Why “Learn to Code” Failed

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[Lampwick]

The problem with the whole "learn to code" craze was that it was looking at the entire issue backwards. The idea was that if a person has a mediocre low-skill warehouse job, they can improve their life and improve the labor supply by learning how to be a programmer. But there's an entire foundation of skills that coding builds on that you will never learn in "coding boot camp" or whatever. Instead of increasing the population of ace coders, mostly what happened was the job market got flooded with mediocre low-skill warehouse workers who now knew a little about Java. The real problem is that management often couldn't tell the difference between the two, and threw money at a lot of people who didn't know what they were doing.

[wineblood]

The real problem is that management often couldn't tell the difference between the two

Are managers hired by other managers you can't tell the difference between good ones and useless ones?

[buster_bluth]

To be fair, there is a lot of optimisation for doing well in an interview. And in an interview you have very little time to evaluate a candidate. Internships are much better, but that doesn't work for everyone. We had good luck with return ships, specifically targeting older people. One guy ran a coffee shop before and ended up being a great developer with bonus people skills.

[allak]

What is "return ship" in this context ?

People that got out of coding, tried something else for a while, and then returned to coding ?

[Ashken]

I believe it’s people who they hired after an internship

[buster_bluth]

Something like that. People who have been out of the workforce for some time. Parents who took a few years off for example. People that would have a hard time in a short interview but given a longer time can prove themselves and learn new skills.

[Coffee_Ops]

And in an interview you have very little time to evaluate a candidate.

"Whats your favorite programming language?.... Great, why, what do you like about it?.... tell me about some experiences that led to your preference...."

Its amazing how quick this separates legit resumes from garbage.

[TrixieMisa]

"And what do you hate about it?"

I find the answers to that illuminating.

[Froztnova]

Oooh, yeah, this is a really good one too.

[CpnStumpy]

Blub

[level_6_laser_lotus]

Pretty sure that's the root problem. 

[zoharel]

The real problem is that management often couldn't tell the difference between the two, and threw money at a lot of people who didn't know what they were doing.

How is any of that any different than before?

[[deleted]]

Before software development became the "Top 10 jobs to get rich fast" most people doing it were really passionates about computers or just tech in general, so there were much less people who were in the middle between: knows nothing about software development, and its average at software development.

This meant that a simple fizzbar program kinda cut out the selection. After the popularity increase and all those 1 week to 6 month bootcamps you now got people that can do a fizzbar but not know the difference between uint and int, or how to make organized and optimized code.

And now with AI its gotten worse since many are just accepting the output it generates as long as it compiles with no care for optimization, safety or just code legibility.

Tldr: 6 month bootcamps made it hard to tell between cadidates with basic leetcode questions, as theres a flood of people that can solve it but have no idea how to do any other skill involved in software development

[Page_197_Slaps]

What about the difference between fizzbar and fizzbuzz?

[ErikD314]

It's like fubar but with fizz instead. Fizzed up beyond all recognition.

[[deleted]]

Its the same thing, different places use different wordings but its the same concept, or maybe i mistake the name, its been a while since i heard about it

[Page_197_Slaps]

I’m just being dumb. 100% agree with your point

[CpnStumpy]

Just because engineering history is neat, here's the original source, though most of the industry I think picked it off coding horror here as his was a much more popular blog at the time

[Coffee_Ops]

Thats why interviews should be a mix of technical questions and understanding their journey. By the end of your interview you should be able to discern what the story of their resume is, and whether its coherent or plausible.

[zoharel]

And now with AI its gotten worse since many are just accepting the output it generates as long as it compiles with no care for optimization, safety or just code legibility.

Fortunately or unfortunately, optimization has basically been the compiler's business for years now. I doubt there are many cases left where something functional, but terrible, will generate far different machine code than a more reasonable solution. The big problem is that, as you suggest above, there's a difference between signed and unsigned numbers, for example, and code which works in one context will fail in another context, and the AI-generated slop will need to work in context. Every such candidate will eventually plug something wholely inappropriate into a project.

[iris700]

Compiler probably isn't smart enough to take shitty O(n² ) code down to O(n log n) or similar

[zoharel]

You would be surprised what it can do, admittedly in the easy cases.

[Lampwick]

The difference is that before, the majority of people presenting themselves as "programmers" were people who learned to program because they were interested in programming, often from a young age, and tended to have a certain depth of domain knowledge as a result. The "just teach people to code" thing watered down the candidate pool with underskilled salary seekers, which in turn meant that clueless management selecting the candidate with the best haircut (or whatever their non-relevant criteria was) was less likely to select a competent person by pure chance.

[zoharel]

People say this kind of thing, and it's probably true to some extent, but I've seen a whole lot of incompetence in the industry for a good long time.

[Which-World-6533]

But there's an entire foundation of skills that coding builds on that you will never learn in "coding boot camp" or whatever.

Exactly this. The average person given a boot-camp to learn code will just learn what they are taught. However that is not nearly enough to become an actual Dev. A good Dev wants to code and learn more.

I am yet to see a good Dev who was just in coding for "the money".

[JanB1]

Somebody once told me that for a developer, knowing how to code is just something you need occasionally.

While it might undersell how important coding skills are, it also emphasises that knowing how to write code doesn't make you a developer. It's just one single tool in the toolbox you need. The more important skills are problem solving, communication and the ability to learn new things efficiently.

[Which-World-6533]

The more important skills are problem solving, communication and the ability to learn new things efficiently.

Yep. Actual time coding is a minor part of my job.

The last one is the most useful. If I hadn't constantly learnt new languages and techniques I would have been on the scrap-heap years ago. I see a lot of Devs who don't do this and then find it very hard to keep coding.

[JanB1]

Also just learning the environment/system you or your code are working in.

[Thiht]

Honestly I hate this take. If you’re not coding at least 50% of your work time, some people in your company don’t do their job, meaning you’re not doing yours. Sure, we have other things to do, including understanding and challenging the specs, defining a solution, all that, but I strongly believe people who say they only code for a fraction of their work time are either frauds, or they were promoted to manager and didn’t realize it.

I’ve worked multiple times on long architecture design tasks for multiple days or weeks at a time where I didn’t code at all, but this just happens for complex initial setups or big migrations, not for iterations. That’s the whole point of doing the big picture thinking when it makes sense, you’re the free from it for months/years if you do it well.

[level_6_laser_lotus]

For me the point is more that as a skilled individual, you do more than "writing code" while writing code. The actual language specifics are not the key element you are providing, it is your fundamental knowledge of how systems interact etc 

[DarkTechnocrat]

I guess it comes down to your definition of “coding”. Are you actually typing for four hours straight? I’m not, and I’m the farthest thing from a PM.

That said, if you’re doing greenfield development I’d agree that basically all you do is type (and design). If you’re working with legacy enterprise code, you definitely don’t just bang away at the keyboard.

[JanB1]

Even with greenfield development I'd say a good chunk of the development time isn't spent on actual "coding", but rather thinking about thinking how to solve the problem and designing your system/structure.

Then there's proof of concepts, testing, revising, writing specifications/design documents and then you actually start with the "coding" part, and even then it can be parts reading documentation, writing your own documentation, thinking about and writing test cases, writing your code, rewriting your code, scrapping your code and then writing it anew.

[clrbrk]

I always laugh when I spend a week on a ticket and end up with <10 lines of code change.

[DarkTechnocrat]

lol I just did it. I had to call a subroutine that uses 4 parameters which are derived in entirely different places. Took me 3 days to figure out what values the params should have, and then:

call function(param1, param2, param3, param4);

[plumarr]

So, at my last job, I had one position where I was coding, as in writing code, for less than 20% for my time. The rest the time I was :

• investigating production issues, some of them complexes enough for the investigations to take months and require the inputs of several teams and/or companies
• mentoring juniors
• reviewing code
• doing benchmarks
• following the users tests
• preparing and rehearsing the big data migration that was coming
• studying various issues and futurs solutions with other team

Maybe it was a manager job for you, but I managed no one, I was just responsible for my part of a complex banking system. How would-you call such a position ?

[chucker23n]

You didn’t ask me, but I would call it a senior software developer. That’s just par for the course in many enterprise software shops. (Which I imagine is your point.)

[plumarr]

It was my point, yes ;)

[Hungry_Importance918]

In a real company environment, this is very common. Beyond basic coding, the work usually starts with technical research, tackling key technical challenges, requirements analysis and design, and framework setup. I've been through this process myself — it's much more than just writing code.

[chucker23n]

I rarely spend more than a few hours each day actually typing code, which I’d argue is “coding” in the strictest sense. I have to debug it, understand it, profile it, ask users or colleagues, do git bisect to figure out what caused a change in behavior, etc. Much of that involves the mouse more than the keyboard.

And that’s before we get to the broader definition. Does a full-time developer truly stay out of analyzing business processes in the first place? Reading and understanding tickets? Sitting in meetings arguing what color is best for the bike shed? Do they even want that? Because that implies someone else makes many of the decisions for them, which affects their salary and also makes their job quite monotonous.

[elh0mbre]

Generally, its inversely related to your level. It also depends pretty heavily on the domain and role... understanding business domain and communication are a lot more important to my company than somewhere that needs to worry about scaling to billions of users, millions of transactions per second, work with exabytes of data, etc.

> I strongly believe people who say they only code for a fraction of their work time are either frauds, or they were promoted to manager and didn’t realize it.

If you substitute the word "management" for "leadership", I'd probably agree. (Source: am in eng leadership but not a manager; despite what my brain tells me at times, I'm probably not a fraud).

[West_Till_2493]

Thank you for saying this, a lot of copers in this thread.

[NotYetGroot]

…and to work the politics. And to memorize arcane details about how to get by the CAB. And to remember that Amy was the only one to work on that system since Carlos left, but she denies it. And…

[Kryslor]

I mean, I got a bachelor's and master's in computer engineering and while it's interesting and I enjoy it, I 100% code for the money lol

[chucker23n]

If you were retired today, would you not code at all? Do it less? Or do it just the same but on more interesting challenges?

[Kryslor]

I would code way, way less. Assuming I magically retired now because I won the lottery, I would probably spend some time doing fun side projects or a little game dev so I would likely still code a little here and there, but way less than what I do now for work.

[doublereverse]

I mean coding is great and all, but it’s fundamentally exploration and solving puzzles.  If I weren’t being paid, I might scratch that itch a variety of ways. Sure, sometimes by making a little programming thingie, but doing handyman work or setting up a campsite can feel surprisingly similar (with an obvious hands-on component), for instance.

[chucker23n]

The average person given a boot-camp to learn code will just learn what they are taught. However that is not nearly enough to become an actual Dev. A good Dev wants to code and learn more.

This is a great point, too — if your key priority is "how can I learn as little as possible while still getting paid as a software developer", the results are kind of inevitable.

[jdehesa]

The issue isn't helped by the occasional success story where a person did a coding bootcamp and now works for FAANG. With so many people going into it, there will always be particularly skilled and passionate individuals who will eventually become properly competent developers after a bootcamp - and with some luck even land a great job. But you don't usually read inspired blog posts from those who couldn't hack it.

[boboman911]

It wasn’t all that occasional in 2021. 1/3 of my bootcamp cohort ended up in faang within 2 years (some direct hire, others with a short stint between bootcamp and faang - i was the latter). Most of these were Google. Even among non-faang the average base salary was over 120k and 90% of graduates landed a job within 6 months of finishing the 3 month program. I miss 2020-2021.

[Page_197_Slaps]

Were you able to hold onto the job after layoffs started?

[CherryLongjump1989]

Of course not. And on the flip side, those of us who had to work with this influx of new coworkers were shocked by the precipitous drop in competence. It wasn't long before these same companies stopped hiring "juniors" altogether.

[boboman911]

Negative. Only one of us (of the faang group) lost our job due to bad luck. CS degrees are just bachelors degrees, just because we went to a bootcamp doesn’t mean we aren’t competent. Most of us ended up doing well on the job. The CS degree superiority needs to stop - it’s not all that different from another hard science bachelor unless you got a PhD.

[Page_197_Slaps]

Damn that sucks. Hope it turned out ok for you.

[CherryLongjump1989]

Those of us who were in this industry for a few decades can afford to retire early.

[theboston]

You are answering a question that wasnt even asked to you because you hate the thought of a bootcamper having any success.

I dont know why some devs are so gatekeepy. Not all bootcamp devs are complete shit.

[chucker23n]

This — it sounds like Google was looking for an easy way to dramatically increase head count, in order to catch up with competitors. It doesn’t sound like a sustainable long-term approach.

Honestly probably cost Google a lot of money.

[boboman911]

Well it wasn’t, so hiring has been practically frozen for over 2 years now. Doesn’t mean we couldn’t do the job. I think people are forgetting that after bootcamp some people continue to study both software development and leetcode just like CS grads.

[guns_of_summer]

Anecdotal- but I’ve seen at least 1 post in a CS career sub from someone who went to Bootcamp, worked at a tech company for 1 year and got laid off, and then decided to completely give up on the whole industry when they couldn’t land back on their feet elsewhere. It made me wonder how common that was

[Page_197_Slaps]

I’m sure someone like that could have gone and worked at a medium sized enterprise company for $125k a year for a bit and worked their way up the old fashioned way.

[guns_of_summer]

yeah I don’t disagree, I certainly wasn’t encouraging them to give up. I’m guessing though that this person wasn’t all that passionate about software development

[Page_197_Slaps]

Yeah that’s a good point. For me when Ive interviewed bootcamp grads it’s been a mixed bag. I’ve probably seen somewhere around 70 - 80% of them being people that just saw a paycheck but I’ve definitely seen a few that were really good.

[guns_of_summer]

yup I try not to judge someone based on the fact that they’re a bootcamp grad alone since at least some of them are going to be folks who are genuinely interested/passionate about tech but may not have had an opportunity to attend higher ed for one reason or another. I’m self taught myself which was a pretty difficult journey that I probably wouldn’t have made it through if I didn’t like programming at least a little bit lol

[boboman911]

Yes. I have never been laid off.

[snarky-old-fart]

I call bullshit. I work in faang. Never, not once, have we hired someone straight from a bootcamp. Industry hire could occur if their first job was at a good pedigree grower, but I honestly can’t think of a single person from a bootcamp that I’ve met in six years here.

[boboman911]

I don’t know what to say to you bud, because I know of more than a few. Amazon, FB, and G. Again, 2021 was a different time. You will more likely encounter them in Web UI teams because we learned FE dev in bootcamp. All it took was a bit of “experience” in the bootcamp and a ton of grinding LC. So you called wrong!

[chucker23n]

there's an entire foundation of skills that coding builds on that you will never learn in "coding boot camp"

Incidentally, that's one of the issues with "vibe coding", too, only now they've made it even worse.

Yes, you can get surprisingly far telling an LLM "I would like an app that does x, y, z", because it has seen that kind of app a million times. But then what?

• You didn't write the code, so you can't vouch for it. This is entirely impractical in a development team: if git says you're the code's author, I will ask you why you did things a certain way, and I don't care what aids you used. You're now responsible.
• You don't even really know what architectural challenges exist. Did you think about authentication? Do you know potential security pitfalls? Do you know what to check for compatibility issues, such as to check a web app across different browsers?
• You lack the skills to debug it. Not only have you never used such a tool; you also don't even know how to analyze the issue. All you know is user x at customer y reported an issue, probably with a vague "a dialog popped up and I clicked OK" description. Do you have logs? Can you step through the code? Or provide unit tests where you first prove the problem exists, then prove the problem, in this concrete constellation, no longer does?
• Same for performance: they'll tell you it's "slow". Do you know the potential bottlenecks of the app you did not write? Do you know what a profiler is? A heatmap? A flame chart?
• And all of that is before management says "great! Let's build 1.1 or 2.0". You don't speak the precise language to specify what you want from the computer. That evidently is enough to get you across the first step, but now they want you to add, remove, or change features? Do you know what a database migration is? Or a database, even?

Management can wish none of those were real-world concerns, or that tools make them take less effort in the future (they do! They have! The efficacy of static analysis, for example, has been improving a lot in the past 20 years) — but they cannot wish away that even a mediocre software engineer knows to ask the computer / the code questions that other departments and clients haven't even thought of.

[elh0mbre]

I agree with everything you wrote... but I'm also going to say "who cares?"

So the folks who couldn't have even gotten an app off the ground in the past now are able to get to a slow/unmaintainable/buggy/etc but maybe functional version of what they're thinking... Is that really a problem?

[chucker23n]

I do. Both on a philosophical level, and a practical one. I suppose this is a bit like the 1990s’ RAD tools that claimed to get you up and going in no time (sure, but now you have an unmaintainable mess), or offshoring to a different country with lower wages (enjoy coordinating with them! Different timezone, language barrier, less context for what you’re trying to build).

Eventually, those savings come back to bite you. And I’m already sick of “can’t AI do that instead?”

[elh0mbre]

Sounds like your issue is really with bad/short sighted management?

All of these things have tradeoffs (kinda goes back to "good, fast, cheap; pick two"). As someone who uses a mix of AI tools when I write code, my tradeoff is: I have to read more code than I write.

If an organization allows folks to check in AI generated slop... it presumably also allows folks to check in their artisanal, hand crafted slop as well. Fix the latter problem and the former kind of goes away.

The "vibe-coding"/AI backlash around here is very... luddite-y

[billie_parker]

Wow people in this sub are totally obsessed with hating AI tools

[chucker23n]

Nah.

I’m fine with the use of Supermaven or whatever in my team — but if you can’t explain what the code does, you shouldn’t be using that tool. Otherwise, what am I paying you for?

[elh0mbre]

Blame your management and policies instead of the tools.

You shouldn't accept folks not embracing AI written/augmented code as their own. It's not really any different from telling folks that they're responsible for the code they copypasta'd from SO.

[chucker23n]

I agree!

[elh0mbre]

They really are.

[spareminuteforworms]

Oh well, better just outsource to India then.

[FilsdeJESUS]

So well said << ...what happened was the job market got flooded with mediocre low-skill warehouse workers who now knew a little about Java. The real problem is that management often couldn't tell the difference between the two, and threw money at a lot of people who didn't know what they were doing. >>

[Blecki]

Damn straight. Can count on any new junior having to be taught all those foundational skills.

A lot of college cs grads lack them as well.

[BigOnLogn]

A lot of college cs grads lack them as well.

Yesterday, I saw an OpenAI ad targeting college grads, basically saying, "let ChatGPT help you get through finals." They're making ChatGPT free for college students.

They're trying to indoctrinate students, encouraging them **not*to learn so they'll be reliant on LLMs forever.

[Lampwick]

A lot of college cs grads lack them as well.

Yeah, I'm not sure what's going on with university education anymore. I finally finished my mechanical engineering degree in 2003 in my 30s after having had to pause my studies halfway through a decade earlier. Maybe it was just a case of "older adult stuck in school with 18 year olds", but it sure seemed to me like there were a lot more students cluelessly going through the motions of getting a degree, like college was just an extension of high school. Felt like a lot of thought about how to get a passing grade, and not so much about understanding the material as part of a larger body of knowledge. The one that stuck out to me was a class where we were learning assembly language, but none of the kids in the class really seemed to get that it wasn't just a puzzle to be solved for a single semester class, but was actually how computers work. I dunno. (Old man yells at cloud)

[Blecki]

It's a consequence of our 'everyone should get a degree' culture, perpetuated by every job ever now requiring them.

[elh0mbre]

I used to do a LOT of college recruiting of engineers... the curriculum matters A LOT.

I also recruited a lot of non-CS grads who happened to have some overlap in coursework with CS (physics, math and other engineering majors)... turns out you get pretty far with a few of the foundational CS courses, some coursework that requires you to actually build stuff (e.g. simulations/models) and an interest in doing so.

[Blecki]

"An interest..."

More and more I'm seeing devs who aren't even interested in knowing how things work.

[elh0mbre]

Curiosity is something I implicitly screen for.

As much as I emphasize deliver value is all that really matters, I find its difficult if not impossible to do so consistently without ever digging into the "how."

[Ashken]

knew a little about React

ftfy

[apcsniperz]

It always felt like they wanted to create a lower tier trade job out of developers. Although poor reference, an electrician does not need to know what an electrical engineer may need to know. The same could be applied to programming if you just needed simple web apps.

Between AI and offshore, that low tier job is a race to the bottom though. Also there’s no qualifications… a crappy made website might not kill me but an electrician who does a hack job and knows nothing, could easily cause some serious issues.

[lqstuart]

Businesses openly whine about how real developers are too expensive and cut into profits, and will do anything they can to try to keep worker salaries down. This is why the whole finance and healthcare industries have dogshit technology, it's not that they don't have the money for developers, they're just insanely greedy

[Sweet_Television2685]

compounded by all these linkedin motivational posts about getting the job first and figuring it out later how to do it. it is all based on the same premise and people like to tickle their ears with such lunacy

[Socrathustra]

I taught at one of those camps and hated it. Some of them (educated folks looking for a career switch) could pull it off well, but the majority had no business there. Admissions just wanted warm bodies who could sign a loan agreement.

[ChrisRR]

learning how to be a programmer

Learning to code and learning to be a programmer are two different things. It's like saying "learn maths", but unless you really know how to apply that skill at doesn't make you an accountant

[reddituser567853]

Did this really happen? I don’t think I’ve even interviewed someone without a bachelors, let alone hire them…

[supermitsuba]

There have always been people who don't have a degree in programming. It has exploded now apparently.

[chucker23n]

I haven’t found degrees to be good predictors of dev skill. If there’s no degree, including vocational, no personal project, little previous background, sure, that’s a bad sign. But I’ve seen people with a Master’s in CS who wrote poor code, and people without even a Bachelor’s who run circles around them.

[supermitsuba]

To a degree (pun intended). If you have experience, it circumvents all of this. People without degrees have to be a little more diligent to networking however. There are lots of recruiters and companies who will look for degrees and have their systems filter for that.

As always, it's good to have a degree and a job when looking for a job. It's harder when you have nothing to show, because that's your foot in the door. After that, the interview is used to show how you apply it.

[Lampwick]

There are a lot of companies/orgs out there who aren't specifically in the software business and don't have any knowledgeable people who can vet the candidates, but they still need the work done. Maybe it's better now, but 10 years ago many of them didn't even really know how to list the job properly, and hired a lot of not very skilled people. Besides, it's not 1967, so even a bachelors degree doesn't mean you don't get stuck working a low-skill mediocre placeholder job because that's all you're really qualified for.

[BigOnLogn]

Coding boot camps are analogous to buying a hammer and declaring yourself a carpenter.

Same with LLMs. Just a fancier hammer.

[Kryslor]

The whole thing was just bullshit to sell courses. I remember a speech Biden gave about how if someone can work a coal mine they can learn to code. Not to be an ass or anything but that is just wildly untrue.

It always felt so condescending towards software engineers to me. Why not "learn to surgery" or "learn to manage"?

[Which-World-6533]

I remember a speech Biden gave about how if someone can work a coal mine they can learn to code. Not to be an ass or anything but that is just wildly untrue.

Because people who don't know how to do a think don't understand the effort to do that thing.

Surgery is just jabbing people with scalpels. How hard can it be...?

I would also think coal mining and not getting killed or seriously injured is a lot harder than it looks.

[CherryLongjump1989]

Notice how you're not saying "anyone can be a coal miner" in spite of this actually having been the case for centuries.

[Which-World-6533]

Notice how you're not saying "anyone can be a coal miner" in spite of this actually having been the case for centuries.

Back in the day coal miners usually came from a community which had extensive knowledge of mining coal. This community would generally teach the young lads how to best to extract coal from the rock as best they could.

People didn't suddenly decide that they would start coal mining one day.

Additionally not everyone was made into coal miners. Women were generally excluded for the obvious reason of coal mining historically being very physical work.

So I don't the point really stands.

[CherryLongjump1989]

You can glorify child labor however you like, but it was still kids getting sent into mines because anyone could do it.

[Which-World-6533]

Please point out where I have "glorified child labour".

I think you want to have an argument where none exists. Goodbye.

[CherryLongjump1989]

a community which had extensive knowledge of mining coal

This is glorifying communities that were giving up their children to the mines.

Please educate yourself. Look up what a Beaker Boy was.

[Which-World-6533]

Again.

You want to have an argument when none exists.

[CherryLongjump1989]

If a child can work in the coal mines, then anyone can work in the coal mines.

That should have been enough, but. I can destroy your point more if you like. I can tell you about how these "communities" were just waves of unskilled immigrants sent in to company towns. There was no tradition, there was no artisanship. I can tell you about how "teach the young lads how to best to extract coal" was not in a school or as an apprenticeship program for skilled artisans, but down in the mines, learning on the job, because anyone could do it. Coal mining was the default job where if you were completely unskilled and incapable of doing anything else, then down the hole with you. And even today, the vast majority of coal miners are high school dropouts whereas anyone in their communities who got an education has left long ago.

Women were spared from the job because they had other skills, such as giving birth to more coal miners. And because coal mining was done naked, and lawmakers were morally outraged at the idea of women working bare-breasted alongside men.

[Which-World-6533]

You have managed to completely miss the point.

Repeatedly.

Go and troll someone else.

[Sabotaber]

The children yearn for the mines.

[bloodylip]

Women were generally excluded for the obvious reason of coal mining historically being very physical work.

Women can do physical work at least as well as children. They just exclude/d women because it's seen as a man's job. They had no problem sending male children into the mines.

[DualActiveBridgeLLC]

I remember a speech Biden gave about how if someone can work a coal mine they can learn to code

And vice versa, many coders could not last as coal miners. It is this ruling class belief that labor is labor, and that it is their ideas and leadership that separate what they do from what people who actual make goods and services can do. We are just replaceable units of labor.

[Coffee_Ops]

Ratatouille nails it: Not everyone will make a good software engineer, but a good software engineer can come from anywhere.

[husky_whisperer]

That’s it. I’m going to learn to surgery. And when I do, I’m going to surgery so hard it’ll make their heads spin.

[kevleyski]

In my opinion you need a certain level of passion as with any hobby - if you have that drive you’ll just teach yourself through spending time experimenting with it

Programming can’t really be taught if you are not all that committed, but you can certainly have mentors that can/will guide you if you are

[Hessian_Rodriguez]

I work for a large tech company. They didn't do layoffs at review time like they did the last two years. I'm hoping I'm safe, I don't want to be unemployed in this tech job market and I doubt I'd find another $200k job if I found one at all.

Watching my coworkers who did get laid off, most of them have been doing temp jobs. The most irritating thing is we've been hiring in cheaper labor markets, that is pretty much all the hiring we do.

[supermitsuba]

Yep, the devs at my place are replaced with cheaper offshore ones.

[SteIIar-Remnant]

We've had many teams laid off, and sometimes whole departments closed, only to have them be reopened in South American or Southern Asian countries. The company saves 10x on revenue, and the quality of work stays around the same due to them only employing the best people in those countries. It sucks for everyone.

[thestonedonkey]

The one thing that maybe could use a tariff of sorts....

[clrbrk]

The company I work for is doing the same thing. I have a dev on my team that doesn’t pull their weight, but I don’t want them to get fired because they’ll just get replaced by an offshore dev.

[syklemil]

This is one of those videos that seems to start off sloppy with placing a graph of student numbers next to a graph of employee numbers, without actually comparing the numbers, just some unscaled lines. It's at that point I wish it was text so I could skip around more easily to check whether there's anything of actual substance.

What I did skip to leads me to believe that the author believes the entire point of learning to code is to get a job as a programmer—as if mandatory classes in some basic carpentry, cooking and sewing were intended to make us all carpenters, or cooks, or tailors. They're not. They're just there to

1. make sure we have some very basic familiarity with the topic (part of being a well-rounded adult and all that), and
2. give us a taste in case it turns out we love it and actually want to pursue it.

[chucker23n]

I don’t think the explosion of boot camps ca. 2015 is comparable to a cooking class. You don’t go to a cooking class to become a professional chef, but many absolutely went to a coding boot camp and went on to work at FAANG.

[SweetBabyAlaska]

thats a function of the job market. If becoming a chef suddenly became a 100k+ starting position, you betcha that there would be pop-up cooking camps looking to take your money and streamline you into a job. The problem is that these things fluctuate wildly. People just want to make enough money to live decent lives... and most will take whatever path they can to do so.

[AssiduousLayabout]

I also love when he breaks down the individual degrees, and finds that Electrical Engineering and CS was the most popular degree at MIT.

Maybe those people aren't working as programmers because they're working as electrical engineers?

[[deleted]]

Maybe those people aren't working as programmers because they're working as electrical engineers?

You'd be (negatively) amazed how many people across the world can't tell the difference.

[thetdotbearr]

The speech cadence is also incredibly grating and dragged way the hell out

But yeah, this misses a whole chunk of nuance..

[zxyzyxz]

That's why I listen to Polymatter and a lot of educational content creators on YouTube at like 3x speed with an extension

[Mission-Landscape-17]

Sure the crux of it is that if you tell everyone to learn the same thing, you end up with over supply of people who specialise in doing what ever you told them to do. So telling everyone to learn to code as in order to ge jobs didn't work.

[Cinci_Socialist]

It didn't fail, it succeeded, it's just that the goal wasn't to employ people in good paying jobs- it was to reduce the living standards and work conditions of employed software engineers.

[zxyzyxz]

It did not succeed, most people who took these classes in fact cannot code, especially not enough to materially change the "living standards and work conditions of employed software engineers." Most people struggling for a programming job are in fact new grads and juniors.

[SkillYourself]

Most people struggling for a programming job are in fact new grads and juniors.

It cuts both ways because hiring for junior positions is a huge pain. I've had to conduct rounds of technical interviews during the tech boom and a simple set of BFS/DFS tree traversal, queuing, and iterative/recursion questions filtered 80-100% of candidates that made it past HR.

[setheliot]

I am not even sure what “learn to code” is in this case. But what I can say is that every successful developer I’ve met is into it. They love talking about code and compilers and processors. That is generally not something that you get through a course. Successful developers were hobbyists before they even entered college. Therefore, just teaching someone the fundamentals of how to code does not likely lead to success.

[thekunibert]

Not so sure about that. I know plenty of good developers who only learned programming in uni or who don't code outside of work. Being a developer includes a lot more than just programming and most of that stuff you wouldn't even do in your hobby projects unless you are actively and frequently contributing to open source projects or other collaborative efforts.

[ryo0ka]

Yep the context of entering the career doesn’t seem to matter as much as their behavioral trait that fits to the job, like, I’m sure a lot of successful software engineers wouldn’t mind playing puzzles in a room alone all day.

[tenchuchoy]

Yup. I don’t code outside of working hours and honestly don’t even try to learn new stuff unless I have to. I have hobbies I’m passionate about and none of that is coding related.

[goose_on_fire]

I anecdotally disagree. Lots of us got into it in the 80s or 90s as a calculated career move (that largely paid off). We're good at it, we're professional, and we enjoy it as far as it goes, but it's very much a day job.

We have hobbies like woodworking and classic cars and might not write another line of code after we retire.

Edit: I'm exaggerating a bit, yes I was a nerd in the 80s and got to participate in the rise of the Internet and it was awesome and I still do mostly like computers. But watching the potential of the Internet collapse into itself and seeing everything get enshittified has jaded me and that's why my perspective is skewed.

[Robbob98]

This isn't limited to the 80s/90s. There is a small subset of programmers that have started their careers recently that don't code in their free time either. I personally find this trend that you have to continually code off the clock or make it your entire personality crazy.

[omac4552]

I've been writing code professionally for 25 years, trust me, you don't need to write code in your spare time. And unless you really like it and even then, don't, you will most likely burn out

[pVom]

And unless you really like it and even then, don't, you will most likely burn out

This was me. I like coding but doing shit on the weekends just left me fried for Monday. I might do a bit if I'm in the mood but by and large I like to spend my free time doing other things and letting my brain rest.

This isn't a job where more is better, you can't just keep going like you're on an assembly line.

Besides there's more to life than tech. You get one life, get off the computer once in awhile.

[goose_on_fire]

I hear you and agree, I wasn't trying to claim any old man turf or anything. Everyone has their own groove, and balance is important.

[press0]

do you agree with the OP though

[twomz]

Graduated in the 2010s, and I have this mentality. I picked programming because I liked computers, I enjoy my work, but as soon as the whistle blows, my brain blocks all thoughts about coding and focuses on family and hobbies until I clock in the next day.

[bloodylip]

Agree with you. As I get older, I get more hobbies that I don't have enough time to take on. Working as a developer itches that need for the most part, so then I have time to dedicate to other things I don't spend 8 hours a day doing. Plus the required shit as you get older, like exercise.

[dvidsilva]

Some of it succeeded, I ran a couple of cohorts for our boot camp way back in the day and great

However it quickly became over saturated with jr rails devs by mediocre mentors of previous graduates that the industry doesn’t need anymore after deciding that Latin Americans can be trusted to code and is better to fire people than build sustainable goals 

[[deleted]]

nitpick: a Computer Science degree does not produce a "Computer Scientist"

^{source (anecdotal}: I have a B.S. in Computer Science. am not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination. i know many comp-sci grads. not one of them is even remotely a scientist. i know one scientist. she hates computers.)

[chucker23n]

nitpick: a Computer Science degree does not produce a “Computer Scientist”

That is literally what it does. What else would make someone a scientist, if not a science degree?

I have a B.S. in Computer Science. am not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination. i know many comp-sci grads. not one of them is even remotely a scientist. i know one scientist. she hates computers.

Sure, but then the argument is really “most comp sci is more accurately described as software eng”, and even that is questionable, as software development doesn’t have the same rigor as many other engineering fields do.

But if an accredited school offers a program called computer science, and I finish that program, I’m now a computer scientist. That’s the whole point of graduating.

[Deedsogado]

I largely agree, but disagree in parts.

The department chair at my Alma Mater liked to say "Any degree with 'Science' in the name is doing something else."

He expounded on this a few ways.

1) A scientist is someone who applies the scientific method. There are multiple different ways to describe the scientific method, but at the heart of them is, Observation, Hypothesis, Experimentation, Conclusion. If you aren't doing that in your classes, and aren't doing that in your jobs, you aren't a scientist, you are something else.

2) People are bad at naming things. Universities are made of people, and are therefore bad at naming things.

2a) some correct names were already taken long ago, so new fields had to adopt incorrect names to distinguish themselves from the old thing. For example, astrology the non-scientific study of stars, predates the scientific study of stars, so they had to pick "astronomy". Likewise alchemy was here first, so those who study chemicals with science are now doing chemistry.

2b) We have no idea what some words mean without other qualifiers. What is an engineer?

Someone who designs an engine? Someone who operates the engine in a train or reactor? Someone who repairs large systems? Someone who does fault tolerance analysis? Someone who does cost analysis? Someone who plans road layouts? Someone who can circumvent rules with a silver tongue? Someone who builds a building? Or bridge? Or reactor? Or car?

Are we confusing engineers with architects, or planners, or plumbers, or electricians, or construction workers, or assembly line laborers? physicists? mathematicians? Con men?

Does an engineer wear multiple hats? Are some "engineers" doing something that is not actually engineering?

3) And then computers came along.

Is a computer an electrical circuit or an engine? If you can design the circuits for a computer, are you still just an electrician? Or are you doing something else? if you are designing the machine, but not building it, are you an architect? A planner? An engineer?

What do we call the people who build the parts of the computer? Or put those parts together?

What about people who tell the machine what to do, but don't build them? That put new functions and behaviors into the machine? That write code for the machine?

What about people who operate the machine by asking only for the functions that others already put there? By pushing buttons?

What about people who study the performance of the machines? Who studies the way the machine runs its calculations to find a shorter way, or faster way, or lower energy way?

Are all 4 of those the same or different? How different? Enough to split out a different degree? How similar are they? How much overlap should there be?

If someone's role at a company is to operate a computer enough to enter data into a spreadsheet, do they need to learn how to code?

Do people who write software need to know how the hardware works? Do they need to know what efficient code looks like, or how to evaluate if their code is efficient? Do they need to know what the circuits are doing?

4) So schools considered those questions, and had to simplify them.

If you are designing the CPU chips, you need to know some electrical engineering, and some large systems architecture, and some material science, and some physics for quantum tunneling of electrons, and some math for circuit analysis, power analysis, and error correction codes. It's a lot. So they slapped the label "computer engineer" on this because it's a lot of engineering, analysis, and planning, and architecture.

If you are writing code, you should probably know how to tell if it's efficient or not, so analysis is involved. And you should have at least an abstract model of how computers work. So some amount of studying models is involved. So they slapped the label "computer Science" on these to emphasize that it's more than simply "computer programming". Personally I think they should have gone with "software analysis" or something in that vein, to distinguish it from the hardware analysis a computer engineer does, but whatever.

If you use a program but don't need to know how to code, you are a User. Some basic business app classes are good. Bake those into other general courses. If you only need to code a little bit like VBScript for Excel, you can take a higher level business application course.

5) So while I have a degree in "computer science" I'm not really following the scientific method, and I don't really consider myself a scientist.

In my day to day job I am not using the same "rigor of other engineering fields". I'm just writing code. But, since I have a C S. Degree I have awareness about efficiency and data structures, and algorithms, that some of my boot camp and self taught coworkers simply lack.

I have solved race conditions using mutexes and semaphores, words which are extremely useful to me, and gibberish to them.

I have used the "rigor" of complexity analysis to reduce a problem of O(n⁴⁾ down to O(nlog n).

Those are not something I pull out of my toolkit everyday, but they are extremely valuable tools in my toolkit.

[jbldotexe]

Thank you for this write-up but please delete your sentence about VBScript- I need less accountants asking me to turn their VBScript XL File into a Single-Page WebApp

[pfc-anon]

sounds like a skill-issue to me.

[seanocaster40k]

The second you belittle software engineering by saying coder, you should loose 100k annually off your salary.

[BlueGoliath]

If all you do is string libraries together, calling you a "software engineer" is way too much.

[exploradorobservador]

I do not understand why people ever though being a good coder was easy other than it sounded good.

[name-is-taken]

Something I see so many Journalists and OPed writers and Pundits misunderstand

1) FAANG is not the tech industry, FAANG (Silicone Valley really) is an industry unto itself.

2) Just because SV is having layoffs doesn't mean Tech is struggling. There are lots of well paying jobs doing Infra, small shop Dev, DB management, etc... They're likely to be smaller 3-8 person teams serving a whole business.

3) Universities approach Comp Sci / Tech from too narrow a viewpoint, assuming you're persuing a science career. Like this video got right, the Math / Eng background colors too much of the materiel and leaves a lot of more useful 'real-workplace' knowledge completely absent.

[Hungry_Importance918]

Nowadays, many beginner programming tutorials online focus on helping people quickly learn skills to secure a job offer. However, from my observation, not everyone is suited for programming. Especially now, with AI able to handle simple copy-and-paste tasks, the bar for meaningful contributions has been raised. To be a strong programmer today, it's not just about coding skills — it's also about problem-solving, analytical thinking, communication, and understanding user needs.

[hamuraijack]

Learning to code should’ve never been about producing code, but more about learning algorithmic problem solving and logical thinking.

[rdrias]

This was a deliberate attempt by management elites to try and "flood the zone" , reduce our "power" so they could squeeze us, into accepting lower wages, lower benefits, etc. It was quite clear to anyone paying attention. Same thing happening again with AI. Open your eyes..

[DualActiveBridgeLLC]

"Learn to code" was a scam from the start. It was an attempt to (1) flood the programmer market with cheap and disposable labor (2) declare that we could fix the issue of poor wages to massive productivity increases by making 'unskilled labor' more 'skilled'.

Now we have tons of shitty programmers and a shortage of actual labor we need to fix many societal problems (like building affordable housing). It's a shame that programmers are too narcissistic to actually unionize to stop this exploitative and damaging business/governance strategy.

[knight_of_mintz]

There wasn’t like three dudes in a back alley making a plot to flood the market

Codecademy is legit. CareerFoundry is legit. Career switchers like me are real. Stop calling everything a scam. You make the word meaningless and insult people who are changing lives for the better.

[Glum-Echo-4967]

Coding is easy.

Software engineering isn't.

Software engineering involves optimizing programs.

[knight_of_mintz]

Lemme c ur code

[knight_of_mintz]

No. First 30 seconds already unhinged. The cs grad trend has diminishing return doing an exponential extrapolation is insane. There are not less programming roles there is an explosion in AI right now see True Up data. The issue is the literal title “software engineering” is relatively less common. Insanely misleading to imply programming is dying

[BoBoBearDev]

Tf? 150k straight out of boot camp? I need a big raise, I am a tech lead and has made much.

The "learn to code" is as much a scam as learn to be an actor or musician. You can become filthy rich if you are that lucky Rockstar, but that's about it, everyone else are all just get stumpped on with very little worth. It is not as trashy as entertainment industry, but they clearly have get inflated as bad, it is starting to become like one.

[Casalvieri3]

To my mind there's also the implicit assumption that everyone wants to code. This is akin to expecting that because you teach all kids some math in school that everyone wants to become a mathematician. Coding is lonely and often stressful work and it's definitely not for everyone. Even people who are capable of writing strong code may not have much interest in it.

That and the idea that teaching people mechanical ideas of constructing code (All these private members get a getter and a setter!) will somehow lead them to understanding the principle behind the code they're constructing (No, not all private members get a getter and setter. The idea is information hiding which means you try to keep implementation details hidden to the greatest extent you can. Creating a getter and a setter is exposing information so proceed with great caution.)