Is It Time to Stop Saying 'Learn to Code'? (vox.com) 147
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: According to Google Trends, peak "Lean to Code" occurred in early 2019 when laid-off Buzzfeed and Huffpost journalists were taunted with the phrase on Twitter...
As Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently put it, "We're in a different world." Indeed. Encouraging kids to pursue CS careers in Code.org's viral 2013 launch video, Zuckerberg explained, "Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find."
In Learning to Code Isn't Enough, a new MIT Technology Review article, Joy Lisi Rankin reports on the long history of learn-to-code efforts, which date back to the 1960s. "Then as now," Lisi Rankin writes, "just learning to code is neither a pathway to a stable financial future for people from economically precarious backgrounds nor a panacea for the inadequacies of the educational system."
But is that really true? Vox does note that the latest round of layoffs at Meta "is impacting workers in core technical roles like data scientists and software engineers — positions once thought to be beyond reproach." Yet while that's also true at other companies, those laid-off tech workers also seem to be finding similar positions by working in other industries: Software engineers were the most overrepresented position in layoffs in 2023, relative to their employment, according to data requested by Vox from workforce data company Revelio Labs. Last year, when major tech layoffs first began, recruiters and customer success specialists experienced the most outsize impact. So far this year, nearly 20 percent of the 170,000 tech company layoffs were software engineers, even though they made up roughly 14 percent of employees at these companies. "Early layoffs were dominated by recruiters, which is forgoing future hiring," Revelio senior economist Reyhan Ayas told Vox. "Whereas in 2023 we see a shift toward more core engineering and software engineering, which signals a change in focus of current business priorities."
In other words, tech companies aren't just trimming the fat by firing people who fill out their extensive ecosystem, which ranges from marketers to massage therapists. They're also, many for the first time, making cuts to the people who build the very products they're known for, and who enjoyed a sort of revered status since they, like the founders of the companies, were coders. Software engineers are still important, but they don't have the power they used to...
The latest monthly jobs report by tech industry association CompTIA found that even though employment at tech companies (which includes all roles at those companies) declined slightly in March, employment in technical occupations across industry sectors increased by nearly 200,000 positions. So even if tech companies are laying off tech workers, other industries are snatching them up. Unfortunately for software engineers and the like, that means they might also have to follow those industries' pay schemes. The average software engineer base pay in the US is $90,000, according to PayScale, but can be substantially higher at tech firms like Facebook, where such workers also get bonuses and stock options.
In Learning to Code Isn't Enough, a new MIT Technology Review article, Joy Lisi Rankin reports on the long history of learn-to-code efforts, which date back to the 1960s. "Then as now," Lisi Rankin writes, "just learning to code is neither a pathway to a stable financial future for people from economically precarious backgrounds nor a panacea for the inadequacies of the educational system."
But is that really true? Vox does note that the latest round of layoffs at Meta "is impacting workers in core technical roles like data scientists and software engineers — positions once thought to be beyond reproach." Yet while that's also true at other companies, those laid-off tech workers also seem to be finding similar positions by working in other industries: Software engineers were the most overrepresented position in layoffs in 2023, relative to their employment, according to data requested by Vox from workforce data company Revelio Labs. Last year, when major tech layoffs first began, recruiters and customer success specialists experienced the most outsize impact. So far this year, nearly 20 percent of the 170,000 tech company layoffs were software engineers, even though they made up roughly 14 percent of employees at these companies. "Early layoffs were dominated by recruiters, which is forgoing future hiring," Revelio senior economist Reyhan Ayas told Vox. "Whereas in 2023 we see a shift toward more core engineering and software engineering, which signals a change in focus of current business priorities."
In other words, tech companies aren't just trimming the fat by firing people who fill out their extensive ecosystem, which ranges from marketers to massage therapists. They're also, many for the first time, making cuts to the people who build the very products they're known for, and who enjoyed a sort of revered status since they, like the founders of the companies, were coders. Software engineers are still important, but they don't have the power they used to...
The latest monthly jobs report by tech industry association CompTIA found that even though employment at tech companies (which includes all roles at those companies) declined slightly in March, employment in technical occupations across industry sectors increased by nearly 200,000 positions. So even if tech companies are laying off tech workers, other industries are snatching them up. Unfortunately for software engineers and the like, that means they might also have to follow those industries' pay schemes. The average software engineer base pay in the US is $90,000, according to PayScale, but can be substantially higher at tech firms like Facebook, where such workers also get bonuses and stock options.
Yes (Score:5, Funny)
Because now it's time to say "learn to prompt."
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
There never was a time to say "learn to code". This always was just an euphemism for "fsck you". A way to blame the victim for the shortcomings of the system, and of leadership.
The thing is, you can always blame one person for his life, education and job market choices, and you might be right in your argument. But if you have millions upon millions of people who run into the same dead end in their lives, this is a societal and economical problem and there is no honest blame to assign to the choices of these individuals.
We as a society educated these people to be blue collar workers and we promised them that they will have successful lives filling these roles in our economy. Now that we have sacrificed them to the altar of neoliberal offshoring to enrich the 0,1%, of course we need the journos to shift blame away from those who engineered the problem.
But the thing is, not everybody is a good match to be a programmer, and not everybody is even going to be able to be a programmer at all. Having been a sysadmin for 20 years, and having had enough contact with programming during this time, I know well enough that programming is just not for me and never will be. How can I then go and tell someone else that this is what they have to do? This is where the hypocricy of the journos shined so bright in 2019. Having spent years griefing on the disintegrating working class, they then found themselves on the receiving end of the unfortune, and boy, were they not amused. The rivers of piss my heart pumps for them.
In the end, a competent leadership will build a society on the stengths of the populace, not on pipe dreams and handwaving of problems away. In these parts, having lived through the absurd of the Soviet Union, we often like to quote Lenin for a comedic truth element. How about: "We need to build communism not with the people we want, but with the people we have". Well the thing is, unilke in communist regimes, the US does not straight go and shovel unneeded people into holes in the ground. But the thing is, they as well might to, because if your are not needed, you can go and die, because markets. And people are dying, slowly, millions of them, in the streets, homeless.
Now the job cuts come disproportionately for the white collar workers, because everyone else has been fired already. How about another quote, I will abuse this for those who might get distracted by the original: "First they came for the factory workers, and we did not speak out - for we were not factory workers. Then they came for the coal miners, and we did not speak out - for we were not coal miners. Then they came for the service workers, and we did not speak out - for we were not service workers. Then they came for the programmers, and there was no one left to speak for them.
Re: Yes (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You’re not going to teach a coal miner to code. Mark Zuckerberg says you teach them [people] to code and everything will be great.
I don't believe that Zuckerberg ever said anything like that, but I made a little effort to find what Bloomberg was talking about. The closest I could come up with was this [youtube.com]. It's a promotional video for code.org which was referenced by CNN in 2013 under the headline, "Gates, Zuckerberg: Kids,
Re: (Score:2)
I think you just need to remember what was going on.
There was a period of time when "learn to code" was the go-to solution offered by Democrats and their media for Republican voters jobs problems. A solution that was believable enough for the Democrat voters to disregard Republican voters problems, all the while being obviously unworkable for those actually affected by the problems. And this is the "fuck you" in this. Being the cause of the problems, all the while cynically posturing to your own voters as a
Re: (Score:2)
Moreover, there are other areas of computing that are just as valuable as coding, yet far more neglected.
Re: Yes (Score:2)
There's also the problem that retraining won't necessarily lead to a job that pays enough. I earn a pretty decent wage in tech, being experienced and inherently interested in learning related skills. If I had to pivot into plumbing then I guarantee I'd see a drastic pay cut, at least until I build experience.
I'm not saying people don't need to switch professions. Sure, times move in. It was particularly arrogant of people to mock miners by suggesting they can simply retrain for an entirely different job.
Re: (Score:2)
“Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as wellGive me a break! Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for god’s sake!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Unfortunately, programming ain't business administration or law. Rote learning won't get you anywhere.
Re: (Score:2)
And that is just it. Same, really, in all engineering and a lot of STEM. Unless you develop a genuine understanding of things, you will never amount to anything. Most people cannot develop that understanding though.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
We're already inundated with professional bad coders. Why do we need more unprofessional bad coders?
There are prerequisites to programming ("coding" is such a bad term, that term came from transcibing originally, taking someone else's program and getting it onto the computer).
1) Logic. Learn it, use it. Not just boolean, but formal, deductive, inference, propositional.
2) Math. Learn it, use it. Seriously, even if "coding" for someone means "writing a hit app". Sooo many professional programmers are lacking here. Know how floating point works before trying to use it.
3) Domain knowledge - ie, what you're working on. Don't just program without knowing what you're programming. Science, accounting, business, whatever.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh my God. You are using four letter words! Use M-A-T-H., get your mouth washed out with soap.
Seriously, what is a professional coder? Is that a coder who gets paid as opposed to an unprofessional code who does not get paid? Or are we talking about coders who got a computer related degree? Does a bootcamp count? What about self-taught? Wozniak and Gates were self-taught.
Instead of a coder, we need to use engineers. But, since the advent of PCs I think the lines between coder, programmer, and engineer h
Re: (Score:2)
Math is important.
But more important is basic physics.
Most people have no intuitive feeling about what can wok and what can not.
A feeling for big numbers helps, too.
Re: (Score:2)
Know how floating point works before trying to use it.
Why?
99% of all programmers don't know it.
From the remaining 1%: 99% do not need to know it - thy probably even never use it.
BTW: how many bits of an integer fit into a double? Just wondering if you know that ...
Re: (Score:2)
Because at least once every couple of years I run across a bug involving floating point used incorrectly, like they're some type of "magic" number format. Such as multiplying a very tiny number by a very big number, losing precision, getting frustrating and saving the numbers to a string because they lost "precision" when some decimal values don't store exactly in binary, or they do direct equality compares with == (doesn't always work). To be fair, most major programming languages don't implement fixed p
Re: (Score:2)
The multiplication of values of disparate magnitude is where floating point does very well, its when its addition instead of multiplication that it doesnt.
So you ranted about the pitfalls of floating point and how you come across a problem regularly, and then wax on about those problems being something that could not have been a problem.
Stop lying.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, I meant add. I need to slow down when ranting :-)
I have noticed that DSP programmers tend to be very good at the math part of coding.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Know how floating point works before trying to use it.
Why?"
Because if you don't, you will write code that looks like it should work but doesn't because you hit a corner case in how floating point is implemented.
"BTW: how many bits of an integer fit into a double? Just wondering if you know that ..."
The important thing is that I know that there are limits to how many places a floating point can be precise to. The details I can look up when I need to. Looking it up, double-precision has a significand preci
Re: (Score:2)
You left off the big one I think, which is critical thinking skills.
Think if it said "learn how to be a good coder" vs. "learn to code" it would be covering many more useful skills than annoying some electrons...
Re: (Score:3)
Too often the programmer is left to their own devices. They will misunderstand formulas, misunderstand what was asked, or worse not understand and then not ask. I see this a lot with things like time/date, arithmetic with floating point, and cryptographic secuirty.
Re: (Score:2)
As a mechanical engineer using a lot of software written by equipment manufacturers, vendors, and others, I disagree. It's usually apparent that the software was written either by an engineer that doesn't know good software practices or a programmer that doesn't understand the engineer's workflow, and either way it's often frustrating to use.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Programming at which level of abstraction? (Score:5, Insightful)
I find that the amount of code I actually write is very small. Quantity is not that useful. Having a tool that can write code for me, even an IDE doing refactoring, is not a big deal for me. Writing up the code is the easy part of the job, and the fun part. I write code when I want to take a break from the rest of the programming job - thinking, designing, testing, reading, reviewing, arguing, debugging, attending meetings, etc.
Language models (Score:2)
levels of abstraction continue to rise. ChatGPT is offering a new one. In several of my recent ChatGPT experiments I explored JavaScript generation.
Yup, that's an actually useful application of LLMs: some humans aren't as good as the average /. geek expressing themselve in code.
For several of us, once you have a clear idea of what you want, the easiest is just to quickly write the code.
But for other people, trying to formulate the idea in code is a very hard task, writting a long description in regular language is easier.
LLMs offer the possibility to have english-to-code translation.
(In one of my former jobs, I was joking that I was merely translating
clickbait trash (Score:5, Insightful)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
When will the answer be "learn to write headlines that aren't amateurish bait"?
Trash.
Re:clickbait trash (Score:4, Informative)
Learn to set goals (Score:5, Interesting)
There's been a ton of proposed changes and programs to increase scholastic ability and/or life success over the years. Almost none of them work.
As a typical example we can consider the "Head Start" program for children from low-income families: children in the program show improvements in measures of learning for the first couple of years, but the improvements vanish completely after a few years. The entire program seems to have no measurable effect after grade 4(*).
This is not a criticism of the "Head Start" program, it had good intentions, but it turns out not to work in any measurable way. In the field of education, in the past there have been over 50 proposed plans of this nature, and all of them have turned out to have no measurable effect, or occasionally a measurably bad effect.
There is one program, the "Self Authoring" course, that does have a noticeable effect on student performance. People who take the course show improvements, college students who take the course go up one grade level on average, and requiring the course in college reduces the dropout rate by half. All of this is backed by rigorous statistical studies that show the significance and the rather large effect size.
To my knowledge, this is the one and only learning adjunct program that has been shown to work in a scientifically rigorous manner(**).
The self authoring course doesn't focus on education, it focuses on conscientiousness: it asks the user to come up with a set of goals and plans, and uses some psychological techniques (based on research) to encourage students to achieve those goals. It's a suite of three courses, each of which asks you to write about yourself (past, present, future), with some cues to help you get a handle on the task (example: "divide your life into 7 phases and write a paragraph or two that describes yourself in that phase").
There is one caveat that people here will probably not like: it was invented by Dr. Jordan Peterson. On the plus side, this was before Dr. Peterson became a controversial target for the left, so that might not be a problem.
So if we want children to have better life success, instead of saying "learn to code", maybe we should say "learn to set goals".
Or maybe integrate the techniques of the self authoring course into the standard curriculum.
(*) From Wikipedia:
The HSIS study concludes, "Head Start has benefits for both 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds in the cognitive, health, and parenting domains, and for 3-year-olds in the social-emotional domain. However, the benefits of access to Head Start at age four are largely absent by 1st grade for the program population as a whole. For 3-year-olds, there are few sustained benefits, although access to the program may lead to improved parent-child relationships through 1st grade, a potentially important finding for children's longer-term development.
(**) There are some non-traditional "private school" formats that seem to have good results as well, but these are whole-school changes and not something that can be added to a typical school education.
Duh (Score:2)
Software engineers are still important, but they don't have the power they used to...
Probably because a lot of them aren't worth a shit. Understanding the syntax of a language is the easy part for basically anybody. Being able to reason about problems is where you either find it easy or you always struggle with it. People in the latter case should be looking for another job, but typically don't. And then they get laid off.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Duh (Score:3)
Full stack is just a euphamism for jack of all coding paradigms master of none.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually nope.
Fullstack means: you develop for the back end and for the front end.
Unless it is a web/internet application, it only means you do internal logic *and* GUI for interaction and display. If it is the former, you also need basic or even advanced knowledge about networking, clustering, virtualization etc.
Re: (Score:2)
You're both right.
I don't think the term "full stack" is going to disappear but its meaning will likely evolve. I've been developing web "applications" since before client-side-rendering was a thing, and the term "full stack" didn't exist. We were all "full stack." We needed to know how to handle server-side persistence, client-side presentation and everything in between. Then a specialization occurred and we split off into "frontend" and "backend" developers, with "full stack" devs being people who do both
Is It Time to Learn to Spell 'Learn to Code'? (Score:4, Informative)
You know, like editors are paid to do ?
Revisionist history (Score:5, Informative)
I realize wordplay was used to obscure the origins of the phrase, but it's worth highlighting that it was originally thrown against non-journalists or techies who lost their jobs, usually in a blue-collar industry which was seen as "evil" due to AGW. Miners lose their job? They should learn to code.
It was most prominently told to these poor unfortunates by journalists. Hence when a journalist loses their job, that's the response they get.
Incidentally, a lot of companies are realizing just how useless most coders are. Anyone working in development will know this, whether they want to admit to it or not; 90% of the "coders" working are doing anything but. Wasting time on tik tok, /. or just normal fucking around..occasionally running to stack overflow when they need to turn in some code.
Of course there are a hundred voices that will naysay this, but then that lines up doesn't it?
Re:Revisionist history (Score:5, Interesting)
Incidentally, a lot of companies are realizing just how useless most coders are. Anyone working in development will know this, whether they want to admit to it or not; 90% of the "coders" working are doing anything but.
From what I’ve seen after forty years in the industry in both large companies and small, and after getting more than one stalled project or team back into shape, when 90% of the coders are termed useless then it’s usually mostly due to poor leadership.
The “useless” are usually simply following orders, happily grinding away at useless corners of the code, and are being rewarded for quietly doing so.
Productivity magically shoots way up for everyone if you give the “right” top coders free rein to write specs and monitor the rest, you stop mollycoddling the laggards, and you foster a culture that tolerates risk and rewards messengers instead of shooting them.
Re: (Score:2)
Agile sounds good when you say it fast. What it actually turns into in practice is that everyone turns into Montgomery Scott during the weekly sprint meeting. "Adding that to the Warp Coil will take me all week, Captain!"
Except its not James T. Kirk running the meeting, its some manager that gives no real shits and will not press against absurd time estimates, the company paid for those Agile Consultants so now whateve
Re: (Score:2)
My boss and I have a favourite pet saying:
"All problems are people problems"
Waterfall didn't work, so in comes Agile.
Agile doesn't work so it's the problem.
OOP gave us problems, in comes Functional Programming.
No one seems to do "actual" Functional Programming (lots of side effects, global state, large functions etc.) so Functional Programming is "the problem. "
The problem is people. Agile is a loose set of principles. How those principles gets applied is very open ended. So far the only alternative I've se
Year 2000 is called and wants its headlines back (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of people in software engineering have no business being there. They just suck at their jobs. Same with the data scientists. The companies who did not over hire doing just fine and even hiring more if needed. If your company has a good management with the eye on the bottom line it would weather this downturn just fine.
Google and Facebook should trim the fat and should be responsible to the shareholders. Google is especially wasting colossal amounts of money. Each project comes with its one build system engineered from scratch.
Re: (Score:3)
Man, I remember the epic Y2K hiring spree ... a great scam like that happens once a generation if lucky. Those were the days. Companies didn't interview you, YOU interviewed the companies hoping to hire you. It was like one of those "in Soviet Russia" jokes except in your favor. Now I'm awaiting the 2038 unix time overflow .. if only can we drum up something for that .. but it seems like idiots have switched to 64 bit too early. One can dream though.
Re: Year 2000 is called and wants its headlines ba (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Man, I remember the epic Y2K hiring spree ... a great scam like that happens once a generation if lucky.
And what actually was the Scam?
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing really, but the easy money made it feel like a scam.
Never was an option (Score:5, Interesting)
I've taught programming to a variety of audiences, for 40 years. Still do. Here's a rough summary:
Half of the population is incapable of learning to program. Hopeless. Can't do it, even on the simplest level.
Of the rest, 90% will never do anything complex. They can handle basic web pages, given a good framework. Maybe a simple Excel macro. Working on anything complex, like back end services? Forget it. In the time it takes a good programmer to support them, the good programmer had done the work themselves, ten times ovet.
That leaves about 5% of the population that could become genuinely productive as programmers. Not all (or even most) of that 5% *wants* that kind of career.
tl;dr: Saying "learn to code" was one of the dummest things ever...
Re:Never was an option (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, this, one hundred percent.
I've been teaching about half as long as you. The very first day completely shattered some of my deeply-held, preconceived notions.
Almost all folks who haven't taught themselves will kick back against this observation and not believe you. Thanks for the breath of fresh air.
Re:Never was an option (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of the problem is that our frameworks have grown too complex. You have to almost be Sheldon Cooper to remember where all the round-about knobs and dials are. There's too much junk in the trunk.
Web frameworks try to be everything to everybody: web-scale, mom-and-pop, e-commerce, social networks, internal crud, etc etc etc. That's too much to ask. Frameworks should focus on a niche and be honest about its limits outside that niche.
And let's get an alternative standard to HTML/DOM/CSS: a state-ful GUI Markup Language so we can get GUI's without needing screwball JS frameworks with giant learning curves and tons of gotcha's. HTML/DOM/CSS is a poor fit for real GUI's, being designed for relatively static documents. GUI's are a different animal.
Maybe build an OSS GUI browser using the Tk kit to avoid having to start from scratch? Put a nice state-ful XML wrapper around it. (Qt has too many licensing limits according to some.)
Too much stuff is rocket surgery that only has to be bicycle surgery if stuff irrelevant to the niche are tossed. Many techies are not keen to solve it because complexity is job security for them. There's no financial incentive to simplify things for the next generation. Bloated frameworks = bloated paychecks.
Re: (Score:2)
And let's get an alternative standard to HTML/DOM/CSS: a state-ful GUI Markup Language so we can get GUI's without needing screwball JS frameworks with giant learning curves and tons of gotcha's.
Exists already, dozens.
And you can use JS without any framework anyway.
Why not google for "single page web apps" to get an idea?
Re: (Score:2)
JS GUI frameworks suck. They have long learning curves, lots of gatcha's, and difficult to debug.
I've heard from multiple devs using various JS frameworks that the real problem is not the frameworks themselves, but that JS and DOM just are fundamentally not meant for GUI's.
A GUI engine is system software, and system software usually should be written in a compiled language, not a dynamic one. You don't write an OS-like thing in a dynamic language. Dynamic languages have their place, but this isn't one of th
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. Matches my observations, although I would like to add that I know Math PhDs that will likely never learn how to code reasonable well. It is a specific talent in the "engineering" class, and most people simply do not have it.
And yes, that hype was utterly and completely dumb. I do not think it is unique in that though, we have a lot of utterly and completely dumb hypes in the current phase of human existence on this planet.
Re: (Score:2)
It comes and goes (Score:5, Insightful)
There was a huge push into IT in the early 80s, then it fell off by the late 80s. Another huge dip in the "dot bomb" crash of '00.
It was always good to "learn to code", but it was never good to learn only to code. Unless you absolutely love algorithms and logic twists all day long, learn something else you do like all day long, and than add "code" to that. Most programming is about subject-matter expertise, not code-expertise.
Have the sexists of code.org apologised? (Score:4, Insightful)
Have Code.org finally apologised and stopped their manhate programs?
Re: Have the sexists of code.org apologised? (Score:4, Interesting)
See my earlier comment that only about 5% of the population and is capable of programming on a useful level. Then comes the question: do they *want* to?
In my experience, a lot more men than women will answer "yes" to that question. I've known some genuinely talented women programmers who took the first opportunity to do something else.
Why? That's a question for the philosophers and psychologists.
Re: (Score:2)
I knew one of those talented women. I tutored her in Fortran when I was a junior in high school and she was a junior at Northeastern University (doble major chemistry and electrical engineering) . She got out of software when she made enough money to retire on by writing perl programs to optimize microcode.
Re: (Score:2)
From one extreme to the other!
Everyone should learn to code (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't argue that everyone should learn to code with the expectation of making a career out of it. It is unrealistic that everyone would be able to make a career with coding - most people can't do it well, there will never be enough jobs that actually require "coding", etc. I do however argue that everyone should be exposed to coding for the general reason of understanding how the world works. (In theory), we teach kids reading, writing, math, science, history, art, economics, health, etc. so kids can have a basic understanding of how the world works and so they can be functional in society. Our world is so computerized these days, teaching a basic understanding of how computers work should be in the list and having kids write a simple program (think "hello world") is just as important as teaching basic math and everything else. Granted that this lesson may be lost on many kids, but so are other math and science lessons.
In my opinion, before graduating from high school (12th year of education for those not in the US), everyone should have had a few lessons on coding that teach the concepts: 1) Computers run programs (and those programs are what tell computers what to do), 2) Programs run a series of instructions in order (sequential execution), 3) Programs can make decisions and follow different lists of instructions (branching / if then else), 4) Programs can repeat instructions (looping), 5) The combination of following instructions in order, making decisions, and looping are the basis for all automated systems (and how computers work).
Re: Everyone should learn to code (Score:2)
Here in the UK computing is an option for school age kids (and unfortunately not all schools offer it due to lack of suitable teachers) but it's a proper starter CS course with proper exams and a qualification (GCSE), not simply a few days of coding.
Learn to build instead (Score:2)
There never was a time I'd told anyone to do that (Score:2)
I would have told people to learn how to split up tasks into small enough portions that you can then translate into programming block.
"Coding", i.e. translating this into a language the computer speaks, is the easy part that you can outsource to menial workers who don't know fuck all about programming, learned some computer language by the means of rote programming and Stack Exchange copy/pasting.
Until you understand that the only distinction that really matters is between imperative and declarative languag
X your Y with this one weird trick! (Score:3)
I don't quite understand where this repeated cycle of zeroing in on one thing as the panacea came from, or if it's even new or unique in any way to America, but holy hell is it a cancer on our society.
Coding fixes everything.
$political_cause fixes everything.
Masks fix everything everywhere.
Masks make everything worse everywhere.
Vax mandates fix everything.
Vax anti-mandates fix everything.
Guns fix everything.
Gun grabs fix everything.
You'd think that a complex, multifaceted existence in a world defined by nuance and shades of grey was a mythical beast only whispered about in rumors and tall tales told over a campfire.
Re: (Score:2)
Way to break the "surgeons wear masks in surgery" scandal wide open.
And don't get started on that Guns don't kill people hippie garbage.
This country is goin to hell in a handbasket.
Now tell us all about white people.
Code if you like it and are good at it (Score:2)
If someone has a talent for it and an interest we should nurture it. Telling people to learn to code because it's a stable job option just isn't smart. Not everyone is going to have the type of mind that is a good programmer.
Wake me up when... (Score:2)
...knowing how to code is a liability, no matter what ever else you know
Code without limits (Score:2)
The biggest thing I will be interested in seeing is if this turns programming back around to be "whatever you can imagine" again. In the early days of home computing, there were no limits. At least no artificial limits. None in the OS's, none in the applications. If you had the skills, you could create whatever your heart desired. But as Windows version progressed, more and more artificial limitations keep getting put in. Initially they were honest and somewhat acceptable, like mild copy protection schemes.
Re: (Score:2)
In a time where no one is ready to pay for software, SaaS is basically the only way for a small shop to sell something software related.
If you are to cheap to pay for a Service: then you most likely do not _need_ that service. Up to you.
Learn to code for fun (Score:2)
If you treat it like a game, it is a game with a lot of possibilities, lot of unique challenges, and you even get a program out of it if you beat the game.
You can even choose any level of difficulty or path you want.
More AI Post Apocalypse BS (Score:5, Interesting)
we just had a round of Layoffs of contractors .. SCRUM Masters, Agile Release Train Engineers, a bunch mid level BA/BO/PO types, but all the developers were spared. As our division manager put it. We kept the people that did actual work. I think many of these companies that are laying off developers and engineers, WAY over hired and are using the AI scare as a ruse to get of folks ( no fault of the people hired) that probably should not have been hired in the first place.
You don't just "Learn to Code". (Score:2)
You are interested in computers and how these devices work and how you can get them to do your bidding. And then you learn to program, step by step. Just about any IT expert worth his salt learned it that way.
Just "Learn to Code" to "make more money" is a really stupid idea, as any IT expert can attest.
To be really good at all things IT, "coding" included, you have to really know what you are doing, which can take years if not decades of training and even then requires enough love for the craft to have a re
That time was 2013 (Score:2)
When this idiotic hype started.
Did the AI suggest this? (Score:2)
If this was the company Dilbert worked at, I could see the AI "subliminally" giving the idea of layoffs to the pointy headed boss.
"Nobody ever got fired for going with a HAL."
Is it time to stop? (Score:2)
Nope. As a software developer, I tell this to my coworkers on a daily basis.
Vox is still salty about "learn to code" (Score:2)
Learn to... (Score:2)
Learn to code
Learn to bitcoin
Learn to franchise
Learn to be rich
Learn to be educated
"Learn to Code" is a euphemism (Score:2)
Laid off coal miners shrugged (Score:3)
Back when their mines were getting shutdown, these 'news' web page were spewing the "Learn to Code". I guess they're just more special when it's their jobs that's eliminated.
There was never a time to say it (Score:2)
Anyone who was ever going to be any good at it found programming on their own. If you needed to be told, you never loved it enough to make a dent.
Yes (Score:2)
What does "learn to code" mean? (Score:2)
Past time (Score:2)
Yes. In my long career, I had to fix complete kludges and crap coded by other people with CS degrees.
Remember, 50% of the people were in the bottom half of the class.
Bottom line (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Bottom line (Score:5, Insightful)
Hating on Bill Gates and Elon Musk is how the ghetto strongmen politicos keep you under their thumb and voting for them. If you think you're too smart to be susceptible to that kind of manipulation of your baser instincts, then you're the perfect mark.
La consult homelessness tomorrow (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re: (Score:2)
Just by giving homeless people homes. We're not post world War II Russia. We don't actually have a housing shortage. The housing shortage people say exists is an artificial thing meant to keep you on your toes and afraid of homelessness. 40% of people who are homeless now have full-time jobs.
You obviously don't understand the logistics of this at all. What good does an extra house in Fresno do when an overwhelming number of people are trying to cram into LA county? Furthermore, much of those 40% are, among other things, Google employees that choose to live in a motor home. They're also not the "problem" per se. Know what the problem is?
https://www.cbsnews.com/losang... [cbsnews.com]
https://ktla.com/news/local-ne... [ktla.com]
More about Venice in particular: I tried walking around there a few weeks ago and...unless you
Google employees are in mobile homes (Score:2)
You don't want the homelessness problem solved. You *like* the homeless. They give you somebody to bitch about, and an excuse to do the same failed right wing policies we've been doing since Reagan.
In 10 years your demo will age out of voting and Gen Z will age in. And the problem'll get solved. Will you still be around bitching? Probably. I'm paying for your health care a
Re: (Score:2)
A housing shortage also keeps house prices and rents artificial high.
Re: I'm sorry but it's literally the opposite (Score:5, Insightful)
You can delete the millionaires and billionaires from existence and redistribute their assets tomorrow, and next week the drug addicts passed out on the streets of LA, SF, Austin, Kensington in Philly, and the rest will still be passed out on the streets, big city schools will still be graduating illiterates, and not paying your rent on time will still get you kicked to the curb.
How do I know this? Simple: I didn't just fall off the turnip truck. The Bolsheviks and the Maoists and the Khmer Rouge seized property and ate the rich and all that happened was they made everyone equally poor (except of course for the animals who invariably end up more equal than the others). In Western Europe where they aren't full blown commies but more "egalitarian" in their conception of the state than they are here, there's still poverty and there's still social dysfunction, and btw their median household incomes are less than they are here.
Your revolution has never worked any time it has been tried. Not revolution-lite in Europe, not revolution-with-firing-squads in the East. Nowhere. Never.
That's not actually true (Score:3)
I think you hit your head when you fell off the turnip truck. The Maoists were never Communists if that's what you're getting at. Neither were the Kh
Re: That's not actually true (Score:2)
Just go to a grateful dead concert already.
Re: That's not actually true (Score:2)
Drug addiction as moral failing...drug addiction as medical condition. Doesn't matter. Just semantics. The people in question are still going to be strung out zombies and still not productive members of society who pull their own weight instead of exporting their problems to everyone else.
Housing can't be a "right" any more than any other free stuff can be a right. Someone else has to put in productive effort to make it happen, and that someone else doesn't work for free and their skillsets don't grow on tr
Da faq? (Score:2)
And we've had the resources to give everyone homes for decades. Just like how being free feel slavery used to no optional being free from homelessness will one day be looked at as a given.
Re: Da faq? (Score:2)
The way you talk you'd think homelessness is entirely causes by external forces and that no one chooses to live like an animal in the streets and no one is too fucking messed up to stay in a home without turning it into a tent camp on a concrete foundation.
You're also talking like it's a uniquely American problem. It isn't. There are dysfunctional people incapable of living among civilized society everywhere. Perhaps other countries paper over it more than we do, and we've just chosen to not take the ouchie
Re: That's not actually true (Score:2)
Because for some mythical reason, *this* time we'll be smarter and better about shedding our human frailties and building utopia. Those other times weren't even *real* communism.
Re: (Score:2)
Depends.
In short term they might not have worked, in the long run they did.
Most countries you mention are much better off than 150 years ago, except Russia.
Would they be on the same level without a revolution? No one really knows. What was a revolution for some countries was WWI and then WWII for Germany and Italy. The revolutions in Spain and Portugal worked quite well. In Portugal was not even a fight, afaik.
Re: (Score:2)
In Western Europe where they aren't full blown commies but more "egalitarian" in their conception of the state than they are here, there's still poverty and there's still social dysfunction, and btw their median household incomes are less than they are here.
What an odd choice of metric. Isn't that exactly what you would expect with some level of redistribution of wealth? After those high-income households have paid for necessary services from businesses that have colluded to raise prices, do they still have as much left as those where the same services are provided not-for-profit centrally?
Re: (Score:2)
How else is 1% of the population supposed to claim over 50% of our civilizations output?
That is easy, obviously by being WaySmarterThanYou!
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
And unlike you, they don't go around drawing artificial distinctions between groups of people to try to get them to fight one another while pretending to call for unity, nor do they long for the collapse of civilization in the hopes that everybody would finally "see reason" and adopt your ideology.
There's nothing artificial about the distinction (Score:2)
Now the current attempts to make trans people into a scapegoat for people's anger is very very artificial. I'm genuine curious when trans people run their course what the next week you're going to want to shit on is going to be. The one thing I'm sure of is you'll do whatever the media tells you to do. I'm sorry but you'v
Re: People who work for a living (Score:2)
masters tend to be paid for by employer (Score:2)
get that masters to get that job and the loan is unlimited so you can buy the books at full cost.
A masters tends to be paid for by one's employer. Or at least highly subsidized.