There once was an island with a population of 100 dogs. Every day a plane flew overhead and dropped 95 bones onto the island. It was a dog paradise, except for the fact that every day 5 dogs went hungry. Hearing about the problem, a group of social scientists was sent to assess the situation and recommend remedies.
The social scientists ran a series of regressions and determined that bonelessness in the dog population was associated with lower levels of bone- seeking effort and that boneless dogs also lacked important skills in fighting for bones. As a remedy for the problem, some of the social scientists proposed that boneless dogs needed a good kick in the side, while others proposed that boneless dogs be provided special training in bone-fighting skills.
A bitter controversy ensued over which of these two strategies ought to be pursued. Over time, both strategies were tried, and both reported limited success in helping individual dogs overcome their bonelessness -- but despite this success, the bonelessness problem on the island never lessened in the aggregate. Every day, there were still five dogs who went hungry.
Meh. While entertaining, this is a fallacious allegory. This fails to consider the divisibility of bones, some dogs getting more than one bone or the fact that in real life scenarios that the number of bones can fluctuate (more or fewer bones).
Furthermore, the site states that there are 1 million unclaimed bones. While I won't argue either in favor of or against that figure, but assuming there are unclaimed bones, your allegory would be more correct if there were something like 105 bones and 5 dogs still went went hungry every day despite the 5-bone surplus.
You misunderstand the nature of the implicit argument. The allegory doesn't have to address the intricacies of bone accounting or the fantasies of bone accountants because the story it describes has already played out countless times in countless economic sectors with one overwhelmingly favored result. The burden of proof lies squarely on the shoulders of the person who believes that this time the story will have a different ending.
Your comment is so generic it is hard to argue with it. Also it is a fact proven by the growth of the gdp per capita and average living quality that economics in general is not a zero sum game.
Currently the overall number of programmers/computer scientists/coders steadily increases and still there is a large shortage of workforce in these areas.
Please provide citations to support that 'countless economic sectors/countless times' claim.
All of our arguments so far have been completely generic. Both of us would love for someone with quantitative historical perspective to shed some light on these issues, but it isn't going to be me. I don't have that kind of knowledge -- all I've got is Cunningham's law and the vague notion that other engineering disciplines pay slightly over ~1/2 as much as software engineering at comparable skill levels, presumably due to having had more time for supply/demand equilibration. A solid route for counter-argument would attack my notion of "comparable skill levels," and while I'd love to hear that I was twice as skilled (comparatively speaking) as my buddies in different engineering sectors I sincerely doubt that that's the case.
Economics is not a zero sum game, but there are a few significant zero-sum games within economics that suffice to undermine the "rising tide lifts all boats" argument: land ownership, profit ownership, power ownership. A significant chunk of the value behind a certain amount of wealth is relative to everyone else. Resenting someone else for earning twice as much would not make sense in a world where prices were fixed, but that's not the world we live in. The 2x guy is absolutely capable of bidding up prices on houses, investment instruments, and political influence, which all hurts the 1x guy. The guy with a skilled job absolutely makes it harder for other people with similar skills to find work. The guy building automated burger dispensers absolutely makes it harder for those at the bottom of the totem pole to secure gainful employment.
I do not debate that the current situation is that there are too few programmers. My claim is that once supply and demand equilibrate (and unless demand experiences exponential growth forever this will certainly happen) then we'll be in the same boat as everyone else. And it isn't a pretty boat.
I would love to be wrong about this, but I just don't think that there's a certain level of education that will creates a sustainably large middle class. It can certainly help in places where there are deficiencies, but it stops being effective at the asymptote. Look at the US, look at Japan. More and more education every decade but at the end of the day the supply of jobs for educated people didn't magically expand to meet the demand. The "magic" I'm referring to is the same magic as the "it's not a zero-sum game" argument refers to. It didn't work: we massively increased education and the middle class crumbled anyway.
> ReskillUSA will close the gap between technical education and employment.
No it won't.
> By connecting students with accessible vocational education programs and employers eager to hire from them, we're training more Americans for the jobs of today.
Yeah because the "jobs of today" all require you to know:
I actually asked their CEO about this on PH. Building websites != engineering, and we need more of the latter. I do think there's a place for skills-based learning to take up some of the slack, but simply rehashing the same Rails/JS tutorials isn't going to cut it unfortunately.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like there's much resources online that say "Learn How to Become a Software Engineer!" without costing you three/four years of extra education and a sizeable sum of money. I'm learning how to program at the moment alongside my degree, and almost all the resources I've seen online are oriented towards web development; consequentially, that's what I'm learning, even though I'd much rather be learning whatever lets me go program things like rockets, robots, self-driving cars, etc., with the hope that I'll be able to eventually move towards that end goal.
This is actually where I started, with MIT's intro OCW. I began to worry, though, that I would be better served learning something directly relevant to the job market, and so half-way in I moved onto The Odin Project. My plan as it stands is to first get a grasp of web development so I can have a solid chance of getting a job after graduation, but I intend to go through a lot of MOOCs once I'm done with TOP. I've got a year and 2/3rds until graduation, which will hopefully let me learn a fair bit.
Are there any chances at your school to learn Matlab or LabVIEW? Another option is to look into what people are doing with Arduino boards. I think that the Arduino crowd have created a lot of tutorials and example codes online.
I'm not touting these languages or tools as the best, but as ways to be exposed to the kinds of programming that people do in areas that you're interested in.
Sadly, no. I attend the worst of schools; a business school.
As my education is European, I'm not allowed to just switch majors either. I'll take a look at your recommendation, though; thanks.
jlees has a good suggestion. I wanted to add Udacity (https://www.udacity.com/courses#!/all). For example, the course 'Artificial Intelligence for Robotics' (https://www.udacity.com/course/cs373) may be what you're looking for. I don't know your current skill level for programming nor understanding of mathematics (stats and probability) and computer science, but the course can be self-paced, which can make it great for presenting a concept and allowing you time to dive into the material, especially supporting foundational material. There are also other lower level courses. Good luck with your studies!
Taking stats ATM; I've got the AI /w robots one marked down in my list of MOOCs, though I've put it at the bottom as I think I've got to cover a lot more 'fundamentals' first. Thanks for the heads up though.
I love that we are bringing people into the industry, but I wonder if it's really responsible to plaster figures like "$80K for 3 months of easy training" is really a responsible way to market that... I know you have to pragmatic to some degree and speak to people in the language they will listen in... but people who go into coding "just to make money" generally end up like anyone who goes into a field just to make money without any love of the craft: unhappy. After 20-some years in and around tech, I have come to just accept this cycle while humming Elton John's "Circle of Life" in my head: "Make a ton of easy money in tech!" ::>> "So many people in tech just to make money." ::>> "Tech Crash Due to Overhype About How Much Money There Is" ::>> "No one makes money in tech - go get an MBA" ::>> "Someone in tech made a ton of money!" ::>> "Make a ton of easy money in tech!"
3 months from beginner to job ready ready is, basically, bullshit. There are people who do it, but they're the exception. The jobs they're getting typically rely on their using other skill sets on day one so they can continue learning software engineering for months in order to gain a useful level of proficiency.
This doesn't make the "3 month" claim worthless, but it does make it hard to fit into a sound bite.
I should know: I'm the co-founder and CEO of the Thinkful, Codecademy's other online partner in ReskillUSA.
Our company has hired many of our own students and helped hundreds of others successfully make the transition to truly job-ready engineer.
I've also spent the last decade as a professional software engineer, and another five years before that writing software. I'm 33 years old. After coding for half my life I feel I know less than half the craft.
Just for historical context: Back in the early 80s, a relative of mine taught the intro programming course in an adult education program. Her students were getting hired. Now, they were adults -- mature and motivated. At the same time, I went through pretty much the same curriculum in a high school course in BASIC, that has been my only formal training in programming.
I don't know about three months, but people were getting programming jobs with what would seem like pretty minimal training. I got to see some programming getting done thanks to internships etc., and the work environment was pretty loose, where you could get away with a fair amount of learning on the job.
It didn't seem all that hard, and despite the fact that I enjoyed programming, I wasn't sure that I wanted to make a career of it, so I pursued other interests. Today I use programming extensively in my work, but am not employed as a programmer per se.
It took me 5 month to get my first Java job (every day 4hrs after work; 8 hours on weekends). And now I see how lucky I was to get that junior position. It took almost year to hone basic Java skills and learn necessary basic stack of technologies to do plain Java projects. It took another year till I got my enterprise stack skills to acceptable level. Every technology/framework is 1-1.5k pages book reading and hours of practice just to start doing something useful. And then you have to repeat that every year, because frameworks updating faster than you can learn, priorities shifting, you forget things.
Edit: However, I must say, ^ was done almost in vacuum: I had noone to ask and had limited access to the Internet (sorry, no Stackoverflow for you :). With good instructors, well-prepared programs and strict discipline in classromms, I would say it is possible to get into entry-level positions.
Not jobs. Maybe an internship. I self-educated starting at a young age, and started almost every job until recently with a very low paying trial period. If someone is showing interest and room for growth, they may qualify for that. It's more of an investment than a hire at first.
To qualify yes. You can teach a beginner enough in three (hardcore, dedicated) months to get on the ladder as a junior developer somewhere. To excel? No way. You need to be very prepared to offer that beginner a lot of support on the job.
I attended a 3 month NYC bootcamp with only matlab and visual basic programming experience (from college). On finishing the program, I had four job offers, two for 115k, one for 105, and one for 100k.
You are viewing the world from a very tiny bubble.
I wish we would stop with the fantasy that we can return to the golden age of Fordism, and instead work on distributing the productivity gains of technology to reduce all of our working hours.
Even with a great college education in CS and an undying passion for coding, it took me a year to really get web development. It's easy to learn the code, and I believe the MOOCs of the world have succeeded in providing great free resources for learning structural thinking. However, no course can teach you intuition - engineering intuition is the easiest characteristic to assess in a job interview and the skill that is most sought after.
Microsoft Certification centers used to target job centers. I've been to a Microsoft training and couldn't believe somebody without understanding of MS Windows would want to become a certified Windows NT server administrator. Simple answer: "the job center is paying for the training". Well in this case it was for soldiers to find jobs in the open market after their 12month serving time ended.
The social scientists ran a series of regressions and determined that bonelessness in the dog population was associated with lower levels of bone- seeking effort and that boneless dogs also lacked important skills in fighting for bones. As a remedy for the problem, some of the social scientists proposed that boneless dogs needed a good kick in the side, while others proposed that boneless dogs be provided special training in bone-fighting skills.
A bitter controversy ensued over which of these two strategies ought to be pursued. Over time, both strategies were tried, and both reported limited success in helping individual dogs overcome their bonelessness -- but despite this success, the bonelessness problem on the island never lessened in the aggregate. Every day, there were still five dogs who went hungry.
-- http://www.philipharvey.info/directjob.pdf