Even the "Idea Person" Should Learn How To Code

theodp writes: "A few months ago," writes Steph Rhee, "I was at a dinner with a dozen students and a 60-year-old entrepreneur who made himself a fortune on Wall Street. At the time, I was a junior at Yale and the only person at the table studying a computer-related major. We went around saying what our big dreams were. When I said that I'm studying computer science because I want to be a software engineer and hope to start my own company one day, he said, 'Why waste so many years learning how to code? Why not just pay someone else to build your idea?'" But Rhee isn't buying into the idea of the look-Ma-no-tech-skills "idea person." "We must not neglect the merits of technical skills in the conception of the 'idea person,'" she argues. "What the 60-year old entrepreneur and others of his generation — the people in control of the education we receive — don't realize is this: for college students dreaming of becoming unicorns in Silicon Valley, being an 'idea person' is not liberating at all. Being able to design and develop is liberating because that lets you make stuff. This should be a part of what we see in the 'idea person' today and what it means to be 'right' when designing an undergraduate curriculum."

Comments

useless idea person...

[gbjbaanb]

for every 100 "idea" persons there is 1 who not only has the ideas but knows enough that those ideas are sane and sensible. This is why the "idea person" is a fool and treated as such.

You see these guys on shows like The Apprentice, the ones who have no talent or skills and so have to fall back on their mouths. They're simply salesmen who always get shown up to be useless in the end. Even a true businessman has plenty of skills they have to learn around organisation and management (real skills, not just shouting at people and pretending they know what they're doing).

So: Idea people, get a clue.There's no easy way to skip the essential steps of truly knowing what you're doing unless you learn those skills.

Re:useless idea person...

[jellomizer]

There is value from someone outside the box. Normally I like to work with the lowest ranking person who would be using such a tool. As they are often the ones with the best ideas, because they know what is going on at the detail level. Not some high up Big Picture Idea guy. Who just crams features that may or may not be useful. Also dealing only with techs (unless your product is made for them) can be not productive, as they will normally resolve down to what is easiest to build, because to make a good product, you will sometimes need to push the boundaries a bit more.

Now that said. Any ideas needs to be balanced with the limitation of technology. I had to once reject a customer who wanted me to make an App to do the following. OCR documents, If the document date (which was not formally standardized, nor was willing to standardize it) was past the data retention period would flag the document to be deleted, as well put them in a work queue for the hard copies to be destroyed. I had to turn them down, because the application was a constant high risk of huge failure. OCR isn't perfect, the fact that the date wasn't standardized made it worse, combined the result is intended to cause data loss means any glitch is a problem. I offered an alternate solution, where when they store the documents they enter the retention date, manually, and if they added a bar code to them it would make the process simpler. However that required too much manual effort. He just wanted to put a stack of documents on a scanner. Scan them and have everything go automatically.

Re:useless idea person...

[timholman]

for every 100 "idea" persons there is 1 who not only has the ideas but knows enough that those ideas are sane and sensible. This is why the "idea person" is a fool and treated as such.

Exactly. Good ideas, even brilliant ideas, are a dime a dozen. It is the execution that matters, and great execution is a very rare bird indeed.

But once again we see this too-common meme popping up yet again; that everyone should learn to code. I see it at my university, where enrollments in our entry-level CS course are going through the roof. Everyone is taking a programming class because all the talking heads tell them they should.

Ultimately (IMHO) it's a waste of time and resources. Any moderately intelligent person can be taught to code "Hello World" in any given language, but that doesn't make him a programmer any more that teaching him to shoot a basketball makes him into a professional player.

Good programmers become "good" by immersing themselves in the language and the problem to be solved. It requires a degree of focus and experience that you won't get from a few simple programming assignments. So what happens if you make your "idea man" take a two-week short course in the fundamentals of programming? He'll write that "Hello World" app, think to himself "Is this all there is to programming?" and become even more dismissive of the profession than he was before.

If you're going to teach programming, focus your efforts on the people with a genuine interest in the subject. Wasting time and money on people with no real aptitude or interest is like teaching a chimpanzee to pretend to play the piano: it makes for a cute article in the news, but it's no substitute for real talent and ability.

Re:useless idea person...

[drinkypoo]

But once again we see this too-common meme popping up yet again; that everyone should learn to code.

What makes it too-common? I don't see it that often.

Ultimately (IMHO) it's a waste of time and resources. Any moderately intelligent person can be taught to code "Hello World" in any given language, but that doesn't make him a programmer

Look, we have this concept of an individual who is "well-rounded" not by accident, but because we have seen that people who know more about more stuff have more intelligent things to say. As it turns out, things you learn in one area often have broad applicability. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you also have a screwdriver, the world looks like a different place. When you have a whole garage full of tools, it looks different again.

Heinlein had it right when he said that specialization was for insects. Life is too short for anyone to become a master of all trades, but life is too wondrous to restrict one's learning to a single discipline. Live a little. Learn. Experience.

The value in teaching everyone beginning programming is a lot like the value in teaching everyone a foreign language, or a musical instrument. Not everyone is going to become a master. Many will not even develop competence. But at minimum, they will become more aware of how the world works, and be able to make better-informed decisions. They will actually learn to see things differently and approach things in different ways. They will have a different idea of what is possible than people who don't know what they know.

TL;DR: It's a waste to try to make everyone into a programmer, but it's not a waste to teach everyone about programming.

Re:useless idea person...

[drinkypoo]

And yet, when you look at the stalwarts of today's tech industry, most of them excelled, not because of their technical skills but because of their ideas.

And yet, when you look at the stalwarts of today's tech industry, all of them excelled in part because of their technical skills, which formed their ideas. Sometimes they lacked the technical ability to carry their ideas to completion without assistance, but that's a mark of every great human endeavor.

Bill Gates was a programmer, albeit a mediocre one. Steve Jobs was also a bad programmer, and a worse EE... but he could at least build circuits and write code. These people excelled because of their ideas, but their ideas were founded in reality because they did have skills, even if they weren't exceptional in those areas.

Re:useless idea person...

[timholman]

TL;DR: It's a waste to try to make everyone into a programmer, but it's not a waste to teach everyone about programming.

I am the last person to argue against a well-rounded education, or to giving people the opportunity to learn whatever they want. But the idea that "we should teach everyone about programming" is, in my opinion, another example of the educational fad mindset that sweeps through society every few years, i.e. "subject XYZ is so important, that we should make everyone learn about it!"

Sorry, but I disagree. If you want better-rounded students, make them take more courses in science or mathematics. Make them learn a second language, or learn to play an instrument. Have them take classes in rhetoric, and learn to make presentations in front of an audience. There are dozens of different classical subjects that will do a better job of providing that broad base of experience and knowledge that you'll need as you go through life.

But programming is too specialized. Now many Slashdot readers will disagree, but most of them think of programming as something so familiar that they can't comprehend why anyone wouldn't see the value in learning about it. Let me provide a different example to illustrate my point.

Consider: Electronics is everywhere today, embedded in almost everything we use in our work or our entertainment. Since electronics is so incredibly important to modern society, we must encourage every student to learn about electronic circuits. Let's have them all design and build simple electronic circuits. At the very least, let's have them all work with Arduino boards and learn the fundamentals of hardware systems.

If one were to make that argument, it would be dismissed out of hand, as it would for any one of a hundred other topics that are absolutely integral to a high-tech civilization. Electronics is too complex and specialized; at best you could only provide a cursory experience to students. Would it still be valuable to some of them? No doubt. But does that mean we should make everyone take a class in electronics? Not at all.

Programming is no different. Learning to program requires learning a considerable amount of syntax to accomplish anything significant, and the "language-du-jour" (do you teach Basic? Fortran? Cobol? Java? C+? Swift?, etc.) changes constantly. So what you wind up with is a cursory exposure to the topic, in a language that may or may even be considered mainstream in five years. It might lead some people to learning more about programming, but does that mean it was the best use of society's limited educational resources, as opposed to a broader instruction in science or mathematics? I would argue "no".

In the ideal world, we'd all be Renaissance men and women, but in the real world people tend to focus strictly on what interests them, or on what makes money. Educational fads come and go, but they never make much traction against basic human nature. Saying "everyone should learn about programming" is no different.

Seems obvious

[asylumx]

I mean I wouldn't expect a non-engineer to be coming up with great ideas for space travel, either. Wild ideas only rarely make it. We hear about stories where those wild ideas from people who have no skill do make it but the vast majority of those wild ideas fall flat.

Listen to the old guy

[rfengr]

Listen to the old guy. He will retire early with a nice nest egg. That beats being a coding wage slave. Also shows you the 0.1%'s perception of CS people; you are just labor to be used, in the grand scheme of things.

Re:Listen to the old guy

[gweihir]

And in the process, he will have had a massive negative influence on society. Too many like him and everything collapses.

Re:Listen to the old guy

[Bengie]

There is an over-abundance of mediocre programmers, making them easily replaceable.There is very high demand for programmers, just not of the mediocre variety. Where I work, the problem domain is complex enough that we have about a 1 year learning curve before a programmer brings in a net profit. It takes us 6 months to a year to find a new programmer. We're specialized enough that both Google and Microsoft have partnered with us so we can help them.

Finding good programmers is hard.

Re:Listen to the old guy

[Viol8]

"A Cloud infrastructure is more fault tolerant and has less single point of failures then a mainframe."

Really? How many times has Azure gone done now? Mainframes are built to be resilient - they have to be as most of them need to run 24/7/365 for decades at a time. When a major bank decides to run its back end processing systems on a "cloud" service then I might sit up and take cloud systems seriously.

"So they are not passing down their wisdom and training replacements, but staying in the job until they die, leaving a gap that is hard to fill. "

If the old guy is doing something like COBOL which the younger coders don't want to learn then whats the alternative?

"By the time you peak in your career, you should be working on a succession plan, trying to get the new guys to work with you, "

Don't be daft. Its not the coders job to sort out training for his potential replacement, thats up to company management to arrange it. Most coders I know have enough on their hands just trying to meet deadlines without being some sort of kiddy coder support service.

Ideas are overrated

[X10]

Ideas are heavily overrated. It's the execution that makes the difference.

Very finance specific

[Errol backfiring]

a 60-year-old entrepreneur who made himself a fortune on Wall Street

The con, sorry, finance industry is one of the few areas where sane thinking only leads to people jumping ship instead of production. In real professions, you'd better know what you are talking about.

I always wonder how anyone with more than a half brain cell can work in the finance industry and still look at himself in the mirror each morning.

Re:Very finance specific

[gweihir]

I always wonder how anyone with more than a half brain cell can work in the finance industry and still look at himself in the mirror each morning.

Apparently, 1 in 100 persons is a psychopath. In the finance industries, among CEOs, military leaders and politicians, that rate is much worse. And there are always the narcissists, the authoritarian followers and the plain stupid. How do you think "they" get anybody to fight wars, to spy on everybody, etc.?

Re:Very finance specific

[blue9steel]

I'm pretty sure that was a comment on morals rather than skill difficulty.

Re:Very finance specific

[gweihir]

The psychopaths are not enough to start wars. For that they need the stupid, the narcissistic and the authoritarian followers.

Re:As long as they're not forced

[jellomizer]

Just like how we are forced to learn how to read, write, and do arithmetic.
In today's world, everyone should have a basic level of programming skills, I don't think it needs to be comprehensive, but to a level where they can solve simple problems and know where your limitations are. Basic Programming literacy should be at least the following
IF conditionals (with AND and OR)
LOOPs
Varables
and nesting.

Mostly a CS101 type of stuff. But that should be generic everyone is taught skills.
Not so they can grow up to be programmers, and software developers, but as a tool to train their brain in different methods of solving issues.
We have Liberal Art skills, that gives critical thinking
We have Mathematics that gives us tools that we can use to solve problems.
Computer science is actually a good way to glue both together. You want to create, you have an problem, you can use the tools of math in different ways to help create a solution.

 

That's the truth, and it sux.

[AndyKron]

Being able to design and develop is liberating because that lets you make stuff like flashing sequins sewn into a shitty sweater you got at Goodwill because you're too fucking poor to buy anything else. That's the truth, and it sux.