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Re:Interview by a 15 Year Old by Alex3917 on Saturday November 07, 2015 @12:27PM (#10525436)
> I think programming is just one of many skills that one can master, not a must-have skill.

For a fifteen year old kid these days, if you graduate from college not knowing how to program then pretty much you are going to have a shitty life. You already need to know how to code to get pretty much any decent job -- not just for web developers, but also for marketers, designers, data analysts, biologists, filmmakers, finance, advertising, manufacturing, transportation, etc. You don't have to be a professional developer for your entire career, but if you don't know how to code then even if you want to go into marketing or whatever, pretty much the best job you'll be able to get is just harvesting leads for minimum wage and then entering the data into Excel.

Don't want to learn to code? Doesn't fucking matter, that's what society is willing to pay for.

Re:Interview by a 15 Year Old by dreamdu5t on Saturday November 07, 2015 @12:34PM (#10525470)
Hyperbole. Programming is a fraction of the jobs in this economy, and it's not even the largest employer when it comes to STEM. People in medicine, finance, or small business don't need to code.
Re:Interview by a 15 Year Old by Alex3917 on Saturday November 07, 2015 @12:41PM (#10525496)
> Programming is a fraction of the jobs in this economy

Yeah, but they're the fraction that don't suck and aren't going away in ten years. And again, most people with jobs that require knowing how to code aren't actually developers. E.g. it's difficult to get hired as a customer retention marketer without knowing how to code, but most of those folks also aren't coding on a regular basis, if ever. It's just that when you have 500+ people applying for any decent job, the person who thought it wasn't a good use of their time to spend 3 months teaching themselves to code is almost always going to lose out to one of the other folks who did, just on the off chance that those skills actually come in handy or whatever.

Is it unfair? Maybe. But that's just how it works.

If you were to look at my HN comments from the early days of the site, you'd see that I was pretty much the poster child for saying that learning to code wasn't necessary. And back then I don't think it was, because the tools were so shitty that to be any good at it pretty much meant that you had to forgo being good at anything else, including other skills that were potentially much more valuable like business or marketing or whatever. And it's hard to pinpoint exactly when, but at some point over the past ten years that has definitely changed.

Re:Interview by a 15 Year Old by username223 on Saturday November 07, 2015 @08:38PM (#10527016)
What even is a "customer retention marketer"? Is that the person who tries to prevent you from canceling your Comcast cable when you call Comcast to try to cancel your cable? I guarantee that those people just need to suppress their shame and sometimes pretend not to understand English.
Re:Interview by a 15 Year Old by Alex3917 on Saturday November 07, 2015 @08:48PM (#10527034)
More like someone who is halfway between a data analyst and an email marketer. E.g. they do things like cohort analysis, but also send out email blasts to increase engagement.
Re:Interview by a 15 Year Old by username223 on Saturday November 07, 2015 @09:26PM (#10527138)
So "spammer." Got it.