Pushing People into IT

Re:Pushing People into IT by drdunce on Friday November 26, 2021 @07:02AM (#29349479)

This is so true. There's a lot of hype surrounding "programming" jobs and a frankly bizzare push to get everyone into one. I think it's incredibly damaging to effectively tell children they haven't "made it" unless they can code. From my personal experience, there's very few truly interesting or particularly profitable jobs in computer science and they take a huge investment to get there - maybe 5% of people with CS PhDs get to actually do something interesting. No, that 1 week scam coding bootcamp isn't going to get you anywhere anymore than you can learn a programming language from one of those 24hr books. Everyone else is doing mind numbing repetitive tasks that often don't even involve writing code after training (testing/data entry etc.).

I personally love computer science and have since a young age, but the career as a whole often isn't particularly meaningful or profitable. I'll do it anyway, because I love it. Objectively, there's much better things I could be doing. Previous generations had the same obsession with their children being lawyers and bankers (although I believe they probable are at least quite lucrative). Hopefully one day we'll learn and let our children be what they want to be. I'd hate to think we might be disuading some aspiring surgeons for example, with the promise of being wealthy "rock star programmers", only for them to end up in an unfulfilling job in data entry.

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Re:Pushing People into IT by randprecision on Friday November 26, 2021 @09:22AM (#29350392)

I'm currently in high school and the school-backed push towards programming careers has sort of created a predefined perspective on what programming is to "the world", and that programmers change "the world" so you should too. This isn't helped by the internet sensationalizing software development successes. I went to a virtual coding competition last year with around 100 contestants and it had this hivemind feeling. Now, I know it would have been different in person since it diverged into a shouting match of tabs vs spaces and other crap, but everyone I've met in school who is interested in computers for the past 3 years has a lot of the same ideas about things and haven't done much actual work. I think it's great that people are getting into software development but there's a certain level of badness in why programmers I know are programming that's hard to explain.

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