Of course this isn't true of everyone, but it is of many "mass employers". I just see a disconnect between the reality of the "mass market" software development in the UK and the "mass market" appeal of education programmes like these.

Is that fair ?

But the cynic in me questions whether a lot of the push to integrate coding into school/society is about diluting the software programmer field.

It's no secret that programmers command extremely high salaries, relative to their level of education. By increasing the number of people who can code, the value of the (average) programmer goes down.

I'd love it if everyone could program, it'd make my life a lot easier and I could do something else interesting.

Also if your job is easy enough to be done by a schoolchild after minimal training, I'm not sure you deserve it.

Worse yet, controlling information to secure your position is a special kind of evil. Do you respect lawyers who make the world more litigative and themselves more valuable? Do you respect doctors/police officers/etc that protect others in their profession at the expense of the people they hurt? That's the world one builds when they hide that kind of information, one where professions aren't equally accountable.

"Also if your job is easy enough to be done by a schoolchild after minimal training, I'm not sure you deserve it."

The question is not whether the job can done by a schoolchild with minimal training. The question is: Does your boss think that it can be done by a schoolchild with minimal training?

I don't have a solution. I don't want to see a license for programming or anything ridiculous---(although perhaps a license to manage programmers...), but there is a real problem here.

Teaching kids to code is very much a Tory thing.

I never said that software programming is easy.

14% unemployment among CS grads in the UK (double that of law). Yet you name it, the government wants more women, minorities, children, you name it to go into the field.

Something doesn't add up here.

People using computers more in a greater range of disciplines at a deeper level doesn't seem like it would necessarily impact on CS at all - there might be more standardisation reducing the demand for new tools. There might be more focussed advances where one or two CS workers get their work adopted in to current tech. Both these things would lead to less employment of CS grads (in CS) wouldn't they?

It might also be that specialists without domain knowledge are not as desirable as those with domain knowledge who can go on to train in CS (or to add IT skills, which I just noticed are wrapped up with the stats you quote for CS).

To add an extra prong to the enquiry, does http://www.prospects.ac.uk/options_mathematics.htm showing only 55% of those studying mathematics having a job mean that we should not teach mathematics to the general school population?

http://bbc.co.uk/news/education-28987787

If you teach your kids to learn to code and they end up hacking the bank and got caught, who is going to take responsibility? Does the kid get tried as an adult or juvenile?

If you teach a kid to eat with a knife and fork and they end up stabbing someone, who is going to take responsibility? Does the kid get tried as an adult or juvenile?

> Table manners are the rules of etiquette used while eating, which may also include the appropriate use of utensils.

> - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_manners

Now the stabbing part, there are many court cases of these. I can't cite specifics, but I'm sure you can find them.