On: Ask HN: Why did you quit learning programming?

[akagusu]

Unfortunately, the majority of resources available to learn programming are made by professional software developers and they assume what people using their resources want to be professional software developers too.

So they start teaching you about IDEs, git, tests, docker and lots of stuff that is completely unrelated to learn how to program.

Think about it. Why should someone learn about testing code if they don't even know how to code?

Sometimes, all people need is to learn enough programming to make their life easier, like automating Excel spreadsheet stuff or PDF stuff.

Unfortunately, there is nobody to teach things like that.

[ravenstine → akagusu]

I have a similar gripe about a lot of "Learn Web Dev For Beginners" courses I've seen. Many of them start out with "Ok, so here's this thing called HTML... ok here's this thing called CSS... ok here's this thing called React..."

No no no no no. You don't just throw tools at people who may or may not have had a background in software development. Yes, they may be able to pick up the set of skills to build a React app, but do they have the skills to be good software engineers? Do they know what's going on under the hood when a React app is being built?

I'm not totally against this method of teaching, but I think there's a perverse incentive to sell these types of courses to absolute beginners when in reality they should be marketed to people who at least know how to program.

This stuff results in a market flooded with candidates who can't do fizzbuzz, allegedly. I seem to keep hearing that there's "tons of jobs" but not enough talented candidates, and though I am skeptical of this narrative, if the narrative were true, the industry itself has no qualms in perpetuating the cycle.