A little bit of knowledge is maybe worse than not knowing at all. I'd rather have someone just say "I don't know" than try to make a decision based on a few weeks playing with Python tutorials. Dabbling a bit in a couple of languages like this article suggests is about as far from programming, or understanding software development, as playing with toy cars is from Formula 1 racing or designing engines.
All of these "you must learn to code" articles are encouraging a dilettantism that is going to plague serious programmers. Why aren't we telling college students to learn just a little genetic engineering so they can find jobs in the biomedical industry?
Badly written ("the machinations of coding"?) and not well thought out.
"... a system that has eight times as many high-school football teams as high schools that teach advanced placement computer-science classes."
Yes, but high school football is taken seriously. A coach who taught football the way some teachers teach AP computer science would be heading for an 0-10 season and a firing. This sounds flippant, but the underlying point is dead serious: you cannot judge a school by its published curriculum, without either observing the work done or talking to the persons who have gone through the school.
> Consider this example: Suppose you're sitting in a meeting with clients, and someone asks you how long a certain digital project is slated to take. Unless you understand the fundamentals of what engineers and programmers do, unless you're familiar enough with the principles and machinations of coding to know how the back end of the business works, any answer you give is a guess and therefore probably wrong.
Even when you do understand the fundamentals of what engineers and programmers do, any answer is still usually a guess and probably wrong.
I wonder if this is what non-programmers think the advantages of understanding programming are? Looks like the author has never actually held a real programming job (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/kirk-mcdonald/0/4/824).
Learning programming skills does have some benefits in learning problem solving. I'll never tell someone NOT to dabble in code, but I don't think the benefits are as pronounced as this article is making it sound to self-teach a tiny bit of programming. There's an earlier comment that states that it might hurt more to know a little; I can see where that viewpoint is coming from.
The RAND institute determined that Americans are avoiding PhD degrees in science and engineering because other professions pay better, offer more job security, and have vastly lower attrition rates[1].
I'll be happy to prescribe you antibiotics, straighten your kid's teeth, or send you a threatening letter that you violated my patent on interpreting data obtained through a web service, though, and I'll extort a lot more money out of you that way than you ever would have paid me to write code.
Yet another article exhorting everyone to 'learn to code'. Which misses the mark. It's true that there are a large amount of tech jobs. It's also rare that people, who would otherwise be uninterested in technology, become useful programmers. If there was a suddenly an overwhelming demand for workers who could do calculus all day, that doesn't mean a larger contingent of people would be suited that that type of work. Additionally employers are discovering that the old trope about 'all kids know computers these days' was an unfounded assumption. Sure 'they all grew up with the internet', but people grew up around cars and there are plenty of terrible drivers.
The real issue (which the author touches on) is that new graduates often don't have any inherently valuable skills at anything. If you can solve expensive problems demonstrably, you'll do fine even if you don't know python.
I don't know if what I'm about to write applies to education in other countries, since my experience is based in Italy.
Well, there are a lot of things that your parents tell you "for your interest" when you're young and that you're supposed to understand when you grow up. For example, in high school, I had a fair amount (read: 5 years straight) of ancient Greek and Latin. I thought it was useless, why bother learning stone dead languages at all? The canonical answer was that in the process of studying those "useless" things I'd be acquiring a method for studying and exercise logic.
More than 10 years have passed since I finished high school, and you know what? I call bullshit with much more conviction that 15 years ago when I was first exposed to "agricola agricolae agricolae". If you want my logic to improve, why don't provide programming classes? It's a better exercise in logic and with a "secondary" effect I'm learning a job, and one of the more requested.
I'm a professional programmer, I never had a hard time getting a job, but that's because I self-taught myself how to program (starting way earlier than Latin classes), but it makes me angry nonetheless to think about some of my friends who are unable to get a decent job because, surprisingly, it seems like 2013 companies are not so much in need of people half-fluent in ancient Greek. This also extends to universities, of course, where providing
real world skills (at least in most Italian universities) seem not to be an point that raises any interest.
One of our interns, lately, had troubles working on an application we developed with a Python backend, a fairly complex javascript-driven frontend that talked to a node.js server taking some data from a Java API. Turns out all he knows after 4 years of studying programming at the university is a bit of Prolog and some Fortran. He was also unable to ssh to our servers.
The guy who wrote this article is absolutely clueless. Does he really think you can understand the fundamentals of computer science by taking a few courses or reading a few book? This is absolute nonsense!
It takes years of hard work and studying just to understand the fundamentals of computer science, and then lots of experience to become a competent software engineer.
The main reason there is so much terrible software is because there are too many incompetent software developers that don't know the first thing about crafting well designed software.
10 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 34.9 ms ] threadAll of these "you must learn to code" articles are encouraging a dilettantism that is going to plague serious programmers. Why aren't we telling college students to learn just a little genetic engineering so they can find jobs in the biomedical industry?
"... a system that has eight times as many high-school football teams as high schools that teach advanced placement computer-science classes."
Yes, but high school football is taken seriously. A coach who taught football the way some teachers teach AP computer science would be heading for an 0-10 season and a firing. This sounds flippant, but the underlying point is dead serious: you cannot judge a school by its published curriculum, without either observing the work done or talking to the persons who have gone through the school.
Even when you do understand the fundamentals of what engineers and programmers do, any answer is still usually a guess and probably wrong.
I wonder if this is what non-programmers think the advantages of understanding programming are? Looks like the author has never actually held a real programming job (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/kirk-mcdonald/0/4/824).
Learning programming skills does have some benefits in learning problem solving. I'll never tell someone NOT to dabble in code, but I don't think the benefits are as pronounced as this article is making it sound to self-teach a tiny bit of programming. There's an earlier comment that states that it might hurt more to know a little; I can see where that viewpoint is coming from.
The RAND institute determined that Americans are avoiding PhD degrees in science and engineering because other professions pay better, offer more job security, and have vastly lower attrition rates[1].
I'll be happy to prescribe you antibiotics, straighten your kid's teeth, or send you a threatening letter that you violated my patent on interpreting data obtained through a web service, though, and I'll extort a lot more money out of you that way than you ever would have paid me to write code.
- Elite American College Grad
[1] http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html
The real issue (which the author touches on) is that new graduates often don't have any inherently valuable skills at anything. If you can solve expensive problems demonstrably, you'll do fine even if you don't know python.
http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=175
Well, there are a lot of things that your parents tell you "for your interest" when you're young and that you're supposed to understand when you grow up. For example, in high school, I had a fair amount (read: 5 years straight) of ancient Greek and Latin. I thought it was useless, why bother learning stone dead languages at all? The canonical answer was that in the process of studying those "useless" things I'd be acquiring a method for studying and exercise logic.
More than 10 years have passed since I finished high school, and you know what? I call bullshit with much more conviction that 15 years ago when I was first exposed to "agricola agricolae agricolae". If you want my logic to improve, why don't provide programming classes? It's a better exercise in logic and with a "secondary" effect I'm learning a job, and one of the more requested.
I'm a professional programmer, I never had a hard time getting a job, but that's because I self-taught myself how to program (starting way earlier than Latin classes), but it makes me angry nonetheless to think about some of my friends who are unable to get a decent job because, surprisingly, it seems like 2013 companies are not so much in need of people half-fluent in ancient Greek. This also extends to universities, of course, where providing real world skills (at least in most Italian universities) seem not to be an point that raises any interest.
One of our interns, lately, had troubles working on an application we developed with a Python backend, a fairly complex javascript-driven frontend that talked to a node.js server taking some data from a Java API. Turns out all he knows after 4 years of studying programming at the university is a bit of Prolog and some Fortran. He was also unable to ssh to our servers.
It takes years of hard work and studying just to understand the fundamentals of computer science, and then lots of experience to become a competent software engineer.
The main reason there is so much terrible software is because there are too many incompetent software developers that don't know the first thing about crafting well designed software.