

Codecademy launches Reskill USA - hirokitakeuchi
http://www.reskillusa.com/

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chrismealy
_There once was an island with a population of 100 dogs. Every day a plane
flew overhead and dropped 95 bones onto the island. It was a dog paradise,
except for the fact that every day 5 dogs went hungry. Hearing about the
problem, a group of social scientists was sent to assess the situation and
recommend remedies.

The social scientists ran a series of regressions and determined that
bonelessness in the dog population was associated with lower levels of bone-
seeking effort and that boneless dogs also lacked important skills in fighting
for bones. As a remedy for the problem, some of the social scientists proposed
that boneless dogs needed a good kick in the side, while others proposed that
boneless dogs be provided special training in bone-fighting skills.

A bitter controversy ensued over which of these two strategies ought to be
pursued. Over time, both strategies were tried, and both reported limited
success in helping individual dogs overcome their bonelessness -- but despite
this success, the bonelessness problem on the island never lessened in the
aggregate. Every day, there were still five dogs who went hungry._

\--
[http://www.philipharvey.info/directjob.pdf](http://www.philipharvey.info/directjob.pdf)

~~~
malandrew
Meh. While entertaining, this is a fallacious allegory. This fails to consider
the divisibility of bones, some dogs getting more than one bone or the fact
that in real life scenarios that the number of bones can fluctuate (more or
fewer bones).

Furthermore, the site states that there are 1 million unclaimed bones. While I
won't argue either in favor of or against that figure, but assuming there are
unclaimed bones, your allegory would be more correct if there were something
like 105 bones and 5 dogs still went went hungry every day despite the 5-bone
surplus.

~~~
jjoonathan
You misunderstand the nature of the implicit argument. The allegory doesn't
have to address the intricacies of bone accounting or the fantasies of bone
accountants because the story it describes has already played out countless
times in countless economic sectors with one overwhelmingly favored result.
The burden of proof lies squarely on the shoulders of the person who believes
that this time the story will have a different ending.

~~~
vdaniuk
Your comment is so generic it is hard to argue with it. Also it is a fact
proven by the growth of the gdp per capita and average living quality that
economics in general is not a zero sum game.

Currently the overall number of programmers/computer scientists/coders
steadily increases and still there is a large shortage of workforce in these
areas.

Please provide citations to support that 'countless economic sectors/countless
times' claim.

~~~
jjoonathan
All of our arguments so far have been completely generic. Both of us would
love for someone with quantitative historical perspective to shed some light
on these issues, but it isn't going to be me. I don't have that kind of
knowledge -- all I've got is Cunningham's law and the vague notion that other
engineering disciplines pay slightly over ~1/2 as much as software engineering
at comparable skill levels, presumably due to having had more time for
supply/demand equilibration. A solid route for counter-argument would attack
my notion of "comparable skill levels," and while I'd love to hear that I was
twice as skilled (comparatively speaking) as my buddies in different
engineering sectors I sincerely doubt that that's the case.

Economics is not a zero sum game, but there are a few significant zero-sum
games within economics that suffice to undermine the "rising tide lifts all
boats" argument: land ownership, profit ownership, power ownership. A
significant chunk of the value behind a certain amount of wealth _is_ relative
to everyone else. Resenting someone else for earning twice as much would not
make sense in a world where prices were fixed, but that's not the world we
live in. The 2x guy is absolutely capable of bidding up prices on houses,
investment instruments, and political influence, which all hurts the 1x guy.
The guy with a skilled job absolutely makes it harder for other people with
similar skills to find work. The guy building automated burger dispensers
absolutely makes it harder for those at the bottom of the totem pole to secure
gainful employment.

I do not debate that the current situation is that there are too few
programmers. My claim is that once supply and demand equilibrate (and unless
demand experiences exponential growth forever this will certainly happen) then
we'll be in the same boat as everyone else. And it isn't a pretty boat.

I would love to be wrong about this, but I just don't think that there's a
certain level of education that will creates a sustainably large middle class.
It can certainly help in places where there are deficiencies, but it stops
being effective at the asymptote. Look at the US, look at Japan. More and more
education every decade but at the end of the day the supply of jobs for
educated people didn't magically expand to meet the demand. The "magic" I'm
referring to is the same magic as the "it's not a zero-sum game" argument
refers to. It didn't work: we massively increased education and the middle
class crumbled anyway.

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fourstar
> ReskillUSA will close the gap between technical education and employment.

No it won't.

> By connecting students with accessible vocational education programs and
> employers eager to hire from them, we're training more Americans for the
> jobs of today.

Yeah because the "jobs of today" all require you to know:

HTML and CSS Javascript jQuery Github

~~~
colbyh
I actually asked their CEO about this on PH. Building websites != engineering,
and we need more of the latter. I do think there's a place for skills-based
learning to take up some of the slack, but simply rehashing the same Rails/JS
tutorials isn't going to cut it unfortunately.

~~~
dashboardfront
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like there's much resources online that say
"Learn How to Become a Software Engineer!" without costing you three/four
years of extra education and a sizeable sum of money. I'm learning how to
program at the moment alongside my degree, and almost all the resources I've
seen online are oriented towards web development; consequentially, that's what
I'm learning, even though I'd much rather be learning whatever lets me go
program things like rockets, robots, self-driving cars, etc., with the hope
that I'll be able to eventually move towards that end goal.

~~~
analog31
Are there any chances at your school to learn Matlab or LabVIEW? Another
option is to look into what people are doing with Arduino boards. I think that
the Arduino crowd have created a lot of tutorials and example codes online.

I'm not touting these languages or tools as the best, but as ways to be
exposed to the kinds of programming that people do in areas that you're
interested in.

~~~
dashboardfront
Sadly, no. I attend the worst of schools; a business school. As my education
is European, I'm not allowed to just switch majors either. I'll take a look at
your recommendation, though; thanks.

~~~
analog31
I suggest starting with something like an Arduino robot kit.

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dccoolgai
I love that we are bringing people into the industry, but I wonder if it's
really responsible to plaster figures like "$80K for 3 months of easy
training" is really a responsible way to market that... I know you have to
pragmatic to some degree and speak to people in the language they will listen
in... but people who go into coding "just to make money" generally end up like
anyone who goes into a field just to make money without any love of the craft:
unhappy. After 20-some years in and around tech, I have come to just accept
this cycle while humming Elton John's "Circle of Life" in my head: "Make a ton
of easy money in tech!" ::>> "So many people in tech just to make money." ::>>
"Tech Crash Due to Overhype About How Much Money There Is" ::>> "No one makes
money in tech - go get an MBA" ::>> "Someone in tech made a ton of money!"
::>> "Make a ton of easy money in tech!"

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brandonmenc
> 3 months: How long it takes a dedicated beginner to learn the skills to
> qualify for computing and web development jobs.

I'm genuinely curious as to how many people here, who either program or hire
programmers, will say that the above is a true statement.

~~~
darrellsilver
3 months from beginner to job ready ready is, basically, bullshit. There are
people who do it, but they're the exception. The jobs they're getting
typically rely on their using other skill sets on day one so they can continue
learning software engineering for months in order to gain a useful level of
proficiency.

This doesn't make the "3 month" claim worthless, but it does make it hard to
fit into a sound bite.

I should know: I'm the co-founder and CEO of the Thinkful, Codecademy's other
online partner in ReskillUSA.

Our company has hired many of our own students and helped hundreds of others
successfully make the transition to truly job-ready engineer.

I've also spent the last decade as a professional software engineer, and
another five years before that writing software. I'm 33 years old. After
coding for half my life I feel I know less than half the craft.

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beatpanda
I wish we would stop with the fantasy that we can return to the golden age of
Fordism, and instead work on distributing the productivity gains of technology
to reduce all of our working hours.

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primitivesuave
Even with a great college education in CS and an undying passion for coding,
it took me a year to really _get_ web development. It's easy to learn the
code, and I believe the MOOCs of the world have succeeded in providing great
free resources for learning structural thinking. However, no course can teach
you intuition - engineering intuition is the easiest characteristic to assess
in a job interview and the skill that is most sought after.

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mtmail
Are they targeting outplacement companies?

Microsoft Certification centers used to target job centers. I've been to a
Microsoft training and couldn't believe somebody without understanding of MS
Windows would want to become a certified Windows NT server administrator.
Simple answer: "the job center is paying for the training". Well in this case
it was for soldiers to find jobs in the open market after their 12month
serving time ended.

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moeedm
Unfortunate domain name.

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puredemo
$12k seems a bit steep.

