Tech Leaders Encourage Teaching Schoolkids How To Code

rtoz writes "Code.org has released infographics and a video to explain why students should be taught to code in school. They've gathered support from leaders in politics and the tech industry. Mark Zuckerberg says, 'Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find. There just aren't enough people who are trained and have these skills today.' Former U.S. President Bill Clinton adds, 'At a time when people are saying, "I want a good job – I got out of college and I couldn't find one," every single year in America, there is a standing demand for 120,000 people who are training in computer science.' Bill Gates said, 'Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.' Google's Eric Schmidt is looking beyond first-world countries: 'For most people on Earth, the digital revolution hasn't even started yet. Within the next 10 years, all that will change. Let's get the whole world coding!'" Part of the standing demand for computer science jobs may be influenced by bad policies from tech companies, like Yahoo's ban on working from home.

Comments

Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Animats]

More "we want cheap labor trained with tax dollars" whining from industry. If there were a shortage of programmers, salaries would be going up. They're not.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't understand! Companies demand lower costs. Demand for programmers wages is to go down~

Yes, that's a sarcasm tag.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. If there was a shortage, people wouldn't be getting fired for being over 30. People who actually can program wouldn't be blown off for interviews after applying because they didn't have every keyword on their resume. Just more justification for more H1Bs into the country to pay them next to nothing.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[erroneus]

Exactly what I was thinking. /discussion

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't refuse programming jobs because they didn't learn how to do it in grade school.

People refuse programming jobs because they hate programming, and don't want to deal with the regular long hours, stress, and complete lack of job security that programming comes with.

Teaching more kids to program won't produce more people who want to do it for a living, but feel free to try.

Making the job worth learning the skill for, on the other hand, will motivate people (old and young) to self-educate. Of course...that might cost something....

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

More "we want cheap labor trained with tax dollars" whining from industry. If there were a shortage of programmers, salaries would be going up. They're not.

India will provide all the programmers the world need.

American citizens will be forced to provide cheap services to our Chinese overlords.

The national debt is not going anywhere good.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people are capable of being programmers, but they aren't capable of being good programmers. Most people just weren't born with the level of intelligence necessary to be such a thing, and evidence of this is everywhere.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Salaries have been going up steadily in this arena for the past two years. Software Engineering is just about the only industry that has.

Having said that, if they really wanted to solve the problem, they'd try to educate Human Resources better, and encourage more on the job training instead of refusing to hire anybody without 6 years of experience in a technology that only emerged last year.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[crazyjj]

Here's a video to show you how tech companies in the U.S. today "recruit" American programmers.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

And as the pool of "qualified labour" expands wages will be suppressed to the point of "will code for a hot meal" will be the norm on every street corner.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[DiSKiLLeR]

There's PLENTY of job security in programming (and all tech jobs) and salaries HAVE been going up.

You're just living in the wrong place.

America is not a country that has job security. Go to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, anywhere in Europe, and enjoy plenty of holidays, great pay and great job security.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[ShanghaiBill]

More "we want cheap labor trained with tax dollars" whining from industry.

By extending your logic, we shouldn't have public schools at all.

If there were a shortage of programmers, salaries would be going up.

No, they would only be going up if the shortage was getting worse.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[ColdWetDog]

,,,, they'd try to educate Human Resources better ...

You first. Talk about an impossible engineering project.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[hackula]

This. I am convinced that swarms of "programmers" who gripe every time this subject comes up have not been in the programming job market in 10 years plus. Saying you cannot get through the HR filter is total BS. Any competent programmer knows how to put the right stuff on their resume to get hired. It takes like 20 minutes to add a few keywords to your resume and it takes about 20 minutes of wikipedia per BS keyword to get through an interview. Most interviews are dumbed down to the extreme anyways, since its so difficult to find programmers that you really cannot afford to scare any away. The outsourcing stuff is BS too since most programming involves proprietary data and there is no way in hell that most companies are going to put that in the hands of someone in India or China.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

Please spare me your Spencerian rhetoric. The notion that ability is fully innate has been so thoroughly debunked that it's not even funny anymore.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Woodmeister]

I kinda hate to point out the hole in your logic, but while ability is not innate, stupidity certainly seems to be so.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[AshtangiMan]

I think the biggest change is that people in many fields will be using programming as a tool in their non-programming job. This is already the case, but it is largely informal. Computers as a job tool for everyone are going to move far beyond the office suite, and kids who don't know how to program are going to be less able to compete and contribute in general.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Kataire]

More "we want cheap labor trained with tax dollars" whining from industry. If there were a shortage of programmers, salaries would be going up. They're not.

More like a recruiting video to try to hire every last programmer who hasn't gotten drained by addiction to a video game.

Frankly, I've never seen an office as Stepford as the ones in that video.

I don't know any kid who would look at any office I've worked at in the past 20 years & get that excited about it.

So programmers who can get into a country club like that are gonna go there, and the rest of the world is gonna have to pay those four or five companies for our services. :)

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[MickyTheIdiot]

I am still trying to understand why this video still hasn't stirred up a national controversy.

Of course the corporate media have reasons to ignore it. CNN, for instance, has admitted to hiring *journalists* on H1-B visas. There is no reason to do that except as a cheep labor ploy.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

May be true.

But the fact remains: If you are alive today, and you DON'T know:

1. how to use the internet to exchange information anonymously
2. how to program a computer
3. what is happening in the world (contrast with what you are being told is happening in the world)

then you are doing yourself a MASSIVE disservice, one that is difficult to over state.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[jgrahn]

I think the biggest change is that people in many fields will be using programming as a tool in their non-programming job. This is already the case, but it is largely informal. Computers as a job tool for everyone are going to move far beyond the office suite [...]

I certainly hope so, because people are in many ways treating computers as typewriters (and TVs). Lots of boring stuff is done manually or (worse) not done at all, because noone bothered to write a commercial utility to automate it. Or because it's a one-off thing.

This is where the traditional Unix approach shines. The everyday interactive interface is also the programming interface. There's no false dichotomy between programmers and users.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[hackula]

Not a single one of my clients would be able to hire someone from India, since it would be perceived as a huge security risk. Not to mention, practically everyone who hires programmers has been burned at one point or another from an exceptionally bad outsourced project. In the west we know how to write some DailyWTF style shit, but if you are not specifically dictating every spec requirement to an Indian firm, it will probably be a terrible experience. Code monkeys will lose there jobs. Real programmers who know how to design quality systems and deal with clients professionally and effectively are not going anywhere.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

And those that find it hateful will more likely use it to exploit systems.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[hackula]

This has never been a problem for me. In most places you tell HR you want to hire someone for X position. They ask you what the requirements and nice-to-haves are. They clean it up and put it in a posting. When people respond, they forward it on to you so you can ask them to schedule an interview or not. The HR filter is largely a myth, or at least not really HR's fault. You think the HR person really listed: "C#, Java, Python, FoxPro, Netbeans" under the requirements? Hell no! They don't know what a single one of those things are. It's the manager that defines that sort of stuff. Dumb requirements == dumb tech managers. Also, most companies who list 10 obscure things under the requirements will usually interview someone with a reasonably comparable tech stack. I have been on both ends, and this has been my experience anyway.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[ottothecow]

This. A million times this.

I don't know why all of the top comments on this article are from people whining about the job market and complaining that employers just want free training (lets be honest, all schooling is just free training for employers, its not like calls for better math or science education aren't a result of the fact that those are the key jobs that need to be filled).

If people are going to be using computers to do 95% of their job, they are bound to run across situations where a little looping script or macro would be very helpful. They don't know how to do this now, or they are scared of it, because they never learned how to do it or they saw it as college level material and even if they briefly encountered it, they don't think they know enough about it to save any time with programming. If there was a little more education in grade school, a bit of coding might end up like basic math. A 27 year old office drone might freak out when they see calculus, but they are probably not going to have to ask for help with more basic math if they end up having to do a little bit of arithmetic. They've been doing it all of their life and even if they don't like it, it is familiar--they are probably going to go open up excel, crunch some numbers, and then get back to their regular work.

Besides, it won't even be that helpful for companies who want real software developers. You don't hire someone as a statistician because they took AP statistics in high school. That person will have a better understanding of stats than the layperson (and be better off for it), but they don't have the serious education needed for a job. The most benefit for true software companies (where they need developers who understand algorithms and data structures, not people who know how to batch process some documents) might be the few extra kids who discover they enjoy programming who wouldn't have figured it out on their own with a TI-83.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

No shortage, eh? Then what can be said about Zynga: Zynga Announces More Job Cuts

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Synerg1y]

Based on your logic, I can't wait for sales to get access to the prod databases. Update without a where anyone? But no, I'd never let a non-programmer program on any of my systems, end of story, nor will that ever change, nor am i exceptional in that view, sorry bye.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Synerg1y]

The 10% vs the 90%? :)

And yes, I have yet to see a competent line of code come out of that country, and I'm probably approaching a million. Not sure what the problem is, but even if the 1% of projects out of india that do succeed make it to production, there's the maintenance costs.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[dgatwood]

Some ability is learned, but some ability is innate. Programming is a skill with a rather unique requirement: the ability to quickly learn and retain lots of information. Where the average person can easily memorize a seven-digit phone number, most good programmers have memorized pi out to at least 15+ decimal places.

The reason this is important should be obvious to anyone who has ever sat down to debug a problem with an 80,000 line piece of software. To do it right, need to be able to instantly recall how the big pieces fit together just so you can know the likely places to begin looking for the problem. Then you have to be able to quickly recall how each of those pieces works in order to understand whether it is doing what it should be doing.

To a degree, good high-level code architecture documentation and good function-level documentation can alleviate some of that need, but at some point, you still have to be able to look at a function that is a hundred lines long (or, in the case of one spectacularly complex function that I work with regularly, almost 5,500 lines long, though admittedly it is mostly a giant switch statement, and each functional piece is only tens of lines long) and be able to efficiently construct a hierarchical model of how the code functions, beginning from a high-level view and progressing to greater and greater levels of exactness as you close in on the problem.

That level of mental ability can't be taught. Your brain can either handle a problem with a very large and complex scope or it can't. If it can't, you can be a passable programmer for small projects (and that's good enough for a lot of things), but you won't ever be a great programmer.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

Or simply realize the rules of man do not apply. Your money means nothing to me. I'm entered the next level of existence. You may join me if you wish. Come on in, the water is fine.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[AshtangiMan]

I can't tell if you're trolling or not. I have never held a job where I wasn't doing some kind of programming, and I only was a programmer by job title for about a year and a half. Most of the time I was writing code in C, fortran, and scripting languages to help me with the automatable or problem solving parts of various jobs.

The fact that I grew up peeking and poking the hell out of my early commodore and apple computers certainly helped. I think the paradigm of desktop computer went away from that because in the 80s and 90s the bulk of the workforce had never used a computer and so it became the glorified typewriter, reinforced by the way you worked with the MS and apple machines (ie, no longer was the user interface also the programming interface).

But any of the people (none of whom were programmers) I spent years working with that were doing simulation on Sun and SGI machines quickly learned at the very least c-shell scripting along with grep/sed/awk and then perl so that they could do more of their job and less of the data reduction tasks. There should always be protocol for the area to which you refer, but I'm talking about something else entirely.

The point is that the usefulness of knowing how to program goes far beyond the commercial and corporate software development worlds.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Kelbear]

Some ability is learned, some is innate, but the key thing to remember here is that the difference is not known without enough education to explore unrecognized potential.

Personally, I think programming should indeed be a part of school curriculum, even if only to a lowly introductory level. Because as the world grows increasingly complex and reliant upon the "magic" of software solutions. It becomes more and more important to have a working knowledge of how these solutions are developed, key inputs, constraints, potential applications. All programmers have to talk to a non-programmer at some point and have to explain away some of that non-programmers nonsensical expectations. They don't need to be an expert, but it helps to know what tech is capable of, and what it really takes to make a good product. Maybe they'll know that they really to think through their original project request in robust detail in terms of how they'll really use it in practical application, and put that stuff into the first plan, rather than passing down change orders that get increasingly more difficult the later they come in development. That basic background knowledge helps get everyone on the same page. I mean, I don't really need history in my day-to-day life, but it certainly wasn't a waste of my time.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[0xdeadbeef]

Yes, but then again, who do these people think they're going to convince to become programmers? There are already plenty of programmers who aren't competent enough to get past HR, so why are they assuming that by sexing up the career to kids, they're going to end up with a crop of graduates who will be more competent than these existing people who got into of their own initiative but can't get hired?

It's like they're pretending there is this legion of programming savants out there, who would be programmers if only someone showed them computers existed and could be programmed!

Nope, this is not about shortages. This is about driving down salaries.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

Could part of the problem be that many companies are looking to stop using full time employees and move to contractors? I moved to the LA area about a year ago and a good deal of the agencies that contacted me after posting my resume were looking for contractors. The main problem here is they want a large cut of the contract - what if they didn't? Would salaries go up? Definitely.

I went to SCALE 11 this weekend and I had a person give me his business card for tugboattech.com, which claims high contractor rates, stating they give the highest pay. I checked out the site and they claim to give the IT contractor a minimum of 75% of the final contract. I've emailed them to find out and they replied that was the case - they're new and trying to partner with new companies, but I submitted my resume - I've always asked per other's directions most who called me what the rate was they were getting paid and no one was willing to tell me. I'm positive I'm getting screwed with my current staffing agency...

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Synerg1y]

I think the biggest change is that people in many fields will be using programming as a tool in their non-programming job. This is already the case, but it is largely informal

My point to you is this isn't and will never be true as far as jobs are concerned.

When you say that I think of Joe from sales, and I think about how I'd never let anybody from that department have even a little bit more access than they need to.

Maybe you're thinking scripting or something? Even so, I'd never let anybody run an untested script, or untested code. If it's coming from a non-programmer I may not even justify QC time for it. Now, if as an admin, you write a script that say starts a certain service across a datacenter as part of an update, I wouldn't call that programming, I'd call that scripting to be clear (and you'd still have to test it). I like to think of programs as something produced through a compiler (web dev exception!)

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[K. S. Kyosuke]

More "we want cheap labor trained with tax dollars" whining from industry. If there were a shortage of programmers, salaries would be going up. They're not.

This is not about programmers in the traditional sense. This is about general computer education. It's difficult for people to effectively use computers if they don't understand that the computer is the most general information-processing tool, why is that so and how does that work. In the general population, there are only few subtle hints of people actually treating computers in this way, one of them being the versatile use of spreadsheet applications, but otherwise, you don't get the impression that people grok computers. Even if you don't end up as a full-time programmer, it will make your life in a computerized world easier.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If there was a shortage, people wouldn't be getting fired for being over 30. People who actually can program wouldn't be blown off for interviews after applying because they didn't have every keyword on their resume.

People like Alan Kay keep pointing out that this is not about you knowing or not knowing Java or Cobol. This is about the vast majority of programmers (and their superiors) suffering from extreme tunnel vision, leading to the absolutely atrocious software ecosystem that we have to live with right now, negating most of the progress made by HW folks ("SW is getting slower faster than HW gets faster"). Kay and his buddies are trying to bring some remedy in form of their research at VPRI.

No matter how many pages you have on your resume, in their words, the things you're doing in your job are like "driving a car by looking into the rear mirror all the time". The world needs people unspoilt by the idea that a useful software system needs to have millions of lines of code with enlessly repeated functionality and impredance-matching boilerplate everywhere. Otherwise, no progress is possible. For that, you absolutely need young people.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If people are going to be using computers to do 95% of their job, they are bound to run across situations where a little looping script or macro would be very helpful. They don't know how to do this now, or they are scared of it, because they never learned how to do it or they saw it as college level material and even if they briefly encountered it, they don't think they know enough about it to save any time with programming.

Or because software currently in widespread use is violently hostile to being extended or programmatically re-used by ordinary users (just comparing, say, current office suites with, e.g., Smalltalk systems from the 1980 illustrates my point brilliantly.)

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Based on your logic, I can't wait for sales to get access to the prod databases. Update without a where anyone?

That just shows how idiotic the current interfaces are, not that the idea per se in flawed.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

Spare me your Spencerian cursive- it is thoroughly unreadable!

I prefer Comic Sans.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

They are going up... for talented programmers. I make $220k not including a 20% performance bonus at the end of year, 5 weeks vacation, $20k / year to spend on training/travel/expenses, and all the traditional workplace benefits.

I have several friends with base salaries also in the $200k range, with one over $300k.

If all you can write are crappy c# apps or shitty python code, then yeah, your pay will stagnate.

My job is to highly optimize c/c++ code to a degree that accounts for CPU L1 cache size, IO latency, and overall system load. I would expect 5% of programmers to be able to do what I do and am thus paid well for it.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

Where the average person can easily memorize a seven-digit phone number, most good programmers have memorized pi out to at least 15+ decimal places.

Oh, fucking spare us the "Programmer as Ubermensch" bullshit. The ability to "memorize pi to 15+ decimal places" is not a marker of "intelligence," no matter how much you want to feel special for having wasted your time doing so. (I'd submit that a "good programmer" would realize this is a useless waste of time when pi to any arbitrary precision is readily available for the price of linking in an external math library.)

I know you want to make it out like you're a special little snowflake, marking a new chapter in human evolution, because you know how to program a computer, but there's a large body of evidence (see: the entirety of human history) to show that analytical skills are not all that rare, or even all that special. Skyscrapers, medicine, and the automobile are all examples of remarkably complex "interrelated" systems which people have managed to master. Peoples' interest in working on complex systems is more limited by attitude and interest in doing boring work than it is by some "innate aptitude."

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

What stupid, elitist bullshit.

Let me guess, you're an MIS guy who took a C course once, and now thinks anything that's written in a scripting language can't possibly be of any value, because it allows you to talk shit about your colleagues who "only know shell"?

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Nefarious Wheel]

1) What is "impredance-matching boilerplate" ?
2) Aren't you a little young to be that bitter?

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[srichard25]

I have been in the programming job market for more than 10 years and I am convinced that many big businesses artificially manufacture "shortages" just so that they can get H-1B Visas to hire foreign programmers for much cheaper. A local big business had 20-30 programming jobs on their website. I applied to many of them. Some of those jobs matched up word-for-word with my resume, yet I didn't get a single call back. Instead, we hear of a ton of new hires coming from India. Most of them moved into a new apartment complex right across from the big business. So many, in fact, that the apartment complex became known as "Little India". You can still see them walking across the street early in the morning and then back again very late at night. They work very long hours, are not able to simply change companies at will, and work for a lower salary. And all the big company had to do was claim that they couldn't find any US citizens to meet the job requirements.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[AK Marc]

Half the time the complaint is "I feel like I'm lying if I put down what I know I need to put down to get through the HR hurdle." If you can't figure that out, then maybe they don't want you. You obviously can't work well in an environment where you identify the hurdles, then work to overcome them.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

I kinda hate out the hole in your logic, but we've been using ability as a proxy for intelligence this entire time.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not necessarily intelligence (although it's still required) but patience. Some people can get an idea of logic and have an idea of what steps would be necessary in order to do a task, but things like syntax and the process of debugging just get too frustrating after a while. People that want results but don't enjoy hacking apart what they just did more than ten times because of some kind of failure or another aren't going to have a good time. Even if you somehow were smart enough to be a physics professor yet ended up tearing your hair out while wondering why your code didn't work (it could be something not always readily obvious to the beginner like non-global variables or how classes or listeners have to be setup, and then don't quite understand what the error is telling you or how data needed for the program to run could go "missing" or out of bounds), then you're not really cut out to be a programmer.

Most good programmers have gobs of patience when starting out. That's usually needed first before you can obtain enough experience to not make the kind of mistakes which require gobs of patience.

Anyone not cut out to be a programmer may start out ok, but after a while it's more like "F this shit! It's better left to the pros!" (Just like not everyone isn't cut out to be a car mechanic or a plumber, even though those trades or skills may seem simple enough in theory.)

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[dgatwood]

Oh, fucking spare us the "Programmer as Ubermensch" bullshit. The ability to "memorize pi to 15+ decimal places" is not a marker of "intelligence," no matter how much you want to feel special for having wasted your time doing so. (I'd submit that a "good programmer" would realize this is a useless waste of time when pi to any arbitrary precision is readily available for the price of linking in an external math library.)

It's not a question of whether they do this. It's a question of whether then can do this quickly and easily. People who can are much more likely to be good programmers. People who succeed in music above a very basic level are also likely to be good programmers because of the need for memorization (and because they use both the analytical and creative parts of their brain heavily, much like programmers do).

I know you want to make it out like you're a special little snowflake, marking a new chapter in human evolution, because you know how to program a computer, but there's a large body of evidence (see: the entirety of human history) to show that analytical skills are not all that rare, or even all that special. Skyscrapers, medicine, and the automobile are all examples of remarkably complex "interrelated" systems which people have managed to master.

What an amazing coincidence. Engineering and pre-med programs also have high dropout rates, in part because not everyone has those innate abilities.

Unless, of course, you mean building skyscrapers, giving people their medicine, or driving/repairing automobiles, in which case, those are all examples of remarkably simple tasks that just happen to tangentially involve complex interrelated systems. You don't have to master the complexity of an automobile to use it any more than you have to master the complexity of writing software to use an iPhone. Other people design the systems to hide the complexity so that you don't have to understand it. And that's a big part of what makes good programming hard.

More to the point, those tasks are easily compartmentalized. You have to be able to understand a small part of how something works, but you do not have to have a big-picture view at the same time. When you build a bridge or a building, you have parts that are numbered, that were cut and measured, that you put into place. You need to know where they go. You need to know how to fasten them in place. You do not need to understand that the beam is arched slightly so that it will end up being flat after the concrete weighs it down. (You do, however, need to know which side goes up.) You do not need to have a complete understanding of why particular beams are thicker than others. You certainly do not need to understand precisely how the length of the beams and other elements were tweaked to avoid resonance problems (Tacoma Narrows, anyone?) because someone already figured out those details and provided someone else with the manufacturing specs to produce the beam that you're hanging.

Programming, by contrast, cannot easily be compartmentalized. You can't write a function in isolation and hope it fits in with the rest of the code, because there's nobody handing you a detailed specification for exactly how that code should be written (usually). You have to figure it out for yourself. You have to be simultaneously creative and logical. You have to simultaneously understand something very large while understanding how something very small fits in with it. And when you get people who do not have that ability writing code, you get colossal train wrecks. :-)

Yes, in a few organizations, you do have division of labor sufficient to turn programming into code monkey work, but that isn't all that common, and tends to be indicative of a bloated bureaucracy, usually involving government contracts. For everyone else, programming is like designing the skyscraper while you're building it, and living on the ground floor wh

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[TheGratefulNet]

I dozed off during your thread until I read 'impedance matching'. and then, I realized I didn't read that afterall.

nice rant, though.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[chrismcb]

Most interviews are dumbed down to the extreme anyways, since its so difficult to find programmers that you really cannot afford to scare any away.

I don't see how dumbing down an interview is going to help you find programmers... Seems like it will help you find people that aren't programmers than can pass your interview. That is like say, use wider holes in your filter to find the smaller grains.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[chrismcb]

I think the biggest change is that people in many fields will be using programming as a tool in their non-programming job. This is already the case, but it is largely informal.

What users do you know that do programming in a non programming job? I've never heard of anyone doing programming for their non programming job. Shoot I've even heard of some programmers not programming for their programming job.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[davester666]

There is a shortage. A shortage of cheap workers that can do the job. More H1Bs will fix that.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Belial6]

As much as I think learning to program is valuable, it isn't because people need to be shown it isn't magic. We are way past the point of expecting people to understand the world around them. Most people don't understand how a light switch makes a room light up. The don't understand why the walls of their house stay up. Worrying about them understanding their computer isn't even in the top one hundred most basic things they should understand but don't. The biggest benefits most people would get from learning to code is how to break big complex problems into small simple ones, and how to go from A to B to C to D without skipping important steps that tell them what D really is.

Re: Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Dr_Barnowl]

It's more that programmers have a respect for truth that borders on pathological. Our job is to ensure that the truth is known in it's fullest detail to a machine. We have little spare capacity for the complex web of lies that seem to be essential to most executive careers.

Re: Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[AK Marc]

"not a team player" Yup, not what they want.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[narcc]

Programming is a skill with a rather unique requirement: the ability to quickly learn and retain lots of information.

How is that unique?

As for programming, the "quickly" part doesn't seem to apply.

The fact is that any idiot can learn to program all by themselves with little more than a few references and some spare time -- and go on to program professionally.

It's so easy, in fact, that the bulk of the users here taught themselves how to program before the age of 13. Back in the 80's, it was so common for kids between 9-13 to write computer programs as a hobby that there where countless children's books on the subject!

It looks like you know how ridiculously simple programming actual is, but just can't seem to fact the truth. Why else would you distinguish between "passable programmer" and "great programmer". (What a joke. Call me when you have an objective way to distinguish between the two.) It tells me that you *still* think that being able to write computer programs makes you special. You know that that isn't true, but you just have too much of your identity wrapped up in that fantasy to let it go!

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[K. S. Kyosuke]

1) What is "impredance-matching boilerplate" ?

Virtually everything in modern programs. The development lead of Photoshop (or someone in similar position) claimed recently that the actual functionality of Photoshop should fit into 10k lines of code, the actual figure being somewhere around two OOM higher. (I have to find the quote again, it could come in handy. THAT is the one thing to be bitter about!) The difference stems mainly from the fact that the expressivity of current environments is so poor, and the levels of abstraction are too low.

2) Aren't you a little young to be that bitter?

No. And anyway, I'm not bitter. I would be if I were to be forced to work with that crap as a programmer, but I'm not. (If you think I'm bitter, what about the VPRI folks?)

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I like to think

I don't think so, based on the rest of your post!

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Modern Primate]

Most people are capable of being programmers, but they aren't capable of being good programmers. Most people just weren't born with the level of intelligence necessary to be such a thing, and evidence of this is everywhere.

Replace the word "programmers" with almost anything and this is still true.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Sparton]

Having said that, if they really wanted to solve the problem, they'd try to educate Human Resources better[...]

That is what their proposal of teaching kids from school basic programming would do, yes?

I know lots of people view HR as an obstacle, but they are people too, you know. :P

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

> Engineering and pre-med programs also have high dropout rates, in part because not everyone has those innate abilities.

I would argue that the higher dropout rates are more due to the increased workload, rather than any innate ability. In contemporary American culture, people want to maximize their profit for time invested, so why get a time-consuming engineering or pre-med degree when you can go business, earn just as much or more, and have half the workload? I don't necessarily agree with this logic, but in my experience, it is the most prevalent mindset.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Synerg1y]

It can, I'm specifically referring to the common business user, of whom I've seen acts of stupidity that never cease to amaze me. To have them write any sort of code is hilarious, they'd have to prove that they can handle admin rights on their local machine first without putting in a ticket weekly. Let me emphasis again, since there seems to be a mental blockade here or something: I'm talking about non-IT personnel as the article suggests. Oh, and I use shells all the time, but for scripting, not coding, google the difference or something.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Marxist Hacker 42]

If I had mod points and wasn't already commenting in the discussion, I'd mod this up. YES!!! Teaching kids to actually program, in a variety of languages, might be the ultimate defeat of the keyword syndrome in HR.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Quirkz]

most good programmers have memorized pi out to at least 15+ decimal places.

This is the exact opposite of what I consider good programming. It's easily looked up and copy/pasted, if it's not built into the code already. If you need it, you can put it in once and refer to it globally. It's inexcusable to potentially insert an error here relying on memory and typing accuracy when a computerized reference will be 100% perfect.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[seebs]

You seem to have completely omitted the part where you make your case in any way, by showing an actual causal relationship between age and the abilities you hypothesize.

And if anything, my experience has been exactly the opposite. Young programmers copy and paste boilerplate. Old programmers think of good abstractions.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[BitZtream]

The development lead from Photoshop must be pretty crappy then. The product and what it is now compared to what it was 15 years ago seems to agree with my assesment, but the reason I say it now is simple.

With enough abstraction, photoshop is 2 lines:

Object b = new Photoshop();
b.Go();

Of course, thats a fucking stupid way to think about it.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[BitZtream]

I can't think of a single programmer on the planet that has ever memorized pi out to some ridiculous number of decimals.

I've been doing OpenGL games for a while now, I can't even remember more than 2 decimal places. At about 4 decimal places, it doesn't matter any more for anyone except for perhaps NASA and the LHC peeps, so memorizing that sort of string of numbers indicates you're an extremely inefficient individual.

What programming environment are you working in that doesn't have define/const/builtin for Pi requiring you to memorize it?

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[jafwatt]

The world needs people unspoilt by the idea that a useful software system needs to have millions of lines of code with enlessly repeated functionality and impredance-matching boilerplate everywhere. Otherwise, no progress is possible. For that, you absolutely need young people.

So glad I don't work with anyone that has an attitude like this. Such a sweeping and indefensible generalisation only shows how little respect you have for your peers, assuming you actually work in the same field as the experienced professionals you just rubbished.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[K. S. Kyosuke]

And if anything, my experience has been exactly the opposite. Young programmers copy and paste boilerplate. Old programmers think of good abstractions.

Perhaps I shouldn't have said "young" but rather "not so old". Granted, a college freshman is hardly to come up with something like the Nile/Gezira combo the way the VPRI folks did - you *do* need some serious expertise to do that. But I was thinking more along the lines of "this is not the way that a run-off-the-mill commercial Java/Cobol programmer thinks after 15 years on the job, these people - at least most of the time - just paste other things together, and any deviation from their long established habits is hardly to be expected, thus little or no actual progress is being done".

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[K. S. Kyosuke]

With enough abstraction, photoshop is 2 lines:

Object b = new Photoshop();

b.Go();

Of course, thats a fucking stupid way to think about it.

Well, that's your fucking stupid way, not his or mine. He meant a description of the actual code logic in an expressive form. Read the VPRI papers for that.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[K. S. Kyosuke]

So glad I don't work with anyone that has an attitude like this. Such a sweeping and indefensible generalisation only shows how little respect you have for your peers, assuming you actually work in the same field as the experienced professionals you just rubbished.

Classy. But that's not from my head; please forward this to the researchers involved, preferably to the FoNC mailing list or the gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc newsgroup.

BTW, the peers you are talking about have very little respect, too. Only now they have started rediscovering things developed in 1970's by others, and all too often they think that they are first ones to do them, rather than to admit that 95 % of "modern inventions" in computing is stuff that has been around for decades without people noticing it. (Just like every generation thinks that they have invented sex. :-))

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a question of whether they do this. It's a question of whether then can do this quickly and easily. People who can are much more likely to be good programmers.

[citation needed]

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[seebs]

Yeah, still not seeing any evidence for this.

I've been programming professionally at some level for, oh, 20ish years now. I know people who've been doing it longer. And so far, I've never once seen anyone do that "just paste things together" thing who had been programming for more than a couple of years.

It's not just that what you say isn't what I've seen, it's that it's precisely inverted from anything I've seen. Maybe there's some huge pool of commercial programmers who suck, but I'm not encountering them. People who don't like to develop abstractions and invent stuff don't typically enjoy programming very much.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[r_a_trip]

You sound like the classic BOfH.

Great video, but will it help...

[SuperKendall]

The video is great, it does as good a job as anything ever could making coding look like a cool thing to do.

But, I wonder how much it will actually increase the number of people that code. I think that inherently there are a small number of people that really have in inclination to enjoy coding. No matter how cool it looks, once you sit down and try to write something the full reality of what coding is overwhelms any amount of social messaging working to convince you that you will enjoy it.

Still, if it even gets a small number of people who would enjoy coding but would not have tried it otherwise - then it's probably worth the effort.

Re:Great video, but will it help...

[loufoque]

They don't pretend it's cool.

Re:Great video, but will it help...

[Joce640k]

"Like learning to play an instrument or a sport..."

(except that instruments/sports are things you can mention at parties...)

Re:Great video, but will it help...

[loufoque]

I don't think playing a sport is cool.
I haven't, however, been exposed to the crazy usian high school system where, if TV series are to be believed, sport players seem to hold some kind of important social status.

Re:Great video, but will it help...

[SolitaryMan]

This may surprise you: not everybody actually enjoys going to parties.

Re:Great video, but will it help...

[blueturffan]

I don't think playing a sport is cool.
I haven't, however, been exposed to the crazy usian high school system where, if TV series are to be believed, sport players seem to hold some kind of important social status.

I don't know what kind of crazy word usian is supposed to be. We're Americans and for the most part don't mind being called such.

I went to high school in the "Commodore 64 / Apple II" era. I played three sports in high school, played an instrument and I also wrote code. Turns out I didn't click with the Jock/Cheerleader clique, the band clique or the computer nerd clique. In fact, my school was small enough that I basically was the computer nerd clique.

There's nothing inherently cool about playing a sport, nor is there anything inherently uncool about coding. Winning sports championships is a lot of fun, and usually requires a lot of hard work and dedication. I also find it fun to find and fix the bug that nobody else seems to be able to find in the code, but I expect that far fewer people will show up to cheer when I'm coding.

For what it's worth, TV series in general have almost nothing to do with reality.

Re:Great video, but will it help...

[blueturffan]

Bravo SolitaryMan - I love the subtle humor.

Re:Great video, but will it help...

[loufoque]

I don't know what kind of crazy word usian is supposed to be.

It's a way to refer to citizens of the USA without stigmatizing citizens of other American countries.
Of course, it's mostly used by Europeans and a few communities from South America which use English on a regular basis.

Usians themselves are too self-centric to refer to themselves by another word than American.

Re:Great video, but will it help...

[jgrahn]

But, I wonder how much it will actually increase the number of people that code. I think that inherently there are a small number of people that really have in inclination to enjoy coding.

I don't think that's true. People surprise you. Many seem to enjoy games, puzzles, systems with strange and detailed rules, creating things ... I don't see why they wouldn't be interested in programming, if they were given the chance.

Re:Great video, but will it help...

[blueturffan]

OK, I'll play along. What other non-made-up word would you have us call ourselves? Statesmen? That has a nice ring to it, but frankly there are far too few statesmen in the world these days. Plus, I'm guessing you would no doubt find this offensive to women and children.

How about Uniters? Sadly, this one is an inaccurate description of our nation these days, plus it just sounds funny. Also, we wouldn't want to "stigmatize" our neighbors from the United Mexican States.

Maybe we could go with something completely different. My friends from The Netherlands (or Holland, nobody seems to be 100% sure) prefer to be called the Dutch. When I was a kid, being in Dutch was something to be avoided, so I'm not sure why they prefer that title.

The one thing that everyone seems to understand is that the citizens of the United States of America are known as Americans.

By the way, I lived in South America for a couple of years and never once heard this ridiculous term. I was frequently called a Norteamericano or Estadounidense. The much less endearing term "Yanqui" was also used, but never in polite conversation.

Re:Great video, but will it help...

[loufoque]

Holland is a region that is part of the Netherlands.
If you want a list of alternative names for US citizens, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_United_States_citizens

You may also want to learn how to use a search engine so that you can acquire knowledge by yourself.

By the way, I lived in South America for a couple of years and never once heard this ridiculous term.

Of course, they speak Spanish or Portuguese.
Americano, which means American, refers to people from South America. Surely you can see the problem. Estadounidense means Usian, Norteamericano means North-american.

In any case I'm not interested in pursuing this fruitless debate any more than this.

Re:Great video, but will it help...

[SuperKendall]

Many seem to enjoy games, puzzles, systems with strange and detailed rules, creating things ... I don't see why they wouldn't be interested in programming

It's because most of those other things do not fight back with you the way programming does.

I know lots of people from school that like all the things you mention and did not care for coding at all.

You have to have the combination of love of creating things, along with the desire to know fiddly technical details of things, and then also on top of that constantly be solving problems layered in other problems.

Re:Great video, but will it help...

[blueturffan]

Holland is a region that is part of the Netherlands.
You may also want to learn how to use a search engine so that you can acquire knowledge by yourself.

Let's see - condescending and apparently completely lacking a sense of humor. I'm going to guess you're French.

Of course, they speak Spanish or Portuguese.
Americano, which means American, refers to people from South America. Surely you can see the problem. Estadounidense means Usian, Norteamericano means North-american.

I'm fluent in Spanish (so much for that stereotype of only Americans only being able to speak one language) so I'm perfectly aware of the meaning of the words. Estadounidense means "from the United States" or "of the United States", not "Usian". Also, in addition to Spanish and Portuguese, I met many people that speak Italian, English, German, Guarani, Korean, Chinese, Hebrew and a few other languages that I have since forgotten. As I mentioned earlier, not one of these people used the non-word "Usian".

In any case I'm not interested in pursuing this fruitless debate any more than this.

It's only fruitless because you believe that you have the moral high ground and fail to recognize how ridiculous your non-word sounds.

Re:Great video, but will it help...

[AK Marc]

I expect that far fewer people will show up to cheer when I'm coding.

At my school, we had a cheerleading group that went to programming competitions to watch. Though only a few were the "spectators" even allowed in the same room. And the only time a spectator was near was the one time that someone on the team didn't show up, so we took one of the cheer squad on the team. Got first place. She didn't code at all, but did get a trophy.

Re:Great video, but will it help...

[Sparton]

You have to have the combination of love of creating things, along with the desire to know fiddly technical details of things, and then also on top of that constantly be solving problems layered in other problems.

That sounds like an abstract, but adequate, description of how many genres of games function, though (4X, simulation, puzzle, RPG, to name a few).

I ended up as a Game Designer. It's what I really enjoy doing (even though I didn't know it was a valid career path until right at the end of high school), but I would have definitely considered programming if I knew it was an actual thing, especially since their pay/job security is way better than my career path...

Re:Great video, but will it help...

[BitZtream]

When you're naming countries, American means USA. It doesn't mean south america, not even in spanish, because south america isn't a fucking country.

You're just a douche trying to make things out of context sound stupid to further you're retarded 'americans are so self centered' ignorance.

No one uses that word, except pretentious assholes pretending to be something they aren't, worldly.

Re:Great video, but will it help...

[BitZtream]

Thats fucking awesome :) Cheerleader with a programming trophy, thats one of those things that you have to look back on like a sitcom moment.

Re:Great video, but will it help...

[AK Marc]

Yeah, we had 3 teams, and they put two of the better programmers on one team (me and the other guy) with a weaker programmer, but the weaker programmer didn't show. The rules allowed for team changes at the last minute, but didn't allow for 2-man teams in a 3-man competition, and we'd already paid the entry fee. So it was forfeit or fill the spot. It was offered to split up our team and disband one of the others, but we (Nick and I) didn't think that fair. So Ashley filled the spot. She didn't code, but she did help us win. The programs were variable credit, and presented in no particular order. She read all the problem statements, and ranked them by perceived complexity and point value. Then we'd code them. They worked as a 3-man team with one computer, so only one could code at a time. She helped with anything we asked, and one would code while the other pseudo-coded. Dependeing on the problems, we'd usually pseudo-code our own, then put it in when the computer was free, then swap when the next was done, but sometimes, if one person got close to a solution, but couldn't get it, he'd pass it off to the other guy. Ashley would make pseudo-code-like notes, but didn't actually do any programming, and her notes were generally ignored as already considered.

But that wasn't even the best incident at a competition. There was one at the Informart (Dallas's main Internet PoP - at the time, if it's moved) where Jeff made a program where the non-output was a single recursive line in BASIC with mutliple conditional statements, an iterative loop, and a goto the same line number. It worked, and all the judges were called over to look at it. It didn't seem right that he combined a complex matrix question into a single BASIC line. He couldn't explain it. It just worked. It was one of the high value questions, and nobody else got it. It was more math than programming. And Jeff was one of the best in Math in the public school system at the time.

And yes, I did go to the best public school in the country. Multiple different reports agree with that.

Re:Great video, but will it help...

[loufoque]

No one complains about the usage of appropriate words except biggots like you.

Corporate IT

[Anonymous Coward]

The vast majority of those jobs are in Corporate IT. From my experience most corporate IT jobs suck. They treat their IT groups like a cost center and place them slightly above the janitorial staff. Why would we expect kids to to find this an attractive career choice?

Re:Corporate IT

[ShanghaiBill]

The vast majority of those jobs are in Corporate IT. From my experience most corporate IT jobs suck.

From my experience, knowing how to code is the best way to escape from the corporate world. Every successful entrepreneur that I know is a techie.

Why would we expect kids to to find this an attractive career choice?

Because job satisfaction surveys consistently show that STEM professionals are mostly happy with their careers.

Re:Corporate IT

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree mostly. I'm independent which makes working in IT a different experience, however the majority of the jobs that they speak of are in corporate IT. My point is how would the availability of those jobs entice students to go into computer science.

I would say most STEM professionals are not working in IT.

Re:Corporate IT

[ShanghaiBill]

the majority of the jobs that they speak of are in corporate IT.

But once the skills are learned, they can be used anywhere.

I would say most STEM professionals are not working in IT.

I would say that most STEM professionals need to be able to code. I work with EEs that spend 90% of their time coding in Verilog, or writing testing code in Python. I have a cousin who works as a Chem Engr in the plastics industry. He spends most of his time writing cracking tower and reactor simulation software in Fortran.

Coding is important in even non-techie professions. My sister is an accountant. I taught her how to write plug-ins and extensions for Quickbooks to automate repetitive tasks, and her productivity and income has doubled.

Bullshit

[crazyjj]

Zuckerberg says, 'Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find. There just aren't enough people who are trained and have these skills today.' Former U.S. President Bill Clinton adds, 'At a time when people are saying, "I want a good job – I got out of college and I couldn't find one," every single year in America, there is a standing demand for 120,000 people who are training in computer science.'

Yeah, and those "jobs" wouldn't just be a fiction to get more H-1B Visas, now would they? Of course not, they're all legit, of course.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Mark Zuckerberg says, 'Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find.

I'm calling bullshit. I work with plenty of very good developers, and none of them has been contacted by Facebook. If he really wanted to meet them, all he'd need to do is offer a yearly salary of $200k. He's apparently unwilling to do that.

Perhaps they can contact facebook, or make themselves visible (linkedin, etc)? I consider myself an above average developer (started playing with BASIC at 10 and now I am 30, with a phd degree), but not the very hardcore ones. I got contacted by facebook and they did offer me a package to the tune of $200k.

Re:Bullshit

[phantomfive]

I'd bet talented engineers aren't generally interesting in getting hired by Facebook. Same with Microsoft: gotta hire them right out of college, before they learn better.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

He can get indentured servants from India for a lot cheaper. All he, his corporate buddies, and their Congressional slaves have to do is keep up the theatre that they can't find American programmers and engineers.

Re:Bullshit

[loufoque]

They've hired quite a few big shots (just like Apple or Google).
It's just that they're only willing to give a lot of money for the very best.

Re:Bullshit

[dreamchaser]

Very few programmers are worth $200k/year

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Come to Silicon Valley, if you count liquid stock per year, there are a lot of programmers making 200k a year.

Re:Bullshit

[dreamchaser]

Good point, but that is a bit skewed by the fact that the cost of living is so high there. Salaries in most industries are higher than average in that region.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

FaceBook Human Resources contacted you directly and offered you USD200K per annum due to your PhD not due merely to a bit of experience programming computers.

Re:Bullshit

[ColdWetDog]

Perhaps they can contact facebook, or make themselves visible (linkedin, etc)? I consider myself an above average developer (started playing with BASIC at 10 and now I am 30, with a phd degree), but not the very hardcore ones. I got contacted by facebook and they did offer me a package to the tune of $200k.

How's that replying to unsolicited commercial emails going for you?

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked at MS for two years as a postdoc researcher back in 1999. They looked after their employees fantastically well and I have never since worked with such a concentration of truly brilliant people.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

>Yeah, and those "jobs" wouldn't just be a fiction to get more H-1B Visas, now would they? Of course not, they're all legit, of course.

He said "talented engineers" not "run of the mill IT staff", which is about all the average programmer is good for.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that far fetched if you have " has created millionaires" on the resume.

Re:Bullshit

[WilyCoder]

Nice try, Ballmer.

Re:Bullshit

[DoofusOfDeath]

I agree. But Zuckerberg was saying that those programmers simply don't exist. There's good evidence that in reality, they only don't exist at the price range he has in mind.

To make my point with a more extreme example: Suppose he offered $10 million/year to any highly skilled programmer. How many would suddenly "pop into existence" from his perspective?

Re:Bullshit

[fermion]

At one company I was with a group of 10 developers. All except one were US citizens,and none was on H1B. It was interesting to see the dynamic. One had to leave pretty quickly because of personality issue, but really because they could not produce a line of code even though they supposedly had many years experience. One of the most highly paid developers really couldn't write code, but was very experienced in other area so quickly was pushed to a management position. One could barely code, but did enough work to justify the existence. One was a HTML art type person who did not have to code very much. One was a database person who did not have to code. One mostly dealt with language interface. This meant that out of 10 people, all hired for their software development skills, 4 were actually able to write production code efficiently

Which is to say, yes, if one is trying to run a profitable company where developers are asking pay far beyond the average for college graduates, finding productive people is hard. They not only have to have the skills, but also the discipline and desire to work. At another firm We would hire anyone who pass a basic math and mechanical skills test, basically what one should have learned in high school if one also took a tech ed class. It was an expensive process. Too many washed out because they could not follow process or did not know the importance of quality. This was not hard work, just setting up machines, letting them run, and then demounting and inspecting. But it did require discipline. Good money that a lot of people did not have the self control to earn. On really smart employee left for fast food in hopes of becoming a manager. Much less money.

Re:Bullshit

[phantomfive]

In other words, you went there right after college but didn't stick around?

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd agree with that statement.

Programmers fall into a fairly standard bell curve. The upper end are worth every penny of $200k, if not more. They will literally save you money in both the short and long terms through efficiency, optimization, etc.. The upper end does not even have to apply for jobs because employers actively seek to hire them based on reputation in the industry.

Step #1 to a high paying programming job: Don't suck.

Re:Bullshit

[KramberryKoncerto]

Postdoc - postdoctoral research. It's right after a PhD, not just college. It's also meant to be a temporary job.

Re:Bullshit

[phantomfive]

Yes, thankyou Mr Dictionary. What is your point?

Re:Bullshit

[CodeBuster]

Salaries in most industries are higher than average in that region.

So be flexible. Be willing to open satellite offices in other parts of the country or to hire more remote workers. This isn't rocket science.

Re:Bullshit

[chrismcb]

, before they learn better.

Before they learn what? That most business are opportunistic?

Re:Bullshit

[phantomfive]

Before they learn that if you are opportunistic, Microsoft and Facebook don't offer the best opportunity. If you are idealistic, they don't offer much for you either.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook GRADUATE salary is close to 450k including starting bonus and stock.

There's zero problem with fb paying 200k. It's actually very low.

Now, "very talented" doesn't cut it. "Among the best in the world" is more the criteria. Add to that "must fit in with culture", and its a very small recruitment pool.

You have unemployed programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

And you have employed hb1 Indians
In fact they ask for hb1 in the emails before they ask for us citisenship
I have the emails to prove it
Is this legal, it should not be
The people are at home unemployed and your importing Indians and the third world

Re:You have unemployed programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't legal, but the Justice Department is prohibited from actually doing anything about it. Congress wrote the law to keep our corporate masters happy.

Re:You have unemployed programmers

[erroneus]

It's not legal. The requirement is to advertise for a local potential for a certain amount of time before they proceed into H1-B territory.

There is no mystery as to what they are trying to pull.

There should be no H1-B program. We are a "supply and demand" idealism nation. If a company needs something, they should depend on the market's invisible hand instead of relying on the government to interfere with their business.

We all know the truth though. They all want government to give them things and to make it easier or cheaper for them, but they don't want the government to protect the interests of the people or the nation as a whole. So for every argument business makes about wanting the government out of their business, ask them if they are willing to give up all that the government gives them such as "copyright" "patents" and all sorts of other things like.

The truth is, without government to "balance" things, someone will get too powerful and cause things to destabilize. It happens again and again and again. Trouble is, things are ALREADY destabilized and things seem to be getting worse every time I look. Everything favors business interests at the expense of the people... the pedestrians... the slaves. "The Human Resources."

Re:You have unemployed programmers

[ShanghaiBill]

There should be no H1-B program. We are a "supply and demand" idealism nation. If a company needs something, they should depend on the market's invisible hand instead of relying on the government to interfere with their business.

The free market "supply and demand" solution is to have no restrictions at all on immigrants ability to work here. By lobbying for higher H1-B quotas, the companies are asking for less government interference with how they run their businesses. If you want the government to restrict the ability of brown people to compete with you, you have the right to say so. But don't claim to be a champion of free market idealism while doing so.

Re:You have unemployed programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

Fair enough, but then any company that suggests my free-market choice to "buy American" is accurately a characteristic of their products (e.g. by having an American company name) should be prosecuted for fraud.

Re:You have unemployed programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

Re:You have unemployed programmers

[erroneus]

I do not claim free market idealism. I hope to show how ridiculous the notion is and now they [business and 1%] want their cake, our cake and to eat it too.

As for immigration? It has to do with more than a labor supply and market forces. A lot more. There has always been good cause for keeping controls in place for immigration regardless of purpose.

And there is no escaping the reality that H1-B is all about getting cheaper labor. If companies paid enough, there would be no shortage of any given type of labor. We have no shortage of people. We have no shortage of skills or training. We also have no shortage of greed.

And seriously, when business measures itself in growth, every time they reach a limit, they panic.

Bullshit

[DoofusOfDeath]

Mark Zuckerberg says, 'Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find.

I'm calling bullshit. I work with plenty of very good developers, and none of them has been contacted by Facebook. If he really wanted to meet them, all he'd need to do is offer a yearly salary of $200k. He's apparently unwilling to do that.

my whole class was taught to program in high schoo

[codepunk]

My whole class in high school was taught how to program. The dirty little secret though is genetics play a key role and only a couple of us had any aptitude for it. Most people can be taught to program in some fashion only a few however will every be any good at it.

copyrights, IP, DCMA, whatever

[k6mfw]

It's been decades since these guys did coding, and back then they didn't have use exclusive platforms requiring register and EULAs and not worry about getting sued. OK so I've not coded in years... but it seems to me whenever IT issues like this arises... here comes another CISPA. Perhaps I'm getting OT but gotta deliver my gripe of the month.

Critical thinking before coding

[fredrated]

Critical thinking seems to me to be the missing education; teach people to think and when they get to coding it will be easy.

Re:Critical thinking before coding

[MYakus]

I wish I'd read this post before posting, you've stated the problem better than I.

Re:Critical thinking before coding

[fliptout]

Along the same lines, teach kids some formal logic so they have the proper tools to think critically.

Re:Critical thinking before coding

[dkleinsc]

No, don't teach people to think! Thinking people are much much harder to control, and we need to control them to ensure they'll take lousy jobs, take on lots of debt, vote for politicians that won't change anything, and blame themselves for not getting anywhere in life. Why, this "thinking" would even convince some people that the corporate leadership isn't really all that smart, and that idea is downright dangerous.

- This message brought to you by the US Chamber of Commerce

Re:Critical thinking before coding

[ShanghaiBill]

Critical thinking seems to me to be the missing education; teach people to think and when they get to coding it will be easy.

Teaching coding is the best way to teach people to think. Most people think they smarter than they really are, but when you have to express your logic in code, it either works or it doesn't.

As an example of dumb people thinking they are smart, I have found that most people that use the phrase "critical thinking", have no idea what they actually mean. Some mean "formal logic", others mean understanding probability, recognizing logical fallacies, or making sure kids are politically indoctrinated. But in philosophy, "critical thinking" usually refers to the Socratic Method that led western civilization into an intellectual cul-de-sac for a couple millennia, until it was replaced by the Scientific Method in the seventeenth century. The route to the truth is seldom through "thinking" rather than observation and experiment.

Re:Critical thinking before coding

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding?

The infographics on the site don't even stand up to scrutiny. "41 out of 50 states" apparently means 38 out of 48 states. Even if you count AK and HI in there as absentees, you still can only get 40 out of 50. And apparently, the Atlantic-facing portion of MD is actually part of either DE or VA. This area would imply that DC is excluded from that count as well, which means there's no hope of getting 41 states to match the colorization of that infographic. IOW, these people can't even count, much less make a valid claim to be pro-geek.

This group is obviously a shill group for industry. May the wrath of the internet be upon them.

Re:Critical thinking before coding

[fliptout]

Cute, but most people are probably incapable of critical thinking anyway. That's never going to change.

What we can do is better develop those with some natural aptitude for it.

Re:Critical thinking before coding

[rohan972]

Given training most people would do it better than without training.

Re:Critical thinking before coding

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck with that one bub. Most kids in america can't read or write well and they also have a hard time with math.

If the gov is so set on this, how about they replace welfare checks with coding classes. Start them off with HTML and CSS, then go to Javascript. They should be able to get a job at Facebook, et al. in about a month or so.

Holy Shit, I just solved unemployment.

Re:Critical thinking before coding

[Anonymous Coward]

The U.S. government doesn't want "free" thinkers!

Sure!

[frank_adrian314159]

Because the shortage of skilled coders the corporations whine about will certainly be ended if we train even more! It's not like there is anyone out there that knows how to write software that's unemployed, is it?

Re:Sure!

[Nadaka]

But you don't understand. If every high school graduate can code, suddenly coding is comparable to flipping burgers and stocking shelves, so they can fill those "programing jobs" for $8 an hour.

Re:Sure!

[loufoque]

You'd have to either suck or be unwilling to relocate to be unemployed.

Re:Sure!

[Anonymous Coward]

They're doing next to that now. There are plenty of U.S. programming jobs that pay little more than that now, with part-time hours and, of course, no benefits.

Re:Sure!

[CanHasDIY]

If every high school graduate can code, suddenly coding is comparable to flipping burgers and stocking shelves, so they can fill those "programming jobs" for $8 an hour.

Nail, head.

Direct hit.

Re:Sure!

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Many Recent College Graduates are the former, and many people who actually have a family and/or invested in real estate are the later. Someday, maybe, HR departments will recognize this fact, and put the extra money they save by hiring an RCG into free training classes, and offer telecomuting options for the more senior positions.

I can dream, can't I?

Except it isn't such a dream. I was contacted in my recent 2 month job search by a company 3000 miles from my home who had identified me as a potential recruit with the skills they desired- AND was willing to let me work from home, and had I made it to round 2, would have actually paid for my plane ticket for the interview.

I found something closer because my wife runs a daycare and I don't want to try to code with 6 screaming kids in the background.

Re:Sure!

[loufoque]

A decent company will pay your plane ticket for the interview even if no telecommuting is involved.

Re:Sure!

[Anonymous Coward]

But after the job offer, and your many years of loyal service, will they pay for your relocation once you decide to move on to greener fields?

Re:Sure!

[ColdWetDog]

At first, I wanted to agree with you and Nadaka, but really that's not quite true. That would be the same as having every high school graduate who managed to dissect a frog without passing out sign up for medical school.

Sure, some people in HS will actually have the intellect and math background to go on and be successful programmers but most folks aren't going to get past moving a form field around in Visual Basic (or whatever serves for the latest GUI approach to programming these days). High School anything just doesn't cut it.

It's just the latest buzz word bingo for 'think of the children'. You're still going to do better flipping burgers (or at least becoming the night shift assistant manager) but that's a whole other discussion.

Re:Sure!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're forgetting the perceptions.

A doctor is a godlike in knowledge and benevolence and requires years and years of study. A knowledge machine like Watson could never replace the infinite wisdom of a doctor.

A programmer sits behind a glowy screen all day long and types. Any idiot can sit behind a glowy screen all day long and type.

Re:Sure!

[CanHasDIY]

That would be the same as having every high school graduate who managed to dissect a frog without passing out sign up for medical school.

No it wouldn't. Obvious false equivalence here, unless you're trying to imply that coding Javascript requires the same level of intellectual dedication as passing med school and the MCATs?

Lord, I hope not.

Re:Sure!

[Anonymous Coward]

had I made it to round 2, would have actually paid for my plane ticket for the interview.

I'm curious. Has anybody being brought in for an interview with a company... NOT had their plane ticket, hotel, and car rental (if needed) paid for?

Jesus, I've been working in the industry for about 15 years now, and interviewed with companies in Northern California, Seattle, Toronto, Texas, New York City, Chicago, Raleigh, Phoenix, Denver, and Kansas City... not once has any one of those companies ever tried to get me to pay for a plane ticket for the privilege of being interviewed. That any company WOULD expect you to pay your way to them is shocking to me, even in a bad market.

Re:Sure!

[Marxist Hacker 42]

This was my first time interviewing non-locally to me, so I don't know. It is NOT normal in my local market to pay for somebody to come interview, ever. In fact, there was recently a story on the news about a teenager who happened to run into a restaurant manager while walking 15 miles to a job interview because he couldn't afford bus fare. When he didn't get the job he was interviewing for, the restaurant manager posted the story on his facebook page and offered the kid a job. It went viral.

It is NOT common in any other industry, and I never bothered to ask until this opportunity.

Teaching kids...

[MYakus]

Watching a friend teach kids Java in high school is just painful. They spend way too much time debugging quirks in the languange than debugging their logic. Teaching kids to program in high school/elementry school should be taught differently than teaching kids to program in a particular language. The demographics I've read is that we are having problems getting kids into STEM let alone Computer Science. Teaching kids to program at a younger age should be a good thing, we just aren't doing it right. Did I just say "LONG LIVE PASCAL"? Not yet,....

Re:Teaching kids...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup.

Re:Teaching kids...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just bought my kids a Scratch programming book (Super Programming Adventure or something). Hope it's good!

Re:Teaching kids...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The problem was Java. He should have started with this:
http://raptor.martincarlisle.com/

Re:Teaching kids...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. I'm studying math at a German university. I have to take a course in "Computer oriented mathematics". But it's not about mathematics at all, it's just a Java 101, and most of it consists in memorizing idiotic peculiarities of a dying language instead of learning programming techniques. The worst thing is, about 95% of the students don't have any prior programming experience. I don't know what they think they are doing there. Why study math if you're not curious about applied math?

Re:Teaching kids...

[SolitaryMan]

Exactly. Teaching kids Java is the best way to make sure those who might have some interest in programming will lose it forever.

Re:Teaching kids...

[ShanghaiBill]

I just bought my kids a Scratch programming book (Super Programming Adventure or something). Hope it's good!

Scratch is a great language, and a far better choice for beginners than Java. Your kids will have fun, and be able to see real results the first day. I started my kids with Logo, which is great for a start, but they soon got bored, so I showed them how to use Scratch.

Teaching Java to high-schoolers as a first language is inappropriate. The learning curve is way too steep.

Re:Teaching kids...

[Patman64]

Debugging quirks in the language? I don't know about Pascal, but it could be a lot worse than Java. At least the ints are always 32-bit.

Personally I would teach Lua, because of the dead simple syntax and good but not complicated feature set (the most complicated it gets is co-routines and meta-tables). Plus it's actually useful in the real world and is used in a number of apps.

Wut

[NettiWelho]

There just aren't enough people who are trained and have these skills today.

Would that have something to do with the way YOU DONT ACTUALLY HIRE ANYONE WHO ISNT A CERTIFIED PROFESSIONAL RIGHT OFF THE BAT?

Seriously, I'm working on my college degree and I cant even get an UNPAID internship without previous PAID WORK EXPERIENCE

Last time I was in a work interview it went fine up untill the point they asked about my previous job which I hadnt included in my CV because I dont have one (because I cant get hired). After they find out I haven't had an actual job in the business the interview quickly goes the way of "we'll call you when we decide" which turns into -> "we have decided to pick someone with more experience" on follow-up call, regardless if Ive had the chance to show them my code portfolio ( do they think its not actually mine or what? ) Hobbies & actual skills dont seem to matter if you lack the "experience".

Re:Wut

[CanHasDIY]

There just aren't enough people who are trained and have these skills today.

Would that have something to do with the way YOU DONT ACTUALLY HIRE ANYONE WHO ISNT A CERTIFIED PROFESSIONAL RIGHT OFF THE BAT?

Seriously, I'm working on my college degree and I cant even get an UNPAID internship without previous PAID WORK EXPERIENCE

That's one major reason why I'm seriously considering bailing on IT. Another is that I can make a shit-ton more money in the family gun shop (especially with all the politicians bloviating on the topic, makes for good business), and not have to worry about whether or not my skills and achievements mesh with what some fucking marketing drone or HR algorithm thinks they should be.

Re:Wut

[Anonymous Coward]

Just change your name to Sanjay and move to India. Then they'll be falling all over themselves to recruit you.

Re:Wut

[Anonymous Coward]

well, experience matters. i worked several random jobs as a teenager through high school and college. none of them were related to the degree i was working toward (computer science).

so, i was a guy in college with no experience who wanted a programming job. that's why i *made my own* experience by working on hobby projects, writing a piece of commercial software with a friend, and taking class in college where i worked on a large project with a couple other students for a year.

a couple months before graduation i started looking for a job. i simply listed the things i just mentioned on my résumé, along with the last restaurant job i had and my soon-to-be-real degree.

then i stuck my résumé up on monster, linkedin, and a couple other sites. the next week i started getting shitloads of emails and calls from recruiters. a month later i had a job that paid very well for a new grad.

i'm nothing special. i'm not an amazing programmer or anything, i'm just decent. my point is that ANYONE with a cs degree can get a job. you just need to have *something* to show people that tells them you're fairly competent, in my case my personal and school programming projects.

and if you have a cs degree yet still can't find a job? move.

Re:Wut

[R3d M3rcury]

This is a good point--you'll see employers asking for a Computer Science degree and HR will, of course, weed out anybody who doesn't have a CS Degree. But I've known some really good programmers without Computer Science degrees (Philosophy and History stand out).

But, as always, getting that first job is difficult and I think that can be true in any profession. They want someone with experience but how do you get the experience without having the job?

One suggestion would be to go to smaller businesses. My first programming job was with a small company with one other developer. They were pretty desperate for somebody--anybody--who could come in and be useful and they were willing to look at code that I'd written on my own. Another option is to consider your skills in the broader market. It's easy to find people with basic skills--there are a lot of them. If you're one of those, what's going to make you stand out to an employer? Why should they take a risk with you when they can find someone else less risky?

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[Anonymous Coward]

The dirty little secret though is genetics play a key role and only a couple of us had any aptitude for it.

And by that you mean white people, amirite?

Teach kids how to think

[davidwr]

Among other things, school is to teach kids HOW to think logically.

How you go about that - whether you use programming or some other method - isn't quite as important.

Now, if a kid is enrolled in a jobs-training program or a pre-computer-science academic program, then yes, teaching programming is important in its own right. Likewise, if you are offering it as an elective, then it's important as long as there are enough students signed up to warrant having the class.

But otherwise I see no reason to insist, without data to back it up, that teaching programming is more (or, conversely, less) effective at teaching logical thinking skills than other methods might be.

Everybody Thinks They're an Expert

[mk1004]

Teach every school kid programming. When they're adults they'll think that programming is easy and grip about how much they have to pay programmers at their work.

Re:Everybody Thinks They're an Expert

[Georules]

Possibly. I think they might have a better appreciation for how hard it is to do something more than printing Hello World to a console or moving a turtle (dog, car, whatever) image around on the screen.

Why so many unemployed coders then?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a dozen programming languages. I am self-employed, because where I live, there are way too many people with programming skills and too few jobs. I won't call all of them bold faced liars, but is about 99% true. They are looking for coders who will work at 25 cents per hour or less. Years ago when I finished a 2 year college program (before I went off to university), employment rates in related fields (computers/programming) was at a high of 18%. There are several things going on here 1) they want coders for a few cups of rice per day 2) They want people with a PhD + 20+ years of experience (experience being whatever they decide on that day), 3) They are looking for someone who is related to someone who already works there. Ultimately when they say 'thousands of jobs' what they really mean is 'thousands of jobs in Shanghai and Bangalore'.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[codepunk]

The word genetics != race, get it?

Actually one was black so what is your point?

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[Anonymous Coward]

And... there you have it. Every kindergarden class has toy xylophones and drums. Most of them don't have a Mozart. A few of them have future part-time musicians. The rest just make noise.

You have unemployed programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

You have unemployed programmers sitting at home from NASA and the dot boom and you have hb1 Indians working
Dreadfull working conditions no healthcare no job security long hours and poor pay

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[Anonymous Coward]

No, even among a 99% white population where I am, finding people who have the aptitude for coding is hard - most can be taught, but having them be /creative/ in their code(as opposed to rote memorization)... that's far more rare.

Maybe if the software interview process...

[Anonymous Coward]

... wasn't so fucking broken, he'd be able to fill the ranks. This isn't a dig specifically at Zuckerberg - more of an observation that the industry in it's continuous quest to self-optimize, succeeds only in screwing itself. There is so much competition to hire the 'elite' coder that companies are completely ignoring the experienced, dependable, journeyman talent that they could have in droves.

Re:Maybe if the software interview process...

[ILongForDarkness]

Well to be fair a lot likely the majority of people don't work for software companies as coders. So it is less of a problem for the Google, MS, Apples of the world to be very selective because either the scale of the systems or the number of users makes the use of rockstars nice. The journeymen can find more than enough work making reports, dashboards, websites etc for companies in all the other industries.

The challenge I find in company work on the other hand is you compete with every other Joe in the office. Joe over here has a degree in psycology but did some progrmaming in R, okay lets have him make something too. It ends up watering down the quality of the jobs so that you end up being + programming when you have time. You end up with either bad programmers making stuff you have to use, or a large part of the job being something that you don't want to be doing. At least that has been my experience both inside of the "IT shed" and as a technical resource at a program/department level. In the IT shed you become a programmer, oh except can you keep the SQL running? Write ad hoc queries, install the client software, create the user accounts etc. In the department level you end up being "the fix it guy" plus build the tools you use. At least that has been my experience.

Anyways, the work is there it is just that even the journeymen want the rockstar jobs but there are only ~300k or so positions for devs in all the rockstar companies vs probably 50M devs.

This just in...

[Kittenman]

Industry leaders want plentiful and cheap labour available in their industry sector. More at 11.

Cool is implied, not forced

[SuperKendall]

They don't pretend it's cool.

They don't hit you over the head with it.

But any video that has popular figures like WillIAm in it saying how they learned to code - well obviously part of the message is "even popular people love to code".

Re:Cool is implied, not forced

[loufoque]

The message is that coding is empowering, not that it is cool.

Re:Cool is implied, not forced

[Anonymous Coward]

In the case of WillIAm, he is actively injecting himself into encouraging young people to learn STEM curriculum. It isn't a case of, lets get popular person X and have them do commercials for us to trick the kids into thinking Y is cool. I'm not sure of his motivations or maybe it use to be the case and he actually started following his preaching but I'm glad some celebrity outside of nerd/geek-dom fame is encouraging young people to make something useful of themselves.

Middle school math teacher here

[ruggerboy]

I teach middle school math and would LOVE to introduce students to coding. The problem is that the only coding I've ever done is basic HTML and some rudimentary old school BASIC (I remember while/when loops, but not much else). Considering my limited knowledge, what are some good programming resources that I could use for 12 year-olds, most of whom have never coded? I love the idea of the class learning together.

Re:Middle school math teacher here

[motorhead]

IMOHO I'd select Perl.

Re:Middle school math teacher here

[Marxist Hacker 42]

http://raptor.martincarlisle.com/

I recently had a career fair to do at my kid's school. I looked up "freeware flowcharting", and found this. Took me all of a half hour to program in the Friendship Algorithm from Big Bang Theory as a demo.

Looks like a great first language to me, and while it is an interpreter, it contains a translator to several other high level languages as a starting point.

Re:Middle school math teacher here

[Anonymous Coward]

check out www.tutorialspoint.com and w3schools.com

Best resources I know of for introduction to such a wide range of languages.

I've just mentored my 12 year old nephew through the html and css portions of both sites. He's really enjoying it, and now has the skills to build a simple static web site and can make it look like anything he wants.

Re:Middle school math teacher here

[Amouth]

i wish they had a +1 Evil mod..

Re:Middle school math teacher here

[Anonymous Coward]

I teach middle school math and would LOVE to introduce students to coding. The problem is that the only coding I've ever done is basic HTML and some rudimentary old school BASIC (I remember while/when loops, but not much else). Considering my limited knowledge, what are some good programming resources that I could use for 12 year-olds, most of whom have never coded? I love the idea of the class learning together.

You could teach them Smalltalk which is one of the easier languages especially for those never exposed to functional or procedural programming. But since you are a mathematics teacher my recommendation shifts to BASIC. Anything you are teaching these students about mathematics can translate to BASIC as appropriate. Sure BASIC is a largely forgotten programming language by businesses but it can be used to teach the essential fundamentals. Try BASIC-256 which provides an interpreted IDE.

Re:Middle school math teacher here

[codepunk]

I would LOVE for you to find some way to introduce your students to it also. It is because of a math teacher that exposed me to it that I have my career.

Re:Middle school math teacher here

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd recommend Scratch (from MIT) for first exposure to programming for pre-teens/K-12. Not quite K, but a smart 8 year old for a parent reading this, sure, and a smart group of 10 year-olds (not a full class perhaps) too.

Next, take a look at App Inventor. It uses the same OpenBlocks (type) interface as Scratch, but produces Android apps which can be debugged in real time, on your device or in an emulator. Developed at Google, branched off to MIT, it works, has serious limitations for serious development, not least that it is no longer being worked on as a "product", but it is an almost finished (http://beta.appinventor.mit.edu/) "project" which is perfectly acceptable for teaching purposes (http://www.appinventor.org/course-in-a-box).

Re:Middle school math teacher here

[motorhead]

Me too. What's the beef with Perl?

Re:Middle school math teacher here

[Anonymous Coward]

MIT Scratch. I taught my 9-year-old about event-based sequencing of independent actors the other day, inside Scratch, so don't assume it's a toy. Scratch's simplicity hides its depth.

The dirty little secret

[wcrowe]

They claim that there is a huge demand for coders, but the dirty little secret is that the industry is rife with ageism. If you're over 35 these people don't want to hire you.

Every student already can learn to code

[Graydyn Young]

Every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn to code

Every kid who's going to turn into a talented coder already has all the resources they need. It's called the internet. Schools are inefficient at best anyways.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[wonkey_monkey]

Ah, so your group consisted solely of fraternal and non-fraternal twins, which allowed you come to this conclusion on some factor other than race?

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[loufoque]

The same is true for every subject already taught at school: math, physics, chemistry, biology, history, and whatever other subjects they teach there.

Programming, not coding

[Todd Knarr]

Don't teach the kids how to code. Teach them how to program. That means teaching them to think about the problem, determine requirements, clarify requirements (I'm working on one now where it's taking literally days to tease out of the person exactly what they actually want, it's repetitions of my restating what he said and him going "That sounds right, except for..." and then outlining a new thing the software has to do that he hadn't mentioned before), evaluate approaches and settle on a basic design and outline for the software, and finally document the requirements and design. And then once the code's written it has to be tested and debugged, which is another skill set entirely. Plus, while coding you have to think about what tools are available in the language, what libraries are out there, and how they integrate with your code. Often that affects the design of the software, and you need to understand that and learn how to think ahead during the design stage so your design works with the tools you'll need to use while coding.

Actual coding is the smallest part of the job. Critical thinking, analytical skills, general problem-solving, research, all that is far more important to the job than merely knowing how to crank out code.

Ask any writer. They'll tell you that the actual physical act of typing out a book is the easy part, it's just time-consuming. The hard parts are all the research and working out the actual story before you sit down to start typing.

Re:Programming, not coding

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly why they are trying to teach students coding, not programming. Programming is like math: in order to be a real programmer, you have to like it, and most people don't. Students who like programming are already programming, because it doesn't take more than a computer and some curiosity to get started. Students who lack that curiosity can still be coders.

Re:Programming, not coding

[Todd Knarr]

No thanks. As a software developer who has to deal with coders, they're literally more trouble than they're worth. To get good code out of them I have to nail things down so explicitly and in such detail that I could've written the code myself in the time it took to write the instructions for them. I nearly have to write the code anyway just to figure out all the stuff I need to give them instructions on. And if I don't give them instructions in that much detail, their lack of analytical ability means they churn out code that doesn't quite do what it's supposed to or does things in ways that conflict with what the rest of the system needs. I either have to spend time re-writing their code, or I have to spend 10x as much time down the road working around the brokenness in their code when I'm trying to do maintenance and enhancement. The kind of code a pure coder would be good for writing, is the kind of code I go find a library for.

Re:Programming, not coding

[Anonymous Coward]

Teaching them how to code is comparable to teaching kids how to write proper English. A fraction of people are actual authors.

Re:Programming, not coding

[jgrahn]

No thanks. As a software developer who has to deal with coders, they're literally more trouble than they're worth.

I didn't know there was such a distinction, and I'm horrified by the GP's idea that people cranking out code to specification without understanding *why* could produce anything useful. However ...

To get good code out of them I have to nail things down so explicitly and in such detail that I could've written the code myself in the time it took to write the instructions for them. I nearly have to write the code anyway just to figure out all the stuff I need to give them instructions on. And if I don't give them instructions in that much detail, their lack of analytical ability means they churn out code that doesn't quite do what it's supposed to or does things in ways that conflict with what the rest of the system needs.

To be fair, it can start at the other end, too. You can have a setup with Architects kidnapping the big picture, and treating the programmers as ... well, "coders". Like Stroustrup wrote, "An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only."

Re:Programming, not coding

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, eventually. But they should learn to code first. Just like you generally teach arithmetic before algebra, symbolic logic, and formal proofs. Otherwise,

1) it'll probably go over their head,

2) it won't be very fun; many of us learned to code by tinkering (and trying to write games), and then learned to abstract it later, and

3) in order write specifications, you need to know how the system works, and that includes some understanding of the code and technical details. Thinking too abstractly can result in something that won't work correctly; just like physics is different from pure math because there are real world constants that have to be considered.

Re:Programming, not coding

[ILongForDarkness]

On that end basic computer hardware is probably more relevant. Having a clue how cache (just at a high level) works, hardware interrupts, rough orders of magnitude differences between network, HDD, RAM register access etc. It then doesn't just apply to building your own software but having a rough idea how your phone, computer, console, computer controlled factory equipment etc works. It is the equivalent of learning mechanics and optics in the yearly 20th century. Software is nice but ultimately it is instructions and still having no clue how the instructions work because you don't get hardware makes things bad (bad coders, and people with no "physical" intuition as to how systems work).

Re:Programming, not coding

[Todd Knarr]

They need things more basic than understanding of the hardware. If it were just that they don't understand the speed trade-offs of various storage, I'd be overjoyed. No, these are people who don't understand the concept of factoring out common functionality so you only have to implement it once, and why this is a good idea. Even though they've just gotten done whinging about having to fix the same exact bug for the fifth time because the same code was implemented in 5 different places, each one using different variable names so scans for other occurrences of one copy don't pick up the others.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[Anonymous Coward]

That's pretty much true of any skill -- or, for that matter, any school subject. Some people will be better than others. Some won't get it at all. And some will truly excel.

Stupid Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

What a stupid idea. Why do we want to train kids to be programmers? So they can move to a "low cost country" and write software at a lower wage for US companies?

If they want to do the kids a favor, teach them about how capitalism works, and money and assets work, and how businesses are created and maintained.

The 80's called - they want their BASIC story back

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Tech Leaders Encourage Teaching Schoolkids How To Code

The 80's called - they want their BASIC story back.

Not every round peg goes in a square hole.

[B5_geek]

As many others have pointed out, if there were such a high demand for skilled programmers the base salary/wage would go up. Too often I have seen crazy-stupid job requirements and they are only willing to pay $1 more per hour then MINIMUM WAGE ffs!!!

But I digress, what schools need to teach is critical thinking, and basic logic-reasoning. (aka trouble-shooting)

I don't want to program, I don't like it. I enjoy scripting repetitive tasks. The peak of my programming abilities was realized when I developed custom MIRC events/notices back in ~'96.

Re:Not every round peg goes in a square hole.

[Anonymous Coward]

Too often I have seen crazy-stupid job requirements and they are only willing to pay $1 more per hour then MINIMUM WAGE ffs!!!

Selection bias. The jobs that are unfilled are the ones that qualified candidates are least willing to fill. Don't assume that job postings are representative sample of all jobs.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[fermion]

Same here. I took my first class in the summer in middle school on a teletype, moving up to a video terminal in high school. It taught me three things.

First, it taught me how to make something work. So many times in school there is inauthentic assessment. The results of your work does not actually result in anything, so it really does not matter if it is right or wrong. In middle school this means kids will just fill in blanks or bubble things in to get finished. Because I was doing something that would be right or wrong for real, I would work to learn how to get the program running. Which meant lining up columns, making sure parenthesis were in the right place, etc. Nowhere else would I put the effort to make it correct, because it did not matter.

Second it taught me to break up a problem, think about what steps for each part were, and then put it back together with code. This process analysis and design served me well for the rest of my life.

Third, it encouraged me to develop abstract thinking. Math class was supposed to do this, but really it did not. That was learned in computer classes. I recall the epiphany of realizing that a swap function was needed to exchange values in variable. I understood what a variable was. When I wrote code to graph and swirl the trig functions I understood trigonometry. The act of me writing code to just generate a graph made me understand that process in way that I see many do not.

I will admit we were a specific group of hand selected students. On the other hand we now have the pedagogical techniques to teach these advanced topics to any somewhat motivated group. I have seen high school students use circuit design software to generate a circuit and then program a FPGA. It can be done if the we invest in the right teachers and pay for the equipment.

Which is my only worry. If we are going to do this in the early grades, we need the right people. Without the right people it is just going to devolve into an application design class, which is what too many computer classes are now. Knowing how to use an application is like knowing how to type. It is not going to teach how to program a computer any more than typing teaches you to build a typewriter.

But if done right it would be revolutionary. Asking a student to program a python web pages that solves a generic two step equation when a user inputs the values, performing a sort to calculate the mode and median, interfacing with data collection equipment to gather and analyze data for an expirent, this would provoke understanding in some students beyond what they would otherwise have.

Of course it won't happen because these skills cannot be tested on a standardized test. The skills on this test are those that no one really needs for work. For example the test asks what is the error in this bit of code. I don't know. When I code the compiler gives me an error, then I look at the code and fixes it. That is the way real people code. Ask me about something real!

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[StueyNZ]

...and as we testified to an adjudicator in a wrongful dismissal case a few years ago:

Jack's argument is that we didn't offer him enough of the right training to become a better programmer.

Our argument is that we gave the same training that 80 other programmers got...programming is like Opera Singing, if you don't have the talent no amount of training is going to make you good at it. Unfortuntely Jack made a mistake when he thought he'd go into programming as a career.

On the other hand teaching all kids to at least write a little programme, may help identify those with the talent early enough to get them trained into great programmers.

Nursing Glut

[Greyfox]

It was that way with nurses a few years back. I woke up to a story yesterday on NPR that new nursing graduates can't find work because hospitals are only hiring nurses with previous work experience. They said that even if all the older nurses who have been putting off retirement due to the economy decided to retire, Colorado would still only need 1500 nurses a year, and we're currently graduating 1800 nurses a year. I'm sure these guys would be overjoyed to have a similar programmer glut on their hands.

Re:Nursing Glut

[Anonymous Coward]

They have a programming glut on their hands called hb1 visas, and white people out of work

We don't want critical thinking ...

[StueyNZ]

No! No! No!

We the management don't want critical thinking in our employees. We want skilled coders who will shut up and do as they're told.

No critical thinking. No analysis of the content of the latest bunch of lies (ulp, I mean management team talk to the staff). and certainly no telling us we're full of shit when we are.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[Spy Handler]

No, he's talking about IQ which is at least partly based on genetics.

Absolute minimum IQ to be a computer programmer is around 110. To be a GOOD programmer you're gonna need 120+. Out of a class of thirty kids, you're only gonna see 3 or 4 who qualify... the smart kids. And if they're really smart, they go on to be doctors or lawyers or wall street somethings and make more money rather than put up with the long hours, deadline pressures and the job insecurity that goes with being a programmer.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[Burning1]

That's fine. The purpose of programs at that level shouldn't be to produce a class full of programmers, but instead to help point students with the aptitude to program towards it as a possible career path.

I'm in the IT field because of a 3 hour computer repair class I took as a kid. I never expected to enjoy it or be good at it - it's just something I did. Turned out to be the right decision for me.

Take a lesson from pro sports

[devforhire]

Being a good software engineer is not something you can teach so please stop trying and wasting money producing a ton of mediocre coders that will flood the low end dev markets. Being a good engineer is mainly dependent natural ability and requires that ability be developed by years of practical experience. Professional sports figured out a long time ago how to farm this kind of genetic talent; it's simple you start our with programs targeting kids as they enter grade school then progressively weed out kids as the years go on in increasingly competitive groups.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[Anonymous Coward]

Definitely! That, and twins separated at birth, reunited later in his very class. How else could he possibly have come to such a bold conclusion? Epic conclusions require epic evidence, and this man has seen it!

Thanks Mark

[ahoffer0]

Zuckerberg needs programmers like the LA Lakers need basketball players.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[Anonymous Coward]

Shoot radioactive gamma waves into them and hope that they mutate into Aspergians then.

Obvious solution.

Teach schoolkids how to riot.

[femtobyte]

Being self-taught in programming, and benefitting from those skills for professional and personal use, I certainly think that's a useful thing for kids to learn.

But, "strangely," industry leaders who claim concern about kids learning skills for getting good jobs in the future, never seem to call for education in those skills that have historically had the greatest impact on boosting job prospects for the next generation. Learning from the past, what is it that assures better jobs for the next generation? Perhaps kids should learn what it took to get things like 40 hour work weeks, vacations, paid overtime, compensation for workplace injury (and workplaces that don't injure/kill workers on a daily basis), equal pay for equal work, pensions, salaries in money rather than company scrip, etc.

In other words, we should be teaching kids how to effectively organize; unionize; march; protest; picket; leaflet; boycott; sit-in; slowdown; sabotage; riot: to strike terror in the very heart of power, until once "unthinkable" concessions are extracted from their oppressors. The generation of kids that learns these skills will surely, as with past generations of heroes, find their job prospects immeasurably brightened.

Re:Teach schoolkids how to riot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Being self-taught in programming, and benefitting from those skills for professional and personal use, I certainly think that's a useful thing for kids to learn.

Like being a self-taught car mechanic. If you're good, you'll find a job. If your very good it will pay decently. It won't, however, get you a job designing cars. If you want a job creating new things, you need an education or you need your own business. This is true in any field, even software.

Re:Teach schoolkids how to riot.

[femtobyte]

Yep, if I wanted to actually work a job in software design/engineering, I'd go get a PhD in that, too. I just use self-taught (because when I was growing up, most school teachers had less years of computer experience than I did) programming skills "on the side" for my work (and play), in which fields I do have extensive "formal" education. Just like we teach arithmetic to kids who aren't necessarily on a career track to being an actuary, a basic level of programming proficiency is a generally handy skill for anyone to pick up, and would be a useful addition to general curricula.

However, expecting that this will effectively secure a better jobs future for the children is just plain stupid --- real advances in employment prospects have only come when workers fight to retain a bigger chunk of the pie they are baking, rather than simply becoming better educated and lower paid obedient tools for their corporate overlords.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[Anonymous Coward]

Where on this good green Earth did you come up with those cut offs? Do you work for the College Board or something? Who makes these metrics?

Oh- that's right. White engineers.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[Anonymous Coward]

Once you're in the upper 120s, you've excluded 97% of the population.

For many, working in pure thought is just not as interesting as working with things you can immediately see, hear, and/or touch.
Programming engages only those who can achieve a high level of focus.

college trun out people with skills gaps and tech

[Joe_Dragon]

college trun out people with skills gaps and tech / trades based learning get's over looked

FB is passe

[CQDX]

Maybe FB can't fill their ranks because the talented software engineers that aren't already there realize that they've missed the opportunity to make the big bucks in stock options and that the work is ultimately unsatisfying as are most dot.com jobs IMHO. I did the Yahoo thing back when they were king and after a year it started to get really boring. I mean how many ways can you serve up gossip and narcissism and still keep it interesting?

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that I disagree that there isn't some factor that predicts programming ability well. I just don't think that it's IQ. And I don't think your cut-offs are valid in the least bit, since you appear to be pulling them out of your ass.

The apprenticeship model is needed in tech / IT

[Joe_Dragon]

The apprenticeship model is needed in tech / IT.

As there is a lot to learn that can't really be done in a pure classes and top level theroy based classed to not help as much as more hands on classes.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you like some salt to go with that chip on your shoulder?

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Salt is too vanilla.

I do not accept salt as payment

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[AthanasiusKircher]

Most people can be taught to program in some fashion only a few however will every be any good at it.

What's your point? If you aren't good enough to be a professional at something, you should never try it or even be exposed to it? Let's shut down all the Little League games -- "the dirty little secret though is genetics play a key role and only a couple of kids on any team (at most) have any aptitude for it. Most people can be taught to hit a ball in some fashion only a few however will ever be any good at it."

If kids are never encouraged to try something out, they'll never figure out what they might actually be good at. And many activities teach useful skills regardless of whether the participants are "any good at it" -- baseball might teach coordination, teamwork, whatever, programming might teach critical thinking about problems, etc.

I fail to see what deserves "+5 insightful" for noting that some people are better at a particular skill than others, or might have a particular aptitude for it... or -- heavens! -- might actually just work hard at it because they're interested rather than being genetically predisposed to be a good programmer.

(Whatever the hell that means -- I don't think computers have been around long enough to put evolutionary pressure on humans to develop a gene for "good coding." And if you're making a claim about how you're required to have a particular IQ or other intelligence marker we claim a genetic basis for, well, I know a lot of people who are incredibly intelligent but terrible at programming, which is a particular skill that seems to require all sorts of personality and intelligence traits to do well... if you've found a genetic marker for "good coding skills," please let us know!)

Anyhow, as the Gates quote in the summary says, good programming does require critical thinking skills and logical thinking. We used to do things like this in schools when we required kids to do proofs in geometry classes, for example. How many kids did we ever expect to become theoretical mathematicians?? A much smaller number than we think might end up doing some coding some day.

Good thinking skills can be transferable. And "genetics" doesn't determine everything about your life.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[baffled]

Yes, and even those few people who become great programmers may struggle to find paying work doing it, and end up doing something else.

How about just for the learning?

[tommituura]

Actually, nevermind the "shortage of IT workers/cheap labor" issue, I think it would be very beneficial for humanity and geeks in general if most people had a passing knowledge how the magic boxes are instructed to do fancy stuff. Maybe such knowledge would help citizenry at large understand things like why DRM is fundamentally broken concept, that an ability to give general purpose computer your own instructions should count as one of the most important features and an important form of expression and self-determination, which would help us make sure stuff like "Trusted Computing" never sees any significant success in its owner/user-hostile form.

Extremely disingenuous lobbying for cheap labor

[echtertyp]

Others have pegged it. This is just more breathless shilling for opening torrents of cheap labor to "suppress wages" as Alan Greenspan put it.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[9jack9]

That's pretty much true of any skill -- or, for that matter, any school subject. Some people will be better than others. Some won't get it at all. And some will truly excel.

But a worthwhile question is, *why* do some excel at one skill, some at another? To what extent is it nature vs. nurture? Lots of slashdotians are willing to come down on one side or the other, but, far as I know, we don't really understand everything about how people develop skills and interests.

Perhaps a reasonable hypothesis is that nature and nurture both play a role, with the assumption that at this point, we don't really understand the interrelationship between the two. Isn't it therefore worthwhile to do our best to give every child the opportunity to realize what unrealized skills and abilities they may have?

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[AthanasiusKircher]

Absolute minimum IQ to be a computer programmer is around 110. [snip] And if they're really smart, they go on to be doctors or lawyers or wall street somethings and make more money rather than put up with the long hours, deadline pressures and the job insecurity that goes with being a programmer.

Actually, if we go with your implicit definition of "smart" based on IQ scores, your claim about salary isn't actually true. There are a lot of mixed data about very high IQs and whether they actually benefit salary. Sure, people with a 110 or 120 IQ do tend to make more money than people with 100, and that's pretty well established. (That said, where you were born, your education, your parents' wealth, your race, your gender, etc. have been shown to contribute as much or greater impact compared to raw IQ scores on salary outcomes.)

But once you get much above that (130 or higher), the results of studies have been pretty mixed. If they end up in a job that is a "good fit" they will do well, but that doesn't necessarily include a high salary.

For example, generally speaking, the average Ph.D. hard science researcher probably has a higher IQ than the average doctor or lawyer. But they don't tend to make as much money -- yet they do research because they're smart and the work is intellectually engaging to them.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[codepunk]

My point is just like NFL players you are not necessarily going to turn out more programmers. You are right genetics do not determine everything but they have a very, very large influence. Certainly everyone should be exposed to it just as I had that opportunity.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[jgrahn]

And... there you have it. Every kindergarden class has toy xylophones and drums. Most of them don't have a Mozart. A few of them have future part-time musicians. The rest just make noise.

You know, that's why punk was invented. Making your own music is more meaningful than listening to a recording of Brian May stroking his guitar (or whatever the options were in 1977).

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[jgrahn]

Ask me about something real!

That would, by the way, look really good on a t-shirt.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[PickyH3D]

But if done right it would be revolutionary. Asking a student to program a python web pages that solves a generic two step equation when a user inputs the values, performing a sort to calculate the mode and median, interfacing with data collection equipment to gather and analyze data for an expirent, this would provoke understanding in some students beyond what they would otherwise have.

This. It also strongly encourages cross-training with other disciplines in order to do something remotely useful. Use the proposed equation to draw the parabola of a curve for a ball tossed into the air. Later, you can use the same code to introduce friction, and revisiting the same techniques, I believe, is what truly opens a lot of eyes. It uses the CS to teach the math and physics in an interactive way where the student can definitively get it right or wrong, but they can use creativity to get there.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[AthanasiusKircher]

You are right genetics do not determine everything but they have a very, very large influence.

I'm not at all saying that it doesn't take a certain minimum level of intelligence to do many jobs. But I do think you overstate the case for genetics. Lots of people also end up in a career track because of social factors (their parents' wealth and education, their racial and ethnic background, their gender, how much schooling they have and whether they were presented with educational opportunities, etc.).

Low-income families may not be able to provide opportunities for their kids to try out programming outside of school, or parents may just not even think of that option. Even kids who do have the opportunity might not seriously consider programming unless they try it out for a while -- as they might have to in a class.

To put my point simply, few kids will consider programming as a career unless they get some exposure to it. Encouraging more schools to teach it will necessarily give more opportunities to the minority of kids who do have the necessary intelligence, and thus you actually do have a better chance of turning out more programmers.

A few years back

[kilodelta]

I did a program review at a local high school. The class was learning how to use Microsoft Office. They were in Excel doing a payroll spreadsheet and referring to a cheat sheet for the tax rates, etc.

So I asked the teacher if they intended on teaching the kids how to code in VBA. Now VBA is pretty simple once you know the object model for the Office App. I.e. worksheets.sheets(x).cell(x). The teacher looked at me and said that in order to get to learn to program a computer you had to have all these math courses first. Was looking at her with some incredulity.

So on my review sheet I wrote in that a) they should be teaching the kids how to code because it teaches and reinforces what they've learned in math so far. You know, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, powers, and hopefully order of precedence. If they've had Algebra I they should be all set.

From what I heard later is that I rocked the schools little world.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[Darby]

Third, it encouraged me to develop abstract thinking. Math class was supposed to do this, but really it did not. That was learned in computer classes.

This ^

Learning mathematics will absolutely develop abstract thinking and critical thinking. It really goes into overdrive at the college level...especially studying mathematics as opposed to taking college level mathematics courses. Even the "real" calculus courses...that the physicists and engineers and such take alongside people studying math are mostly how to do calculations rather than how to do abstract reasoning. Note, this is in no way intended as a slight against physicists and engineers. They learn how to work with more advanced mathematics that most mathematicians don't even learn about until later in their education. I'm just talking the basic undergrad calc series excluding business calc because that's even more dumbed down.

Programming develops those muscles but with a built in reward system which is much more visceral and more easily achievable at earlier stages.

Proving that sqrt(2) is irrational requires abstract reasoning, but it's easy to do with high school level mathematics, however while I thought it was totally bitchin' I understand most people would probably slog through it without giving a shit.
Seeing things displayed in vivid color on the magic box due to one's own actions and growing understanding, I believe, would induce a wow factor in a much wider range of people and is achievable with much less "boring" prep work.

What about Africans?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will they be coding too?

It's sure going to be difficult with an average IQ of 70...

I'd Like To Teach The World To Code

[Nefarious Wheel]

I'd like to teach the world to code
In perfectly formed C;
And write BigTables and Hadoop
But what's in it for me?
I'd like to work a 9 to 5
And have a family;
With no complaints from every side
About its quality.

Learn to code and train your H1B replacement!

[walterbyrd]

If you want people to learn STEM, provide good, stable jobs for them.

People don't want to learn a difficult subject just have their jobs offshored, or to be forced to train their visa-worker replacement.

Re:Learn to code and train your H1B replacement!

[geekoid]

STEM is more then software. Good luck outsourcing a bridge.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[Anonymous Coward]

Punk was invented to give bored middle class white kids a uniform.

That's nothing!

[walterbyrd]

Where the average person can easily memorize a seven-digit phone number, most good programmers have memorized pi out to at least 15+ decimal places.

Pfft. Never mind 15 decimal places, I have memorized the entire 26 letter alphabet!

Raspberry Pi to help teach coding!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats why Raspberry Pi is a very important tool to help teach coding to kids.

Its cheap, easy and thin.

I think the future of education must have coding as a class.

also

[geekoid]

Music experts think kids should be taught music, history experts think kids should be taught history, and stamp collectors think school kids should be taught philately.

taxes

[manu0601]

Not enough skilled engineers? Perhaps big companies could stop working on tax evasion, so that more money could go to the educational system, lowering the need for student debt (the net bubble, anyway), and allowing more students to go through college.

Re:The 80's called - they want their BASIC story b

[cashman73]

Seriously, for real. I learned to code on the Apple ][ back in grade school in the early 80s! What in hell are kids learning in school today if we're STILL seeing news stories about kids needing to learn more computer programming?! I mean, this is supposed to be the future, and in two years, Marty McFly is going to be here from 1985 expecting hoverboards and Mr. Fusion!

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[CodeBuster]

A few of them have future part-time musicians. The rest just make noise.

And yet the taxpayers continue funding it. Fascinating.

Educational singularities.

[Ostracus]

"Code.org has released infographics and a video to explain why students should be taught to code in school.

I'm sure I'm going to offend quite a few, but in the grand scheme of things, why that particular set of skills? We could be teaching people other, just as important, fields, so why single out coding?

you know where the shortage is?

[ILongForDarkness]

At least in Canada it is more likely to be skilled trades than programming. About a third of us have university degrees. More have some university, than you have the dumb and generally lazy, or smart but can't be bothered. All leads to a lot of people with some programming experience but not a lot of people that can fix your sink.

Just because a particular field is popular and pays well doesn't mean we should encourage EVERYONE to do it. Just like the invention of the car (didn't, though did more than it should have IMHO) mean that everyone should work directly or indirectly on cars. You only need so much transportation before you get the people and things to where they need to be and then need to do something else, similarly computers aren't going to do away with the need for physical goods and people that can fix them.

I hope they teach them the most important thing

[NotSoHeavyD3]

Fucking Google it you idiot.(Sorry, pet peeve but I've seen people re-implement stuff that was built into C++ instead of spending 2 minutes to google for a feature.)

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[Visserau]

Of course it won't happen because these skills cannot be tested on a standardized test. The skills on this test are those that no one really needs for work. For example the test asks what is the error in this bit of code. I don't know. When I code the compiler gives me an error, then I look at the code and fixes it. That is the way real people code. Ask me about something real!

Totally agreed with you up to here. Being able to look at a block of code and have some idea what is wrong with it is really important. In many cases, compiler errors are only tangental to the actual cause of the error. E.g. a missing } or " is often going to produce some generic parsing failure for a line before or after the actual error line. (Forgetting to close a comment block can also be rather entertaining.) I've seen plenty of beginners get lost because they had a syntax error and the compiler message didn't help them.

Being able to (within reason) write a simple block that will run first time is also a huge efficency improvement - not that I don't also over rely on the compiler in my more zombie-like moments.

Being able to e.g. cite the exact error a compiler would produce for a given language is wrote learning of little value. Understanding the problem that would trigger such an error is important.

It's important and could solve many problems

[Casandro]

Currently many people see computers as magical boxes they don't believe they can understand. (or believe they already do, which is worse)

If you teach children how to code they will understand what computers are, how they work. They will understand that Facebook privacy settings don't mean a thing to Facebook as they will always be able to access the data, that copy protection is not possible in principle, and that democratic elections using computers (and machines) are impossible.

In a democracy everyone needs to have some fair understanding on how the world works. What the "Tech Leaders" don't understand is that their success was based on people being stupid.

Kill offshoring and they'll get what they want

[sethstorm]

The problem is that they would rather have a pliant workforce that stands in opposition to any US citizen that wants to program and/or code.

Take away the very thing that allows them to distort the market and things go back to normal.

Job Training is NOT Education

[SoothingMist]

As an experienced technologist in industry who has taught graduate and undergraduate courses, and mentored interns, what I have seen is that people who come out of a "job training" environment are not educated. As a result, they are stuck in the lowest-level jobs and can not advance. They simply do not have the educational background. Given the rampant profit mentality in our "educational pipeline" and the notion that "every child deserves a degree", there are plenty of ways for a person to spend some money, sit in a chair, and end up with a piece of paper stamped "degree" in whatever domain one desires. This is not going to solve the every-increasing technology and manufacturing gap between America and its serious competitors.

Re:my whole class was taught to program in high sc

[BitZtream]

What you call invented, I call failed at accomplishing.

Punk was 'invented' because too many kids were told by mommy they were special so when they got rejected because they aren't actually capable of playing, they just ignored it and played anyway. Turns out a bunch of kids who also aren't nearly as special as their parents told them they were ALSO ended up thinking ti was great to be around others who felt the world wasn't fair to them.

Punk is just a manifestation of spoiled brats who didn't stop playing when someone informed them they sucked.