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Michael Bloomberg: You Can't Teach a Coal Miner To Code
theodp (442580) writes "Gigaom reports that while speaking at the Bloomberg Energy Summit on Wednesday, former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he gives 'a lot of money to the Sierra Club' to help close dirty coal plants, but added that as a society we have to 'have some compassion to do it gently.' Subsidies to help displaced workers are one option, said Bloomberg, while retraining is another option. But, in a slight to the tech industry's sometimes out-of-touch nature with workers outside of Silicon Valley, he said retraining needs to be realistic, 'You're not going to teach a coal miner to code,' argued Bloomberg. 'Mark Zuckerberg says you teach them to code and everything will be great. I don't know how to break it to you... but no.'"
So it's more accurate to say that some coal miners may be able to learn to code: Watch out for those blanket generalizations, they bite back.
If you actually RTFA, you'll see that Bloomburg didn't actually make the blanket generalization he's accused of, he was referring to exactly what you said here: Not all coal miners are fit to be programmers, so to say "just teach them to code and they'll all become programmers" smacks of elitism and a lack of understanding about how the non-tech world works.
To that end, Zuckerburg's quote sounds like it could have come straight from the mouth of Marie Antoinette.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Bloomberg didn't say that you can't teach any coal worker to code, just that you can't teach every coal worker to code, refuting Zuckerberg's Marie-Antoinette-style "let them write code" statement.
Only the Zuck sounds like an out-of-touch elitist in this case; Bloomberg is making a legitimate point that the retraining process is more complicated than that because it has to be tailored to the skills and interests of each person. The article summary is misleading, and the headline is outright wrong.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
He was the head of Data Systems Development at Solomon Brothers. When that company got bought out, he started a company selling Bloomberg Terminals, which were extremely innovative. He parlayed that into the Bloomberg News service. He grew up middle class with no family connections or a leg up, and now has $33B. That doesn't happen to dumb people.