Programming Education: Selling People a Lie? (blogspot.com)

An anonymous reader writes: It's hard to exist in the tech world today without hearing the constant refrain about learning to code: "it's easy, we desperately need programmers, and everyone should learn how!" UK software developer Mike Hadlow disagrees, strongly. He says, "Formal education for programmers seems not to work very well and yet the majority of those who are successful programmers are mostly self taught. On the one hand we seem to have people who don't need any guided education to give them a successful career; they are perfectly capable of learning their trade from the vast sea of online resources available to anyone who wants to use it. On the other hand we have people who seem unable to learn to code even with years of formal training.

This rather puts the lie to the barriers to entry argument. If the majority of current professional software developers are self taught, how can there be barriers to entry? Anyone with access to the internet can learn to code if they have the aptitude for it. The evidence points to a very obvious conclusion: there are two populations: one that finds programming a relatively painless and indeed enjoyable thing to learn and another that can't learn no matter how good the teaching. The elephant in the room, the thing that Yvette Cooper, the 'year of code' or 'hour of code' people seem unwilling to admit is that programming is a very high aptitude task. It is not one that 'anyone can learn', and it is not easy, or rather it is easy, but only if you have the aptitude for it. The harsh fact is that most people will find it impossible to get to any significant standard."

Comments

Logic versus programming

[TWX]

Seems to me that there's a disconnect in the way people think about programming versus thinking about math and logic. Might it make more sense to people to think logically and procedurally, then worry about applying that to a computer? Those skills are useful in life itself and are not limited to even mathematics disciplines, let alone computer programming.

Re:Logic versus programming

[Anonymous Coward]

You realise that logic teaching of various kinds predates programming by millenia, right?

Re:Logic versus programming

[JustOK]

end of one school year, they took a bunch of students to the library. They needed to test the schedule for the following year. Some students became "Rooms", some "Classes" (e.g 6a, 7b etc) and some were teachers. The rooms were positioned, and they started the clock. Teachers went their way, classes came in. Clocked ticked on, with teachers and classes following their schedules and time tables. They looked at mis-assignments, double bookings, "traffic" jams in hallways etc. It was kind of a neat way to look at programming, although they were just testing the results of the scheduling software.

Re:Logic versus programming

[WarJolt]

The problem with teaching someone to program is that they tend to miss the part where you have to think about the problem abstractly and structure the problem properly. If you can communicate the problem effectively to other people, then you can find a programmer to code up your idea relatively easily. The aptitude problem comes from the fact that many people think learning to program is the point. Good programmers are able to communicate abstract concepts at a high level, which can't really be taught through just learning to program. Honestly, I think you learn how to program better simply by explaining what you are trying to do in plain English. The actual programming task has almost little educational value.

Students should come up with a problem they are trying to solve, conceptualize it and then explain it to their coding buddy and if their coding buddy can code it then the student probably understands how to program well.

Re:Logic versus programming

[Rei]

I think the whole term "learn programming" leads people to think in the wrong direction. One semester should be enough for a person to learn the "basics of programming". If they can't get the basics down in that time, they're never going to. Most of the time spent on programming education needs to be not on basics or learning languages, but on getting your future-programmers to avoid the giant list of common pitfalls that programmers make in every field of programming. Teach them O(N) notation. Teach them data structures. Teach them of buffer overflow. Teach them of injection. Teach them how and when to optimize and to recognize what optimizations actually help versus just making the code confusing. Teach them to avoid directly overwriting important files, rather to write the data to a temporary and then move it to the ultimate destination to prevent data corruption during crashes. Teach them refactoring. Teach them threading and race conditions. Teach them the importance of server-side checks on data validity rather than just client side. Etc. Basically one should take a survey of people working professionally as programmers and ask them, "What lack of knowledge or bad programming habits have frustrated you the most about any of your coworkers, past or present?" - the most common answers should form the basis of a good programming education, along with whatever teaching about tools and principles that will increase their productivity.

I really don't have too much to complain about with how my college taught CS, although some things could have been improved. I have more of an issue with some of the maths courses that were required which really had nothing to do with programming except in very specialized fields. I actually got a lot more out of my elective math courses than I did out of my required ones.

Re:Logic versus programming

[TheRaven64]

TFA seems to be completely missing the point. We're not teaching programming because we expect everyone to be a full-time programmer, we're teaching programming because it's an important life skill. Even if they just learn that there are some tasks that can be automated and when to ask a professional programmer to do it (and, ideally, what tasks can't easily be automated) then that's a huge win. If they can do the simple automation tasks themselves, that's even better.

How often have to seen people in admin jobs spending ages doing something in MS Office that half a dozen lines of VBA could have done in under a second? Eliminating that is the kind of productivity win that we expect to see from teaching everyone a little bit of programming. The argument makes as much sense as saying 'most people won't become novelists, we shouldn't teach English', or 'most people won't become accountants, we shouldn't teach mathematics'.

It's not entirely a lie

[JoelKatz]

Programming education should try to find people who have the aptitude to be good programmers and quickly weed out those who never will.

Re:It's not entirely a lie

[hey!]

Well, I don't know whether it's inborn, although if sometimes seems this way. But without taking a position on whether programmers are born or made, there are skills and habits involved with being a good programmer that would be useful to anyone. That said, however, I'm not convinced that these skills and habits are what the programming education movement is teaching. I am convinced that coding isn't the only way to gain those things.

What a really skillful programmer does that special is transform problems from something it isn't clear how to solve into other problems that are readily solvable. That takes a peculiar mix of discipline and imagination which simply teaching coding per se will not foster.

Re:It's not entirely a lie

[ImprovOmega]

Programming education should try to find people who have the aptitude to be good programmers and quickly weed out those who never will.

I had a professor in college who would actively and zealously apply this principle. His class was the one gateway class in all of the computer science department - if you couldn't pass his class, you couldn't get a CS degree period. When I was an undergraduate I remember his class being a lot of work but surprisingly engaging and with interestingly tricky problems to solve. When I was a graduate student I got to see behind the veil a bit and he explained how those tricky problems would separate out the folks that shouldn't have been in the class in the first place. I always thought that was kind of cool, that he cared about the state of the field that much to not want people who shouldn't have a CS degree to get one.

ahem

[jasno]

Even if you *can* program it doesn't mean you'll actually want to do it.

Many aspects of programming are boring and tedious. You need someone who can handle the abstract thinking, memorize the various components involved, understand how they fit and how to change them, and then sort through the various administrative steps(version control, bugtracking, communicating with devs/qa/mgmt, etc). Also, many programming jobs are very un-social. I've had times at work where I did't speak to another human for several weeks.

Cut the fat.

[pushing-robot]

We should get rid of history classes while we're at it... how many kids become historians?

In fact, let's go back to apprenticeships and work-training. Imagine how quickly we could get working-class children into their lifetime careers of burger-flipping and form-filling and ditch-digging if we remove all the distraction of a 'well-rounded education'...

Agile/Scrum == hot potato

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience, from numerous Agile/Scrum/Kanban meetings, the concept was sound -- get people together, find out where everyone is at, find what is slowing stuff down, go on.

However, that works in Japan where there is a level of respect from employers to employees.

Here in the US, what was, "what did you do, what are you planning to do, and what is in your way" becomes "explain the pathetic amount of stuff you did", "make promises for next meeting", and "point the finger at someone else." The concept of a blocker, for example is used as a way to blamestorm, and ultimately, a way to find who gets shitcanned first.

As for development in general, find a niche. Mainstream development stuff is offshored, and if by chance it isn't, it is handled by H-1Bs that rotate out after 90 days so they can't get a chance at a green card. Even if you find a dev job, you have to program at least 1000 lines of code a day, or else you will get replaced by someone who will. Bugs? If it builds, ship the damn thing. Security problems? Security has no ROI, worry about it when the lawsuits happen.

I personally recommend people go law, accounting, or a trade. You cannot offshore a plumber, electrician, or lawyer, and there is no such thing as an unemployed attorney. No, one may not wind up as a senior partner at Ben Dover & C. Howlett Fields... but one can eke out a living.

Re:Agile/Scrum == hot potato

[mikael]

Effectively, the person who is getting the least work done is the one to be promoted to management or fired. That leads to an arms race where programmers start working until the late hours of the morning to make sure they are not the one completing the least number of tasks.

Re:Agile/Scrum == hot potato

[Anonymous Coward]

REALLY bad advice. Unemployment for law school grads is >15% and climbing fast. 2 out of 3 are not working in the profession of law at all. Meanwhile developers are in huge demand, and no one is offshoring anything interesting.

Re:Agile/Scrum == hot potato

[605dave]

Sadly I think this is way too true. What are people going to do when robots can build a house or a bridge? Or when everything else turns robotic, like cars. What are people going to do? The reality is that we will have to move to a world without money because no one will be able to make any. Only those at the top will have a source of income, ownership of the automation.

Reading that last sentence I wonder if Marx wasn't somewhat right. Those that own the means of production are going to end up with all of the power.

Geometry

[Anonymous Coward]

Back In The Day, I had Geometry in High School. 10th grade.

I don't know what others Geometry classes looked like, but ours was proofs. All proofs, nothing but proofs. We never did anything with compasses, protractors, straightedges, etc. Just proofs. Day in and day out. First 6 weeks was vocabulary, the rest of the year -- proofs.

Strangely, at the time, we had Saturday classes -- just the way it worked. I had to go in to Geometry class on Saturday, all of the students did.

But on those days, the teacher would basically hand out worksheets and we would work problems. These worksheets typically had 3 problems on them.

I would finish those problems in 2 minutes. Literally, zing, zang, bing, bang, boom. Done.

For me, proofs in Geometry were trivial. As the year advanced, we simply adde more theorems and axioms to tap in to do the proofs, but the logic -- that was all the same. Since Geometric proofs are all about logic. Damnable, inarguable logic.

"Teacher, can I leave now?" "No! You must stay here the entire class." he'd shout at me as he was helping some other student. And we all know that student, perhaps it was you. The student who Did Not Get Geometry and proofs. They'd been sitting in that chair the entire year, and, never "grokked" it. All they can do is struggle.

So, it was no surprise that I took to computer programming like a moth to flame. I get it. I'm good at it.

And I know there are a lot of people who will not be. I did not know Geometry going in, heck I don't know it now -- it's been so long. But they did not have to teach me Geometry per se, they had to show it too me, show the logical relationships, how it starts, and that was it. After that, just feed me theorems. Operations that I can use.

I have no problem with children being exposed to programming. That's how you find people like me. But I think, with the ubiquity of it today, when you could program on your cell phone if you were so inclined, the people that will do well and attend those classes, will already know what they need to know before they even go in.

But it's like the Force. You have it or you don't. Some have it stronger than others, some develop it more easily than others. But if you don't have it, the Force won't be with you. No matter what Master Jedi you train under.

Re:One door it does open for the failures:

[Opportunist]

Those who can do, those who can't manage?

Aptitude, Ability and Desire

[Archangel Michael]

Anyone with access to the internet can learn to code if they have the aptitude for it. The evidence points to a very obvious conclusion: there are two populations: one that finds programming a relatively painless and indeed enjoyable thing to learn and another that can't learn no matter how good the teaching.

I fall somewhere in the middle. I have programmed in languages from Assembly to PHP/Javascript (if you call those languages), so I have the ability to code.. I also know I don't have the aptitude to; I find typing at a keyboard to be very monotonous and am quickly bored. This doesn't mean I don't have desire to code, I just find it boring. I wish I wasn't bored with it.

However, I have a colleague who loves to code and is quite good at it. However, when he gets stuck he doesn't ask other programmers (I no longer code), he asks me, because I don't see the code, I only see the logic. I've helped him solve a number of problems simply by not being a coder but being a problem solver. I'll let him code the details needed to accomplish the solution.

That being said, knowing logic is fundamental to solving problems. People with strong logic skills can solve problems. Coding does help you learn how to be logical and solve problems.

Re:Egalitarianism

[careysub]

For those of you who are blessed to find this reference utterly mysterious, I hold up for you a case in point of John Roger's insightful comment on Kung Fu Monkey:

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

Degree vs self-taught is a bogus comparison

[perpenso]

Also, having a CS background (I didn't say degree - there is a difference) WILL make you a better programmer because you'll have an understanding of what's going on behind the scenes.

And often a greater breadth of knowledge. One of the advantages of a formal CS program is that one will most likely take classes in topics a student has no interest in. Yet those topics may be important or yield info that unexpectedly solves problem in other areas/topics. Many self taught tend to skip a topic or two and have gaps in their knowledge.

That said, in a formal CS program there are two obvious groups. Those who are there because they have a genuine interest in coding and the problem solving it involves, and then there are those who are there because someone told them it is a good career path. While both can graduate, the former (genuine interest) tend to be far better programmers. They will learn something, or more importantly do something, just for their own curiosity. Things unrelated to class assignments, and they learn more and become more proficient.

So the whole degree vs self-taught is sort of a bogus comparison. Many top programmers are both, degree and self-taught are not mutually exclusive.

The title is lying

[zJe]

So the blogger uses 2 polls in his article, one his own twitter poll of 101 responses, hardly meaningful. The other is a the 2015 Stack Overflow developers survey, that survey had 21,314 respondents for the education question which is certainly better than 101. He uses the graph for education to backup his statements which has the following data:

41.8% I'm self-taught
37.7% Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (or related field)
36.7% On-the-job training
18.4% Masters degree in Computer Science (or related field)
17.8% Online class
16.7% Some university coursework in computer science (or related field) but no degree
6.1% Industry certification program
4.3% Other
3.5% Intensive code "boot-camp" or night school
2.2% PhD in Computer Science (or related field)
1.0% Mentorship program

He then goes on to say "Only a third have a computer science or related degree and nearly 42%, the largest group, are self taught."

Turns out the percentages add up to 186.2%, the horror, some people had more than one source of education or they lied about their education. Now it's probably safe to assume that if the poll respondent had a PHD they didn't also claim a Bachelor and Masters degrees, that would mean that 58.3% of the poll have a computer science or related degree. If you include the response of some university course work it turns out that 75% of the respondents had some level of university training. It would seem that according to Mr. Hadlow's sources that university training is important.

Perhaps Mr. Hadlow should head back to university, his math and logic skills need refreshing.

Love...

[The Code Hog]

As I've gotten older (started BASIC with a Timex/Sinclair XZ81, do NoSQL engine design for a living now), I've come to believe that the population split is true; there is a segment that has the aptitude to code, and the rest who don't.

The easiest way to see this aptitidue is to look and see whether someone loves to code. Just loves it. Works late because they have their teeth into a problem, holds incredibly complex systems in their head comfortably, etc. LOVES to code. Who feels, to paraphrase The Wind in the Willows: "There is nothing-- absolutely nothing-- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in code."

You rarely find crappy software folks who enjoy puttering about in the code. You often find crappy devs who got into it for the high salary.