Ben Tarnoff writes about technology and Silicon Valley. In this article, he notes that many districts plan to teach coding as a basic skill, one that is necessary in the new global economy. He believes that the push for more coders is not about helping young people find jobs, but about enabling the computer industry to lower wages.
This month, millions of children returned to school. This year, an unprecedented number of them will learn to code.
Computer science courses for children have proliferated rapidly in the past few years. A 2016 Gallup report found that 40% of American schools now offer coding classes – up from only 25% a few years ago. New York, with the largest public school system in the country, has pledged to offer computer science to all 1.1 million students by 2025. Los Angeles, with the second largest, plans to do the same by 2020. And Chicago, the fourth largest, has gone further, promising to make computer science a high school graduation requirement by 2018.
The rationale for this rapid curricular renovation is economic. Teaching kids how to code will help them land good jobs, the argument goes. In an era of flat and falling incomes, programming provides a new path to the middle class – a skill so widely demanded that anyone who acquires it can command a livable, even lucrative, wage.
Forget Wall Street – Silicon Valley is the new political power in Washington
This narrative pervades policymaking at every level, from school boards to the government. Yet it rests on a fundamentally flawed premise. Contrary to public perception, the economy doesn’t actually need that many more programmers. As a result, teaching millions of kids to code won’t make them all middle-class. Rather, it will proletarianize the profession by flooding the market and forcing wages down – and that’s precisely the point.
At its root, the campaign for code education isn’t about giving the next generation a shot at earning the salary of a Facebook engineer. It’s about ensuring those salaries no longer exist, by creating a source of cheap labor for the tech industry.
As software mediates more of our lives, and the power of Silicon Valley grows, it’s tempting to imagine that demand for developers is soaring. The media contributes to this impression by spotlighting the genuinely inspiring stories of those who have ascended the class ladder through code. You may have heard of Bit Source, a company in eastern Kentucky that retrains coalminers as coders. They’ve been featured by Wired, Forbes, FastCompany, The Guardian, NPR and NBC News, among others.
A former coalminer who becomes a successful developer deserves our respect and admiration. But the data suggests that relatively few will be able to follow their example. Our educational system has long been producing more programmers than the labor market can absorb. A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that the supply of American college graduates with computer science degrees is 50% greater than the number hired into the tech industry each year. For all the talk of a tech worker shortage, many qualified graduates simply can’t find jobs.
More tellingly, wage levels in the tech industry have remained flat since the late 1990s. Adjusting for inflation, the average programmer earns about as much today as in 1998. If demand were soaring, you’d expect wages to rise sharply in response. Instead, salaries have stagnated.
Still, those salaries are stagnating at a fairly high level. The Department of Labor estimates that the median annual wage for computer and information technology occupations is $82,860 – more than twice the national average. And from the perspective of the people who own the tech industry, this presents a problem. High wages threaten profits. To maximize profitability, one must always be finding ways to pay workers less.
Tech executives have pursued this goal in a variety of ways. One is collusion – companies conspiring to prevent their employees from earning more by switching jobs. The prevalence of this practice in Silicon Valley triggered a justice department antitrust complaint in 2010, along with a class action suit that culminated in a $415m settlement. Another, more sophisticated method is importing large numbers of skilled guest workers from other countries through the H1-B visa program. These workers earn less than their American counterparts, and possess little bargaining power because they must remain employed to keep their status.
Guest workers and wage-fixing are useful tools for restraining labor costs. But nothing would make programming cheaper than making millions more programmers. And where better to develop this workforce than America’s schools? It’s no coincidence, then, that the campaign for code education is being orchestrated by the tech industry itself. Its primary instrument is Code.org, a nonprofit funded by Facebook, Microsoft, Google and others. In 2016, the organization spent nearly $20m on training teachers, developing curricula, and lobbying policymakers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane I’m wondering if there are any OTHER reasons, besides “getting a good job” to teach children to code? (And by the way, I get the thrust of the article: that “getting a good job” is CODE for “driving down costs.”
Fighting cyber warfare? That’s all I can come up with and it’s thin.
Kids seem to gravitate to that all on their own . The old men at the KGB/FSS did not hack the DNC . It was a kid on the bed in Vladivostok or Moscow who found an inventive way to make money from Uncle Vlad . You would think that neither Gates, nor Jobs, nor Zuckerberg had enough formal education to be as innovative as they were. We can argue how much of the creativity was theirs.
4% of the population can supply all the STEM needs of this nation. And again we can argue about who that 4% is (please don’t make me look up where I got the number . I think it was Salzman )
http://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-geeks-on-the-frontlines
I teach physics and I have incorporated coding into my class for 3 reasons. 1) a lot of science and engineering is done numerically using coding. I want my rural students who have that future in mind to be exposed to coding before going to college.
2) coding simulations that use basic physics equations can help students see how the math describes and predicts the motion.
3) I want them to see the limitations of the code – how the computer cannot interpret or “understand” anything that it is not programmed to do. I do this so students do not automatically “trust” a computer generated result.
Alice in PA Sounds good to me–meaning valid to students’ educational experiences. I also think that, having turned 70 this year, I have found that I have SOME computer skills; but didn’t even know about e-mail until late in my 30’s. I have never liked being on “the other side” of the computer divide; so your class sounds to me like, coupled with students’ informal experience, they won’t find themselves on that other side.
But that’s a far piece from thinking it’s an end all to education. The more I see what oligarchs and techno-fascists are doing, the more I fear for education and democracy, not to mention the students themselves. Techies and oligarchs CAN help by supporting public education, but their attempts to totally abscond with the public school and human studies traditions takes ignorance into a new horizon of the obscene.
Catherine: AGREED!!! I am a techie science person and I am appalled at the love affair with all things code and screened. I am the rare voice of dissention in faculty meetings where tech is promoted with no sctirical thought given. At least mine is the rare voice that is heard. Many of my fellow teachers fear reprisals if they speak up because the brain washing done by the tech companie$ is $o $trong.
Sounds like a plan, & I would like to see something along these lines in every student’s math curriculum– not just for physics students.
I had a literary/ artistic bent & struggled mightily w/math (except geometry, in which I excelled). In my 30’s I took an Intro to Computer Sci in connection w/ my job, & loved it. All I can remember of it was logic-paths, but soon I wrote a little BASIC program for my Radio Shack computer that cut tax-figuring-time in half [we rented 1/2 a 2-fam home, & were making cap improvements].
My take-away as a young adult was that programming, like geometry, was an endeavor in logic– that I had talent in logic that had not been sufficiently developed in K12 math.
DeVos and all of ed reform are pushing the Summit Charter/Facebook schools- it’s all cheerleading.
But Summit has now expanded to some 130 school districts and local reaction and coverage is much less favorable than the national marketing push:
“It seems innocuous – any old school on any old day. But behind the scenes plays a fight so fierce that at least two families have yanked their children from Boone County Schools and other parents are accusing the district of treating students like guinea pigs.
Parent Stacie Storms said the final straw was when her 12-year-old daughter came home talking about how Facebook made her curriculum.
“I was like, ‘Since when do they have anything to do with education?’” said Storms, who now homeschools her daughter. “My husband and I looked at it, and we were appalled.”
There is local coverage like this all over the country. DeVos doesn’t mention it in her speeches and you won’t find it it any of the glowing ed reform reports on Summit.
Summit was actually at the last Harvard ed conference- no one mentioned the pushback in local communities.
It will eventually break through, though. It always does. Ed reform is perceived much differently when it actually lands in these schools. Remember when they were shocked at the pushback to the Common Core? That happens over and over and over.
“Some parents, though, think it’s more than that. Justin White, who has a son in seventh grade at Conner Middle School, said Summit may or may not be good, but this is a terrible way to find out.”
It’s the arrogance. It trips them up again and again. Summit/Facebook will crash and burn Summit/Facebook deserves to crash and burn. They’re arrogant people and they over-reach.
http://www.cincinnati.com/news/
Here’s my take on Summit learning from a visit I made to a blended learning middle school in Providence, RI. https://resseger.wordpress.com/2017/06/03/a-glimpse-inside-a-blended-learning-middle-school-in-providence-ri/
Ever since Obama took office, Silicon Valley has been inserting itself into public policy, particularly education. Obama allowed Gates to use his vast wealth to quash public education through the Common Core and various test and punish schemes. Make no mistake about the Silicon Valley geeks; they are looking to exploit any opportunity to profit. The whole STEM “crisis” is a manufactured “crisis” to create a glut of tech workers to, of course, drive wages down, sort of like the “crisis” of “failing schools.”
Silicon Valley has also been allowed to abuse the intent of H-1B visas. Companies are only supposed to get the H1-B visas, if they cannot find a qualified American for the job. The fact is most of Silicon Valley does not even look to fill jobs with Americans, and in some cases, Americans are fired and replaced by H1-B holders. It has been estimated that about 60% of entry jobs in tech are filled by H1-Bs.
retired teacher
A few points .
Almost the entire skills shortage can be put in the same category.
400,000 manufacturing Jobs remain open . (I’ll skip that one , but it is not real ), 200,000 Construction jobs remain open , But wait the Union trained highly paid construction trades are experiencing severe unemployment in many parts of the country.
Lets bring this home to the people on this site.
“Our analysis estimates that U.S. classrooms were short approximately 60,000 teachers last year,” Leib Sutcher, the study’s co-author, told reporters Tuesday ahead of the study’s release. “Unless we can shift these trends, annual teacher shortages could increase to over 100,000 teachers by 2018 and remain close to that level thereafter.”
(But why )
Enrollment in teacher-preparation programs dropped from 691,000 in 2009 to 451,000 in 2014, a 35 percent decline, according to the study, “ WA.PO.
Yes the law of supply and demand does work and when you attack wages and working conditions supply drops . The Same thing happened in the construction trades as the work share declined fewer entered the trades ,fewer openings were offered to do so . Now they cant get enough low paid workers to travel across the nation . The Union workers will wait till a union job comes up. Or do what they always did Journey to one . Thus Journeyman is their title. While 100 story towers with 100 million dollar Penthouse apartments experience a shortage of labor willing to work for below 20 an hour .
The call for coding , for vocational training are all supply-side solutions for a demand problem .
In talking about our immigration debate in reference to amendments that would force employers to justify their requests for foreign workers. Not be able to layoff Americans and then be granted an H1B . Sanders made a Senate address raising these points in the 2007 immigration debate . That if you remember is before “Economic Armageddon”
(can we have a redo )
Which leads to point Two
How have we have taken an issue , a labor issue, by definition a left wing issue and turned it over to the most anti worker people in the world backed by right wing oligarchs claiming to be populists . .
And lastly
That 82,000 dollar wage is probably not as rosy as it seems . Although it is a median . I suspect that where as most jobs are spread over vast regions of the Nation. My guess !!! is that most of these jobs are concentrated in higher cost cities. And many in our highest cost cities . A factor that makes the wage not quite as good as it would seem .
Not to be able …
How we have taken . oh boy
You are correct about the building trades. I read an article a while back where they interviewed people working in fast food. They said, “Why should I work in the building trades when the wage around here is the same as for fast food, the job is more dangerous, and the training more costly.”
I am often skeptical when business cries that they can’t find enough qualified workers. If you really believe in capitalism, wouldn’t the answer be to raise wages?
My oldest son is a computer professional- he thinks this whole thing is bunk. Coding is really tedious and detail-oriented. Certain people enjoy it- he does- but it is in no way universal in the way these people are portraying it.
It’s like insisting everyone has to learn French or how to wire a circuit or plumb a bathroom. He thinks these people are all nuts, or idiots, take your pick.
He says you can teach them coding or knitting or a different language and it’s the same set of skills.
I had two sons who liked computers. They both can code. One is a programmer and the other is an electrician. The electrician can also take an engine apart and does that for pleasure. Maybe taking the engine apart was the essential skill. Maybe building a bird house in 4-H was.
This Guardian reporter, Ben Tarnoff puts out some amazing work. He has great insight. I can’t believe this study he cites: “A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that the supply of American college graduates with computer science degrees is 50% greater than the number hired into the tech industry each year.” Whoa!
My son has a BS in computer networking and several Microsoft certifications. He has been looking for a job for two years without success. He is very capable, and he has started his own business. His business, however, is not a replacement for a legitimate career. He has also been applying to other cities, and many of the ads state “Local candidates only.” There is already a glut in networking.
At the bottom of this article was a link to an opinion article I also found fascinating: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/15/oligarchy-lessons-ancient-greece.
(Those Ancient Greeks really knew how to play soccer. Ha!)
The link is fascinating. We are already in the realms where politics and economics as fused together.” These billionaires would not have so much wealth if they had been paying a fair share of taxes all along. I hope Trump’s assent brings about “oligarchic destruction,” sooner rather than later.
Politics is economics . Period end of story . “Politics ,Who Gets What When And How ” Laswell 1936 .
And some one just sent me this Ted Talk from Hanauer
someone , love the edit button
Thanks for the Hanuer Ted link. I opened my unit on The French Revolution with the first six minutes, showing the kids how we use history to talk about the future.
Roy Turrentine
My favorite bill board was pasted on to a building approaching Wall Street on the highway. It was for a storage company . .
” Even the French aristocracy never saw it coming. “
IMHO, the whole “hour of code” thing was dreamed up by tech execs to make it look like they actually care about our schools — rather than actually increase the number of programmers.
It costs them little to nothing and is really just a joke.
If companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft were really interested in helping American schools, they would begin by paying the tens of billions they owe in corporate income tax on the hundreds of billions they are currently holding in offshore accounts to avoid said tax.
And after that, they would establish a fund that contributed to schools on an ongoing basis with no strings attached — money’s that could be used for the arts as well as STEM. After all, many tech companies are successful largely because of their creativity (or at least were at the beginning). Steve Jobs was a “designer”, not a coder. Bill Gates was a coder, but he produced crap, so is not a good example.😀
I appreciate this perspective very much, and I am skeptical of how schools and districts approach computer programming, as well as how the tech industry may have an outsized influence in the curriculum.
However, there is a huge difference between teaching through the mode of Silicon Valley Tech products (and hubris), such as the wholescale Summit platform, and tech education in which students may learn how to build technology and technological tools. Computer science courses and accompanying technical education classes have been around since the 80’s at least, however, in the Bay Area, where I live and work, computer science classes are remarkably rare, as California underfunds education and vocational programs have been replaced by college for all support classes to get students to meet the a-g entrance requirements of our university systems. Most of the programmers that work in the area come from other places, other states as well as some from other countries. There is an appalling lack of diversity of ethnicity and gender.
I see coding classes and computer technology classes as a social justice issue to allow more students access to a white male dominated field that has swamped the Bay Area. One of the interesting conundrums that such initiatives have faced is the disparity between local teacher wages and local tech industry wages, as it can be challenging to find qualified teachers, who could earn more by working in the industry itself. While vocation ed has died out in many of our middle and high schools, computer science classes offer our students opportunities to do the creative work of actually building something, and move students from consumers of technology to the creators and inventors of such technologies.
So, if Silicon Valley is really interested in helping people become IT literate, are they willing to pay the salaries of teachers in schools across America to teach not just coding but good software design?
There are 26,400 secondary public schools in the US. If tech companies paid for an IT teacher in each of those schools, I figure $3.5 billion a year would easily cover salaries and benefits. That’s chicken feed for companies like Google, Apple, Intel and Microsoft. So, perhaps they should put up the money or they should shut up, eh?
Also, having worked as a programmer for a good part of my career, I can tell you that knowing how to code is far less important than knowing how to identify and solve problems and design a “solution” that actually does what it is supposed to do, that does it well (without a million bugs like Microslop software) AND, most critical of all, is what people want.
Finally, a lot of coding is now done automatically and the trend is toward ever more automation in coding. A good example is web site development on sites like Squarespace for which you don’t have to know any coding at all. Just a few years ago, you actually had to know html coding to make a website. Such automation is happening quicker than many people are aware.
Absolutely! My comments point to all of these issues. While my cousin’s kids in Minneapolis have access to classes in which students build computers, in the Bay Area one must attend a private school or magnet school in order to get hand-on building experiences. The billions that Silicon Valley companies are willing to spend on education are controlled undemocratically and the $$$ do not match the tax savings they receive.
I would like to see vocational education courses and programs make a comeback into comprehensive middle schools and high schools. Building the hardware of computer systems and learning how to design software programs are enticing and motivating experiences for young people. I just don’t want only the rich to get access.
My eight year old grandson enjoys some computer games like Mindcraft. I came across this ad for a new “Lego” like product that attempts to teach children between the 5 and 13 coding. Apparently, when cubes are assembled in a meaningful sequence, some go bots start to move around. Clearly, this is an attempt to interest young children in programming. However, I have no way of knowing if it is garbage or something of interest. I am sure lots of these will be sold to nervous parents that want their children to be “coding career ready.”
Some genius programmer undoubtedly equated the “blocks” of a programming language with “block structure” with Lego blocks
.. and another blockhead idea was born.
Incidentally, just Google, Apple and Microsoft owe over $100 billion combined in taxes on the combined hundreds of billions they are holding in offshore accounts.
So, that alone would cover the cost of an IT teacher in every school for DECADes to come.
The reality is that these companies have zero interest in anything other than their bottom line.
Their claims to the contrary are simply a load of manure.
This is true. Gates was a crappy coder, but was able to recognize good coding and used what he was good at start his company. There’s an elegance in good coding that’s rare. Coding is just an introduction – much like introducing to baseball in gym. That’s all.
Gates knew how to recognize “good enough” code — and obtain it however he could (under false pretenses, if necessary.)
But having worked as a programmer, I can vouch that elegant coding is indeed rare.
A big part of the problem is that CS departments produce people who can write in code but not in English.
I am actually being very serious. To produce a good, coherent computer program, you first have to be able to explain in very plain English what it should do.
Many of the programmers I worked with over the years could not do that.
And I think many of them actually believed “code” meant just the opposite — a cypher that no one else would be able to understand or “decode”.
Not sure if it still runs, but there used to be a contest for “Obfuscated C” programming in which a prize was awarded to the most opaque program.
Sounds funny until you realize that that actually seems to be the goal of many programmers.
My partner is a programmer and discusses the problems that many in the industry have in writing and communication. He believes it was his liberal education and study of history and anthropology that enabled him to become a more elegant coder and a better manager of the overlapping systems (and well as user interactions). Like many boys of his generation, he got access to building computers and programming early on. Such access does not exist in many schools serving poorer children, while entertaining iPads and iPhones do. And from this disconnect and misunderstanding of technology’s productive uses, charter schools serving poor brown children, such as Rocketship, utilize computer programs to interact and entertain students instead of teachers. I want to make sure parents understand the difference between education and “education”.
I agree totally.
To say that many of these people lack communication skills is like saying a mime lacks verbal communication skills.
I once worked with a fellow at a software development firm in Boston who could not even pronounce the name of the company correctly.
😀 And it had nothing to do with his having a speech impediment or foreign accent.
He had also been a “gamer” and, like many gaming programmers, wrote code that was impossible to decipher — Called spaghetti code because it was just a tangled mess of glop. I know because i was once given the task of debugging his code. I failed. I didn’t even know where to begin.
Teachers got a first hand look at Gates’ hostile tactics under Obama and Duncan. It was a bribe and punish scheme that assumed the Common Core, the testing with rigged cut scores and VAM were all reliable and legitimate. Teachers have enjoyed watching the whole extortion scenario unravel before their eyes. The assumption was that this guy is rich and brilliant; he’s got to be right!
Bill Gates asks question about “Obfuscated C contest” but gets an even better answer
KEY WORD: Gates can recognize good/exceptional coding and OBTAIN it…is it all about controlling who gets the rights to our students’ intellectual property?
As my daughters and their friends are choosing college majors, if a software career is mentioned I always warn them of the pending collapse of this as a stand alone career. Half of the reason is the one described here, the other half is because we programmers are automating ourselves out of our jobs as we create better tools to automate everything. In twenty years you won’t have lower paid business analysts working with higher paid software programmers to customize their business tools, there will just be lower paid analysts doing the customizing with AI wizards.
I agree that the push to make every kid a programmer is nefarious. But that said, I do think that taking a course or two in coding is worthwhile in the same way that learning a foreign language is worthwhile. In the way that taking Spanish in HS taught me about English language structure and about other cultures around me, I see coding being a great cross discipline tool to teach mathematical reasoning and understanding of this technical world that we live in. And underserved communities need these rich experiences more than anyone.
So for these reasons, I support efforts like Chicago’s computer science requirement. The only thing nefarious in Chicago is that, at the same time they are investing in computer science teachers, they are starving neighborhood schools of art, music, sports, counselors, social workers and librarians.
Making every kid code has the same rationale behind it as Teach for America. It is part of the commoditization of tech just like TFA is for education. The result is crappy code and lower wages and more money for those at top.
This is the best article I’ve seen on this topic so far.
p.s. This approach is also misinformed. If you want good coders, kids need a thorough background in math and being able to think critically. I have a friend in tech who complains constantly that the young software engineers write really bad code and they struggle with planning out their ideas before they actually start writing. What is lacking is not just good coding abilities but good thinking abilities that one acquires from things like writing clear arguments, analyzing problems, debating effectively etc. These are skills taught in liberal arts classes not stem. Coding can be fun at a young age and so is music theory – should all kids be required to take music theory then?
I agree with your friend completely.
That was also my experience.
And the real kicker is that many of these people suffer from a strain of Dunning Kruger disease which makes them believe they are experts in areas that are well outside their area of expertise.
Bill Gates is a perfect example. He knows nothing about education but nonetheless pretends to be able to tell with VAM which teachers are good and which poor and what standards are the best.
The coding for all phenomena is another way of dumbing down the education of the next generation of citizens. Laura and others have commented that what students need are the skills that enable good thinking abilities: critical thinking, problem analysis, writing, arguing from evidence and so on. When curriculum is added to the limited school day, something has to give. The kids have time for only so many classes in a day. We saw arts and music disappear from classrooms when English and Math became Common Core tested subjects. We have to ask ourselves what goes away when coding becomes a graduation requirement? My bet would be on social studies: it’s a win (writing and thinking skills go away) win (no one will know what a robber baron was) win (wages are depressed for coders as the article says) for the tech execs.
It’s already happened exactly that way. In Utah, the requirement for students to take a full year of geography in order to graduate from high school was cut to a half year in about 2002. The other half of the year is devoted to a “computer technology” class.
“Future Geography”
Where is Utah?
I don’t know
My computer
Knows it though
What is Yellowstone?
Sure beats me
Here’s my smartphone
Let’s ask Siri
Siri and Google can show where these places are and provide maps but they can’t make the person (or child) remember what they learned. The decisions to move memories from short-term to long-term are mostly out of our control.
When we go to sleep, there is no way to know what that automated process will keep and what it will delete.
When I was much younger, I took a fortran class so that I would not be an uninformed teacher. It was fascinating, somewhat frustrating, and helpful in that it streamlined my way of thinking about some mathematical processes.
Not every class needs to lead a student to a job. On the contrary, it seems that publically funded learning ought to have to pass the test of being good for all students. Skills that lead students to jobs ought to be funded by companies that need the skills in their businesses.
To the extent that an introduction to coding will serve to introduce an alternative way to think through a problem, I would support it. Unfortunately, most of my students do not have time for this, already being so swamped that they do not have time to study geography. Maybe we need to do one thing at a time. Teach citizens first, then technicians after that.
I took Cobalt,
It just proved that CS should not be a career choice.
COBOL also proved that CS should not have been the career choice of the creator of COBOL
Forcing children to learn to code is absurd. Children are a product of the environment they grew up in. Much of that environment is the home and family.
Imagine if Grace VanderWaal had been forced to learn to code. Would she have won America’s Got Talent and a million dollars at age 12 for the songs she writes and sings?
Would she have signed a record contract with Columbia Records?
Would she have performed at the Austin City Limits Music Festival early this month to a packed crowd of thousands from all ages and generations that are her fans?
Forcing children and parents to comply to crap like this will lead to a police state where an AI computer decides our fates for us based on an algorithm and test scores.
I wrote and published a post yesterday about “What does it take to become a child prodigy?”
https://lloydlofthouse.org/2017/10/14/what-does-it-take-to-become-a-child-prodigy/
The job of the K-12 schools is not to meddle with the child’s individuality but to educate all children to become life-long learners that are critical thinkers and problems solvers that love to read … not to become a coder or whatever some billionaire oligarch thinks they should grow up to be. Children, hopefully, with support from their families, should be allowed to grow up and make their own decisions just like child prodigies Grace Vanderwaal and Angelina Jordan have already done.
Why is it re-branded as “coding,” and no longer called “programming?” It’s a marketing ploy but what is the goal?
Technically, “coding” is just translating an algorithm into a particular computer language.
It’s actually a pretty mindless procedure, which is why it can be automated.
Coding is only one aspect of software development and actually the easiest.
The hard (creative) part is coming up with a detailed specification for what a program should do and an algorithm or algorithms for achieving that.
The Achilles heal of software development is the tendency to jump right into coding without a specification or any clear idea of the best algorithms to use.
Unfortunately, it happens all too often which is why so much software (eg, from Microslop) has security holes and other bugs.
RI Governor Raimondo is very enamored of the sham arguments debunked in this article. Computer Science for all, k-12! http://www.governor.ri.gov/initiatives/cs4ri/
oops
Job Prospects
SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Projections program
Occupational Title Computer programmers
Employment, 2014 328,600
Projected Employment, 2024 302,200
Percent Change, 2014-24 -8
Computer Programmers – Bureau of Labor Statistics
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information…/computer-programmers.htm
Yes. That is indeed very interesting.
And most interesting of all is the fact that ten years ago, it was one of the fastest growing professions and prospects for computer programmers were very bright.
The internet and outsourcing have changed the outlook from positive to negative.
Programming is one of the easiest jobs to outsource.
It used to be that Americans had an advantage over other countries because of greater access to technology, but this is no longer the case. Now, anyone with a computer or smart phone and internet connection can do software development. And the people in places like India can do it for a lot cheaper because the cost of living is much lower than in the US.
Just like taking Calculus doesn’t guarantee you’ll be an engineer, taking a computer science class doesn’t guarantee a career as a programmer. Not everybody has the innate ability to write code, even with training. However, being exposed to the introductory coursework might lead more students who have the aptitude to choose that career path.
‘Coding for all’ just sounds silly & I predict the idea will go nowhere fast in a K12 world still mired for yrs to come in the messes created by ‘college for all’ and ‘accountability’. Nevertheless, I’m surprised that the basics of computer science have not already worked their way into math curriculum the way, say, genetics has worked its way into the science curriculum. Math teachers correct me if I’m wrong about that. It seems like there’s room for logic-paths, the basics on binary systems, the building-blocks of programming. The proofs I enjoyed in geometry are part of that, but I understand they are given short shrift today. Despite the claim that recent math pedagogy is more concept-oriented, US K-12 math looks to me like less time on logic/ deep understanding of theorem, most time spent on practicing its application.