
Why Learning to Code Won't Save Your Job - walterclifford
http://www.fastcompany.com/3058251/the-future-of-work/why-learning-to-code-wont-save-your-job
======
freyr
> _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.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
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.

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lostcolony
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).

~~~
ArkyBeagle
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.

------
Matumio
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.

~~~
scottLobster
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.

~~~
barrkel
_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.

~~~
scottLobster
Perhaps. I'll admit most of my "evidence" is anecdotal, and I've read the
studies about giving free money to tribes in Kenya and the Cherokee and how it
greatly elevated them in general, although both studies come with serious
caveats. My concern is what a long-term infusion would do, and I'm not aware
of any research that's even approached that.

Give someone who was desperately poor more money and sure it will elevate
them, for a time, in large part IMO because they are aware the infusion is
temporary and they try to make the most of it (whatever that means to them).
Make the infusion constant enough to be taken for granted, and IMO there's be
a lot less drive to be productive. When you have food, water, shelter,
reasonable comfort and entertainment, what's the drive?

Sure some will be motivated by personal passion, fascination, sense of
exploration, etc just as they are today. In fact that probably describes most
of the posters on this board, and I'd argue that more likely projective
argument here is that the AVERAGE person would care about things like art,
charity, science, even power and popularity. I don't know where you went to
school, and I'm certain this varies from culture to culture, but in my
experience the vast majority of students below the post-grad level are in
school for two reasons: 1. Someone told them to go and 2. They want a job with
a snowball's chance in hell of earning decent money. Those strongly motivated
by something other than necessity are few and far between.

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dasil003
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.

~~~
cinquemb
> _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.

~~~
dasil003
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.

~~~
cinquemb
> _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._

Which assumes that every person in our species seeks the "singularity"
(whatever comes to mind when whoever throws this word around) as a goal. Not
every entity in a species needs to exist/work for resource maximizing in order
for it improve among a defined direction (of which is probably not agreed upon
by everyone), nor is every entity in such species at any given time is equally
adept for maximizing for such direction (due to variable circumstances, some
of which we as individuals have no control over).

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burritofanatic
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.

------
henrik_w
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...](http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software-developer-is-
a-great-career-choice/)

~~~
javajosh
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.

------
drcode
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.

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

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

~~~
nickik
Ad networks are more likely to creat skynet then everything else

~~~
sitkack
No I think high speed trading bots that use sentiment analysis based on news
articles is more likely to create skynet.

------
dreamcompiler
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.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
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
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.

~~~
kwhitefoot
> 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.

------
afrancis
"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](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](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.

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

