Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ad Exec: Learn To Code Or You're Dead To Me

Posted by samzenpus on from the what-can-you-do-for-me? dept.

theodp writes "In a widely-read WSJ Op-Ed, English major Kirk McDonald, president of online ad optimization service PubMatic, informed college grads that he considers them unemployable unless they can claim familiarity with at least two programming languages. 'Teach yourself just enough of the grammar and the logic of computer languages to be able to see the big picture,' McDonald advises. 'Get acquainted with APIs. Dabble in a bit of Python. For most employers, that would be more than enough.' Over at Typical Programmer, Greg Jorgensen is not impressed. 'I have some complaints about this "everyone must code" movement,' Jorgensen writes, 'and Mr. McDonald's article gives me a starting point because he touched on so many of them.'"

1 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Jorgenson is full of shit by tnk1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    His point could have been made better.

    I'm not cut out to be a doctor. I'm probably smart enough to do the job, but I don't have the mindset for it, nor really the interest. So, I'd probably make a shitty doctor.

    While it is easier to become a professional programmer, becoming someone that can legitimately base a career on it, or write something that a company can rely on is not just a matter of picking up a book. Yes, you could sit down with BASIC and your Commodore 64 and make a little balloon made of sprites fly across your screen, and I could probably sit down with an anatomy book or a first aid book and learn some stuff, even very useful stuff, from that too. However, if I was a hospital accountant, I might decide that I'd do more good for the hospital by actually spending my time being a good accountant, instead of trying to splint bones.

    If they want me to learn something completely outside my interests and skillset to do a job that has nothing to do with being able to do my job well, I suppose I would consider such a directive to be idiotic. If anything, sometimes you want people who *don't understand* what you do for a living to do the jobs that are supporting you because they will not gloss over things that you take for granted.