The Virginia Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of High-Quality Posts

[Gustaf]

Reposted from the old thread:

Entirely leaving aside the fact that a great many people are simply slightly but noticeably less intelligent than average and that these people deserve to have safe and meaningful lives too, I've become increasingly curious as to how many computer programmers and IT people folks think society actually needs or can support.

It's important to note that the tech industry has a wide range of jobs, and the improvement of integrated development environments make basic programming much easier by automating low-level systems programming tasks like memory management and pointer handling, so overall ability needed to program is decreasing as time goes on, so accessibility may not be as big of an issue as it might seem for the profession.

It's absolutely fascinating how neoliberals these days don't even have to preach on the glorious virtues of The Market anymore, because they have been so thoroughly immersed in their creed that they can't even comprehend why anyone would not view it as the only possible mechanism for making social decisions. Truly a textbook case in the study of ideologies.

Already you should start thinking about splitting potential labour supply of programmers into two groups: those who have no training and need training to reach competency, and those who have the ability to attain competency, but are really investing in their signal so they get the best programming job.

When the OP's talking points get raised, it's almost always considered by the latter category - college majors or adult professionals who, to keep up with their income expectations, can't just learn how to code but need to do it well. But, even if this ends up being most of the potential programmer supply, it's still a small chunk of the US labor force.

The irony though is that plenty of people think they're really aiming the talking point at the former category, those who need training to reach competency.

Let's get real - you can talk about "accessibility" of programming all you want, but for someone who couldn't get past Algebra II more than a decade ago, on the margin programming training is not a good choice. And it's a scar on the U.S. that there are plenty of people like who I described there.

If I were actually trying to give good job advice to people in the former category, I would say very little which they or the market doesn't already know - the fastest growing industry in the U.S. if not the developed world is nursing.

Personal Care Assistants alone account for more employees than all programmers and software developers in the US combined, according to the BLS. This one group excludes all the other nurses and caretakers employed in hospitals, jails, clinics, etc.

I've already written why I think coding can be of value to students who want to learn it, but I remember when I was in grade two or three in 1977 or 1978 and we had a substitute teacher and there were, for some reason, a bunch of punch cards strewn about part of the school grounds (I believe around the bike racks) and one of the students took one of the punch cards in with them asked the teacher what they were, and the teacher replied "they're punch cards for computers.  We should be teaching you about them and how to use them with computers because you'll be using them when you grow up."

Let me frame the question by analogy. In particular let me ask this question in 1945: How many auto mechanics does society actually need?

In 1903 the Ford Motor Company was founded and in 1908 they released the mass produced Model-T. 40 years later, after WWII, the automobile exploded in use creating the suburban culture of the late 20th century. Auto mechanics was a standard high school class by the 1960's, and even if one wasn't going to be a professional, a large fraction of the population understood how to perform a number of basic auto mechanical tasks.

In 1975 Microsoft was founded and in 1981 they released MS-DOS for widespread use in the new IBM-PC. Almost 40 years later, computer use has exploded and defines culture in the early 21st century. Computer science courses are becoming common in high school as states work to define what that curriculum should mean. Extending the analogy then, I would expect that like auto mechanics a generation after WWII, in the 2030's and 40's we will see a large fraction of the population knowing how to perform basic coding tasks, even if they aren't at the level of a professional.

If you look at the actual market for higher education, you would see that people looking to be retrained from the bottom up don't listen to any of the persuasion. [...] More people want to get a Masters in Education than all the aspiring engineers and programmers combined, despite the attack on teachers' unions and the average-below average hourly wage including overtime.

I also repeat my claim in the previous post that everybody has learned through market signals that nursing is the highest-growing industry, and are training appropriately.

The point here is that the market for higher education adjusts far more quickly than the discourse surrounding higher education. If anything, the question of "making honest choices about what society must orient around" seems better left to the market than to academia or punditry, both of which are rigidly hierarchical.

That doesn't mean the current market for higher education is perfect by any means. What I'm saying is just that, of the problems facing higher education, whether the system is churning out enough programmers is not a major concern in my opinion. A much better question would be: "if we're making honest choices about which industries should grow in the U.S., should we be allowing all these new realtors?"

To expand on that, programmer fetishism isn't a new feature of US education policy: I would trace the tradition of politicians throwing money to make technological education go the way they want to all the way back to Sputnik. Instead of trying to achieve education goals by lobbying and flattering these politicians' sensibilities, you should let philanthropy keep a few private schools alive or create a regulated private student loan market.

I guess the plus side of people shilling for ~coding lessons~ as a panacea for Middle America's labor market woes is that people can, in principle, do coding anywhere that has internet access, so one doesn't, in principle, have to desperately scramble to make it into one of a few hip-'n'-happening metropoles the way one does with certain other "new economy" jobs.

Selections from Nathan's "How many computer programmers does society actually need?" thread on the Economics board. It's one of my favorite forum conversations from the past several years, although it becomes an extremely frustrating read at points. Antonio's comment is best read as a chaser after plowing through Gustaf's tendentiousness.

Is it no longer frowned upon to post yourself into these threads?

I always think it's amusing when the attack is something like being "tendentious" - as if I am more of that than anyone else in that thread.

[Gustaf]

Have you noticed that other economically literate posters frequently express the same ideas as you with more clarity and are better at engaging with posters who have different ones? You usually seem less frustrated by ignorance than by anyone who insists on the validity of other perspectives - e.g. your insistence that Nathan wasn't even asking an interesting question.

And o/c what could be more tendentious than insisting, "No, really, it's not me, it's literally everyone else!"?

I'm not comparing myself to or competing with other posters on who has the most clarity. Perhaps other people are more pedagogical than me though, I'm happy to accept that.

I'm not sure how you measure my frustration levels. In fact, if I weren't interested in other perspectives I wouldn't ask about them. Nor was I insisting that Nathan wasn't asking an interesting question. Not sure where you get that idea. I did suggest it was rhetorical which I think was correct. And I tried to get an idea of what his proposed metric actually was by asking about it.

Your last sentence I'm afraid lacks clarity for me. Tendentious, by my understanding, is when someone claiming to be an objective observer is actually running a biased agenda. Tendentious reporting and so on. I don't really think I ever claimed to not have an opinion that I believed in, nor do I think I'm more convinced of my beliefs on this issue than say Antonio. And I don't know where I said "it's everyone else" or why if I did it'd be tendentious.

I know you hold some weird grudge against me so I don't expect your answer to be anything other than tendentious though.