People seem to think everyone being a programmer is needed otherwise humanity will fall. Honestly it is one of the stupidest things I have heard.

Could more [good] programmers be a good thing? Sure, we can always do with more good programmers.

However the truth is we need more of many, many types of people. Teachers, personal care workers, doctors, nurses, etc.

Not everyone wants to be a programming. Not everyone can be a programmer.

Can I teach anyone to write Hello World or a simple number game in Python? Of course, same way I can teacher anyone to track their budget in a basic Excel file.

But I can't take anyone and teach them Excel to be a spreadsheet wizard for the finance department. Believe me I know this from first hand experience :)

What we need is an open, fair and free education system to encourage people of [almost] all ages to do what they are good at and enjoy. We put far too much positive spin on learning to code as if it is the answer to every god damn problem in the world.

Ill repeat what ive said elsewhere...It is a legit path to a rewarding job which is open to those without degrees and who might have felonies on record.

Since starting Underdog Devs Ive seen it over and over. With real commitment its very attainable. We have many success stories which seem like outliers, however they consistently happen.

This isn't something Ive read, its something we've done over and over with mentees. I get that youre tired of that trite bit of advice, but its happening for a lot of people. There are a lot of people who have had their entires life changed through that skill. Definitely not the solution for everyone, but it is the solution for some.

Good to see you here in the community.

> I dont think anyone mistakenly believes that

Unfortunately many people do. I volunteer here in France teaching mostly teens the basics of programming but it is open to all and I quite often have adults that have been convinced they should know how to code by the "learn to code!" messages that seem to be everywhere the past decade or so.

Many of these people get upset when they struggle beyond the basics which is probably 60-70% of people going by how many complete the course. I did wonder if perhaps I just suck as a teacher but comparing the numbers not just across those I work with but across the whole country the figure is the same. Just seems two thirds of people can't or don't have an interest to push passed the wall once they hit it.

> It is a legit path to a rewarding job which is open to those without degrees and who might have felonies on record.

I 100% agree with you here. After all I myself have been a professional programmer for near twenty years now and love it so much I give my time to others to help them see if they have the same love for programming as I do. I have taught dozens of people from ~11 years old up to mid-40s how to code that have gone on to have careers as developers.

> With real commitment its very attainable.

This is a big point. It takes commitment. Many people can't or won't commit. Sometimes it is that they can't do it for whatever reason but many times they don't commit because they never had that spark which is clear you did. To them programming was boring. They didn't find it interesting solving some "silly" syntax issue instead they found it frustrating and would rather do something else.

> There are a lot of people who have had their entires life changed through that skill.

And that is awesome. Like I said in my first post I am very happy to see more good programmers enter the market. We need them.

> Definitely not the solution for everyone, but it is the solution for some.

The point in my original reply was that in my experience the whole "learn to code!" thing is talked about as a solution for everyone. What frustrates me is there is so much invested into the learn to code "solution" that I see hardly any other options with the same kind of drive behind it.

Now I can't talk about prison education systems as I have no knowledge of them. But I do know UK and French schools and my personal opinion it is unfairly pushed over almost everything else. Why? I am not privy to the decisions made higher up but from how I see things it is because it is cheap.

Computers are cheap, resources are almost all free or close to free (YouTube is free, books are cheap, etc), the software needed is almost always free for education, etc. It can be done pretty much anywhere you have a power socket and it doesn't require special single purpose hardware. I know you know all this getting started with Python and OpenCourseWare after all.

Simply put the financial barrier for entry to learning to code is very near zero and that is super attractive to schools.

Anyway my first comment wasn't in any way an attack on people learning to code. I apologise if you felt that it was and hopefully this reply better explains why I feel the way I do.

I am glad that learning to code has had such a positive impact on your life and wish you success in the future :)

And you are spot on about the other options (for employment) not being discussed. I think plumbing and HVAC (here in Florida HVAC techs are in constant demand) are reasonable options to pursue for many folks getting out but you dont see it discussed as much.

Obviously the allure of a high salary is one of the reasons people talk about coding more but the consistent demand for the less discussed skills should be factored in. Its damn near a sure bet you can find work if you learn HVAC or plumbing. In all transparency I only have seen and heard of the demand second hand, I dont know for certain. Ive never done either of those trades.

and no offense taken. Nonetheless thank you for explaining further.

Yes I made a mistake not clarifying I was talking in general about the push for learn to code programmes.

For people incarcerated I agree a learn to code programme makes a hell of a lot of sense however so do many other career options as Rick mentioned in his reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32705015

Programming is truly fun for a very select group of people. (I count myself as one of those( But even then, as a job it is almost always miserable in some form.

I encourage people to check it out if its for them, I dont think they should be gaslit into becoming programmers.

But telling someone to learn to code as a career choice is only slightly less insulting than saying to learn guitar as a career choice.

All of which having a criminal record disqualifies one from.

However I was not talking about those with a criminal record. Like in the comment I was replying to where learn to code programmes were seen as the "solution" for coal miners whose mines were closed.

Is it an option? Of course. Is it the solution for all? Hardly but it is often treated as one so people can say "look we told you to learn to code and gave you access to a computer and resources but you didn't do it so it's not my fault you're jobless".

To me it just comes across as a cheap and lazy way to say they 'did something' and blame the individual when it didn't work out.

Just my opinion of course, you don't have to agree with it :)

And as soon as it was turned around on the very journalists advocating for that it was deemed bullying...

But really the issue is that every job should be a pathway to a middle class life.

Teachers I could possibly see but even then much of this has been optimized away. If you lower the bar of "learning to code" to learning excel I'd tend to agree with you. No reason to hack together a set of python scripts to grade papers, and the actual useful work of generating random test questions, etc has been automated away by software nearly every school uses.

The difference between reading, math, and programming is that reading and math are fundamental. Math teaches logical, methodical thinking. Reading teaches the ability to well...read. Programming on the other hand is a higher level abstraction of math. Mathematicians tend to become good programmers. To me, this would imply we simply need to teach more math. It's very simple to say "it should be a basic skill" but there are other, far more fundamental, skills we don't teach either. Why don't we teach machining or woodworking? For the average Joe these two would have infinitely more value both professionally and personally than learning how to fire up a terminal and write a basic python script.

The problem that "learn to code" has, and the problem your suggestion has, is that even getting someone to "get" how to code is non-trivial. Once you move beyond the formulaic "here's how to put these pieces together to make a website" suddenly everyone gets lost. I've seen this not only in people I've attempted to mentor, but also being an interviewer at a large tech company regularly seeing code camp graduates coming from fields like teaching, food, etc. These people miss the point of the exact thing you suggest: programming is a conduit for productivity in an underlying field and "learning to code" is a means to an end and not the goal.

There certainly are people "cut out to be programmers" and this societal shift to "everyone can be anything they want" has really disenfranchised a lot of people. We never want to talk about it because the idea life is fundamentally unfair is seen as taboo. But it is, and it is the reason code camps produce garbage in 80% of cases and the reason drop out rates in CS programs are so high. The high flying high school kid getting an $XXX,000 salary is an extreme edge cases promoted as a common case. The guy who automates half his job as a data entry clerk was probably fit for professional grade programming anyway. We are guilty of this perpetuation ourselves.

Before he used to have like 30 MS Word documents that acted as templates for his most common situations. He basically had a psuedocode workflow on sticky notes he already used that was really easy to turn into real python.

It's not a fabulous project or anything but he gets to spend a bit more time looking at each case, and also gets to go home sooner.

Maybe because “learn to code” really means “learn to make websites”?

I never learned how to make websites, never coded a line of JavaScript and have no idea what people who do those things are talking about with their frameworks and whatever but I know how to code so could probably figure it out fairly easily if I was motivated enough.

Maybe if they taught people how to use the language instead of how to glue together different bits of library code things would be different. Probably not a full CS curriculum but more than React in 30 days.

How often do we see "learn to code" as a solution to jobs that have gone away for whatever reason? Over the past ~15 years I've seen it almost everywhere as literally the only advertised option for people whose profession has vanished.

All I am saying is I wish as much was invested into other re-training options as we've seen put into learn to code programmes.

Every week I teach teenagers and adults that want to learn to code. Almost all because they want a career as a software developer.

I don't see those learning to code as competition in the way you seem to think I do.

The issue here is not skilling these people in trades, it’s really about working on mental health and the underlying reasons why they are in prison. Until those challenges are addressed, these people mostly will not succeed. Many have not experienced much of a « normal » family life or friendships that promote personal growth, or mentorship.

On top of that, when many are released they have nothing. So, imagine trying to stay employed for a week when you have nowhere to live (especially hard to rent a place also when you have a record[1].

Anyway, we might know how to reduce recidivism, but society sure doesn’t seem interested in taking the steps to invest what’s needed.

[1] I recently spoke in front of the Colorado Senate concerning Assembly Bill 99 which will auto-erase the records of non-violent offenders in the state with some outcomes being that they can more easily find employment and rent places to live.

I also have wondered whether probation officers have a positive or negative impact overall on recidivism. It feels like forcing people to have an additional stress layer that can send them back to prison on top of everything else isn’t actually helpful.

    > You still get free housing and food

Being able to expunge records helps, but if you really want to help people with criminal records re-enter the workforce, you have to fix business liability insurance. Insurers often the ones forcing the issue in hiring practices by rate increase or by clauses that will not cover an ex-offender. A rate increase for a 200 employee company will cost what hiring 3-4 people costs, so everyone wants to help until they find out what the hidden costs are. In Indiana we fixed this, and it is much easier to hire people with records, and did more to help expunging records.

Removing records does not help much when asked "have you ever been convicted" and get caught telling less than the truth. The lie itself is often considered moral turpitude by the employer. Laws that make it ok to lie, never work as expected for anyone.

I'm sorry my message came a bit across like "Just copy Scandinavia, then everything will be great". Obviously that isn't the case. My point was that there's no easy solution to reduce recidivism, but if we need to start somewhere it might be better to look into incentives created by the current prison system than learning inmates to code.

That doesn't solve the whole cultural view on inmates, the social and psychological problems that placed a lot of them in the prison in the first place, etc. etc. etc.

Do you find prisoners/former prisoners get any benefit from new labels like this?

Timpson Group uses non euphemistic language: "people who have criminal convictions", and proactively hires them.

https://www.timpson-group.co.uk/timpson-foundation/ex-offend...

Also the term "justice impacted" seems to strip us of all agency. I would like to retain at least a smidgen of autonomy in my decision making.

The current "justice" system is a huge jobs program all around, and it is predicated on a persistently large mass of criminals who scare the crap out of the public. If they go away, so do cops, lawyers, prison jobs, and all the ancillary positions which feed off them. Society needs to own up to this fact and figure out what to do with all those people, especially the ones who live in rural areas which are completely dependent on prisons. I really feel the economics are what keep mass incarceration going year after year, no matter how many stories get written about it, or how awful everyone agrees it is.

If we could become software devs "by our own bootstraps" there would be no need for an Underdog Devs. Thats the point, support is needed.

Overall I agree with you though, learning to code is not some panacea to cure recidivism. It is however a legit path to a rewarding job which is open to those without degrees and who might have felonies on record.

Since starting Underdog Devs Ive seen it over and over. With real commitment its very attainable. We have many success stories which seem like outliers, however they consistently happen.

Did this even happen? I cannot find any articles in which miners were told to learn to code. I think instead those miners were offered vocational training, which included coding. This was in 2017.

maybe this is what they were talking about

https://venturebeat.com/entrepreneur/dev-bootcamp-shuttering...

Then I guess you really didn't look to hard:

https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/47...

snip:

"During a rally yesterday, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden spoke to a crowd in Derry, N.H., a town that many miners call home. He acknowledged the economic setbacks and job insecurity that coal miners face these days, and gave them some advice: learn to code."

https://twitter.com/ComfortablySmug/status/10900807581260759...

It is two different countries and very different cultures. Just modeling US prisons on Scandinavian ones is not a solution. I could even imagine it making things worse in the short-term (a banal example would be "so the prisoners in Norwegian prisons have access to knives in the kitchen they roam freely, let's try that in San Quentin"...)

But I think we could start looking at the incentives the American prison system creates while also addressing the social issues that seems to be the root of a lot of the challenges. It is not easy and I can imagine it taking a century to solve unfortunately.

"I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, 'wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them?'

So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03bOrvlAyeQ

> are the US willing to make the changes necessary to create meaningful impact on the rates of recidivism - or shall we continue to be fed "pull yourself up by the bootstraps! We found one guy who did it, and so can you!" stories?

I think what the US first needs is a general cultural shift towards crime and criminals. I don't want to generalize too much, but the general attitude is that criminals are barely human monsters, and that every bad thing that happens for the rest of your life is "don't do the crime then!!!111" You know, stuff like this.[1] And don't even get me started on things like "At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt" from last week.[2]

Funny how such an allegedly Christian nation doesn't seem to understand forgiveness. Guess I didn't read the Bible right shrug.

Things are changing, slowly, but there's still a long road ahead.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/05/08/...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32621642

That's dangerous. I know people who went to prison.

We want educated ex-felons, what you might get is educated felons.

>> We know how to reduce recidivism

Do we? Again, I know criminals. They're hard core. A guy says he's gonna shoot up meth every day until he dies, he's going to finance that any way he needs to, what is the known way to reduce that recidivism?

He's not advocating that we teach lock picking 101 for chr##-sake.

But it's OK because you "know criminals" so naturally that extrapolates to all criminals in perpetuity throughout the universe.

These are my friends that I'm talking about. They don't want to be, will never be, and never could be if they wanted to, productive members of society.

What's your alternative?

I can sure fire guarantee you that they'll be ill-equipped to be able to get a job with the potential to become a productive member of society, no matter what happens.

So what happens to them?

Seriously, you're making me defend meth addicts. Christ.

>> These are my friends that I'm talking about. They don't want to be, will never be, and never could be if they wanted to, productive members of society.

So right, we should’ve nipped it in the butt and cut them out of preschool. ;)