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How St. Louis Is Bootstrapping Hundreds of Programmers
itwbennett writes "The MOOC (massive open online course) failure rate is notoriously high — only 1% of people who take the beginning computer science programming class, CS50, that Harvard offers over the EdX online platform complete it. A new effort in St. Louis called LaunchCode is changing that — and solving the city's programmer shortage. For the past several weeks, about 300 hardy souls have been gathering in a downtown St. Louis library to listen to the CS50 lectures and work together on the various programming problem sets. But the support offered by the all-volunteer run LaunchCode doesn't end with meet space. They're also doing an end-around on the traditional coder hiring process by pairing the students who complete the course with experienced programmers in one of more than a 100 tech companies who are looking for talent."
David Malan, who went to Harvard himself and is a rockstar teacher, teaches the course. I watched a couple of his lectures and found them interesting and engaging, even when he covers some basic concepts that I have long known. If I had him teaching me programming back in the day, I might have stuck with it and become a coder myself.
i'm sure its just me, but isn't this possibly the dumbest excuse for not becoming a programmer around?
almost all programmers i know who really add value to projects learned the stuff mostly on their own...teachers don't teach this stuff, the computer does. for the first six months almost everyone who is trying to write a program is going to be pounding their head on the desk.
only through that struggle will you begin to grok it.
i still thank my first Comp-Sci undergraduate teacher (FORTRAN for those interested) for issuing this offer to his students...
"anyone interested in getting an A and skipping having to come to class, if you write a bowling league manager that does this, this, and that and have it done in 10 weeks, talk to me after class"
I believe i was the only one who took him up on his offer, and to this day i'm thankful for him for the things i "learned" about PROFESSIONAL programming.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
I'm one of those people who dropped it. Namely, because my IT classes (I was getting college credit for) picked up. I wouldn't discount a 1% completion rate as a sign of failure, or even one of difficulty. Hell, I'd go so far as to say that every person who signs up for it for any sort of personal growth is a success, even if most drop it later on.
The point of MOOCs is that since they're free, those who enroll in them can pick and choose from what's there that interests them. Plenty of people enroll in a MOOC because they want a refresher on something, or to learn about just one aspect of what's covered, or just to see what it looks like. It's not failure when those people don't go through everything in the course.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Where is this shortage or programmers problem coming from? Last I check there are lots and lots of them. If they are looking for good programmers, they wont solve it by offering one course...
did you forget to take your meds?
I took Jennifer Widom's SQL course out of Stanford a couple years ago, just as a refresher (and to see if I could "hang" in a world class instutition). I found the class rewarding.
At its peak we had 120k students. Now consider 1% of 120,000 is still 1200 students; far more than she could teach in a year at a school like Stanford.
Yeah with MOOCs, like everything else accedemic, you get out of it what you put in. At least in these cases, they let us, the prospective student decide if we should be there, instead of weeding out students through the admissions process or with heavy prerequisites and other selective measures.
Just like real college, many will fail and few will succeed. At least this way, my outcome is all up to me.
These efforts aren't solving the programmer shortage, they are simply mills churning out unqualified candidates (only ~1% of which will get a job and %1 of those becoming a solid developer) in order to deflate wages for everyone else.
There is another program that is ramping up called CodeRed, which helps high-schools introduce a series of courses that will supposedly get high-school graduates entry level jobs from $45-60K.
I'm not too worried as ITT / Pheonix / have tried to do this for years with little success (and several lawsuits for promising things they cannot deliver). You'll get the same result out of these programs.
As an aside, I just wish the developer community had the political awareness to see these things for what they really are. Maybe it's industry maturity or the aggregate political / sociological leanings, but you don't see this kind of crap from Doctors, Lawyers, etc.
I also wish we didn't devalue education by stating this is all it takes, but, hey call that the Holiday Inn effect.
I've wondered why more online educational institutions don't try something this, real groups that meet somewhere public to work through a course together. The aspect of being paired with a working programmer eventually is also a great advantage, but just having a group to work with would lead lot more people to have enough motivation to complete a class.
Some schools do. Back in my academic days in the 1990s, my school (a state university) partnered with the local AFB for such things. Some of the people in the lab spent half their day working on fighter jet programs and other systems on the base. In exchange a lot of people got recruited by the base and by the base's contractors as civilian programmers before graduation.
However, I note in the story that they businesses are looking for a specific class of programmers: The low-paid programmers who have enough background to be useful but not enough background to demand a high salary.
Specifically the businesses are looking for people with one year of training on how to use the language. Those who graduate from the program will likely enjoy a few years on the job --- probably paid a living wage for those few years --- and then will be dumped when they start asking for professional wages.
Contrary to what those business want you to believe, there is not a shortage of programmers. Instead, there is a mismatch between what the businesses want to pay versus what programmers believe they should earn. Skilled programmers provide valuable services, are very much white-collar workers, and are able to demand a high salary just like doctors, lawyers, pilots, architects, and other highly-trained, highly skilled professionals. Businesses who pay well have no difficulty finding skilled and talented programmers. Businesses who pay their programmers the same rate as their hourly call center workers, well, they get the quality they paid for.
Software runs the world. I wouldn't want a minimum-wage physician, or a minimum-wage airline pilot, or a building designed by a minimum-wage architect. I similarly wouldn't trust custom-built software written by minimum-wage programmers.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Most of the tech companies in the area treat programmers/developers (and IT as a whole) as a fossil fuel, to be immediately burned for their energy and quickly forgotten. Attitudes are slowly changing and quality of life is improving at a glacial pace. Still, it's a hard market to thrive in-- long hours, pay that is commonly bottom 25% of national medians, and special types of business people that can only be the result of inbreeding. Expect to be worked like a rented mule, especially in the health care sector.
STL does have its gems (Enterprise RAC, Savvis, Panera, MasterCard etc.), but they're pretty difficult to get in to with all of the competition.
IT / tech needs apprenticeships and CS is not = IT.
Both IT tech work and programming some kind of trades / apprenticeship system.
The older college system is to much of a one size fits all and at times can be theory loaded / has lot's of skill gaps.
Some of the theory is nice to have but others is only really useful for very low level OS stuff that most programmers witting code should have to deal with much less wire there own systems bypassing the build in os ones.
Also with IT / desktop / sever / networking is more hands on and the over load of theory is bad as well doing stuff out a book without being in real settings that can be quite a bit off of what the book says.
It's either the Peter Principle or the Dilbert Principle, depending on the business. Has almost nothing to do with government, and everything to do with either promoting people past their competency or hiring sociopaths who don't know the first thing about what a man with ability looks like because they have an MBA from Phoenix.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I am gratified to hear you are willing to hire midlife people who are tired of the rat race. There is something to be said for programmers who understand how to understand your problem, figure out a solution in the language of your choice (and learn it if necessary), then explain what they are going to do and how they are going to do it. You will seldom get programmer/analysts from a quickie course in CS, and generally people need about 10 years in practice to have any idea what I am talking about. You should not be trying to compete with Silicon Valley for the cream of the young programmers. Even if you could afford them, and you can't, they would not be happy with you. The country is full of unemployed middle-aged and older programmers. You have to be willing to pay them a bit more than entry level, but of course there is value in these people.
businesses are looking for a specific class of programmers: The low-paid programmers who have enough background to be useful but not enough background to demand a high salary.
If this is what businesses need - then great, let's get more of these people in the workforce.
I work at a different level of programming and industry experience, and I might demand 3x the salary that these guys do - but if we had 3 of these guys for every one of me, I wouldn't be wasting my time doing a lot of simple stuff that doesn't add as much value to the product as I could otherwise - the business as a whole would benefit by getting product to market faster, and they can still afford to pay my salary.
Worried that these 3 guys will work their way up to "your level" and compete your salary down? If you're really adding value at a high level, you shouldn't worry much, most of these guys will not be working their way up - it doesn't mean they're (all) worthless, just that there's a lot of simpler stuff that needs doing, and there always will be. Some of the new people will wash out, not cut out for desk work or whatever, some will muddle along fixing build scripts and addressing bug reports one at a time because that's what they're good at, and a rare few will become the new top architects - but, mostly, the new top architects will not be coming from public library based MOOC study groups, and when they do, they will mostly be "paying their dues" for a decade or two, like the rest of us.
I really wonder if programmer shortages really exist or if it just a ploy by employers to undercut the worth of people who are already writing code? This is quite distinct from the facile discussion about "coder" vs "computer scientist" or "designer" and all the complexity of skills needed. Clearly there is a big difference from writing some static language with few abstractions, even coding HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and Haskal or Python. It may be that maintaining legacy code such as FORTRAN and COBOL is real demand that is in fact hard to satisfy, and that there are too many people trained in newer more powerful environments. I just don't know, but I am somewhat skeptical of claims of shortages where the range of need is so complex. It sounds like the real problem has always been matching skills a certain person has with a need out there and that the average recruiter, even the average technical recruiter out there, is not very good at making the matches.
Even more problematic is this tendency to believe that in economically disadvantaged places like Oakland Ca, or St. Louis Mo. that teaching inner-city kids how to "program" is going to help but a very few of them. You may find people who are able to thrive as developers at random in any population, but the number will be small in any given collection of people. Teaching large numbers of people the basics, and especially if the language chosen is strongly typed, like Java, is just not going to get very far for most. Just because software development is glamorous doesn't mean everyone should do it, or even try. In my experience it requires a special set of skills and attitudes that in fact few people have.
I think that basic language literacy skills, very possibly using a computer, are more important for disadvantaged youth than programming skills, or that programming should be used as a tool in pursuit of another interest. So that if people can find self-expression in imagery, or graphic arts, or writing, they these come first and that programming be viewed as a tool that might aid that pursuit.
Finally, it must be said again that opportunity is based not on the needs people have in a Capitalist economy, but in the recognition by investors that funding a need of people is worthwhile. Since investment has run askew because of financialization and international investment, there is no one to one mapping of need with resources. There is some mapping but it hingers on the wisdom of investors, which is something that reasonable people can question.