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Learn to Code?
“Learn to code.”
Familiar with the phrase? It’s a rather insensitive shorthand way of suggesting that someone enhance his commercial opportunities by acquiring new skills. That can be sincere advice; Walter Brooke encouraging a young Dustin Hoffman to pursue a future in “plastics.” It can be a practical career choice, as demonstrated by a handful of out-of-work Kentucky coal miners who successfully made the transition from working bituminous mines to agile coding techniques.
Most recently — as in last week — “learn to code” is a snarky rebuke to displaced print and internet journalists, and in particular to people recently let go by Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, and the Gannett media giant. In part, the comment is intended to be karmic, alluding to an attitude that prevailed during President Obama’s tenure when his administration bragged of shutting down entire industries (coal mining, for example) and some in the media glibly suggested the displaced workers upgrade their skills and go get good jobs — in short, “learn to code.”
I code. I’m good at it. I’ve been doing it for a long time, far longer than the average Buzzfeed journalist has been alive, I suspect. I know a thing or two about writing software, and so I want to offer some advice to the young journalists recently of Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post who might be considering a foray into the verdant pastures of my industry.
Software isn’t what you’re used to. Software is the real world.
We all have a pretty good idea, or, at least, a strong suspicion, about what goes on in the modern newsroom. We understand that most everyone thinks pretty much the same way, supports pretty much the same causes, tilts the news in pretty much the same direction. (That’s to the left, in case anyone isn’t clear on that.)
We know that standards are pretty low, particularly at Buzzfeed but pretty much everywhere else as well. (See Covington for a glaring recent instance, but examples abound.) We know that there’s a tendency to pick the news that fits the preferred narrative, and to studiously ignore inconvenient truths. Some of it — most of it, probably — is innocent, the simple consequence of living inside a bubble and breathing the same righteous atmosphere as everyone around you. It’s understandable and even forgivable. But it isn’t real.
Software is real. Computers are remarkably unforgiving things, completely disinterested in your view of the world, your sense of what should be. Computers don’t care about your groupthink, your consensus, your so-called settled science. They simply do as they’re told — exactly as they’re told. They do it quickly, reliably, relentlessly, inflexibly, and mercilessly.
You can’t sweep software details under the carpet. You can’t ignore exceptions that don’t conform to your hopes and beliefs. You can’t make computational reality real by wishing it so, by telling others it’s so, and by agreeing with all of your peers that it’s so.
By all means, learn to code. It’s a wonderful business, a rewarding and often lucrative activity, and a lot of fun. But it’s going to require something new from you: a commitment to reality, to comprehensive analysis, to an open-minded consideration of the various sides and aspects of a problem. Approach it that way and you may be successful.
But business as usual? No, you’re going to have to up your game if you want to succeed in the real world.
Published in Journalism
Interesting 2013 article in the Atlantic complaining about coding being taught in journalism school:
Translation: “I went into journalism so I would not have to worry about getting the details right.”
HT https://twitter.com/CjLayzee via #learntocode
I always felt that telling someone to “learn to code” was like telling someone to “learn to saw” so they could be a finish carpenter or “learn to wrench” so they could become a car mechanic. There is a lot more involved in all those careers.
I have always worked in embedded systems where coding was just a part of the engineering involved in developing a product which then had to be integrated into production. I am not sure about game programming – maybe it requires less actual engineering.
That’s what I’m saying, Vance.
Think about it. Self-driving car software written by left-leaning coders will inevitably steer the vehicle…
…into on-coming traffic.
I had even earlier exposure to using computers – something the majority of people at that time never had – but I started actual programming in 1973, beginning with the front-panel switches of a PDP-8. There was ONE computer at the High School that I went to, and it was NOT in the office. In the office, they used typewriters and manual filing including of all student records.
I still don’t believe that most people are capable of being even adequate at programming. It may be a basic problem similar to schools, there just aren’t enough really good smart people to be the wonderful teachers that every parent thinks their child deserves. But if all the Ph.D scientists are teaching science classes, as some people seem to think should be the case, who’s going to do the other inventing and launching rockets to the moon and stuff? Not to mention that there aren’t enough Ph.D scientists to teach all the science classes at all the schools, even if they were good at it which I don’t think they would be.
Most of education really needs to be done by rote, using methods that have already been proven. But the mostly-leftist education establishment treats education as their playground, not as what it needs to be: getting children educated and civilized.
But programming, at least good effective useful programming, cannot be done by rote.
I would say my personal reason for getting into programming was partly that I hated the idea of a repetitious job. Making stuff that people eat, and then making more of the same that other people eat… or whatever.
Programming lets me write the program ONCE, and then the COMPUTER – or perhaps dozens or today even MILLIONS of computers – do(es) the same thing over and over, milions/billions of times, as God intended. And let me sleep!
Only if the passenger has voted Republican.
There is an enterprise-software company, ESW Capital, whose business strategy is based largely on hiring contract programmers in low-wage countries. The company argues that the current cloud wage for a C++ programmer, for example, is $15 an hour, which is what Amazon pays its warehouse workers.
What makes this especially noteworthy is that the CEO’s previous startup, Trilogy, was well-known for going to great lengths to recruit talented programmers at high compensation and various perks. (see the article for a view of Trilogy recruiting back in the day)
I don’t think this model is going to displace all US-based programming, or even the majority of it–for one thing, there are a lot of cases where close and creative interaction among the development team in important. (ESW’s non-US workforce seems to be mainly focused on maintenance and minor enhancements of its application products.) But it probably *will* displace a lot of the opportunities for marginally-talented programmers.
Unlike physical goods, code has no material shipping costs and is very difficult to tariff.
So it may not be doing a favor to people to have them learn to code unless they have the potential to be seriously good at it.
Aren’t we just sayin’ get a real job?
Quite so. And these days, considering how verboten it seems to be to tell someone they’re not good at something – or even to do something like try to find out, such as with a test or something – I can see programming/coding becoming the next sort of “English Lit Major.” Or what in my day was referred to as “basket weaving.” A lot of people who have been told/allowed to believe they can do something useful/valuable in a certain area, when it’s really not true.
Higher education had a certain role, or merit prior to the G.I. Bill. Somewhere in there it became about “job signaling”. Starting in 1980, education started to relentlessly go up way faster than inflation. Then the Marxist indoctrination started. Now it has no merit outside of the actual salary one gets, i.e. “Not everyone should go to college” and only 20% get a career in their major.
(Colloquialism) just happened?
Discuss.
#theft #lies #governmentlargesse #graft #indoctrination
How does one become “educated”? Discuss.
#VoteDemocrat
Simply not true. I have to go through my pieces and note (cq) behind the details to indicate that I had double-checked and backed up the names, dates, locations, etc. Then another editor looks at the piece and comes up with a few more questions, which I check, and then it goes to the rim, which checks it again, and comes back to me if there’s anything unclear.
2 The people let go from Huffpost Opinion weren’t journalists. They were, well, opinion writers. It’s the difference between an auto mechanic and the people who write the copy for the brochures in the showroom.
3. I used to ask all the interns and college kids who toured the newsroom if they knew how to code, how to edit video, and other ancillary skills. A few years ago, few did. Now, most do.
4. Think of a newspaper as a single program written for different OS – Windows (conservative), Mac (liberal), and Linux (libertarian.) The story has to run on all three platforms. It’s not easy.
5. Henry is right about the philosophical predilection of most journos. It’s not that they slap their hands together every morning and say “Let’s tilt the news to the left!” They have a set of preconceptions and biases that come from reading the NYT and the WaPo and listening to NPR, and are largely unaware of the specifics of the ideas and arguments on the right, unless they come filtered through the aforementioned sources.
6. I have liberal friends in the newsroom who regularly ask me about a particular issue that’s heating up the wires or Twitter; they want the right-leaning take. They listen and ask questions. It’s quite respectful and I value those conversations quite a lot.
7. We used to have a spectacularly bad open-source blogging platform that mangled my formatting so badly I just wrote everything in HTML, and for a while this gave me the reputation of a 17th Level Mage, or something.
I get this, but whoever came up with the idea of doing journalism by stringing a bunch of anecdotes together. I complained about this type of journalism twice today at the WSJ. In one case the anecdotes were interesting ones about the aging of the farm population around the world, but there was nothing to be learned from them — no research on trendlines, no numbers, and nothing that was news.
I haven’t hung around with any journalists online lately, but back in the day I’d see journalists from the local paper or elsewhere say they were looking for an anecdotes of X happening–something to round out a story they were working on. I’m sure that if given one they checked the names, dates, and locations, but basically the story was already written and they just wanted an anecdote to fit their preconceived idea of how it should go. Where do they get the idea that that’s how to write an article? Even the editorial page editor of our local paper did that. He was a good guy even though he was a liberal, and since he left the paper has become a mere hate sheet. But I was embarrassed for his sake when he did things like that.
Digression: This guy (the good, liberal one) used to take my letters to the editor and slash stuff out of them, improving them to the point where I’d say, “I wish I had written that!” I learned some things by paying careful attention to his edits. His replacement, on the other hand, just printed my letters the way I had written them. In other words, he didn’t think they were worth editing. So I quit writing letters to the editor.
Exactly what I said: https://www.foxnews.com/tech/twitter-fights-harassment-against-fired-journalists-told-to-learn-to-code
There was nothing practical about what they did to the coal miners. In my area of the country stories of the failure of this program is regularly on the various local news. It was a con job designed to such money from government programs with very little actual value to the miners or the area.
https://beltmag.com/appalachia-coding-bootcamps/
No, surprise. The non-profit industry (aka ruling class) blames the failure on a shady, private firm. But from what I’ve seen of job retraining programs, they are no better when operated by the traditional, government institutions. The authors of the article trot out a bunch of the usual nostrums, and while those factors are important in opportunity to transition to new jobs, I doubt that providing them as government mandates or welfare would help, either.
Switching jobs is one thing, but making one’s self over for a new way of life is something that can’t be handled by education. Education can be important, but it may not be the key.
I’ve known and known of people who have learned coding late in life, which was part of a major change in their life directions. But learning how to write code was just a small piece of what they did, almost incidental to the new directions in their lives. They couldn’t have done it without knowing how to write code, which I suppose is why some people with an education-centric mentality tend to latch on to that factor.
Exactly. If all they are learning is coding, there is no possible way to compete with kids in India.
Just over 20 years ago, my liberal arts major brother decided to learn coding and got a job at a major software company. He got in under the wire for that kind of transformation.
Less than a decade later, he was sent to India to train his replacements. Unlike others in his company and many of those at Disney, he was able to move to a supervisory role within the company.
Writing software is a pretty rigorous and demanding occupation, and it’s hardly surprising that most people pushed in that direction by circumstances rather than by personal interest would not be very good at it. I’ve read of fewer than a dozen successes from the coal-mining-to-software projects.
Some jobs seem to require a natural proclivity. Programming is one; for all I know, journalism — good, serious journalism — might be another. Tech companies have been relaxing degree requirements for software people because they’ve discovered that people who will be capable programmers are generally autodidactic, at least where computer programming is concerned. It would not surprise me to discover that most people who write for a living are similar. (I’ve long had a gut skepticism of degree programs in journalism.)
Gaming is high stress and not conducive to long term career. It’s for the young and unattached with no life, hence the high turnover. Not all software industries are like this. DOD and other have high stress points, but the business cycle has more valleys than gaming does.
Anything that expects to last a couple years before its next iteration will be more workable than where the product’s life cycle is 6 months for the average game.
It is the impetus behind this post.
President Obama told coal miners and others out of work due to his administration’s policies to “learn to code.”
Journolists began to use that as the go to phrase as their recommendation to anyone out of work due to their industry downsizing.
Last week when there were significant journolist lay offs (BuzzFiend, Huffington Post opinion, etc.) people on twitter began to taunt them with “learn to code”.
Twitter responded by suspending people who were taunting their valued “blue checkmarks”.
No, the whole thing was a joke, scam. Obama at the time showed up in my city to give millions to the IT training company that was doing the job. They were supposed to have 1000s of workers and IT people to assist in the training. Only issue. I work in IT, I know a lot of IT people in my city. Nobody I knew ever worked for that company or even knew it existed 6 months before Obama visit. The company did not exist 6 months later. After the money was gone. Just another Democrat pump and dump fund raiser with just enough meat to make it look good for reporters that don’t report.
I’m not sure just which “whole thing” you’re talking about. A specific program or set of programs, I’m guessing.
Anyway, the point is that a small number of coal miners (and/or mine workers) did transition to coding in one form or another — did “learn to code.” But they’re the exceptions: as I mentioned earlier, programming is not a good choice when retraining people en masse. Programming requires unusual skills, skills that are probably unnatural to most people. Programming is hard.
FJ/JG,
More and more this is all that there is to the Democratic Party. That and telling childish people what they want to hear are all they do. The reporters that don’t report facilitate this pathetic state of affairs.
Regards,
Jim
The whole thing is a government program doomed to fail in which millions are spent on to extract money from government largess. The whole green thing was one boondoggle (think Solyndra) this was another such scam.
As for teaching coal miners to code. That was the liberal answer then to putting entire industries out of business and a regions in recession. Just had to teach everybody in the world to code. It solves every problem. The science is in. Sorry to see you did not get the message.
Still not sure which “whole thing” you’re talking about. I’m talking about a handful of people who have transitioned from coal mining (etc.) to programming.
Improving one’s skills is a perfectly sensible idea. Switching from a failing industry into a booming one is smart… if one has the interest and ability to make the transition. When the booming industry is software, most people probably don’t have the peculiar set of skills required to thrive there.
Of course, “learn to code” is not a literal prescription for personal re-invention. It’s a tag-line, intended to communicate the general idea that, when what you have done all your life goes, for whatever reason, out of fashion, consider adapting to changing circumstances by improving yourself. I latched on to it only because it gave me an opportunity to poke fun at the blithely en-bubbled lightweights at Buzzfeed et al, and to suggest that their special skills are of limited utility in the real world where, as Dr. Stantz famously observed, “They expect results.”
And it is just flat out delicious that the same bunch of creeps who were gleefully and condescendingly advising coal miners and oil drillers that they should learn to code because those jobs were obsolete and would never again be viable careers were themselves far more in that position. We will absolutely be using coal and oil for generations to come, but the business model for print journalism is totally dead, and was killed by the computer/internet age. So it is the height of irony that truly, the group who most literally should ‘learn to code’ is them.
And yet, when their own advice is turned back on them, despite the glaring appropriateness of it, they demand it is an unacceptable and offensive slur. They, who invented it!
The once venerable group known as ‘newsmen’ is long gone. Journalism is in its death throes. And the best they can offer is twitter bans to those who point out the irony of their hypocrisy? Doesn’t that one fact illustrate perfectly why they are nearing extinction?
I hope that isn’t true. We need journalists, investigative reporters, people who devote enormous energy to ferreting out dishonesty and explaining complex issues.
But I agree that the economics of advertising, the historic lifeblood of newspapers, is changing in ways that threaten the news industry. I’m sorry that’s so. Twitter and social media are garbage platforms, designed to titillate and enrage, and to cater to our most trivial impulses.
We’re replacing something with almost nothing, and that’s going to hurt us.
I don’t think the internet is what is killing journalism. I think it is those who claim the title who are killing it. There is a nearly untapped market for unbiased, sober, honest and carefully vetted journalism. Someone will step up and fill that need, but first a reputation will have to be developed, and a new business model created. The vast majority of those involved today have squandered whatever reputations they had. For example, the New York Times, once considered the flagship of all journalism, is now revealed as an organ of the liberal Democrat party. ( as are the network newscasts.) But the same can be said of many that have become Republican party organs. ( far fewer, but Fox is hardly unbiased, they are just equal time) One is hard pressed to know where to go for truly solid, fact based, unbiased straight news.
Opinion is opinion. It is inherently biased. But there was a day when the news was separate from opinion, carefully neutral and meticulously vetted and verified. I understand that that takes time and the internet culture is immediate and impatient. But I for one am anxious for a true news outlet whom’s word I can take as fact, would gladly wait a day or so for the story to be presented with integrity and authority, and would gladly pay a reasonable subscription fee for that service. Until then, any story I read, from left or right, NT or MAGA, I read as an opinion and assume that any and all the ‘facts’ in the story are open to interpretation and revision at any time. So, in effect, I am waiting days for the story, because I have to read stories from multiple sources and wait for slow developing facts before I can form an image of the truth. I am forced, in effect, to be my own journalist, because there is no one with the credibility to perform that task for me.
I share your low opinion of most of what passes for journalism today. I’m not confident that a new business model will be forthcoming — that is, one that will adequately reward the significant number of professional (i.e., honest, self-aware, and diligent) journalists required to inform a great nation.
There was no journalism back in the days of Charlemagne. If we got along without it back then, we can get along without it now. Besides, we now have FaceTruth to tell us what we need to know and to keep us from knowing things that it would be better we didn’t know.
Heh.
But we’re in a very different world now. I know it’s trite to say “things are different now,” when in fact things — most specifically, human nature — are rarely all that different. But things are different now.
Back then (as my children used to say when referring to any historical time), news moved slowly, people were suspicious of novelty, and satiating the craving for stimulation and entertainment was difficult — and not something most people had time to indulge. It was a meaner but less trivial time.
Today, we live in the information equivalent of the Big Mac: all the fat and salt you could want, more cheap calories than most of us can afford. We are a nation grown fat on vacuous streaming drivel, on half-truths and non-truths and unsubstantiated and insubstantial salacious gossip. We crave the feeling of righteous offense more than the sense of mastery that comes from actually understanding an issue or our opponents’ views on it.
Where once we were self-confident citizens of a small world who put great stock in the ideas they’d held since birth and were distrustful of challenges to them, we are now cattle herded by demented yapping Twitter feeds, changing direction every second and never caring beyond the next Instagram post or Facebook comment.
There’s a reason we’ve becoming an obese nation: fast food and indolence are comfortable, easy, and attractive in the short term. They’re luxuries we humans crave, have rarely enjoyed, and are not evolved to resist.
Trash media is the same kind of thing: a luxury — endless novelty and stimulation. We are evolved to notice new things (survival demands it), but have rarely lived in a time when new things were plentiful or accessible. Now novel is normal, and we’re all growing fat, dumb, and
happydistracted.End of rant.