positions like software development. I'm not saying that is necessarily a sinister thing, but things like this should be thought of in the context of reducing labor costs. Reducing labor costs in the long run reduces average prices and increases real incomes. Historically, it's not usually a bad thing; in this case, real incomes[1] go up whenever cost savings are passed to consumers. The market may not be perfect, but it's usually better than fiat and ignorance. [1]: cost-adjusted income, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_income
dpcheng2003 13y ago
That's a particularly cynical response to something I consider to be incredibly positive, but I think there's a lot of scar tissue in the industry from bad behavior so you may be right to be wary. Let me tell it from my perspective. I was a finance guy whose only coding experience was a couple of CS classes in college and some excel coding at my job in ibanking. When I decided I wanted to start a company, the first thing I did was spend three months of teaching myself how to do some basic coding. I did the Udacity classes and Codacademy. I read up stuff online and did bash tutorials. I spent 4-6 hours a day doing this because I wanted to be serious. Today, I'm the CEO of a lightly-funded startup that just got our TechCrunch bump last week. I do all the front-end design and development because of resource restraints (I'm okay at it; not great). But the biggest takeaway from learning to code was not the work itself, but how to talk to developers and manage their time and resources. When I draw up requirements for our dev team, I have a baseline knowledge of what's easily do-able, what's quick vs. what's long, what we can hack and what we need to build to scale. If I started a company in China, I'd expect to learn a little Chinese. Why isn't this the case for people who work in technology? Now back to the President's announcement. As he stated, software is eating the world and if we want a generation of consumers to have some knowledge of how their world works, then a baseline education in software is critical. Thanks for reading.
- tslathrow 13y ago
  Why'd you leave IBD/VC?
  - dpcheng2003 13y ago
    Before, I built pitch books and excel models and funneled money from one place to another, taking a cut. Today, I build websites that democratize content (okay that's a bit hyperbole). I just feel better about my life choices now that I'm building something substantive. Being an entrepreneur is a great experience for anyone who can cut it. I also think it should be a necessary pre-req for investors to be a founder at least once. I do miss the money and lifestyle though...
    - 13y ago
strlen 13y ago
Large employers (or any other corporations) don't see labour costs as an end in it of itself, but merely means to an end: the ends being (whether in the long term or in the short term) making money. They could pursue the ultimate "throw more bodies at the problem" strategy, but per Brooks it is known not to work; companies that do so are penalized by the market. On the other hand engineers can't choose between working many low-satisfaction jobs simultaneous or working for one high-satisfaction job -- so they choose jobs that maximize their satisfaction. While there's low marginal value in higher salaries past a certain point (so other factors, e.g., for me it's working on interesting things take over); however, significant sub-market compensation (in terms of both salary and stock) -- compared to what an individual of similar ability, experience, and location would get in a company of similar size, age, etc... -- does greatly decrease satisfaction. That gives: engineers want to maximize their satisfaction which requires not being underpaid; companies want to maximize the money they make, but can take many different approaches to this. So at the end, the market "chooses" to hire fewer, but strong engineers through a combination of university recruiting (and paying high salaries even to new graduates), tolerating a certain degree of churn among early-career software engineers, and also aggressively going after a smaller cadre of experienced programmers who can also mentor talented but less experienced new-hires and interns. So no, I don't see the scenario you describe as happening. Instead, I'm not alone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_is_Over http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_is_Over) in thinking that similar trends will occur (or, rather, are already occurring unseen) in other white collar jobs, as well as many skilled blue collar jobs. Company finance departments will want to hire workers who are able to write VBA and not rely on clunk recorded macros; manufacturers will (and already do) want to hire workers who can program a CNC machine[1]. This will not make them software engineer any more than me being able to solve a differential equation makes me a mathematician or understanding logic circuits makes me an electrical engineer (to take it one layer lower, knowing Maxwell's field equation and even using it on the job, doesn't make an electrical engineer a physicist). Circling back, this is exactly why it makes sense for people to learning programming -- if robots are automating large parts of people's job's, there will jobs that require knowledge of both the job and programming, to be able to write "userland" programs on the robot, as oppose to program the robots' embedded systems (or to write Excel VBA scripts as opposed to build Excel itself, etc...) [1] Language they use is G-code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-code http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-code -- note the date, it's nothing new), and yes, it's Turing-complete: http://callenblogi.blogspot.com/2011/03/bf-interpreter-in-g-code.html http://callenblogi.blogspot.com/2011/03/bf-interpreter-in-g-...)

theseoafs 13y ago

> Sure, except we talk all the time about how bad hiring practices are in our industry, how bad we all are at discerning talent. So I don't really see this being a positive thing for existing developers (increasing supply and pushing wages down), though who's to say we deserve the situation we're in presently? In what way does high school kids learning to write simple Python scripts affect your career as a software developer? We're talking about giving students a baseline knowledge of programming here.

badman_ting 13y ago
If you agree that teaching people to code will result in more professional software developers, which seems reasonable to me, we'll have more of them and the cost of any one of them will be reduced. And again, the skill thing is diminished because we all suck at figuring out who the talented developers are. I'm not saying we should hoard the coding knowledge or whatever -- that cat is already out of the bag. But if the president is saying nice things about coders, maybe think about what reasons he could have for that besides the goodness of his heart.
- theseoafs 13y ago
  > If you agree that teaching people to code will result in more professional software developers, which seems reasonable to me, we'll have more of them and the cost of any one of them will be reduced. I'm not sure I can agree with that, though. The barrier to entry is already really damn low -- the kids who are seriously interested in programming are already learning to program anyway, because it only costs them their time. The net effect will probably just be that the average student will become a bit more knowledgeable about how software works, which is pretty undisputably a good thing. If you go into a high school district and make a home economics class mandatory, are half of your graduates going to become chefs? Of course not -- only a few are going to do that, and they were probably going to do it before you even made the class mandatory. The only difference is that now everyone knows how to cook for themselves. > And again, the skill thing is diminished because we all suck at figuring out who the talented developers are. On the contrary, I think giving everybody a baseline knowledge of programming could have the opposite effect. If you study English at a liberal arts college and blast through the Codecademy Javascript tutorial over the weekend, you can see why you might think that a career as a programmer would be good for you -- you don't have any technical friends to talk to about what you've learned, and Codecademy says you learned everything there is to know about Javascript, so obviously you must be ready for a web development position, right? You have to know what you don't know, and the problem with unqualified developers is that they don't know what they don't know. If everyone learns how to write functions in high school, then you're acutely aware that there's a whole world of stuff you won't know unless you study independently. > I'm not saying we should hoard the coding knowledge or whatever -- that cat is already out of the bag. To be honest, most of the objections to the "everyone should learn to code" suggestion sound like that. It seems like everyone is extremely concerned with protecting the value of their own education, no matter what the cost. > But if the president is saying nice things about coders, maybe think about what reasons he could have for that besides the goodness of his heart. What are you suggesting here? The president has an evil plan to destroy your livelihood?
- bpyne 13y ago
  I doubt President Obama came up with the campaign on his own and I very much doubt "pushing down labor costs for software development" is even on the list of reasons. Labor costs may ultimately come down, but it won't be due to some devious collusion between the IT industry and him. It's more likely that this campaign to encourage programming is aimed at multiple problems from a better understanding of the tools necessary in the 21st century to making young students interested in the field again. Just possibly there is a long term hope in him that the USA can cut down its reliance on foreign help for software development, thereby, keeping jobs in the country. If I was in his shoes, I would be concerned that the USA seems to be relying on foreign graduate students for its research in technology. Until domestic students are interested in the field again, the reliance cannot be reduced.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - gaius 13y ago
    Most likely his motivation is the ACA website debacle. What he fails to grasp tho' is that it's not a technical problem.
- Sakes 13y ago
  I think you will find more people applying to be CS majors, not necessarily graduating with CS degrees. The weed out classes at the better colleges will put an end to anyone striving for a CS degree that shouldn't have one. What I would expect is that the myth of just get some high school kid to do it would finally end if everyone had an idea of how high the skill cap is for coding/design. Plus it'd be a lot easier for me to talk to people, which would be nice. It seems the only people that really get along with me these days are technically informed.
- tejay 13y ago
  > If you agree that teaching people to code will result in more professional software developers, which seems reasonable to me, we'll have more of them and the cost of any one of them will be reduced. If I may disagree - you're assuming that the 'demand' for software developers is fixed. But, we know that it isn't. In fact, more software developers working on software may actually increase the demand for software talent, particularly if these developers go on to start companies themselves =).
- mlangdon 13y ago
  This assumes a constant supply of programming work, which is simply laughable. We probably only ever need, e.g., so many lawyers as a proportion of the population, but the demand for programmers relative to supply is accelerating. Failing to train more people now risks either simply not being able to do the work, or an opening of the immigration floodgates in which case present demand could theoretically be met and wages could be depressed. But doing this slowly through educational initiatives would be a minimal risk to salary status quo. Keep in mind, there is virtually no one available to teach everyone to code. Many US states regard computer science as a high school elective and thereby disincentivize schools from offering it. Then take someone like me who really likes the idea of teaching programming, but would need about three more years of college to qualify and then would see my wages cut in half, with minimal job security (initially) or advancement in salary (forever) and all the attendant disrespect that our society bestows on teachers. Being able to teach all our kids to code would be a good problem to have.

scythe 13y ago

>Sure, except we talk all the time about how bad hiring practices are in our industry, how bad we all are at discerning talent. So I don't really see this being a positive thing for existing developers This only applies if there's no way hiring practices could possibly improve, which given the existence of some data on the subject seems unlikely. In particular, it's not too far-fetched that people with some coding literacy may make better hiring decisions than Muggles. >Large employers in this company would like to have labor costs reduced, especially for costly positions like software development. I'm not saying that is necessarily a sinister thing, but things like this should be thought of in the context of reducing labor costs. Reducing labor costs in the long run reduces average prices and increases real incomes. Historically, it's not usually a bad thing; in this case, real incomes[1] go up whenever cost savings are passed to consumers. The market may not be perfect, but it's usually better than fiat and ignorance. [1]: cost-adjusted income, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_income

dpcheng2003 13y ago

That's a particularly cynical response to something I consider to be incredibly positive, but I think there's a lot of scar tissue in the industry from bad behavior so you may be right to be wary. Let me tell it from my perspective. I was a finance guy whose only coding experience was a couple of CS classes in college and some excel coding at my job in ibanking. When I decided I wanted to start a company, the first thing I did was spend three months of teaching myself how to do some basic coding. I did the Udacity classes and Codacademy. I read up stuff online and did bash tutorials. I spent 4-6 hours a day doing this because I wanted to be serious. Today, I'm the CEO of a lightly-funded startup that just got our TechCrunch bump last week. I do all the front-end design and development because of resource restraints (I'm okay at it; not great). But the biggest takeaway from learning to code was not the work itself, but how to talk to developers and manage their time and resources. When I draw up requirements for our dev team, I have a baseline knowledge of what's easily do-able, what's quick vs. what's long, what we can hack and what we need to build to scale. If I started a company in China, I'd expect to learn a little Chinese. Why isn't this the case for people who work in technology? Now back to the President's announcement. As he stated, software is eating the world and if we want a generation of consumers to have some knowledge of how their world works, then a baseline education in software is critical. Thanks for reading.

tslathrow 13y ago
Why'd you leave IBD/VC?
- dpcheng2003 13y ago
  Before, I built pitch books and excel models and funneled money from one place to another, taking a cut. Today, I build websites that democratize content (okay that's a bit hyperbole). I just feel better about my life choices now that I'm building something substantive. Being an entrepreneur is a great experience for anyone who can cut it. I also think it should be a necessary pre-req for investors to be a founder at least once. I do miss the money and lifestyle though...
  - 13y ago

strlen 13y ago

Large employers (or any other corporations) don't see labour costs as an end in it of itself, but merely means to an end: the ends being (whether in the long term or in the short term) making money. They could pursue the ultimate "throw more bodies at the problem" strategy, but per Brooks it is known not to work; companies that do so are penalized by the market. On the other hand engineers can't choose between working many low-satisfaction jobs simultaneous or working for one high-satisfaction job -- so they choose jobs that maximize their satisfaction. While there's low marginal value in higher salaries past a certain point (so other factors, e.g., for me it's working on interesting things take over); however, significant sub-market compensation (in terms of both salary and stock) -- compared to what an individual of similar ability, experience, and location would get in a company of similar size, age, etc... -- does greatly decrease satisfaction. That gives: engineers want to maximize their satisfaction which requires not being underpaid; companies want to maximize the money they make, but can take many different approaches to this. So at the end, the market "chooses" to hire fewer, but strong engineers through a combination of university recruiting (and paying high salaries even to new graduates), tolerating a certain degree of churn among early-career software engineers, and also aggressively going after a smaller cadre of experienced programmers who can also mentor talented but less experienced new-hires and interns. So no, I don't see the scenario you describe as happening. Instead, I'm not alone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_is_Over http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_is_Over) in thinking that similar trends will occur (or, rather, are already occurring unseen) in other white collar jobs, as well as many skilled blue collar jobs. Company finance departments will want to hire workers who are able to write VBA and not rely on clunk recorded macros; manufacturers will (and already do) want to hire workers who can program a CNC machine[1]. This will not make them software engineer any more than me being able to solve a differential equation makes me a mathematician or understanding logic circuits makes me an electrical engineer (to take it one layer lower, knowing Maxwell's field equation and even using it on the job, doesn't make an electrical engineer a physicist). Circling back, this is exactly why it makes sense for people to learning programming -- if robots are automating large parts of people's job's, there will jobs that require knowledge of both the job and programming, to be able to write "userland" programs on the robot, as oppose to program the robots' embedded systems (or to write Excel VBA scripts as opposed to build Excel itself, etc...) [1] Language they use is G-code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-code http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-code -- note the date, it's nothing new), and yes, it's Turing-complete: http://callenblogi.blogspot.com/2011/03/bf-interpreter-in-g-code.html http://callenblogi.blogspot.com/2011/03/bf-interpreter-in-g-...)