This, from the Wall Street Journal.
It annoyed me, not because I disagree with the idea of people learning to code – I don’t – but because as a piece supporting the idea that people should learn to code, it has some glaring errors in it and doesn’t really support the idea that people should learn to code. Personally I think a lot of tech people should learn to communicate more effectively but a lot of them appear to think they don’t have to so let’s just explain why this piece is a problem.
The most important technological skill for all employees is being able to code. If, as Marc Andreessen once noted, “Software is eating the world,” knowing how to code will help you eat rather than be eaten. Understanding how to design, write and maintain a computer program is important even if you never plan to write one in business. If you don’t know anything about coding, you won’t be able to function effectively in the world today.
So, two major assertions here: the most important technological skill for all employees is being able to code and “if you don’t know anything about coding, you won’t be able to function effectively in the world today”.
These assertions are patently not true. To be frank, the most important technological skill for an employee, in my opinion, is the ability to describe what’s gone wrong on the screen in front of them. That’s also a communications issue but it does enable technology experts to help them. As for “if you don’t know anything about coding, you won’t be able to function effectively”, I strongly disagree with that and would suggest that ultimately, the problems lie with interface design which employees are not actually responsible for the most part.
You will inevitably work with people who program for a living, and you need to be able to communicate effectively with them. You will work with computers as a part of your job, and you need to understand how they think and operate. You will buy software at home and work, and you need to know why it works well or doesn’t. You will procure much of your information from the Internet, and you need to know what went wrong when you get “404 not found” or a “500 internal server error” messages.
Not one thing in this paragraph requires coding skills. It requires programmers to learn to communicate effectively and given a lot of them have trouble with the basic need to document what they are doing already, it’s a steep learning curve. With respect to software, again, how well it works depends on how well it is documented and designed. You do not need to be able to program to understand a 404 not found or a 500 internal server error.
Of course, being able to code is also extremely helpful in getting and keeping a job. “Software developers” is one of the job categories expected to grow the most over the next decade.
But not every employee is a software developer and nor should they be.
But in addition to many thousands of software professionals, we need far more software amateurs. McKinsey & Co. argued a few years ago that we need more than 1.5 million “data-savvy managers” in the U.S. alone if we’re going to succeed with big data, and it’s hard to be data-savvy without understanding how software works.
Data and programming are not the same things. Where data is concerned we frantically need people who get statistics, not just programming. IME, most programmers don’t get statistics at all. Teaching people to code will not fix this; it’s a tool to support another knowledge base.
Even if you’ve left school, it’s not too late. There are many resources available to help you learn how to code at a basic level. The language doesn’t matter.
Learn to code, and learn to live in the 21st century.
I’m absolutely in favour of people learning to think programmatically, and logically. But I don’t think it’s a requirement for learning to live in the 21st century. The world would be better served if we put more effort into learning to cook for ourselves.
I hate puff pieces like this. Ultimately, I mistrust pieces that suggest everyone should be able to code particularly at a time when coding salaries are low at the time we are being told there’s a frantic shortage. I’ve seen the same happen with linguistic skills. There are a lot of good reasons to learn to code – but like a lot of things, people need to set priorities in what they want to do, what they want to learn on. Learning to write computer code is not especially different; learning to apply it to solving problems on the other hand takes a way of looking at the world.
I’d prefer it if we looked at teaching people problem solving skills. These are not machine dependent and they are sadly lacking. In the meantime, people who have never opened a text editor understand that 404 Not found does not mean they could fix their problems by writing a program.