Why Learning to Code Won't Save Your Job

http://www.fastcompany.com/3058251/the-future-of-work/why-learning-to-code-wont-save-your-job

by walterclifford • 10 years ago

39 53 10 years ago

I didn't expect the India argument anymore. But going down that route..., British India was from 1612–1947, and English speakers there today probably have skills comparable to most of ours here in the States. Yet, I still pay a few bucks, and trade my clicks and ad space to read articles like these originating from here (New Yorker, Times, etc.).

So if the author happened to have farmed out work on article from Indians on Upwork, then maybe he'd be onto something.

RamshackleJ• 10 years ago

Nice bait title. The author knows how to stay employed working in new media.

imtringued• 10 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if someone trained a neural network to turn sensible headlines into clickbait jargon to increase ad revenue.

nickik• 10 years ago

Ad networks are more likely to creat skynet then everything else

dasil0032• 10 years ago

The article seems to be more hand-wringing over declining employment than any specific commentary on learning to code.

Actually learning to code and discovering that you're good at it is probably one of the safest career moves you could make today. The elephant in the room is that not everyone is good at it, and furthermore no one starts out good at it, so most of the time one has to put in some number of years before ones potential becomes apparent.

I think probably anyone of average intelligence or higher can learn enough code to pass a bootcamp but that the bar for guaranteed employability is significantly higher. The issue is that a well-architected system can eat all the value of poorly architected ad-hoc systems. Consider that 10 years ago I was churning out websites for $5k-$10k a pop, and today for 90% of those clients I just recommend Squarespace. There's probably some equilibrium where the top x percent of programmers are employable to work on the best of breed systems, but the bottom end won't stay as democratic as it has been through the first stage of the computer revolution. I suppose the end game would be the singularity, but I'm skeptical that our society is stable enough to reach that point.

monk_e_boy2• 10 years ago

most of the time one has to put in some number of years before ones potential becomes apparent

How do you pay for those years being a student (self taught maybe) ... I think this is where basic income really shines. We need a flexible workforce who can change jobs and careers with help from a kind government.

cinquemb2• 10 years ago

I suppose the end game would be the singularity, but I'm skeptical that our society is stable enough to reach that point.

Stable singularities? That's one I never thought to see asked for.

dasil0032• 10 years ago

Not sure how you are parsing that meaning out of my sentence. My point is that our resource utilization as a species is a house of cards that we have to stack much higher to get to the singularity.

ArkyBeagle6• 10 years ago

It's considerably less democratic than it was. Fully half the practitioners I knew coming up ( from the mid 1980s ) had no degree. The transition from minis to micros created a great opportunity for self-taught people to make real money. Many were quite good after a few years.

And where are any best of breed systems now that are for sale? All I see is flavor of the month. But I'm in the embedded space, so my vision may be obscured.

I was forced to take a J2EE course around 2008, and ... I'll keep my opinion of that experience to myself.

lloyd-christmas2• 10 years ago

I think probably anyone of average intelligence or higher can learn enough code to pass a bootcamp but that the bar for guaranteed employability is significantly higher.

I think one misconception about bootcamps is that everyone takes them to become software engineers. I took one, and out of 20 people, only a few actually had intentions of joining the industry in exclusively that role. A large portion of the class were designers trying to expand their reach a bit more. The next largest portion were project managers looking to gain better communication skills. I'd say only about 1/3 of my classmates went into a true programming role, and only 2 of us ended up truly on the "software engineering" side of the spectrum. Not all that unsurprisingly, both of us had undergraduate degrees in math and statistics. For me, my salary went down a bit, and it probably won't ever catch up. Even so, it's both a safe career move and a nice lifestyle change for me.

The elephant in the room is that not everyone is good at it

Again, speaking for my class, I think 3 people came out of the program actually disappointed with their ability to learn the material. I think the discussions related to bootcamps typically overestimate the general population's interest in "best of breed systems". Most people aren't taking them with the intention of a full career U-turn. They are taking them to continue to be competitive when all the 12 year olds currently taking computer science coursework join the workforce in a decade.

Matumio• 10 years ago

In this century we should stop worrying so much about job safety and workers and instead care more about humans (regardless of their employment status). We will never run out of useful work. But we should get used to the idea that work is no longer a necessity for bare survival. And that useful work is not always paid for. It's a political problem, and I'm thinking UBI here (unconditional basic income). Don't let existential fears stop anyone from working on the real problems of our time.

monk_e_boy2• 10 years ago

The problem is peoples perception and they think that jobs can be created and that this will solve all their problems. See Trump vs Sanders.

javajosh2• 10 years ago

Totally agreed. The really nice thing about being the first generation to implement UBI is that we'll be able to reap some excellent one-time benefits by being able to dismantle so many specialized programs rendered redundant by UBI. The net effect would be a discount on the UBI -- e.g. people would get $20k but it would only cost $5k more than what the USG currently spends on entitlements.

I'd like to see a flat-tax too, but that's just me. :)

scottLobster3• 10 years ago

Unfortunately it's not as simple as a UBI. Give the average person money without structure, instruction or necessity and they cease to be productive in any sense of the word. We'd ironically have less equality, with a minority of motivated individuals at the top doing meaningful work, and a large majority of entitled "dolists" with little dignity at the bottom.

Instead I'd propose guaranteed civil service that paid a basic livable salary, such as publicly funded infrastructure projects. But whatever the method, resources should be tied to productivity in some manner. Otherwise we just create a bunch of lottery winners, and many lottery winners sadly don't have the wherewithal to keep their winnings for long.

c22• 10 years ago

Give the average person money without structure, instruction or necessity and they cease to be productive in any sense of the word.

Is there research that backs this assertion? It doesn't match my (anecdotal) observations.

barrkel• 10 years ago

Give the average person money without structure, instruction or necessity and they cease to be productive in any sense of the word

I don't think you have evidence to make a statement this strong. We have no idea what would happen because it's never been done before. I think you're projecting an idea you have of people on the margins of productive society onto society as a whole, and I think this is a fundamental mistake.

People are status-seeking - that's what people in groups do. Capitalist consumer society measures status in a large part based on how much money you can spend. Remove money from the equation and a substitute marker for status will be found. It could be power, art, popularity, charity, science - anything. What it is we don't know, but it will certainly be something.

msvan• 10 years ago

Source? If anything, the substitution effect is much stronger than the income effect. People will still work because work gives you purpose, engages you with people around you and can even be fun. They might do work that would go unpaid today.

Subsidizing people into unprofitable civil service is in my opinion less dignified and more paternalizing than just giving them money and telling them to do what they want to do. UBI means you don't have to prove your worthiness of existence through wage slavery. If resources should be tied to productivity, maybe we should start with the people who grew up with trust funds.

lostcolony3• 10 years ago

I think you're a bit confused. If someone isn't working, an UBI is, by definition, giving money to someone who has necessity; they have no other income.

If someone -is- working, an UBI will just be in addition to their salary; they'd readily recognize "I can keep doing this job and have this extra money, or I can stop working and suddenly be making far less, though perhaps enough to live on".

The only people that would 'stop working' would be the ones who currently hate their jobs, and who would happily stop the misery, even in lieu of extra income, if only they knew their basic needs would be met. I'm...pretty okay with those people leaving their jobs, and forcing the working conditions to improve to attract anyone back.

fu9ar2• 10 years ago

The dignity of work is a Protestant myth.

kwhitefoot3• 10 years ago

Give the average person money without structure, instruction or necessity and they cease to be productive in any sense of the word.

Citation required.

ArkyBeagle6• 10 years ago

In the South from the end of Reconstruction to .. oh, call it 1932, one crime was "vagrancy" - not having visible means of support. You'd be put on road work. Dunno that they got paid, but they got three hots and a cot.

A Paul Muni movie ended that.

freekh• 10 years ago

Actually I have been thinking that I wouldn't mind doing some kind of civil service from time to time (at least). I often have some sort of 'next big idea' and enjoy spending time thinking about it while doing chores. If I could do it more often (even whole days/weeks) and if it was a more common thing to do, I think I would done more of it. On the other hand there's nothing really stopping me right now so maybe it just some hipster/hippie/retro wannabe fantasy I am tricking myself with :)

Edit: clarity

curun1r• 10 years ago

Give the average person money without structure, instruction or necessity and they cease to be productive in any sense of the word.

We know they'll be (re)productive in one sense of the word :P

But in all seriousness, everything we know presumes a world where people are expected to work and a good deal of self esteem is tied to work. In a future where machines are primarily responsible for the majority of the things that people do today, that won't be the case. Some people might lack the drive to occupy themselves with something useful, but that's okay...we wouldn't be relying on them for anything anyways. But many others would occupy themselves with some sort of creative activity. Whereas many people tend to focus on all those freeloaders receiving UBI and not giving anything substantial back to society, I choose to focus on the freedom that UBI provides to those that do want to be productive.

When YC gave a call for research on UBI, everyone assumed it was an assuagement of guilt thing where they wanted to prepare for a world where they've disrupted everyone out of their jobs. But I don't think that's why YC is interested in UBI, or at least it shouldn't be. I think they want UBI because of how much easier it would then be to become a founder. Ramen profitable would suddenly mean the business actually being able to lose money each month. A break-even business where founders took no salary would have an infinite runway. First hires could be compensated solely in equity and YC could seed with lesser amounts of money since the amount of money spent on employees would go down significantly. Paying rent rent and buying food for the founders of a company increases the challenges that need to be overcome and means that starting something becomes unthinkable to many people with family obligations. Imagine if that challenge and that fear over supporting one's family disappeared. How many world-changing startups are we missing out on because someone with a killer idea is too afraid of failure to try?

In short, I see UBI helping creative members of society create so much more easily than they do today that I have no problem believing they'd more than make up for people that simply took their UBI and did nothing.

henrik_w• 10 years ago

Programmers will be the last to be automated out of a job in my opinion. Also, as far as I can tell, the more we do with programs, the more we want to do, which increases demand. Outsourcing seemed like a problem, by my experience is that demand for local programmers has increased (in Stockholm, Sweden, at least), not decreased, despite the option to outsource.

All of this (and more) is the reasons I still think SW developer is a great career choice: http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software-dev...

kough• 10 years ago

Maybe one of the reasons demand for local programmers has increased is the strong protectionism exhibited by the Swedish department of labor. My application for a work visa for a summer internship in Stockholm was just denied because I'm "not experienced enough", although I have three years of relevant experience in the field and a year and a half of university education under my belt. For a three month internship.

javajosh2• 10 years ago

I think that entertainers and therapists will be the absolute last. Ironically I think 'CEO' is going to be one of the first (although the biz dev and product design might still be human). Manufacturing with motor skills may also be in high demand for a very long time, because the human hand is a miracle. In fact I can see AIs and humans being quite symbiotic: they mine the asteroid belt, and build habitats for us, and in return we build them new and better bodies. Seems fair.

andyidsinga• 10 years ago

agreed it's a great career choice especially if a career is what's being chosen. simply "learn to code" as "literacy" is where things seem to get shaky. but here's a counterpoint (I'm just thinking out loud here) : to an artist making street art using coding skills to build out pieces of the scene, coding is a tool. or maybe coding is part of the medium. but it's not a career in that case.

drcode• 10 years ago

This article is pretty wrong-headed: The argument is essentially that programmers are so productive that only a few of them will be needed to write all the software in the world, causing demand for developers to go down after the current uptick.

I guess it never occurred to the author that software in the future might become more complex and require larger teams.

lostcolony3• 10 years ago

Ugh, there is so much wrong with this article.

First, the statement "More and more, "learn to code" is looking like bad advice." Okay, in the context of "it will guarantee you employment", yeah, true. Except that that's a straw man. Nothing will guarantee you employment. Will it make you more employable? Yeah, in pretty much any profession that doesn't entail pure physical labor, since even if your job description entails no coding, having learned to code will let you automate some things your competitors (including coworkers), are doing by hand.

"This trend is bound to increase" with regard to outsourcing: is it? Outsourcing as an economic model is based upon trade agreements and tax law. That can fluctuate. But even aside from that, more and more companies are learning that outsourcing is actually a bad idea; having development taking place in isolation from the business introduces new challenges. A different culture, different values, different schedules...outsourcing takes all the difficulties of working with a consulting company, and all the difficulties of remote work, and adds in even more. As this person even indicates, projects are just getting more complex. Those obstacles will add up.

Finally, as others have noted, automation can reduce the need of far more jobs than it provides. This is not a bad thing. What's bad is our perception that people must work to earn. -That- has to change (as others have indicated).

ArkyBeagle6• 10 years ago

So long as we're all obsessed with job security, technological progress will slow to a crawl.

I know a few people who've successfully outsourced things, mainly factory work. But they designed their process around outsourcing to capture part of the subsidy offered for it. Those who tried to offshore existing systems weren't so lucky. I've read of cases where it's worked out, though.

freyr• 10 years ago

However, as coding becomes more commonplace, particularly in developing nations like India, we find a lot of that work is being assigned piecemeal by computerized services such as Upwork to low-paid workers in digital sweatshops.

In the 1990s and 2000s, when I was about to choose a career path, doom-and-gloom journalists predicted complete offshoring of software development and the end of programming as a viable profession. As an impressionable youth, I bought into this narrative and enrolled in a major I enjoyed much less, thinking I was making the right long-term choice for my career. Fast forward fifteen years, and I was in a dead-end job in a declining field while my former CS major schoolmates were earning multiples of my salary.

My point being, read articles like this with a grain of salt. The future is unpredictable, and Douglas Rushkoff doesn't have a crystal ball. If you do something you love, you'll likely be good at it. And if you're good at something, you'll likely have opportunities to be rewarded for it. Increasing your skill set won't hurt you.

bfstein• 10 years ago

Whenever I see an article like this, I think of Michael Crichton's "Why Speculate." [1] It's a fantastic read, and really helps put speculative pieces like this in perspective.

[1] http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/

ArkyBeagle6• 10 years ago

I'm nominally a software engineer, but what I really do is form proper questions. Coding is just how the answers to those questions are written down, and sometimes how they are answered. But my cost is a drop in the bucket compared to the things I work on.

If you're doing software and said software is not strategic and it's not tactical, then it's nothing but cost and you're a target.

And to be fair, programming as a career got oversold between 1990 and 2000. At least my experience in the 1980s was that instructors were careful to signal the downside of it as an activity. Adam Curtis documentaries are pretty careful to express skepticism about technocratic Utopianism and I don't think he's wrong.

I lacked the resources ( and probably the talent, frankly ) to obtain a PhD in applied mathematics but I knew that's what I should have striven for. It's still true, probably.

aswanson• 10 years ago

I take journalist perspectives on technology trends as an anti-signal. They usually don't know what they're talking about, which is why they are journalists rather than technologists.

markbnj• 10 years ago

I agree, except that I think you need more than a grain of salt with this piece. My take on it after 20 years in the business is that there is a sort of hard cap on the percentage of the population that will be able to, or interested in, creating programs using the current technology for interfacing with and instructing computers. Some future development will almost certainly completely upend this whole economic network, because the economic opportunity is huge, but I feel that is still quite a ways off from any sort of production application.

lloyd-christmas2• 10 years ago

In regards to that quote, what I've seen is a move in quite the opposite direction since the early days of the "I program in rails. What's ruby?" dev shops.

With so many non-tech people creating businesses, these prospective business owners have been forced to become more tech-literate to get a piece of the pie. Working in the med-tech space, I interact with doctors who actually can understand what I'm talking about when I discuss client vs. server. I even had a surgeon approach me to discuss difficulties associated with "on-prem deployments" (I shit you not, he used those words). What I hear in their networking events is "don't go offshore", and that advice seems to be sticking.

That being said, I honestly don't know if it's industry specific. I realize that the medical industry does have significantly higher regulation, so it might simply be that they want to work with people that have the ability to understand the local regulations (as well as assume some shred of responsibility).

dreamcompiler• 10 years ago

This isn't really the point of the article, but I don't like the title or its implication that simply "learning to code" should be enough to save one's job. Few people seem to think that basic Boy Scout first aid skills qualifies one to be a surgeon, but lots of lay people (and many managers) seem to think that writing a couple of working computer programs qualifies one to be a software developer.

ArkyBeagle6• 10 years ago

People see what they want to see. Work in a few ... dying companies and the truth comes out. As they say, when the tide goes out, you can then see who's wearing a bathing suit.

dreamdu5t• 10 years ago

All evidence to the contrary. Software is eating the world, and continues to at a rapid pace. Transportation, medicine, and finance have only begun to be eaten. This trend is far from over and when it's done, there will only be programmers and their machines. Programming will be the only job.

It's the most inclusive industry. It's the only industry where people are going to trade-schools for mere months and then getting jobs with 2-3x their previous salary.

kwhitefoot3• 10 years ago

It's the most inclusive industry.

Doesn't look like that from where I'm sitting. A lot of companies demand degrees in relevant subjects, quite a few of my younger colleagues (well those under 35 anyway, almost all of them are younger now that I am sixty :-) ) have computer science degrees. Very few of them are black, or South American, or ${your-favourite-minority}, and there seem to be fewer women every year.

TheLogothete3• 10 years ago

What a shite article. Can somebody who upvoted explain his or hers reasoning for doingot?

afrancis• 10 years ago

"Although I certainly believe that any member of our highly digital society should be familiar with how these platforms work, universal code literacy won’t solve our employment crisis any more than the universal ability to read and write would result in a full-employment economy of book publishing."

I read the article. I have seen similar arguments made by Nicholas Carr in "Peak Code" (http://www.roughtype.com/?p=5594) Perhaps learning to code and universal code literacy (for now, lets not argue exactly what literacy means) may, or may not save individual jobs. I sense as software development as a discipline matures, at the level of the firm, software developer wages as percent of a software project's budget, may shrink. At a macro level, software development as percent of GNP may rise but the software developer employment may look like the numbers involved in manufacturing, or farming. The point I feel Ruskoff misses is that coding literacy may not save an individual's job. Or having a sizable chunk of the U.S economy (or any sophisticated modern economy's) GDP coming from software development. However a critical mass of the population programming, like universal literacy, will most likely translate into vast productivity gains and ability to create new opportunities. An example. The idea behind "software carpentry"http://software-carpentry.org) is about teaching scientists just enough programming, so they can write tools be productive at their main activities, instead of doing things by hand, or hiring programmers. As a whole, research immensely benefits. It is easy to extend these ideas to the populate in general (and yes, I, like chef Gusteau, believe anyone can program). When I come to think about it, maybe this is what the BBC Microbit is about. I feel fields like home automation would explode once a critical mass of the population are code literate. To get back to Ruskoff's analogy, book publishing would be a much smaller industry if universal literacy did not create the supply of writers and demand in the form of readers.

Why Learning to Code Won't Save Your Job

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