Slashdot Mirror
Coding Academies -- Useful Or Nonsense? (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Stephen Nichols, CEO of a platform that helps non-coders create simple video games, thinks that so-called coding academies are essentially snake oil. "In 20+ years of professional coding, I've never seen someone go from novice to full-fledged programmer in a matter of weeks, yet that seems to be what coding academies are promising, alongside instant employment, a salary big enough to afford a Tesla and the ability to change lives." His point is reminiscent of Peter Norvig's in "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years."
Nichols also thinks coding tools will become powerful enough in the next decade that the demand for actual, dedicated coders will diminish (perhaps not surprising, given his business). But he's probably right that the people likely to go to a coding academy are likely to be the ones using those tools, when they arrive. "Put succinctly, coding is writing text files in foreign languages containing instructions suitable for an absolute idiot to follow. ... For a little while, spending tens of thousands of dollars on a coding academy might feel like a good way to surmount the intimidation. ... More likely, it is just a new pathway into debt."
Nichols also thinks coding tools will become powerful enough in the next decade that the demand for actual, dedicated coders will diminish (perhaps not surprising, given his business). But he's probably right that the people likely to go to a coding academy are likely to be the ones using those tools, when they arrive. "Put succinctly, coding is writing text files in foreign languages containing instructions suitable for an absolute idiot to follow. ... For a little while, spending tens of thousands of dollars on a coding academy might feel like a good way to surmount the intimidation. ... More likely, it is just a new pathway into debt."
Coding academies are nonsense and attract the kind of mind that becomes a lawyer because they want money, or becomes a doctor because they want money. Real programmers have gravitated towards their field long before ever having a formal education in it. Also, I highly doubt you can teach the computer science concepts that back up this field in a few weeks. Really, these places just produce code monkeys who don't really understand what they're doing but glue pieces of code from Stack Overflow together.
Teach them math and critial thinking... Coding is just a translation level. ie human "compilers". Taking one language and encoding in another. As C++ is converted to binary (or P-code to bin).
Writing code easy ANYONE can do it. Understanding what you are writing is meaningful, actaully does what you want? That is crital thinking.
It's called attrition rate. For any profession there's a relatively small amount that stay within that profession for 10, 20, 30 years. The counterexamples to this rule are the professions that tend to be taken by people that wanted to be in that profession for all of their lives. i.e. an MD or a lawyer. I'm sure coding academies will attract a high amount of novices. But from that influx there will still be some percent - perhaps even 0.001% - that just springboard after it.
Is it enough to call it not snakeoil? Probably not. In my totally unscientific and personal experience, programming languages and frameworks usually have sufficient information for me to figure them out and know how to use them. That includes the very basic stuff of learning java, for example. If you name a programming language there's a way to teach yourself it for free. So the coding academies are vying for a portion of a market with a "free" and viable enough alternative. I'd call THAT snakeoil.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Nichols also thinks coding tools will become powerful enough in the next decade that the demand for actual, dedicated coders will diminish
That's what they said when they created Cobol.
Seriously I've seen this same pattern over and over. Some company comes up with a "power user" development tool which is seen as the best thing ever because it will allow business users (who have business knowledge) to do everything themselves. But unfortunately the tool never does exactly what is needed and it proves a bit too tricky to configure so either the thing is shelved or it's passed on to a team of "real" developers so they can integrate in-house tools with this piece of shit and work around the bugs. It's a nightmare because the tool is too high-level and limited for a programmer to easily sets his hooks in, so rockstars run away from that project (or company). That team becomes a dark pit where only lifers and quota employees are thrown in, and they are miserable and the whole thing sucks and there's champagne for everyone whenever a ridiculously low hanging fruit goal is achieved.
A power user development tool is even worse than an in-house "framework" designed by some dude who left two years ago to do whitewater rafting in South America and never came back.
lucm, indeed.