Teaching kids to code isn't about turning them into future code monkeys. It's about exposing them to skills that will very likely be essential in the future.
I work at an investment bank. Believe it or not, there are executives there that have no idea how to use email. Their secretary prints every email out, reads them to them in their office and the executive then verbally dictates a response that will be typed out by the secretary. These executives honestly don't even know how to use the phones. They can get away with this because they're in their 60s and have four decades of experience.
Now imagine a 20 year old getting hired today and on his first day he discloses that he doesn't know how to use email and doesn't know how to use a phone. And worse - he has no interest in learning either. How long until he would be escorted out the door?
In the future, there will be fewer IT departments. Using commodities like CPU, disk and RAM will be as familiar to the common workforce as using electricity is today. There will be 60 year olds that don't know how to extract data from a database and group it, sort it and transfer it from one application to another. But you better not be a 20 year old in that situation.
Teach your kids to code. Not to be a code monkey - but so they can do whatever it is they choose to do in the future.
I work at an investment bank. Believe it or not, there are executives there that have no idea how to use email. Their secretary prints every email out, reads them to them in their office and the executive then verbally dictates a response that will be typed out by the secretary. These executives honestly don't even know how to use the phones. They can get away with this because they're in their 60s and have four decades of experience.
Now imagine a 20 year old getting hired today and on his first day he discloses that he doesn't know how to use email and doesn't know how to use a phone. And worse - he has no interest in learning either. How long until he would be escorted out the door?
In the future, there will be fewer IT departments. Using commodities like CPU, disk and RAM will be as familiar to the common workforce as using electricity is today. There will be 60 year olds that don't know how to extract data from a database and group it, sort it and transfer it from one application to another. But you better not be a 20 year old in that situation.
Teach your kids to code. Not to be a code monkey - but so they can do whatever it is they choose to do in the future.