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NYC Mayor Bloomberg Vows To Learn To Code In 2012
theodp writes "New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced his intention to take a coding class in 2012 via Twitter ('My New Year's resolution is to learn to code with Codecademy in 2012! Join me.'). So, is this just a PR coup for Codeacademy, or could EE grad (Johns Hopkins, '64) Bloomberg — who parlayed the $10 million severance he received after being fired as head of systems development at Solomon Brothers into his $19.5 billion Bloomberg L.P. fortune — actually not know how to program? Seems unlikely, but if so, perhaps Bloomberg should just apply to be a Bloomberg Summer 2012 Software Development intern — smart money says he'd get the gig!"
So? Just beacuse you manage a department doesn't mean you can do the work they are doing. He was there to manage people, not code.. a vastly different skill set.
Sure, its nice if you can do the job of your people, so you can have a deeper understanding of what is going on, but its not a requirement.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Common in the 60s: Punch cards, text only dumb terminals, mainframes...
Common Now: Online storage, visual designers, client/server setups....
If your knowledge of computers ends in the 60s. there's a lot of updating to be done. Mayor Bloomberg has the right idea... every 10 years or so it's time to retrain to the current tools.
If you look at just about all tech companies, the person who got it going was the sales guy. In some cases the tech guy is also a great salesman - Larry Ellison of Oracle or Zuckerberg of Facebook - actually, FB is just a marketing data collection company.
In my years in software development, I've seen some really great ideas and implementations just get burried because the geek didn't know how to sell it's value.
All the tech bigshots knew how or knew someone who knew how to sell the value of their stuff.
Wozniak had the luck of having God's gift of salesmenship, Steve Jobs, as his friend. All the gazillionaire techies had someone with them that had the contacts and sales ability to take their idea and make it into something.
"Build a better mousetrap and the World will beat a path to your door" is a lie. The countless examples of inferior technology ruling the marketplace is proof.
The MBA's still think you can describe a piece of software in Word, and then it's a trivial process to make the software that customers want. Informal language is desirable to humans because it supports leaving out details - which is exactly what makes it useless for programming a computer.
That's because software *is* the description of what the computer should do. Check this great article: http://www.osnews.com/story/22135/The_Problem_with_Design_and_Implementation
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