"Learn to code" is just a synedoche for systemic oppression by capital
June 6, 2017 10:47 AM   Subscribe

Sam Kriss goes to Collision, "America’s fastest-growing tech expo", and writes about it. Learn to code? "Code what? To do what? And why?"
posted by Automocar (123 comments total) 40 users marked this as a favorite
 
At a roundtable I somehow ended up chairing

UNDER THE PULPIT, THE BEACH!
posted by chavenet at 10:58 AM on June 6, 2017 [6 favorites]


This is a digression but god damn

I saw a clump of heavily armed men in Duck Dynasty outfits standing around the statue of Jefferson Davis that stood off the Jefferson Davis Trail and flanked by the Jefferson Davis Parkway, trading insults with an opposing crowd of communists and anti-racists. The neoconfederates were belligerent, and gruff, and doing everything possible to radiate an image of untroubled hypermasculinity; they were also the most abjectly cowardly people I’ve ever seen in my life. At one point, one of the protesters fired a can of Silly string harmlessly towards a man’s head; he responded by spraying bear mace in a wide arc at everyone within range. Most of the time, these rugged individualists quavered for police help. I watched one man, bearded, with an AR-15 slung from his waist, get spit on by a demonstrator. “Officer!” he yelled. “She’s got AIDS! She’s got AIDS! I’m being assaulted!”

Sam is such a good writer. His recent piece on the outrage ginned up around Corbyn and nuclear first strikes had me reeling at just how awful the things we think of as normal and sensible are.
posted by Space Coyote at 11:15 AM on June 6, 2017 [24 favorites]


Capitalism doesn’t know what to do with its surpluses any more

Here's a thought: it never did
posted by GuyZero at 11:16 AM on June 6, 2017 [13 favorites]


I need to read more of this person's work. This was very good.
posted by WalkerWestridge at 11:17 AM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


But I should add that while short this piece made good points - ew train people blindly based on macro-level job market needs without much analysis. It's a get-rich-quick scheme except for the trainers and conference organizers, not the attendees. For them it remains get rich very slowly and probably not at all.
posted by GuyZero at 11:19 AM on June 6, 2017 [3 favorites]


I'm grumpy today, but:

Code what? Whatever they want coded.
To do what? Who cares.
And why? So you can make a living.

Actually, I'm a very happy software developer who writes code that helps people get their health insurance claims paid. And I believe there are certainly many people who can retrain to do things like this. There is way more to tech than silicon valley start ups and frivolous apps.

And re: capitalism? See also:

Sell what?
To do what?
And why?
posted by kitcat at 11:22 AM on June 6, 2017 [17 favorites]


Well written and provocative, minus a solution--except maybe the solution is to write well and to provoke! Reminded me of the lines about school in Coates' book from last year:

"...my father beat me for letting another boy steal from me. Two years later, he beat me for threatening my ninth-grade teacher. Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body. We could not get out. I was a capable boy, intelligent, well-liked, but powerfully afraid. And I felt, vaguely, wordlessly, that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced to live in fear was a great injustice. What was the source of this fear? What was hiding behind the smokescreen of streets and schools? And what does it mean that Number 2 pencils, conjugations without context, Pythagorean theorems, handshakes, and head nods were the difference between life and death, were the curtains drawing down between the world and me?"

I still think it is a good idea to learn to code, and to apply those theorems, and to find new ones. What and why? Reforming the prison/slavery/economic system is arguably for people like Harriet Tubman, Barack Obama, and Ta-Nehesi Coates, but there is also a role for people like G.W. Carver and Neil deGrasse Tyson--saving the world on a longer-term basis by discovering the algorithms and math models that allow sustainable life, and providing human models for the rest of us. (Earning a living is not to be sniffed at either.)
posted by TreeRooster at 11:25 AM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


Code what? To do what? And why?

I mean--I agree that it's often overblown, but at the same time, this is ridiculous. I am a boot camp grad. I don't think boot camps are great for everybody--even for most people--but it was good for me, and more importantly, I think while boot camps suck for genuine newbies, that the country does indeed need a lot more people who know how to code, because chances are pretty good that your life revolves around code. Your insurance company is actually a software company. Your bank is actually a software company. Your favored chain pizza place is half a software company and the other half actual food production and distribution. Netflix is a giant data management company that happens to store and distribute entertaining data. Your taxes now are probably at least 95% done by software even if you use a CPA.

For every startup idea that is completely harebrained and stupid, there's another dozen organizations that live and die by software. Very few of them are particularly young. It applies as much to your local credit union as to Chase, as much to your local bookkeeper as to PwC. Even when you're buying physical stuff from a physical store, the transportation, inventory management, and checkout is all done with computers. Doing all those things well does take a lot of devs. The failure of boot camps is in adequately training new developers, not in there not being any kind of need for good developers, even in, say, Nebraska.

The huge quantities of money that get invested in the stupid stuff is basically the current form of acceptable gambling for the ultra-rich, and is ludicrous, but completely unrelated to the need for coders and computer-literate testers, project managers, and so on and I wish they'd leave the rest of the industry out of it.
posted by Sequence at 11:32 AM on June 6, 2017 [31 favorites]


Well written and provocative, minus a solution--except maybe the solution is to write well and to provoke!

It's hucksterism because it's as hard to learn to code as it is to learn to write well---and like writing, there are many levels of competence and artistry people are capable of. It's by-and-large hucksterism because the only folks getting rich here are those fleecing the marks, selling false hopes to ex-coal miners.

We need jobs for the folks who don't or can't or won't tolerate sitting down all day working on abstracts. Coding jobs are, for the most part, a fantasy for them.
posted by bonehead at 11:32 AM on June 6, 2017 [14 favorites]


The huge quantities of money that get invested in the stupid stuff is basically the current form of acceptable gambling for the ultra-rich, and is ludicrous, but completely unrelated to the need for coders and computer-literate testers, project managers, and so on and I wish they'd leave the rest of the industry out of it.

Exactly.
posted by kitcat at 11:35 AM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


And why?

So you have a chance in hell of having some agency in, or being able to make any sense of, a world where software is everywhere and in everything from managing your air conditioning, voting district and credit rating to pumping your drinking water, insulin and antilock brakes.

Software is just a big pile of somebody else's decisions - biases, ignorance, failings, bigotries and all - and if you don't really get that, and understand something about how that works, then you're giving up a lot of control over your life, your society and your future to the people who do.
posted by mhoye at 11:35 AM on June 6, 2017 [14 favorites]


Collision Sounds like a tech evangelist Ponzi scheme. The trick is to not learn to code, but to get paid for teaching people to code. Or better yet, get paid to tell people to teach people to code.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:37 AM on June 6, 2017 [9 favorites]


Uber for dogs, GrubHub for clothes, Patreon for sex, Slack for death, PayPal for God, WhatsApp for the spaceless non-void into which a blind universe expands.

On the other hand, I would definitely download some of these apps.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:39 AM on June 6, 2017 [14 favorites]


Well written and provocative

Stylistically, I thought it was sophomoric and formulaically rant-y.
posted by thelonius at 11:41 AM on June 6, 2017 [13 favorites]


We need jobs for the folks who don't or can't or won't tolerate sitting down all day working on abstracts. Coding jobs are, for the most part, a fantasy for them.

So I agree in general but I don't think that just because you use to be a coal miner that you're somehow constitutionally unfit to ever work an office job. My grandfather was a dairy farmer. My father went from farming to refinery work to working in an office. I've been an office drone forever. You don't need some sort of genetic gift to sit down all day.

But again, shoving people through a boot camp isn't an actual economic transition plan. It's the pretense of helping people.
posted by GuyZero at 11:41 AM on June 6, 2017 [5 favorites]


Seems like the author has missed what I thought the whole point of the "learn to code" mantra was.

I've parsed it not as "become a professional programmer" but instead as "learn to code at a basic level so that you have some insight into how all the things that make up an incredible part of modern life work."

People are technologically illiterate. They don't think logically. They don't get how code works at a basic level. Nobody means everyone should know how to write a linked list, I don't think; the point is that acquiring at least a superficial understanding of programming opens a whole world of understanding.
posted by uberchet at 11:48 AM on June 6, 2017 [8 favorites]


Except that this is exactly what mass organized evil is: never cold interstellar madness, but a warm cozy home, where mothers love their children, and people are whipped to death outside.

For every ranting White Supremacist, there is a huge cohort of "totally nice people," just a bit suspicious of "that sort." I guess, by analogy, the arrival argues that American culture is a sort of Ponzi scheme for racists, which isn't untrue.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:49 AM on June 6, 2017 [5 favorites]


uberchet: "I've parsed it not as "become a professional programmer" but instead as "learn to code at a basic level so that you have some insight into how all the things that make up an incredible part of modern life work.""

You've not been paying attention then. The author links explicitly to a program to retrain people with coal jobs to become software engineers. There is a relentless drive to get people to enroll in bootcamps, which is absolutely not what you're talking about. Your impressions are not at all reflective of any actual situation.
posted by TypographicalError at 11:53 AM on June 6, 2017 [36 favorites]


I think while boot camps suck for genuine newbies, that the country does indeed need a lot more people who know how to code, because chances are pretty good that your life revolves around code.

My life revolves around my family, my children, gardening, reading, napping, good food, good wine, my dog, in addition to other pleasurable time wasters. Technology is a useful adjuvant to the things my life revolves around, not a central purpose itself.
posted by scantee at 11:55 AM on June 6, 2017 [26 favorites]


For every startup idea that is completely harebrained and stupid, there's another dozen organizations that live and die by software. Very few of them are particularly young. It applies as much to your local credit union as to Chase, as much to your local bookkeeper as to PwC. Even when you're buying physical stuff from a physical store, the transportation, inventory management, and checkout is all done with computers. Doing all those things well does take a lot of devs. The failure of boot camps is in adequately training new developers, not in there not being any kind of need for good developers, even in, say, Nebraska.

Yes, but. The software behind all the stuff you're talking about is often frighteningly bad or ill fit for purpose. My takeaway after almost 20 years in "enterprise" software is general amazement that anything works, ever.

As to why to learn to code? There are few other fields that are creating new ground, growing, and offering decent income opportunities. There's lots of bad software out there that needs fixing, and good software to be written. My own trench level bitterness and cynacism aside, there are certainly worse trades from which to pick.
posted by NoRelationToLea at 11:56 AM on June 6, 2017 [6 favorites]


The more people I know who quit their various jobs to go to boot camps, the more I worry that "just learn to code" is the new "just go to law school." Those friends have either succeeded or else just decided it wasn't for them, but the economy cannot support an infinite number of coders.

It's also weird that multiple people have responded to me saying I'm unhappy in my industry by suggesting I try going to a coding bootcamp, when 1. I've never expressed any interest in or aptitude for coding and 2. those people are not in the industry either. It's become a meme at this point. That doesn't make it a bad idea for everyone but I get the impression people think it's a panacea.
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:58 AM on June 6, 2017 [27 favorites]


I want to spend a few minutes talking about Uber For Dogs, though. I would absolutely buy into a company that could identify nearby good dogs on a map and charge me some nominal fee to spend a few minutes with a good dog.

I don't know about you, but I've had days when I could really have used that.
posted by mhoye at 12:12 PM on June 6, 2017 [25 favorites]


I think there are huge problems with "learn to code," both as career advice and as an ideology. But I agree that it's kind of dumb to equate "coding" to "working at dumb trendy tech startups like Uber for Dogs."
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:13 PM on June 6, 2017 [4 favorites]


I would absolutely buy into a company that could identify nearby good dogs on a map and charge me some nominal fee to spend a few minutes with a good dog.

I mean, given how often it's asked, you couldn't blame a startup for trying to answer the question "Who's a good boy?"
posted by wildblueyonder at 12:23 PM on June 6, 2017 [10 favorites]


Capitalism doesn’t know what to do with its surpluses any more.

In a related story, capitalism has surpluses.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 12:24 PM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


I want to spend a few minutes talking about Uber For Dogs, though.

They're good apps Brent
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 12:33 PM on June 6, 2017 [17 favorites]


I want to spend a few minutes talking about Uber For Dogs, though.

You mean rover.com?

As for teaching people to code, it's definitely not all bullshit. I know exactly one person who has been through a coding bootcamp; she currently works for a major software company on real products that people use every day, and she seems to generally like her job. I have another friend who is just starting out at a coding bootcamp where the company sponsoring her has all but promised her a job at the end. It happens to be the same big company where my other friend works, so the whole thing seems quite legit to me. I'm sure there are some shady bootcamps out there, but overall I think it's a very effective model for improving the career prospects of people who didn't have the luxury of getting a four-year degree right after high school.
posted by shponglespore at 12:55 PM on June 6, 2017


I think focusing on the "learn to code" framing of this piece is missing the brunt of the argument. Whether or not boot camps are useful, shiny new capitalism is a lot like the old capitalism. It can feel good, but let's not pretend that "learning to code" will solve the human collateral damage from the equation.
posted by Think_Long at 1:02 PM on June 6, 2017 [10 favorites]


> So you have a chance in hell of having some agency in, or being able to make any sense of, a world where software is everywhere and in everything from managing your air conditioning, voting district and credit rating to pumping your drinking water, insulin and antilock brakes.

> I've parsed it not as "become a professional programmer" but instead as "learn to code at a basic level so that you have some insight into how all the things that make up an incredible part of modern life work."

Most people understand neither how an airplane flies nor how an air conditioner works, and yet many thousands of people are chilling in airport terminals waiting for their flights every day. Nobody is demanding that they get engineering degrees, because that would be ridiculous. "Learn to code" is a throwaway line to deal with all of the people constantly being left jobless and precarious due to capitalism's creative destruction and neoliberal policies of the past few decades moving blue collar jobs to overseas sweatshops.
posted by indubitable at 1:16 PM on June 6, 2017 [29 favorites]


I initially read the author as Sam Kinison. "Learn to code? Oh, it never ends. AHH! AHHHHH!"
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 1:17 PM on June 6, 2017


Yeah, "learn to code" is a neoliberal dogwhistle to remind you that "those people" could get good jobs as programmers if they would just grab their bootstraps with both hands. It's patently obvious that not everyone is going to be a coder; this is just so we can throw eggs at the underclass without the guilt.
posted by TypographicalError at 1:21 PM on June 6, 2017 [31 favorites]


I would absolutely buy into a company that could identify nearby good dogs on a map

looks like someone heard, woof

(have not investigated)
posted by sammyo at 1:25 PM on June 6, 2017


In a strictly practical sense, telling someone today that they should learn to code is like telling them they need to learn to read and write and do basic arithmetic.

It's is essentially a bare minimum requirement to do many kinds of knowledge work, and it is only going to become more so. I can tell you from personal experience, that learning to code productively has more than tripled my income in the past 5 years, without spending a dime on college classes or boot camps. You can learn how to program without spending any money on classes.
posted by empath at 1:39 PM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


I pay attention fine, TypoError, though I will confess I lost some precision in editing. However, you're more than a bit off yourself -- in particular with your oh-so-indignant closer
Your impressions are not at all reflective of any actual situation.
A simple search on the phrase "why learn to code" turns up no end of articles and discussions that answer the question in the terms I used. Sure, some will also suggest anyone can become a coder on the strength of a bootcamp start; that's certainly an overstatement, though I'm sure it's true for some people. To interpret the phrase to only and ever be an admonition to enter the software industry is to ignore every other usage of it; literally no one thinks the answer to our broad economic problems is more people knowing how to compile. To pretend otherwise is ridiculous. (It's also ridiculous, though, to insist that more people learning is somehow bad, because some of those people will be good at it.)

My point, though, is that from the earliest moments of the phrase the primary subtext has been technical literacy, not job training.

This piece is a complete mess. He completely misses that aspect of learning-to-code, and then moves on to suggest that learning to code is a TERRIBLE idea, because REASONS. In fact, he seems to suggest pretty clearly that the very idea of needing to update one's skillset in the job market is somehow unjust, which is a point of view I have a hard time wrapping my head around. One wonders if he'd be similarly down on any job training program -- say, for welding, or carpentry, or a health trade. It's particularly perverse that the program he focuses on here requires no payment until and unless you land a job with the skills in question.

This whole paragraph is a wreck of straw men and jumped conclusions:

Across the country, there are boot camps teaching computer languages to the long-term unemployed, with no fees until you land your first job. It can be grotesque — if the economic structure of society is failing to meet people’s needs, it’s quite a leap to blame the people affected for not having the right skills — but this is, at root, a utopian promise. All the prejudices and stupidities that churn beneath our vague, signifying human language will be wiped away by the world that’s coming, expressed in the blank mathematical intricacies of code. Your age or race or gender don’t matter; they belong to the age of objects. Just learn how to code, and you’ll be fine. But something’s missing. Code what? To do what? And why?
I added the emphasis here, because that cutesy little closer is just astonishing in its fundamental and willful wrongness. Indeed, Sam, why do anything? Ever?

Even if we decide to accept his theory -- which I do not -- that "learn to code" is 100% about job training, it's absurd and privilge-blind to dismiss job training so completely because some of those jobs might be on apps the author thinks are pointless. He trots out dot-com retread, old-man-shaking-can complaints about the app economy without for a moment considering that maybe the long-term unemployed could actually USE some of those jobs to replace the ones they lost when coal went bust. People gotta eat, even if our heroic jeremiad artist manages to get his nebulous economic revolution off the ground, that's gonna take time.

Maybe slinging some PHP for a while on a temp-to-perm basis might actually be better than going hungry in the meantime. You know, while we wait for a wholesale reorganization of our economy into a magical system where nobody needs a job or skills, led I'm sure by sesquipedalian Brits desperately trying to justify how many hours they've evidently spent on critical theory.

This dude got salty about the phrase "learn to code" and went looking for a flimsy excuse to shit out a broadside about many, many things with little actual coherence. Sure, let's make fun of marketing droids and buzzword compliant sentences, and yeah it's awful how Louisiana treats its inmates (and gosh I nearly forgot they were Confederates!), but how any of that supports the idea that technical training in pursuit of a career change for the long-term unemployed is somehow empty or stupid is absolutely beyond me.

On the other hand, TypoError, your flip response DID prompt me to give it a closer reading, and to investigate the author more closely, and so now I'll be able to save time in the future by ignoring anything Kriss has to say. So thanks for that!
posted by uberchet at 1:40 PM on June 6, 2017 [10 favorites]


Most people understand neither how an airplane flies nor how an air conditioner works, and yet many thousands of people are chilling in airport terminals waiting for their flights every day. Nobody is demanding that they get engineering degrees, because that would be ridiculous.

Learning to code doesn't require a degree. Neither does knowing how an airplane flies or an air conditioner works. And I think you should probably have some understanding of all of them.
posted by empath at 1:41 PM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


Maybe slinging some PHP for a while on a temp-to-perm basis might actually be better than going hungry in the meantime.

I used to be a grocery store checker. My father spent his whole career as a grocery store clerk.

I wouldn't even take that job again if you paid me what I make now as a software developer. I'd rather work as a software developer for minimum wage than take one of those 'low-skill' jobs that everyone waxes rhapsodic about for any amount of money.
posted by empath at 1:48 PM on June 6, 2017 [3 favorites]



People who picked up how to code for fun and profit way underestimate the learning curve.
posted by soren_lorensen at 1:50 PM on June 6, 2017 [9 favorites]


Whether or not some people enjoy programming doesn't affect the main point of the article - that the problems of our current situation don't need big systemic overhauls because the next employment bubble will keep us afloat instead.
posted by Space Coyote at 1:56 PM on June 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


empath: "In a strictly practical sense, telling someone today that they should learn to code is like telling them they need to learn to read and write and do basic arithmetic. "

You're making an argument orthogonal to the article. Telling one person that they should learn to code is not problematic. Implying that an entire society can raise itself from service sector serfdom to white collar freedom is a cruel lie that only serves to make the lives of grocery store clerks worse.
posted by TypographicalError at 1:59 PM on June 6, 2017 [22 favorites]


My feelings on coding as a potential job/career: I can't see the appeal personally, aside from money, in which case... i mean you gotta do what you gotta do to eat i guess but.. yeesh..*shudder* corporate dronehood indeed.

I taught myself to code in several languages as part of my previous career. Even published some open-source stuff that was relevant to my industry at the time. I spent close to 15 years in that industry, and did well enough (not great, not rich) for myself, financially at least.

I would never want to write code (or go back to my specific niche) for a living and instead do much more manual, but skilled, labor now. The pay's less, sure, but I want to blow my brains out, or commit assault much, much less often as a result.

I think coding for your own reasons is probably just dandy, but doing it for someone else sounds like torture to me. They'll never truly appreciate it if you do excellent work, even if they could assess or understand it as such, and they'll shit all over you if you screw up. I guess I could think of worse ways to spend my time, but I'm not going to try right now.

and that concludes my bitter rant for today. thank you.
posted by some loser at 2:03 PM on June 6, 2017 [7 favorites]


> Implying that an entire society can raise itself from service sector serfdom to white collar freedom is a cruel lie that only serves to make the lives of grocery store clerks worse.

Nobody has ever suggested that every single person on earth should be a computer programmer. But I do think computer literacy in general is a baseline requirement for almost any sort of skilled work, and really just for an understanding of how the word works.
posted by empath at 2:04 PM on June 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


Nobody is demanding that they get engineering degrees, because that would be ridiculous.

It would, and I think "learn to code" is silly in that respect, but engineering is something that is in fact a high-demand job exactly because of this, and we'd be better off if more people who are capable of being engineers wound up as engineers and had an easier time getting from where they are now to that point. Smart people do not all already have college degrees in challenging disciplines. I know good developers who used to work retail, as adults. One guy I went to boot camp with, one of the ones who was good at it, was selling shoes before he did the boot camp. It's not a good solution for people who are not capable of more intellectually difficult work than retail--but if those people who would be happy and capable software developers or engineers or whatever are working customer service, then not only are they underemployed, they're holding a customer service job that could be done by someone else.

Not everybody is going to be a coder, but there are a lot more people than you think out there who're languishing underemployed who have not had a good traditional route to doing more challenging work. Especially women and POC, who have historically been seriously discouraged from entering STEM disciplines. "Everyone should code" is overstating it, but it is possible to go way, way too far in dismissing the value that nontraditional education has for exactly the sorts of populations that need the help. Massive expansion of education opportunities doesn't solve everything, but I think it's a necessary component to mitigating the damage that's being done to marginalized groups. I have been working a lot recently on trying to help a handful of internet friends at least explore making the jump, and these are people who've been Nerds their whole lives, but who did not have access or support for making that a thing that actually paid a living wage.
posted by Sequence at 2:07 PM on June 6, 2017 [3 favorites]


Anyway wrt programming enhancing your value at your current job, teach yourself pivot tables first, the gain in productivity is a lot higher than discovering how many different ways brogrammers have cooked up to avoid writing any CSS.
posted by Space Coyote at 2:08 PM on June 6, 2017 [5 favorites]


how any of that supports the idea that technical training in pursuit of a career change for the long-term unemployed is somehow empty or stupid is absolutely beyond me.

The whole active vs symbolic learners are issues that are not well addressed at all in the article, but have, time and again come up as roadblocks to this sort of retraining. And it's not like there aren't skilled trades shortages in the US too. I think the real weirdness is why coding? Why the rush to dress black-rock miners in white button-down short sleeves and khakis? It comes across to me as an empathy failure: it worked for me, it must work for everyone!

There have been two generations at least of strong self-selection in labour. Many of those who wanted out are doing something else. An increased range of opportunities is great in skills training, but for people who have chosen mining career path, given the demand for trades as well as programmers, there are likely other alternatives which might be better suited.
posted by bonehead at 2:15 PM on June 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


I do think computer literacy in general is a baseline requirement for almost any sort of skilled work, and really just for an understanding of how the word works.

i dont think even microsoft programmers know how Word works bruh
posted by entropicamericana at 2:26 PM on June 6, 2017 [8 favorites]


empath: "Nobody has ever suggested that every single person on earth should be a computer programmer."

That's not what I said, because it is not what I meant. There is no concrete suggestion that everyone should be an engineer, just a sense that if you learn to code, You'll Make It. No one ever has to say, "Everyone should be a programmer," because like you, they just say that coding is an essential skill of life, talk about how the masters of the universe use it constantly, slag working class people, then waggle their eyebrows suggestively.

It's all a con game that says "If you just learn these magic skills, you'll pull yourself out of the precariat."
posted by TypographicalError at 2:30 PM on June 6, 2017 [16 favorites]


There are real points to be made - like the simple observation that maybe the tech sector is way smaller than it's cracked up to be, or that on the whole, startups underperform public markets.

But this article tastes like the author had an idea and went to a conference just to give it a real-world setting. And the idea itself, ironically, doesn't think about why? - it doesn't dig into why economic stagnation has led to this U curve of billionaire dreams and broke realities. It doesn't ask why the people at said conference are working on their "useless products."

In other words, there's no indication that Sam talked to anyone at the conference.
posted by tmcw at 2:36 PM on June 6, 2017 [3 favorites]


Learn To Code exhortations are bullshit. Learn to be computer literate and how to not facilitate malware. Learn to identify kids with natural coding talent and incentivise them.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 2:44 PM on June 6, 2017 [3 favorites]


One time, back in the 90s, I heard a segment on local public radio about how TV stations had a hard time finding people qualified to do closed captioning. The industry rep said that it was terrible that there were so few people qualified to perform the skilled work that they were having to compete for them by paying them higher salaries! Can you imagine?

The solution, according to said industry rep, was to graduate a bunch more people trained in the skill so they could drop salaries to an acceptable level.

I don't know why I thought of that just now. Weird.
posted by stet at 2:49 PM on June 6, 2017 [30 favorites]


My feelings on coding as a potential job/career: I can't see the appeal personally, aside from money, in which case... i mean you gotta do what you gotta do to eat i guess but.. yeesh..*shudder* corporate dronehood indeed.

I dunno, as someone who is a corporate drone already, I kind of wonder what the difference is between being a coder and being an "assistant" except for the money. Except (a) I'm not smart enough to be able to code, and (b) by the time I ever learned how, there'd be too many coders.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:55 PM on June 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


But I do think computer literacy in general is a baseline requirement for almost any sort of skilled work,

I'd like to introduce you to the wonderful world of the humanities. It's a big world! My colleagues think I'm a wizard because I can do simple pivot tables. I'm afraid if I confessed that I can do a VLOOKUP they'd burn me at the stake. It saves time for me (and I don't trust our IT people to get things right), but they go through life just fine without.
posted by praemunire at 3:03 PM on June 6, 2017 [6 favorites]


maybe the tech sector is way smaller than it's cracked up to be

While true, most programmers don't work in the tech industry. They work for non-tech companies doing technical work. (That said, those are exactly the kind of jobs that often end up like some loser talked about above, where the work is not understood/rewarded/appreciated by the larger company). Size of tech sector and number of programming jobs are not quite the same thing.

(I work in one of the flagships of the tech industry, on the other hand, and companies like this are the opposite -- too engineer-focused and tend to not recognize non-engineer contributions appropriately, IMO)
posted by thefoxgod at 3:05 PM on June 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


It's all a con game that says "If you just learn these magic skills, you'll pull yourself out of the precariat."

And I'm sitting here as a queer Latinx person from a low-income background who was completely drowning trying to make a life for myself until I managed to get on this particular lifeboat. It can't save everyone, but it is saving some people. Why is it so hard to acknowledge that? Wages are likely to fall; they are not likely to fall so far as to be below a living wage precisely because it's something not everybody's cut out to do. There are assholes out there, but there were also people who went to bat for me in this process. Even one of the people I know who flopped at establishing a post-boot-camp career--largely because of a lack of a prior degree of any variety--is now using funding from a government program designed to get people to learn to code to help cover a real degree to fix that.

The absence of programs intended to help the lower classes learn to code just means that coding salaries stay astronomical and coding jobs are filled largely with cis white guys from comfortable backgrounds. None of this is ever magic, but that doesn't mean these programs don't help people. Marginalized people who can't code need support to obtain stability, but that doesn't invalidate this as one route to better things. The idea that everybody smart has already self-selected into this sort of thing ignores the many barriers that lower-income people have to better career options to start with.

Learn to identify kids with natural coding talent and incentivise them.

And what about all the adults who're capable of doing this and would be happy doing this who're out there already and un(der)employed? Fostering the talents of kids is great. I'm a Girls Who Code volunteer. It does not replace making career opportunities available for everybody over the age of 18 who didn't have a program like GWC available when they were teenagers.
posted by Sequence at 3:12 PM on June 6, 2017 [6 favorites]


And I'm sitting here as a queer Latinx person from a low-income background who was completely drowning trying to make a life for myself until I managed to get on this particular lifeboat. It can't save everyone, but it is saving some people. Why is it so hard to acknowledge that?

So, I'm not opposed to the existence of boot camps, etc., per se, but you have to realize that, especially if it came to being in the present day, anything offering to teach you, at a price, to do something in order to make money is going to be at least 70% scam.

Even one of the people I know who flopped at establishing a post-boot-camp career--largely because of a lack of a prior degree of any variety--is now using funding from a government program designed to get people to learn to code to help cover a real degree to fix that.

And here's another part of the issue: why didn't they start there? How much time and money did they waste floundering first? Why, in a civilized society, do we expect people to have to expend their own $$$ for professional training that may or may not even take? The "lifeboat" and the need for the "lifeboat" don't exist independent of conditions on the sea, if you take my meaning.
posted by praemunire at 3:22 PM on June 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


anything offering to teach you, at a price, to do something in order to make money is going to be at least 70% scam.

That is not my experience.

And here's another part of the issue: why didn't they start there?

Maybe because they were hoping not to spend four years on the process? Maybe because they thought they probably didn't need two years of "Geography for Art Majors" or whatever gen ed requirements were going around in order to pick up a vocational skill and get a job?
posted by the agents of KAOS at 3:35 PM on June 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


It's all Levi making jeans for 49ers, or hardware store guys selling them shovels, becoming the actual millionaires in any bubble, isn't it? There were actual windows, of course, IBM assembly programmers back in the 60's, or learning telecomm in the 80s, etc. Having a garage and indulgent parents in the Valley in the 70s. McLuhan wrote about this, our penchant for chasing the future while looking at our rear-view mirrors.
posted by Chitownfats at 3:40 PM on June 6, 2017 [4 favorites]


Love that boy
(quoting and seconding a friend)
posted by Joseph Gurl at 3:40 PM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


And here's another part of the issue: why didn't they start there?

In that case, because the program in question requires you to have been on government unemployment for 6 months before you have the option, so yeah, that's a huge problem. Very few of the programs available for adults are ever available before you're at what they consider to be the bottom of the barrel--and as a result they're usually in reality only available to people who have more social support than the average low-income person in that position.

So, I'm not opposed to the existence of boot camps, etc., per se, but you have to realize that, especially if it came to being in the present day, anything offering to teach you, at a price, to do something in order to make money is going to be at least 70% scam.

And this is where I've tried to clarify that I don't even really like the boot camp model, but that not liking the boot camp model and not liking the idea that people outside CS degree programs should be offered ways to learn to code are totally different things. I mean, your description there basically applies to the whole modern university system, in particular as it applies to kids from lower-income backgrounds who do not necessarily go to Follow Their Dreams but rather to Not Be On Food Stamps. Insofar as anything is worth learning to get a better job, if you have the ability to do it, code is something that a) may not take a CS degree to do professionally, and b) there will reliably be white-collar jobs in that pay more than a living wage for awhile yet, for people who are competent.

But yeah, in general, I am 100% behind the idea that capitalism is terrible and a lot of Tech People are terrible and all that, just there's a difference between trashing those things and generally trashing the idea of poor people learning to code as one concrete way of mitigating the damage done by terrible people.
posted by Sequence at 3:49 PM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


Not only do you not need a degree, but at my last job interview, we had a long conversation with one of the partners of the company about what a waste of money a degree is.
posted by empath at 4:18 PM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


I don't know whether it's just because I'm in a field where no one believes you can do a thing unless you have the associated degree, but I have a lot of anxiety over whether I would have any credibility as a coder from a non-traditional background.

I think that I would be a reasonably good coder - I've played around with code a lot, though never past the point of making little toy programs, and I know more math and computer stuff than the average humanities graduate student - but every time I think about it seriously, I keep hitting the wall of "if I don't have a degree, who the heck is going to look at a middle-aged public librarian and see a coder?"

I'm not trying to turn this into an AskMe. But I keep seeing this idea that you don't need a degree to get in the door as a coder, and... maybe I'm completely off-base! But my gut feeling is that it's truer for some people than for others.
posted by Jeanne at 4:38 PM on June 6, 2017 [4 favorites]


I think it's a pretty anti-intellectual assumption to think that education in computer programming is something that can happen divorced from what universities contribute in computer science and many related and interdisciplinary fields. It is incredibly privileged, to be sure, having the chance to spend time at one of the elite CS departments. But to propagate the conventional claim that academia is somehow out of touch or "poor value" is missing the point: a university education offers a person a set of skills to look at these issues critically and scientifically. Programming, at any level of competency, is not exempt from such standards. If anything, it's industry that's continually lagging in serious research, in fundamental ways, precisely due to the incentives of capital.

Ok that was a lot of words, but the analogy is that biologists and doctors are very different. The roles and outlooks involved are different. The debate prompted in this article conflates such categories. And the question is, would a "coder" have the information to reason about these social issues?

What I'd like to see is more computer science literacy. It's the only Enlightened way to empower people on the questions of what, and how, in programming.
posted by polymodus at 4:50 PM on June 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


given the demand for trades as well as programmers, there are likely other alternatives which might be better suited.

Say, the number of jobs in solar energy, which seems to be growing.
posted by wildblueyonder at 4:54 PM on June 6, 2017


Not only do you not need a degree, but at my last job interview, we had a long conversation with one of the partners of the company about what a waste of money a degree is.

Two things:

1) There are actually very few growth industries available today that also need more help and provide relatively low barriers to entry. Yes, tech has problems with gender and racial diversity, but it's comparatively easy to get in and start making some money vs. fields with artificial barriers to entry such as, say, lawyers. Sequence is actually articulating this point much better upthread.

2) Define "waste of money." Apart from a Peter Thiel view of the world, most people (probably rightly) view the tech industry as rather impoverished in terms of perspective. In other words, given all the power and leverage we're creating with our wonderful products - we're doing what with it, exactly? Ads? Attacking margins in working parts of the economy and diverting the reduced (but collectively huge) profits into a single winner's pocket, desolation in our wake?

If we're really going to defend the idea that "everyone should code," I actually think there's really interesting work yet to be done by people with technical skills and deep humanities and social science educations. It shouldn't be the case that the only tech nerds who develop an awareness of this stuff are billionares with no more foes to vanquish. Maybe we're in a better a place if social justice folks learn how to leverage their efforts onto the world via technology. If their effect is only a fraction of Amazon's on traditional retail, that'd really be something, no?
posted by NoRelationToLea at 4:55 PM on June 6, 2017 [4 favorites]


Yeah my dad got a job as a reporter when he was in his 20s by more or less promising the editor he'd come back with 2 stories by noon each day. He was able to do this, but is that the same thing as getting an education in journalism, including composition, ethics, etc? The publisher who likes underpaying their staff might not be the one to answer this objectively.
posted by Space Coyote at 4:57 PM on June 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


but I have a lot of anxiety over whether I would have any credibility as a coder from a non-traditional background.
My anxiety isn't exactly about whether I would have credibility as a coder without a degree. It's pretty specifically about whether I would have any credibility as a middle-aged woman without a STEM-related degree. Because not only do I not have any credentials, but I pretty much don't look a thing like what people imagine non-credentialed programmers looking like. I'm not young; I'm not male; my educational and work background aren't in STEM. I have two humanities degrees and work in a traditionally-female helping profession. I'm pretty sure I could learn to code. I got an A- in the weed-out course for the CS major a the university where I work. But I don't have a lot of confidence that I could have a tech career. I'm also not really sure how I could get from where I am to a tech career, because I'm not going to be able to do a bootcamp. I would have to quit my job and relocate to a real city, and neither of those things are in the cards for me.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:58 PM on June 6, 2017 [7 favorites]


  The solution … was to graduate a bunch more people trained in the skill so they could drop salaries to an acceptable level.

Yes, because the problem is that in programmers expecting NoRelationToLea's “decent income opportunities”, employers wish to find programmers more cheaply. They don't need better programmers, just more of 'em to keep prices low. A company near me was paying full-stack JS coders minimum wage (if you factor the hours), and they were tripping over applicants trying to get in. And with no organization, programmer labour will wash out with the tide.

I wouldn't rely on the solar thing for jobs. I'm a (perhaps too) old wind and solar engineer, currently working part-time in retail because my industry blew away when the subsidies ran out here.
posted by scruss at 5:06 PM on June 6, 2017 [4 favorites]


I would have to quit my job and relocate to a real city, and neither of those things are in the cards for me.

This is my issue with bootcamps. It's not that they're universally bad but they're like giving people a knife and telling them they're chefs without checking if there are a lot of restaurants nearby.

Or delivering a million dollars of mining equipment to somewhere without any major mineral deposits - sure it's a nice effort but it doesn't really get anyone a job in the end.

Bootcamps in Louisiana are fine to an extent but without making it explicitly useful to local job requirements it's not going to move the needle on employing people.

If you're already living in San Francisco and have a network here a bootcamp gets you over the credentialing issue. If you live in Bloomington IL and you take a bootcamp well now you have some incentive to move to San Francisco I guess.
posted by GuyZero at 5:18 PM on June 6, 2017


given all the power and leverage we're creating with our wonderful products - we're doing what with it, exactly? Ads? Attacking margins in working parts of the economy and diverting the reduced (but collectively huge) profits into a single winner's pocket, desolation in our wake?

Writing mostly CRUD apps for medium to large businesses tbqh. Translating business rules into code. Finding out what business rules actually exist. Getting people to agree on how a running business is actually being run. Trying to stop them from trying to re-engineer the entire business so you can just get the information you need to write your CRUD app. Crying.
posted by GuyZero at 5:20 PM on June 6, 2017 [9 favorites]


Anyone advocating that even 50% of people should learn to code is either inhabiting some sort of parallel universe where real people don't exist, or just hasn't met very many people outside of a tiny little bubble.

Disclosure: I spent over 20 years coding and was a software design authority on many projects with nine figure budgets. I have also worked in supermarkets, warehouses, fruit packaging operations and various charities.

In my experience asserting that enough people have either the aptitude or interest to make learning to code realistic for anything other than a decentish minority is something out of cloud cuckoo land.

I'd try to put it more politely but I'm too busy trying to pick my jaw up off the floor.

Crikey.
posted by walrus at 5:24 PM on June 6, 2017 [13 favorites]


So...the way this works is that society generates a burst of coders so we can build, like, full automation and put everyone out of work? Become a coder, o proletarian, lest other people get there first and code you out of a job?

I mean, I don't see what the race to get everyone to code is going to achieve, except ever faster destruction of jobs that are not Taskrabbit and Postmates. And after a while, the bottom will fall out of the coding market, because everyone who has been Taskrabbited and Postmated will be semi homeless with no money to spend on consumer goods and the whole thing will collapse.

It's not a ponzi scheme, it's a gold rush and a poison pill.
posted by Frowner at 5:34 PM on June 6, 2017 [13 favorites]


Exactly
posted by Joseph Gurl at 5:41 PM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


I don't know how so many people in here are reading "coding is not a good career path for everyone yet is being pushed as one, and that is a problem" and seeing "you, the specific coder reading this, should never have gone into coding."
posted by showbiz_liz at 5:47 PM on June 6, 2017 [18 favorites]


Learn to write? Write what? To do what? And why?

Learn to cook? Cook what? To do what? And why?

Learn to sing? Sing what? To do what? And why?
posted by erniepan at 5:52 PM on June 6, 2017 [8 favorites]


I think that, on the one hand, it's kinda dumb to act as if the only things left to be made with code are Taskrabbit clones (or Uber for Dogs, or whatever). But it's equally dumb to act as if learning to code is going to solve the deep problems with our economy, which mean that a lot of people can't get decent jobs. And it's an argument that often comes down to blaming the victim. If the solution for people having crappy jobs or no jobs is for them to learn to code, then who is to blame for the shitty jobs and career prospects of people who don't learn to code? Why didn't they just learn to code? It's a slogan and an argument for bootstrapping, rather than actual career advice. And I say that as someone who is learning to code and thinks that coding is swell, both as a hobby and a career path.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:59 PM on June 6, 2017 [7 favorites]


I'm probably one of the people better positioned to both receive and benefit from the "just learn to code" mentality - I'm a young, white guy who just graduated with an unrelated degree - and I have to come down pretty hard on the side of it being a bit of a bad joke at this point.

I don't think it's like singing, or writing, or cooking - it feels a lot closer to "why don't you just learn to build cabinets". Now, cabinetry is clearly essential, and can also be a good career path. It's not essential to using a kitchen, though! And no matter what the retraining being suggested there's a very real cost in taking the time do to it.

I'm a very technically-minded person with a few summers of software development under my belt. I basically know how to throw scripts together, do the internet, and how to learn new systems. I think everyone saying "learning to code is the new learning to read" is talking about something very different from the phenomenon the article describes (which is a real one, I think - see also Hacker News). That complaint - that computers are becoming more and more central and people know less and less about them - is talking about technological literacy, not full-on education for developers. Hopefully, there's a distinction between the two - we probably don't want a world where to use a car, you also have to be able to design one.
posted by sagc at 6:05 PM on June 6, 2017 [5 favorites]


I don't know how so many people in here are reading "coding is not a good career path for everyone yet is being pushed as one, and that is a problem" and seeing "you, the specific coder reading this, should never have gone into coding."

if only they had majored in liberal arts they wouldn't have such a reading comprehension problem
posted by entropicamericana at 6:30 PM on June 6, 2017 [5 favorites]


Yeah, there's a lot of really interesting stuff--and beautiful prose!--here and it's getting lost in the "learn to code" framing (if this were just about developer conferences it could potentially be more interesting). I worked for one of those orgs that teaches 12 year old girls to code and yes, of course what we taught them to code was an app for an iPad. Not because we wanted to indoctrinate them early in the ways of consumerism and the monolithic power of Apple, but because they were 12 and wanted to make games and toys!

I think like uberchet alludes to in this comment, learning to code is kind of like the modern equivalent of wood shop. Most of us won't be carpenters but we understand what the fabric of our universe is made of. There's lots of things to say about what lying bastards Republican politicians are when they claim to think we could reduce student debt and make America whatever it used to be again by just chopping all university programs that don't teach coding (spoiler alert: it's not a skills gap, it's growing economic inequality). And there's lots to say about the fact that the tech economy stands in many ways on the back of slavery or something indistinguishable from slavery but don't worry, your tech startup is a mission-based company so that makes you an altruist. But it has nothing to do with empowering people (especially girls and girls of color in particular, who are the target audience for most of these 'learn to code' programs) to understand technology and use it to create.
posted by capricorn at 6:42 PM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


Ha, I was typing this while sagc posted this comment mentioning cabinetry so I'll just reiterate my point that woodshop totally was A Thing.
posted by capricorn at 6:44 PM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


Coding is literally becoming fluent in a foreign language. A foreign language that is not designed to communicate with humans. And what most people mean by coding is becoming fluent in several related-but-not-cognate foreign languages.

I'm a technical trainer and tier 2 support tech. I'm not computer illiterate and I know very well how important basic computer literacy and even knowing the basics of front end web stuff are to being able to do many, many important things in your career and your life. Learning to code is such a high degree of stretch goal I don't even know where to begin. Most people can barely operate basic office productivity applications. It might not land you an impressive-sounding tech job, but it will help you work a solid 40 hours a week as an admin where the other people there will think you're a wizard because you can make a pivot table and take the old phone number off the company website. (And VLOOKUP? Bring me my fainting couch!)

(My bread and butter is PhDs who don't know what a web browser is, or that there's more than one of them. I once had to explain to a nursing professor over the phone what a cursor is and where to find it on their screen. When the robots really take over, we're going to need a bigger help desk, let me tell you.)
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:46 PM on June 6, 2017 [8 favorites]


I once had to explain to a nursing professor over the phone what a cursor is and where to find it on their screen

When I did desktop support, this was the most important thing I learned: you can't assume any knowledge or vocabulary, no matter how obvious it seems to you, and it's best to actually go to the office of the person you are trying to help. I got a call from a panicked admin worker, who had been tasked with uploading quiz answer keys to a course web page using Acrobat. A coworker had typed out for her very good, clear, step-by-step instructions but she said they made no sense at all. So I got there and found that she did not know what was meant by "drag the file to...".

A lot of my users were older workers, a few years from retirement, whose jobs had been totally upended by the advent of the PC. They often felt great anxiety about tech, and were very afraid of both looking foolish because they didn't know how to do things, afraid to ask for help because they would be thereby exposed as unable to do their job, and afraid of breaking things. So there was a kind of therapeutic side to the job, building trust and making them feel that it was OK to ask basic questions, and that they would not be belittled for so doing, but would be instead (on my watch!) treated respectfully and patiently.
posted by thelonius at 7:00 PM on June 6, 2017 [4 favorites]


"Need to code" is just a variant on "everyone can be an entrepeneur." It's nonsense, you can't run an economy that way, but if you think it then you can imagine the next generation--who grew up "getting it"--will all be fine and the fact that seasonal strawberry pickers get paid squat for working harder than I'd be willing to is not something we need to deal with. Since they'll be coders or something.

It cracked me up that the article mentioned 'garbage men and coders' as a bit of idiocy actually heard spoken. Since it's one of my go-to examples when I get into this discussion--we need garbage men, it's an honest & honorable way to make a living, you shouldn't be treating them like failed programmers.
posted by mark k at 9:43 PM on June 6, 2017 [13 favorites]


Yeah, if you want to find failed programmers, walk down the hall to where the product managers sit.
posted by GuyZero at 10:24 PM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


if only they had majored in liberal arts they wouldn't have such a reading comprehension problem

Can we not do this? As someone who went to a snooty snoot liberal arts institution and who also has a graduate degree in computer science, this is a really not necessary bit of snark that's already piling on a misread, namely:

I don't know how so many people in here are reading "coding is not a good career path for everyone yet is being pushed as one, and that is a problem" and seeing "you, the specific coder reading this, should never have gone into coding."

I'm not sure there's anyone in the thread that's really attempting to defend their career choice - at least not to the degree that this comment tries to caricature.

The analogy to woodshop is interesting. Most of us don't really need geometry, either - but most of us still learned it. At one time, most of us probably would have little need for (and certainly wouldn't be taught, in institutionalized schools no less) what are now basic skills like reading or basic arithmetic. When we were primarily an agrarian society, who needed to learn all the stuff associated with industrialization?

And now we're very likely in the middle of a shift from an industrial economy to whatever it is that comes next. And that's very likely to include things like knowing how to code. Frankly a lot of these comments read like something out of rural newspapers decrying the ways of cityfolk and what they like to think of as "progress." Some things were lost with industrialization, sure - but good things came out of it, too. Things like the middle class, unions, and oh I don't know, the Haber process increasing the Earth's human carrying capacity by 4x or more.

Similarly, tech (not just coding) doesn't have to just be predatory automation, or the singularity, or distopian scifi. Maybe it's corny, but why does the reaction to tech in general and coding in particular have to be a conservative knee jerk instead of something more hopeful and/or participatory?
posted by NoRelationToLea at 11:07 PM on June 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


Yeah, if you want to find failed programmers, walk down the hall to where the product managers sit.

When people talk about how the tech industry is toxic, this is a prime example of why. Assuming all non-coders are failed aspirants to what it is you do is a terrible way to go through life.

Also, lot of female technical staff often find themselves pushed into product and project manager roles, even when they'd rather be coding, so the attitude that these positions are less important gets the weight of sexism added on to it.
posted by Space Coyote at 11:21 PM on June 6, 2017 [14 favorites]


Similarly, tech (not just coding) doesn't have to just be predatory automation, or the singularity, or distopian scifi.

Are you sure?
posted by Joseph Gurl at 11:42 PM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


People are saying he writes well, but it is filled with casual ableism. Strong words for ugly realities, but equating "morons", "idiots", the "stupid" etc. with the BS he's talking about further marginalizes intellectually disabled people. He needs to get in touch with the disability community if he wants to have a more broad view of life so he can spin his beautiful prose. It is pervasive to misuse disabilities to describe negative things, but it does not have to be that way: http://www.autistichoya.com/p/ableist-words-and-terms-to-avoid.html
posted by RuvaBlue at 11:45 PM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


Those words appear with tremendous frequency here at Metafilter as well (two of them are present in this thread, in fact). (Not to take away from your point but to emphasize that they are still completely normalized in the discourse, even on a site like this one that's (relatively) forward-thinking and has a track record of caring and putting its guidelines where its mouth is.)
posted by Joseph Gurl at 11:50 PM on June 6, 2017


Coding is literally becoming fluent in a foreign language. A foreign language that is not designed to communicate with humans. And what most people mean by coding is becoming fluent in several related-but-not-cognate foreign languages.

I'm a technical trainer and tier 2 support tech. I'm not computer illiterate and I know very well how important basic computer literacy and even knowing the basics of front end web stuff are to being able to do many, many important things in your career and your life. Learning to code is such a high degree of stretch goal I don't even know where to begin. Most people can barely operate basic office productivity applications. It might not land you an impressive-sounding tech job, but it will help you work a solid 40 hours a week as an admin where the other people there will think you're a wizard because you can make a pivot table and take the old phone number off the company website. (And VLOOKUP? Bring me my fainting couch!)

(My bread and butter is PhDs who don't know what a web browser is, or that there's more than one of them. I once had to explain to a nursing professor over the phone what a cursor is and where to find it on their screen. When the robots really take over, we're going to need a bigger help desk, let me tell you.)


I studied journalism and work at a nonprofit as a grant writer, where I'm one of two people under the age of about 40. Despite the fact that I, from my perspective and probably yours, know practically nothing about computers, I am the office computer genius. At least once or twice a week I have to help somebody out with Word or Excel, and usually I'll explain what I'm doing because I think it will be easy to understand, and I will get the blankest looks. And now everybody knows that if you need a table of contents made in Word, or a column of full names split into two columns for first and last name in Excel, you come to Liz.

These people aren't dumb. Many of them are experts in things I will never understand, but their brains just don't seem to process information the same way mine does, because various techniques for manipulating data in Excel that I think are incredibly straightforward and elegant are 100% baffling nonsense to these guys. And we're not talking VLOOKUP here - I still haven't gotten around to googling what VLOOKUP does, though I hear it's neat. That's the level we're operating at, where the Excel whiz hasn't had time to figure that out yet. We're talking sorting by multiple columns at once, or highlighting duplicates, or making line breaks inside cells - stuff you can do by pressing two or three buttons.

When I hear people talk about how coding isn't that hard to learn I think about my brilliant human rights lawyer colleagues forcing fake line breaks in Excel cells by adding dozens of spaces until the second word text-wraps down to a new line.
posted by showbiz_liz at 12:03 AM on June 7, 2017 [6 favorites]


I can't believe I forgot to mention the high-level UN conference at which none of the Ministers of Justice, internationally known academics, etc could even BEGIN to operate Powerpoints.
posted by showbiz_liz at 12:54 AM on June 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Kriss is an entertaining read when he cuts loose, but one can't help but notice that the world he lives in is one governed by the rules of doctrinaire Marxist ideology, where things work somewhat differently than bourgeis-liberal “common sense” would suggest. Reading his writings is a bit like listening to Christian Alternative Rock, in that one is left with a sense of ostranenie; the world looks familiar, and yet the mechanisms behind it are subtly different.
posted by acb at 4:51 AM on June 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


"I learned to code and it worked for me so everyone should" is emblematic not so much of an empathy deficit among tech workers, but more their monumental lack of sophistication when it comes to labor markets. Highly successful specialist doctors will tell you that being a doctor is terrible, no one should do it, why would anyone go to (artificially restricted) med school to enter a profession where you have to deal with, like, patients or something. Lawyers, nurses, teachers -- they'll all tell you something similar. They recognize that anyone telling more people to enter their profession with talk of shortages has one motive: trying to drive down salaries.

Tech workers, on the other hand, hear "You're awesome! Everyone should try to be like you because you're so smart and awesome!"
posted by Ralston McTodd at 5:06 AM on June 7, 2017 [11 favorites]


Anyone advocating that even 50% of people should learn to code is either inhabiting some sort of parallel universe where real people don't exist, or just hasn't met very many people outside of a tiny little bubble.

There's knowing how to build enough to put up some shelves or build a treehouse, and there's knowing how to build enough to master-plan a block-sized mixed office/retail/residential complex. Similarly, there's knowing enough coding to write a script to sort through your holiday photos or a simple game, and knowing enough coding to develop a large-scale application without drowning in technical debt along the way. Only a few professionals will need to get to the latter, though the former can be useful to vastly more people.
posted by acb at 5:07 AM on June 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


These people aren't dumb. Many of them are experts in things I will never understand, but their brains just don't seem to process information the same way mine does, because various techniques for manipulating data in Excel that I think are incredibly straightforward and elegant are 100% baffling nonsense to these guys.

I think a lot of people are confusing plain old knowledge with natural aptitude. I have been a working programmer for eleven years (and a hobby programmer for many years before that) and I am totally useless with Excel because I've never had any reason to learn it. (When the business-side people at work watch me fumbling with a spreadsheet I can almost hear them thinking, wait, I thought this guy was supposed to be good with computers. Sometimes I end up loading spreadsheets into Postgres so I can use SQL because I have such a hard time getting anything done in Excel.)

No, coding jobs are not the solution to income inequality or falling wages at the national level, nor should people who have no interest be badgered into going into the field. But there is a narrative that programming is something that some people are naturally good at and other people will never be capable of, and I think that narrative is actively harmful to people both within the field (because it encourages a monoculture of the sorts of people who tend to be put into the "naturally good at programming" bucket) and outside of it (because it discourages people who might enjoy it from trying to enter the field, and also because it discourages people in other fields from even trying to understand software systems at the same time as those systems are becoming increasingly critical to running the society in which all of us live).
posted by enn at 5:12 AM on June 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


Highly successful specialist doctors will tell you that being a doctor is terrible, no one should do it, why would anyone go to (artificially restricted) med school to enter a profession where you have to deal with, like, patients or something. Lawyers, nurses, teachers -- they'll all tell you something similar. They recognize that anyone telling more people to enter their profession with talk of shortages has one motive: trying to drive down salaries.

The endpoint of this approach is discouraging individuals from changing their own lightbulbs, instead requiring them to rely on one of the small number of well-remunerated electricians to do so. (I think there were laws to this effect in various places at various times.)
posted by acb at 5:12 AM on June 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


GuyZero: your CRUD app description is really where the money is: there are legacy systems, there are huge business process systems, and there are turnkey applications, and every business wants them to all talk to each other. It's a boring, dirty job, but it's the job business actually need done, not the Next Big App or tablet gaming or VR.

The company I work for has seen the light and understands that if we don't have the developers, our business software customers will go where they are -- we started with the two existing employees that already had progamming experience, and have tried to hire a third; the first was one right out of a 2-year program who still had a lot to learn; he left to go work from home on a freelance basis doing some web coding, which may be more in his wheelhouse, and in hiring his replacement we found a couple different types:
  • COBOL programmers with 20+ years of experienced, laid off through downsizing;
  • Laid-off ex-Microsoft employees (<2 years with MS) who had very basic programming skills, but Worked For Microsoft so apparently headhunters tell them that fact alone makes them extremely valuable.
  • Non-programmers who, as part of their past jobs, had to learn how to build widgets on the fly to keep the business running
That last chunk were were we found the most promise; They came from a business automation source, so they understand the tears over trying to figure out how to reproduce a paper-based or "Joe remembers how it works, ask him" business process to translate it into code and web services and a shim between the Windows/SQL based system corporate bought 5 years ago and the web/cloud/API product corporate bought last week. This is where the money is, not shiny new program development, not coming up with a new algorithm, not starting a new industry, but making a GUI so users have to click less when working between two parallel systems. There's millions of dollars in that.
posted by AzraelBrown at 5:14 AM on June 7, 2017 [4 favorites]


I used to be a grocery store checker. My father spent his whole career as a grocery store clerk.

I wouldn't even take that job again if you paid me what I make now as a software developer. I'd rather work as a software developer for minimum wage than take one of those 'low-skill' jobs that everyone waxes rhapsodic about for any amount of money.


OTOH, as Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis once said, “I used to work in a factory and I loved it, because I could daydream all day”.

One downside to coding is that one has to focus; there is no cognitive slack leftover to daydream in. Or rather, when there is, productivity grinds to a halt. I'm wondering whether jobs which are cognitively unchallenging might be more attractive to those who can make their own use of this slack.
posted by acb at 5:17 AM on June 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


These people aren't dumb.

Indeed! But I have tried and failed to get an internationally renowned scholar to understand the difference between his laptop, the campus network, and the Internet. I'm thinking, you have a PhD, you practically created your own field, I know you can learn this. But, no: people seem to think it's OK to just throw up their hands "Oh, I'm not a tech person!". Just like they do with math. Notice that you never hear people offering jocular boasts about an inability to write a simple sentence, or tell words apart: "Oh, I'm just not a language person! Ha ha!". No, they are ashamed of any such deficiency, and they hide it or work to rectify it.
posted by thelonius at 5:29 AM on June 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


your CRUD app description

Pet peeve alert. There is no such thing as a "CRUD app", outside of the artificially dumbed-down examples beloved by writers of ORM documentation.
posted by thelonius at 5:31 AM on June 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Also it's an unbearably ugly term. I don't want to make "CRUD", I am a very busy man!
posted by thelonius at 5:32 AM on June 7, 2017


PayPal for God

This exists, at least if by "God" you mean "church", and you're okay with only being able to make donations to God instead of the other way around.
posted by madcaptenor at 5:50 AM on June 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


One reason - though not the only one - that Very Important People don't know how to use PowerPoint is that these tasks are for the little people. It's the same reason that they don't "know" how to put a new toner cartridge in their printer, or "know" how to put an event on their calendar, etc. They don't devote brain space to, like, remembering what the "wrap text" button does because that is a low-status thing that someone else, usually female and from a working class background, should do for them.

Over the years I've known many, many people who direct complicated projects. With the exception of those who were already maybe in their fifties when desktop computers became more than a little word processing, almost all are capable of learning PowerPoint or Excel (or toner cartridge changing) up to a reasonable daily standard. Not pivot tables, unless they need them regularly, but not "you mean I have to pull the plastic strip with the orange ring attached before I put the cartridge in the printer?" level stuff either. Some of them occasionally take a note or two, because they know how to learn. All are clever and are capable of fooling around with something or googling instructions.

Again, this doesn't get you through the really tricky or rarely-used stuff (I have to review the directions for VLook-up and pivot tables regularly myself, and I use them).

When I encounter someone under about sixty who can run a lab or a large non-profit but can't - despite regularly making PowerPoint presentations - understand the forward tab, I don't assume that they're just too smart for the mundanes, or totally wired differently; I assume that they're classist.

When I got my first really good grownup job, with insurance and everything, it was a secretarial gig - copies, calendar keeping, ordering the office supplies, putting up flyers, showing guests around the place, booking hotel rooms. To get that job, they told me I would have to learn HTML, PhotoShop and InDesign in order to support our other processes. I needed that job, and I learned those things. To the extent that I can "code", it's because I am self-taught and had to do it for a secretarial job. So when someone tells me they "can't" understand PowerPoint, what I hear is "I have always been privileged enough that I never had to learn anything that isn't high-status and high-value".
posted by Frowner at 6:30 AM on June 7, 2017 [14 favorites]


(Also, I learned PowerPoint, Excel and Access so that I could test well enough to get temp work. I taught myself at the library.)
posted by Frowner at 6:31 AM on June 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


I'm firmly of the opinion, as a coder, that it's a skill that involves a mindset that does not come naturally to people and expecting them to develop it is not helpful. The world might be increasingly made of code, but have you seen how much code is bad in subtle ways that only very experienced coders understand? The problem is not that we need more people to understand the world of code. The problem is that we should not be building a world out of code at all. There are lots of things that are useful that code can do, and that's fine, but it's irresponsible to be building so much new code to re-solve problems instead of making sure the stuff we do need computers for is as reliable as a steel girder. IT tends to shy away from that kind of reliability (although computer science has some value here), because it's hard and not as fun as agile development, but we shouldn't be able to have civilisation grind to a halt because someone's built a botnet out of internet-connected cameras and pointed them at the internet's central directory.

I code for a transdisciplinary research institute with a little light tech support. There's definitely room for most companies to have an IT person, in the same way that most companies have HR - it's useful to have someone who can stick systems together, or even wield a pivot table, and understands the business - and I think that's probably healthy, given how many useful things only talk in data these days.

@Frowner: It's interesting that you mention the idea of not have basic technical skills or a mindset that finds them useful as a class thing. Most of our researchers make an effort, which makes my job easier, but it might also explain why my mum lost patience for computers, up to even forgetting things she used to know, as she got richer. Surely it's just old age, right? Surely.
posted by Merus at 6:51 AM on June 7, 2017 [6 favorites]


There's knowing how to build enough to put up some shelves or build a treehouse, and there's knowing how to build enough to master-plan a block-sized mixed office/retail/residential complex.

What acb said. There are vast disparities in the blast radius of tech workers - from barely rippling the surface to creating giant tsunamis. The economics of medicine, or law, or education (all of which allow the vast majority of practicioners basically zero leverage, where more work is effectively linear in relationship to more time and/or more people) really can't be compared.

I'm not threatened - at all, either emotionally or professionally - by one more replacement level tech person joining the industry. That person still exists in the more productivity=more hours world (or worse - they often create so much technical debt they're actually productivity sinks). Someone with a big blast radius producing work product that catches the market just right can displace thousands of workers, however.

Except they don't have to just use their powers for evil. There's plenty of good for software yet to do, in addition to what it's already doing today. People are literally dying because of bad software. Institutional and historical inequities don't just exist in people, but their processes, too. So what happens when those unjust or error prone processes are rendered into systems? Someone's going to need to fix that stuff.
posted by NoRelationToLea at 7:07 AM on June 7, 2017


Notice that you never hear people offering jocular boasts about an inability to write a simple sentence, or tell words apart: "Oh, I'm just not a language person! Ha ha!"

You have never seen a classroom of students' eyes completely glaze over and their brains shut down when you start speaking Spanish to them. You could be saying "hola" and they will say, "I don't understand you, I don't speak Spanish."
posted by chainsofreedom at 7:14 AM on June 7, 2017


Writing mostly CRUD apps for medium to large businesses tbqh. Translating business rules into code. Finding out what business rules actually exist. Getting people to agree on how a running business is actually being run. Trying to stop them from trying to re-engineer the entire business so you can just get the information you need to write your CRUD app. Crying.

GuyZero may work at my company.

So yeah, there are a lot of dev jobs out there that don't really involve complicated code, they just involve SOME code and SOME dealing with trying to get your fellow employees to actually define their requirements BEFORE you start coding and MUCH crying.
posted by Sequence at 7:34 AM on June 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


The problem is that we should not be building a world out of code at all.

I agree completely, but pending the Butlerian Jihad of my dreams, people have to exist in this world where software is more and more being used in dangerous ways. (I'm thinking here of things like risk assessment software used in criminal sentencing, which I'd argue is given more credence than it deserves by low-software-literacy decisionmakers in the criminal justice system.) To steal a line, you may not be interested in code, but code is interested in you.
posted by enn at 7:40 AM on June 7, 2017


When I encounter someone under about sixty who can run a lab or a large non-profit but can't - despite regularly making PowerPoint presentations - understand the forward tab, I don't assume that they're just too smart for the mundanes, or totally wired differently; I assume that they're classist.

I don't get this. You're cool with delegating basic tasks to computers, but not to people? Only one of those two can earn a living at it.

When you bill at several hundred dollars an hour, your client is damn well not paying for you to futz along inefficiently in PowerPoint when an assistant could be doing it better and faster and for one-quarter the hourly rate. When reliable spreadsheets are necessary to a task but not its main point, having a half-amateur take a whack at making them instead of someone who does it regularly is not the right choice, either.
posted by praemunire at 8:58 AM on June 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Well, when people are standing in front of a room and can't hit the tab on the PowerPoint but require a lowly functionary to do it for them, or when people need to walk down the hall and tell someone to change the toner (taking longer than changing it themselves!)...that's the thing. If it's a genuine time issue, find, let someone else do it. But - and believe me, as a working class person I've encountered this many times - if it takes you longer to find a person to do a simple task, explain what you want and then review their work product to make sure it's, like, blue where you want it to be blue and has italics where you want the italics than to do the task yourself you are not saving time or billing more efficiently. It doesn't save time to email your assistant and ask her to put something on your calendar when your easy to use calendar is open on your monitor.

My favorite related example was recounted in my presence, proudly, by the senior person who did it. This person was talking about how they had reproved a lowly pink collar worker because the senior person grabbed them on their way out the door to catch their express suburban bus home (so, after hours) and insisted that this person miss their bus to change the toner in the printer for the senior person. When the worker explained that they would miss the only available bus if they didn't split, they were reprimanded by the senior person.

Now, this wasn't a 1990-style printer where you had to fool around with it to change the toner - it was a plug and play modern printer. But knowing how to put the toner in, or taking a bash at figuring it out, was simply too declasse for the senior person, so the worker must miss their bus and figure out another way home.

The nerve of the worker, said the senior person! The nerve! Don't they know that this is their job?

And you know, if it were a genuine emergency, or even a genuine VLOOKUP, I'd have some sympathy. But "this is a routine, quick process that many people know how to do, but I won't sully my hands" is...well, it's an impressive testimony to class bias and inquality.
posted by Frowner at 9:47 AM on June 7, 2017 [8 favorites]


It's good to know that the dream of becoming the next Hunter S. Thompson by ranting about a mishmash of topics without adequately contextualizing any of them but making it sound like everything is as urgent as a panic attack is alive today. I guess Matt Taibbi officially turned too old to hold onto the title at some point.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:56 AM on June 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


GuyZero: your CRUD app description is really where the money is: there are legacy systems, there are huge business process systems, and there are turnkey applications, and every business wants them to all talk to each other. It's a boring, dirty job, but it's the job business actually need done, not the Next Big App or tablet gaming or VR.

I kid because I love. I am fully aware that CRUD apps make the world go 'round.

Pet peeve alert. There is no such thing as a "CRUD app", outside of the artificially dumbed-down examples beloved by writers of ORM documentation.

Most apps are CRUD apps. Google Calendar is a CRUD app with some hooks into notifications and a pretty UI.

I actually have the opposite opinion - most apps are CRUD apps and people should get over being so precious about whatever their special baby of an app is and focus on making the CRUD part of their app work reliably.

This is where the money is, not shiny new program development, not coming up with a new algorithm, not starting a new industry, but making a GUI so users have to click less when working between two parallel systems. There's millions of dollars in that.

I guess my sarcasm went too far - I completely agree with you.

When people talk about how the tech industry is toxic, this is a prime example of why. Assuming all non-coders are failed aspirants to what it is you do is a terrible way to go through life.

So let me apologize here. You've interpreted my comment the wrong way, but that's my fault, not yours. I was again being sarcastic. I moved from being a developer to a product manager 20 years ago so this should be interpreted as self-deprecating humour.

Also, lot of female technical staff often find themselves pushed into product and project manager roles, even when they'd rather be coding, so the attitude that these positions are less important gets the weight of sexism added on to it.

So I agree and disagree. Women do get pushed into roles based on perceptions around emotional labour. That said I don't really think anyone in general thinks that product managers are less important than developer, my perception is actually the opposite. And I've know more female product managers than developers (and considering the ratio of those roles in most places is probably around 10:1 that's pretty crazy) and I've always perceived the role as being less hampered by sexism in that I see women succeeding in product management roles quite often. Project management is a different thing altogether which I think is more applicable to the issue around emotional labour.

There's probably an ethnography paper to be written about what differentiates product, program and project managers and the emotional labour aspects of them all.
posted by GuyZero at 10:38 AM on June 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


GuyZero: I wasn't debating with you or thinking you were against CRUD and business process automation systems, just offering my two cents :)
posted by AzraelBrown at 1:04 PM on June 7, 2017


Notice that you never hear people offering jocular boasts about an inability to write a simple sentence, or tell words apart: "Oh, I'm just not a language person! Ha ha!". No, they are ashamed of any such deficiency, and they hide it or work to rectify it.

Not really. There are an awful lot of people who read zero books per year, would struggle to write a coherent page, will cheerfully admit that these are not what they are good at, and find jobs where they don't particularly need those skills anyway.
posted by mark k at 9:52 PM on June 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


God, this turned into a long comment. Let's see if I can articulate this after being awake for 36 hours.

Your favored chain pizza place is half a software company and the other half actual food production and distribution

Way upthread, but my favored chain pizza place is run by a network of salvadoreños whose POS system is still a literal cash register. And it's really not very good pizza, but neither are any of the other chain pizza places. A better app doesn't seem to make better pizza, it just makes it easier to order.*

The problem is that we should not be building a world out of code at all.

This. There's a larger argument than whether boot camps are efficacious or not. It's about the point of doing these things, and the positive examples in Sequence's comment help illustrate it; your bank, insurance company, and taxes are/are done by software companies, and "Netflix is a giant data management company."

None of these are productive endeavors in the classical sense of productive. The first three manipulate money, the other manipulates intellectual property. Few software companies make things, by definition. Domestically, those that do are producing IoT dreck (Juicero) or boutique luxury goods (Tesla, Nest is arguably both).

As far as I can tell, the boot camp model isn't creating the kind of programmers you need for manufacture or industry, which generally require a greater understanding of math/engineering than you're going to be able to cram. They aren't filling R&D departments at Lockheed with people who did python boot camps.** Instead, boot camps create more semi-skilled workers who can build web applications and manage other people's money. And there's certainly a place for that.

I agree everyone with any capacity for it should learn to code, because I think almost everyone benefits from a surface-level concept of algorithms and general computing. But at a macro level so much of this intellectual effort is being placed, in the US at least, into tertiary and quaternary industries that thrive or perish at the whims of disposable capital.

Meanwhile, public infrastructure is crumbling, public works stall for lack of funds, public health is decimated, public education gutted, and being a public servant of any sort is being made an undesirable career path for anyone with a dedication lower than maniacal.

And they're trying to train coal miners to write code.

The problem isn't the boot camps, the problem is libertarian Venture Capitalism.***

There are an awful lot of people who read zero books per year . . .
Something like 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate. Those are also not people who can learn to code.

It's good to know that the dream of becoming the next Hunter S. Thompson by ranting about a mishmash of topics without adequately contextualizing any of them but making it sound like everything is as urgent as a panic attack is alive today.

Fair enough.
_____________________________________________

*thereby obfuscating how/by whom it's produced.
**military contracting being one of the few remaining reliably-funded forms of domestic manufacturing.
***obviously there's more than one problem, but that's what I got out of the piece.
****there was no ****, just being pretentious.

posted by aspersioncast at 5:15 PM on June 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


Coding seems like (and probably appears to be to the outside world) pretty much the only non-management job that you can buy a house with anymore, so it makes sense that people gravitate toward it. Whether it results in houses remains to be seen, but it appears to have been working in some respects so far. Further to your point, I code and I don't have a house yet and may never.

That said, "efficacious?" Let us, at the same time as we denigrate the bare usefulness of coding campers, reflect on the communications skills of the technically gifted. Nothing personal I swear, I'm sure you know this isn't the first time this has come up on the Internet, but part of what a lot code deals with is the outside world of people who don't code. Humanity is left wanting just as often as the business when it comes to computer skills.
posted by rhizome at 5:32 PM on June 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


Coding seems like (and probably appears to be to the outside world) pretty much the only non-management job that you can buy a house with anymore, so it makes sense that people gravitate toward it.
Where I live, plenty of people with blue-collar jobs own houses. If you're thinking that coding is the only non-management job that you can buy a house with, it's probably because you live in one of the areas where all the coding jobs are.

I work at a university, and I guess that I think that, for all that there's a ton of bullshit educational technology, code has made a lot of things at my workplace better. For instance, it is better that students can register for classes online, rather than having to run around getting add slips and then take them to the registrar's office. It is better that they can apply for disability accommodations online, and then after they're approved, the system automatically generates letters for them to take to their professors that say what their accommodations are. In the past, students had to go to the disability office during the first week of classes and then wait in a line to pick up forms that the office produced manually. It's better that profs upload recommendations to a centralized medical school application service, and then if you later choose to add another school, you just tell the service to send them a letter, rather than having to go back to your prof and provide a new stamped envelope and explain why you're adding another school. It's better that my paycheck is deposited directly into my bank account, rather than me having to pick it up and deposit it, the way I did when I first started working. There are just a lot of ways in which automation makes things run more smoothly, and those things aren't all related to the gig economy or Uber for Dogs.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:11 PM on June 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


Let us . . . reflect on the communications skills of the technically gifted.
Since I'm the only one who used that word, I assume you're responding to my comment?

It's a perfectly cromulent word (and I'm not sure how "efficacious" is any more inaccessible than "denigrate").

People #notallpeople often get really defensive in MeFi discussions of "coding" (as opposed to general tech or computer science).

For one thing, there are a lot of users in my age bracket (old-millenial/gen Y) who spent the first years of our lives getting shit for being into computers, and those of us of a certain class probably had parents who never will/never did understand that as real work, even if we were well-compensated.

I think all the greater points about boot camps and the macro critique of the system can be voiced without any sort of implied criticism of coding as a professional or amateur pursuit, and I hope such wasn't inferred from my comment.
posted by aspersioncast at 11:20 PM on June 8, 2017


To the extent that I can "code", it's because I am self-taught and had to do it for a secretarial job. So when someone tells me they "can't" understand PowerPoint, what I hear is "I have always been privileged enough that I never had to learn anything that isn't high-status and high-value".

This reads suspiciously close to 'since I did it, when someone can't it's due to privilege'. So, bootstraps. Or it may be that some people, who are good at their area, need computers incidentally, and only got introduced to them late in life, are scared by the prospect of messing up, don't understand how they work, and computers don't really matter to them when they're not the main focus of their area of expertise. Unless every other person's parents are classists who dedicated their learning potential to high-status skills like cleaning after their kids.
posted by ersatz at 11:46 PM on June 10, 2017


ersatz, if I understand Frowner correctly, that description is specifically speaking about a group of people who are largely privileged white men in academia who choose not to learn how to do simple tasks in programs they already use because it is a power play, and it 100% reflects my own experiences with white male academics. (Frowner, my apologies if I'm mischaracterizing your description based on my own experiences.)

Someone I work with (someone with multiple doctorates in technical fields) once asked how to update something in our database, and I showed him the incredibly simple one step process. He said "this is too complicated and I will not learn how to do it. Please do it on my behalf from now on."

Also, for many of these dudes, not learning how to do these tasks themselves is an EXCELLENT way of always blaming other people (usually female staff) for their mistakes.

If these guys can use their iphones, then they can do these incredibly simple tasks. The fact that they literally choose not to is absolutely a choice and a performative one at that, rather than a matter of ability.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 5:49 AM on June 11, 2017


a fiendish thingy, that was exactly my point! Another part was the idea how you deal with "can't" varies hugely up and down the economic ladder, as does how you're rewarded for "can".

Like, I would never, ever have characterized myself as a computer person who could "learn to code". Even now, with HTML and CSS and some finer-points understanding of Filemaker under my belt, it's a big struggle for me and thinking about how to put together fancy database stuff makes my head go all foggy. But I had to do it. I did not have the economic option of not doing it. Not only did I lack the status option of telling a subordinate to do it for me, I had at the time one chance to get an entry level job in this institution, and that chance involved "be a secretary, but also learn HTML and CSS because our WYSIWYG system doesn't work and we have to hand-build everything".

Because jobs with stability and benefits are rare for working class people, my employer could say "you should have basic secretarial skills and also acquire these higher-level skills that normally would merit more pay or be done by a specialist just to get the job". I mean, on the one hand it's cool to learn the higher-level skills, but on the other it was definitely "we can get someone to maintain our website on secretary wages and save money rather than paying a professional".

It's like, yes, there are people who really can't do things. Up the ladder, they have options. Down the ladder they're screwed. But there's a substantial grey area of people who really struggle to do a thing, and if they're up the ladder they can say no, and if they're down the ladder they just have to belt up, and in that situation "can't" changes meaning depending on how much social power you have.
posted by Frowner at 7:24 AM on June 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


"Should've learned to code" is the new "should've got a degree" which was the new "should've done better at school" which was the new "should've been a better Christian" or "should have worked harder". It's just plain old achievement ideology, which is a Puritan work ethic wolf in made-in-China-by-slave-labour Neoliberal sheep's clothing.
posted by turbid dahlia at 6:02 PM on June 11, 2017 [10 favorites]


Fucken spot on, td
posted by Joseph Gurl at 8:38 PM on June 11, 2017


A relevant article:

Programming bootcamps seem to make an impossible claim. Instead of spending four years in university, they say, you can learn how to be a software engineer in a three month program. On the face of it, this sounds more like an ad for Trump University than a plausible educational model.
But this is not what we’ve found at Triplebyte.

posted by Gyan at 1:43 PM on June 26, 2017


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