Any career change is non-trivial for a mid-career worker and it's probably unrealistic that a majority of blue-collar workers would be able to transition into software jobs.

"Learn to code" is great advice in general and can change the lives of certain individuals but it's not a winning strategy for shifting a mid-career workforce from one career to another, at scale.

> Any career change is non-trivial for a mid-career worker and it's probably unrealistic that a majority of blue-collar workers would be able to transition into software jobs.

Unrealistic in what sense? That most people are unable to learn managing state and code flow?

I never hear anybody say "it is unrealistic for workers to learn Spanish/Russian/Mandarin/Japanese", yet I really feel basic programming is even easier to learn than a spoken language.

I used to think that until I tried teaching people programming a few times, it's hard work, and a lot of people don't find it enjoyable. Additionally I heard people who do well in code school have prior programming experience as well, so it becomes more about selection and refining skills than actually making new programmers.

I don't think the "hard work" excuse works when you are talking about people who used to work in coal mines and have a family to support.

I think it's more likely that the basic math (algebra, geometry, etc) is missing when you look at men who started working in the mines before they finish high school. Without the math foundation, it's not "hard work", but a weak foundation which just causes frustration.

That, and a 58 year old guy learning to code will soon have to compete against a 20-something with far more education + computer + social media experience, especially since coding can be done overseas.

I think it’s even more basic than that. It’s basic logic skills. Boolean logic. I mean these are often people who blindly believe politicians they like are truthful, and ones they don’t like can’t be truthful. They seem to have no ability to examine facts and draw conclusions consistently.

Oh and age by itself has nothing to do with it. There are old people who could pick it up because they have the right fundamentals. Sure there are some challenges that come with age, but let’s not sweep all old people into the category of “cannot enter a programming career.”

I’m not saying that’s what you were doing. I think you were talking about age as a further factor compounding the difficulty on top of already lacking basic related skills.

> I think it's more likely that the basic math (algebra, geometry, etc)

I am a senior full stack developer and typically in the top 10% of the developers in my org wherever I've gone past 5 years.

I do 0 algebra or geometry. I call APIs, I put stuff in databases. I store state.

I really don't think it's "math"y at all. I transform data, I use libraries. I can't think of any algebraic examples of anything I've done in the past 5 years, let alone geometry.

> I do 0 algebra or geometry. I call APIs, I put stuff in databases. I store state.

That's not something to be happy about, that's something to be terrified of. If nothing the average coder does requires any particular specialized skills beyond gluing together libraries built by experts, what do you think will happen when, like the coal miners, some technological or societal change comes along that reduces the need for average coders?

Demand for coders isn't infinite.

Sorry I was unclear, I meant it was hard for me. And maybe part of it is that I'm not great at teaching.

I mainly taught a handful of college educated people who studied things like earth sciences, arts, and ocean science, but struggle to understand a for loop or a function call.

And now I understand how it can be un-fun to struggle, especially if you don't intrinsically enjoy writing scripts and mucking around the terminal.

It's unrealistic for middle age blue collar workers in America to learn Spanish/Russian/Mandarin/Japanese, assuming that they have no prior experience or exposure to these languages. Learning a natural language is a lot harder than learning a programming language.

The tone of the comments here at HackerNews are basically:

middle age blue collar workers can't learn a natural language or a programming language

I really have to ask, what makes us "programmers" so elite? I find it hard to believe that if your average person spent 90 months learning programming that they couldn't scrape by as a mid-level web developers. I have developers in my org who go weeks without committing and management seems to have no problem with that. If that's the quality accepted, why can't that be taught in 90 days?

Because most people on this forum live in a bubble when it comes to computer literacy and the average population is really, really bad at it, you won't get them into coding when they're already failing at tasks you'd need for a basic white-collar job.

Telling blue-collar workers to learn to code is in their analogy like telling them to be rocket-scientists. If they could, they probably wouldn't be blue-collar in the first place.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037674

As a bit of a corollary, there are things that blue-collar workers take as absolutely basic "common knowledge" that would not be at all intuitive to people in the tech scene.

It's all about what you've been exposed to.

> for a basic white-collar job.

What are some basic white-collar jobs other than "go to meetings" and "Excel"?

Spoken like a "Them", and not a "us".

I've been on both coasts. I've been in big cities. The prosperity is there. The hope is there. The schooling and resources are there.

My family came from the Appalachians. Hill country. they live off the land, cause the only money is from tourists. They used to work in the mines, but 'them environmentalists' ruined their livelihood and ended their bodily suffering so their kids could do better. But in doing so, the coastal elites destined those cities, those families to poverty.

But this poverty is working in restaurants, working menial service jobs that pay $8/hr, no benefits, and no vacation. And remember that in the USA, your property tax is linked to school funds. Sure the feds pitch in a bit, but not that much.

So you get: bad education, bad jobs, no upward mobility, low/no healthcare. You get poverty equal to what we'd call 'Third World'.

So when I see a bunch of coastal elites say blasely, "Why cant the blue collar workers just learn programming and be rich?" It's about as tone deaf as Marie Antionette saying 'Why can't they just eat cake?'

They don't have the prior education to learn programming. They don't have the free time due to working 50-60 hour weeks. Or they don't have the ability to afford computers or the know-how to use free and open source software effectively to learn.

We need socialism, especially when policies end up destroying counties, towns, and cities founded in old paradigms we now kill for being bad. We can end dirty jobs - but we should never end the people. But that's what we're doing.

> So you get: bad education, bad jobs, no upward mobility, low/no healthcare. You get poverty equal to what we'd call 'Third World'.

This is often the situation faced by the poor and working classes on the coasts, also. Even if they have different beliefs from you on, i.e. social issues, on economic fairness there is a lot of agreement.

> We need socialism, especially when policies end up destroying counties, towns, and cities founded in old paradigms we now kill for being bad. We can end dirty jobs - but we should never end the people. But that's what we're doing.

The fleeting, once in a generation chance to turn the country in the direction you propose (cleaner jobs, more support for people and communities) begins in the upcoming primary election. Arguably, how people vote in places like Appalachia and the Midwest will decide if we enter your hopeful future, or continue down the current path toward the greater concentration of wealth in fewer hands.

There are plenty of people that would rather work with their hands than work with their minds. My brother included - he owns a successful blue-collar business (selling accessories he installs on construction trucks), but no amount of handholding or sitting down with him has been successful at weaning himself off of his paper bookkeeping system.

He spends hours every year at tax time, carefully collating his paper records onto a paper ledger that he shares with his accountant. If he'd enter the data into even the most basic of bookkeeping systems or even an Excel spreadsheet, tax time would take him a few minutes (and he wouldn't be paying his accountant so much to handle the paper). And he'd have a better handle on monthly expenses, revenue, etc. his system works for him, it's just labor intensive.

But he still makes a good living at what he does, he just prefers to do it with a welder while climbing on a truck. Even if he were offered free coding classes, he wouldn't take it -- he can't understand how I can possibly sit in front of a computer all day long, stuck in an office.

A scenario would be something like you and your entire family live somewhere, and you make a good income that allows you to have a decent life, and now that income stream is gone and you’re expected to retrain after who knows how long to “learn 2 code” and then somehow get another high-paying job. What go back to college? A coding boot camp? Uproot you’re family to move to San Francisco and compete with 20 year old kids who have been writing code for years? Obviously some people could do that, but it’s incredibly tone deaf when someone seriously suggests that some coal worker learn to code. They might not even get it or literally be able to do that job. And while I think we should shut down every coal plant, from their perspective it’s the government coming in and destroying their way of life and then not even bothering to help, while those rich liberals keep getting rich and fly around in private jets. I got my haircut the other week and a lady was chatting with me about how she quit her job at a warehouse. While she was great at her job, she said the management let people do a crappy job and it made her angry. Recently that company changed management and asked her for seasonal help and knew she was a good worker. She told me she was thinking about it, and they were offering her the same rate she previously had. You know what never occurred to her? (Her words) it never occurred to her that she could negotiate a better pay rate. So had I not said anything, this lady may have never in her life considered asking for more money. My point isn’t that I’m a savior or something, it’s that when you come back and say “you don’t have to leave, work remote” you’re not even speaking the same language.

I actually co-founded a non-profit to address this to the extent that I can with entreprenuership training in the Appalachian region. I think building up the area and creating successful businesses where people live is the way to go.

I hope that what I said here makes sense. It’s based on my own work and experience,

Thank you

I agree that it's an unreasonable expectation for the average West Virginia former coal miner late in life to "Learn 2 Code" in San Francisco. But the guy that sits next to me in my webdev job did exactly that (family of 6, middle-aged, moved from working in "business" in Texas, went to a coding bootcamp for 3 months, we hired him, now he's the hardest working programmer in the office). I'm not inclined to feel sorry for the guy who can't put in the same effort.

> from their perspective it’s the government coming in and destroying their way of life and then not even bothering to help

It's not our jobs as taxpayers to maintain coal miners' "way of life". Coal mining was a massive improvement to the world in the mid 1800s between whale blubber and refined petroleum, but the world doesn't owe coal miners anything more than a paycheck on the open market, where coal is a commodity and has to compete against fracking (cheaper) and solar and wind (far cleaner and create more jobs). They have cashed 200 years of paychecks and chose to send their young boys into the same coal mines rather than invest in a better life for their kids.

But I also don't look at this in a vacuum. As far as I know, coal mining companies don't offer great pensions for their mine workers. No state in the US has a decent job/vocational retraining and placement system. The coal mining states don't vote politically for good welfare programs that would allow what you claim to want (retirement at their current standard of living). If coal miners wanted a retraining system, they have the ability to vote for political leaders who could do that -- but there is no political will. They could start their own companies or non-profits (like you), but I don't hear about them (doesn't necessarily mean they don't exist). The guys that made billions in coal aren't investing in the same regions that have historically been single-industry areas.

And when it comes to coal, I would argue that - (1) it was largely beat by innovation and fracking before the EPA / federal government / renewables started reducing coal jobs. The largest coal mine in the world is in Australia finished in ~2008 and idled because it was no longer cost effective to run the mine at those current coal prices. - (2) it has massive negative externalities to the entire air-breathing world just to keep a few thousand coal miner jobs[1]. Coal miners know this acutely, but they continue to work in the industry (to the extent that it's possible).

I think it's important to help others, but self-agency has to play a role. Your anecdote about the chat lady shows that she had enough agency to quit her job willfully (I've worked at jobs long past when I had decided that management) and that she didn't bother to go to read a book or internet article about how to move up in the workplace shows a great example of the possibility of agency, but the unwillingness to execute.

I think this kind of complacency is why we are losing jobs to other countries. The Netflix documentary "American Factory" perfectly describes the mismatched expectations of American union workers in 2020 thinking they have the same bargaining power as in 1960 and international companies who know they the Chinese workers doing the "996" work ethic is a far better value than the American who clocks out after a very safe 40 hours a week and demands much higher for producing the same exact product.

When it comes to the entire US, I think we should adopt a more comprehensive employment-and-reemployment program, more like Germany's. But we like to pride ourselves on "being free" and not accepting government handouts or entitlements, so we reap what we sow.

> Coal-mining employment increased rapidly in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and peaked in 1923 at 798,000. Since then, the number of miners has fallen considerably since, due to mechanization. By 2015 it had fallen below 70,000.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining_in_the_...

> It's not our jobs as taxpayers to maintain coal miners' "way of life".

When you legislate the job away for the benefit of society you have an obligation.

Something like Venture for America?

First time hearing about it. But we also target more than just students/recent graduates. I also don’t think they have a presence in our region, but I could be wrong.

There’s an entire learning curve before the learning curve we normally think of. Basic computer literacy, basic literacy even, communication skills, people skills, planning skills. And this isn’t even getting to things like typing or right clicking. Yes some computer scientists get by without typing skills but I think you’ll find they have basic literacy and analytic skills at least.