The galling aspect of "learn to code" was when it was thrown at unemployed older workers. Like it's an easy retraining option, and tech firms are just racing to hire 53 year olds.
Meanwhile the competition is every programmer in India and China: one element of work from home since covid is firms realizing "home" can be Bangalore.
An interesting example of what you're talking about:
One of my good friends got his PhD in German several years ago. For whatever reason, this doctorate program had a minor boom in the early 2010s, with many universities opening their own German PhD programs. This seemed ideal for him!
So he went in, got into a program at a prestigious university, did the work, defended his dissertation, and got the paper. Of course, by the time he was finishing his doctorate, this minor boom was already crashing, with German doctoral programs closing at many universities. Fortunately for my friend, his advisor warned him about this, because the available jobs for someone with a doctorate in German rely on there being many German programs that need professors. His advisor believed his own job would be safe because he had had it before the boom happened.
And so my friend, somewhat ironically to this post, learned to code and eventually stumbled into a job at Hulu.
His advisor, about a year ago, asked HIM for career advice.
This is askew of Freddie's point, but I also wonder what technologies like ChatGPT are going to have on the programming market (or any job, honestly). I've asked it to generate some code for me and while it often is missing something to make the code run correctly (a variable declaration or loading a package, for example), it often does a passable job, and it's only going to get better.
I think the answer from those calling for more to enter the field is that even after sustained growth "computer science majors still have enviable outcomes in the job market."
I buy the evidence you lay out here, but I'd also argue that demand isn't fixed. Cities and countries can build up industrial clusters with spillover benefits. That's not going to negate the effects of greater supply, but can mean an industry collectively can grow, and limits on labor availability can be an obstacle to that growth. I'd say this can also be true for the pharmaceutical worker you cite elsewhere. Yes the premium will slide a bit, but this would be a great time for that sector to grow and diversify to accelerate the vaccine development process to respond to new strains and go after longstanding scourges of humankind.
Of course, sectoral demand is entirely outside of the hand of any individual and future growth or reduction can be difficult to predict. That's a place where those calling for people to go into any given profession should absolutely be held to account. Do they know what they're talking about or are their predictions for fields no better than chance?
This is all true and was a big part of the reason I went into accounting. It's estimated that something like 70% of CPAs will retire in the next decade. The MBA degree has been peeling people off for a long time because you tended to make more money and it was easier. There's scarcely a week that goes by where a recruiter or employer doesn't contact me unsolicited now talking about a job, and I haven't even finished the degree yet (but am close). After more than a decade of taking it on the chin as an English major and accepting whatever lousuly bottom tier office job people would throw me, it's a relief. I'll sure as hell never be in that position again. I can also quit and get hired again at the drop of a hat, which was the entire point.
For once, the NYT article is pretty good and doesn't just focus on elite universities -- that article either covers normal schools, or schools that are only elite for CS and not in other fields. The students are trying to gain skills to have a financially well-remunerated career.
There's a different thing that happened at elite universities about 10 years ago, where computer science shifted from a small major for weirdos to a "legitimate" path on the upper-middle-class prestige track. Getting a job at Google or Facebook became as respectable as McKinsey or Goldman. I don't know that the money and perks have improved, but the social acceptability has.
Previously there was a heavy selection in CS majors of people who didn't like to play the prestige career game, or couldn't manage the polish/social skills to succeed. Now there's much more representation of the same kind of smart ambitious person as in every other lucrative field. You can see the shift in Silicon Valley over the last 10 years.
“And there’s a natural cap on the number of people who can enter the field: it’s hard to code. Not everybody can do it. It takes a certain degree of talent, and most people don’t have it. It’s a cognitively-loaded field in world where not everyone has the same cognitive gifts. “
My anecdotal evidence of being a college tutor and corporate trainer for a variety of STEM topics is that this is more true for coding than for many other things. Either that or I’m just better at teaching other things... but I’ve seen this story told by enough other people I think there might be something to it.
Well, yes, but there is also the issue that with more graduates in computer science we will get more code written, which is a good and necessary thing, and frankly *the* reason we wanted more people to go into CS in the first place, no?
I think one fact that skews the data is that supply and demand is also based on quality. For example the demand for coders who are highly skilled is different from the demand for coders who are not highly skilled. When an industry is in a boom, then even moderately or lowly skilled workers are in demand. But when the industry is in a slump then the demand for the less skilled coders plummets much faster than the demand for the highly skilled coders.
You can substitute "well connected" or "dedicated" or "willing to work extra hours" for "skilled". When you do statistics on a heterogenous group as if it is homogeneous then you can get results that are quite invalid for certain subgroups. This is what leads to arguments. People will say your analysis is not valid because they know people to whom it doesn't apply.
People who say that supply and demand does not apply to various professions usually are pointing to subgroups and not the profession as a whole. If you are in one of the subgroups then the general analysis may not apply to you, but people often assume they belong to a more attractive subgroup than they really do.
Of course. Right now quant traders make TEXA$, but if everyone knew how to design the latest trading algorithms to capture maximum alpha, just one of those things you learn by the time you're in middle school, then quant traders wouldn't make much more than burger flippers.
The folks who say "just learn to code!" know all that already, or at least they should, if "learn to code" were anything other than a smug PMC excuse to avoid having to anything about the fact that poor people are still poor.
I don't know how true this is for other fields, but junior engineers are difficult to make significantly net positive earlier than ~1 year of experience and the productivity to pay ratio dramatically improves continually from year 1 through about 4 years of experience. As entry level salaries went up dramatically over the past several years, it's created circumstances where now that there isn't as much free capital floating around companies are really looking at costs rather than just output and juniors look really bad.
There is so much more to a career than just having some hard skills. There are so many soft skills required to be successful in your career, and over the years, I've seen more and more people coming into the job market without these skills. This applies to programmers and engineers (and other positions requiring technical skills) as well as people with business degrees, or non-technical backgrounds. In my experience, the people that have these soft skills do better (relatively) than the people that don't.
When I was a kid (late 70s/early 80s) there were all kinds of jobs that I could do - mowing lawns, shoveling walks before I was 10, paper route from the time I was 10 through 17. I got paid to do these jobs (good for me), but more importantly, I learned the soft skills needed to be a successful employee.
I had to get paid by my customers face-to-face, and most of my customers were not shy about criticizing my performance. I learned that I could be resentful of the criticism and have to listen to more complaining every week (ugh), or improve my performance and start getting praise (yay), but more importantly more work or better pay.
By the time I had my first real job (with a W2 and a pay check) I already knew how to work. I didn't have any hard skills yet, but I knew what work meant. It was not super fun playtime - it was work. I went to work, did my job, and got paid. If I did my job, I got more hours, and more money. If I didn't do my job, my hours were cut, and I got less money. (Needless to say, I'm not a big fan of the anti-work movement).
After college, in my first professional job (1985 or so), I started seeing a pattern. People that had worked through high school and college were much more prepared for their career than the people that didn't have jobs before.
And this is not a "kids these days" rant. This is an "adults these days" rant. Part of the problem is that we as adults made it virtually impossible for kids to get the kinds of experiences I was lucky to have.
There are no paper routes for kids any more, they are all car routes done by adults.
For the most part, kids can't mow their neighbors lawns anymore because we have landscaping companies that have taken on all of that work - same with shoveling snow. Even if that's not the case, there is a reluctance to let kids do things like this on their own.
I was able to work for a couple of different businesses when I was 13 and 14 (light janitorial work -emptying the trash, vacuuming the offices). That is nearly impossible these days.
The only opportunity that I see for young kids these days are the mandatory "community service" hours required for school. Unfortunately, most of these opportunities result in a bunch of kids pretending to contribute, while some adults do the real work.
And again, it's not the kids' fault, the adults won't let them do anything by themselves, and immediately take over if they see anyone struggling, so the kids never get to learn anything.
This is something that I think we need to figure out.
Another aspect is that not all coders are CS majors. For example, my physics professor/engineer (optics) husband codes in several languages and just taught himself Python so he could write the software for an optical device he's working on. Some people just pick up coding skills and languages as part of their skillset.
I have seen this first hand. I am retired. In 2018, out of interest, with no plans to leverage this into a job, I took a three year coding diploma at a junior college in Ontario. There were several in the program who were there to "get a job". We also had some really talented coders who had been coding on their own for years (many of my classmates had been in the work force, but not necessarily in IT jobs).
From what I know of them, the great coders had little problem being hired, many by the people with whom they did their work placement. One fellow I know, after a year with one employer, was offered double his salary at another firm. Others have not been as fortunate. I know at least one who still does not have a job and others who looked for up to a year before finding something.
You are right. Not every one can code and those who do it well are even more rare. A Comp Sc degree is no longer a ticket to a great job.
I can assure you that business is not a practical major.
The galling aspect of "learn to code" was when it was thrown at unemployed older workers. Like it's an easy retraining option, and tech firms are just racing to hire 53 year olds.
Meanwhile the competition is every programmer in India and China: one element of work from home since covid is firms realizing "home" can be Bangalore.
An interesting example of what you're talking about:
One of my good friends got his PhD in German several years ago. For whatever reason, this doctorate program had a minor boom in the early 2010s, with many universities opening their own German PhD programs. This seemed ideal for him!
So he went in, got into a program at a prestigious university, did the work, defended his dissertation, and got the paper. Of course, by the time he was finishing his doctorate, this minor boom was already crashing, with German doctoral programs closing at many universities. Fortunately for my friend, his advisor warned him about this, because the available jobs for someone with a doctorate in German rely on there being many German programs that need professors. His advisor believed his own job would be safe because he had had it before the boom happened.
And so my friend, somewhat ironically to this post, learned to code and eventually stumbled into a job at Hulu.
His advisor, about a year ago, asked HIM for career advice.
This is askew of Freddie's point, but I also wonder what technologies like ChatGPT are going to have on the programming market (or any job, honestly). I've asked it to generate some code for me and while it often is missing something to make the code run correctly (a variable declaration or loading a package, for example), it often does a passable job, and it's only going to get better.
I think the answer from those calling for more to enter the field is that even after sustained growth "computer science majors still have enviable outcomes in the job market."
I buy the evidence you lay out here, but I'd also argue that demand isn't fixed. Cities and countries can build up industrial clusters with spillover benefits. That's not going to negate the effects of greater supply, but can mean an industry collectively can grow, and limits on labor availability can be an obstacle to that growth. I'd say this can also be true for the pharmaceutical worker you cite elsewhere. Yes the premium will slide a bit, but this would be a great time for that sector to grow and diversify to accelerate the vaccine development process to respond to new strains and go after longstanding scourges of humankind.
Of course, sectoral demand is entirely outside of the hand of any individual and future growth or reduction can be difficult to predict. That's a place where those calling for people to go into any given profession should absolutely be held to account. Do they know what they're talking about or are their predictions for fields no better than chance?
This is all true and was a big part of the reason I went into accounting. It's estimated that something like 70% of CPAs will retire in the next decade. The MBA degree has been peeling people off for a long time because you tended to make more money and it was easier. There's scarcely a week that goes by where a recruiter or employer doesn't contact me unsolicited now talking about a job, and I haven't even finished the degree yet (but am close). After more than a decade of taking it on the chin as an English major and accepting whatever lousuly bottom tier office job people would throw me, it's a relief. I'll sure as hell never be in that position again. I can also quit and get hired again at the drop of a hat, which was the entire point.
For once, the NYT article is pretty good and doesn't just focus on elite universities -- that article either covers normal schools, or schools that are only elite for CS and not in other fields. The students are trying to gain skills to have a financially well-remunerated career.
There's a different thing that happened at elite universities about 10 years ago, where computer science shifted from a small major for weirdos to a "legitimate" path on the upper-middle-class prestige track. Getting a job at Google or Facebook became as respectable as McKinsey or Goldman. I don't know that the money and perks have improved, but the social acceptability has.
Previously there was a heavy selection in CS majors of people who didn't like to play the prestige career game, or couldn't manage the polish/social skills to succeed. Now there's much more representation of the same kind of smart ambitious person as in every other lucrative field. You can see the shift in Silicon Valley over the last 10 years.
Is this an argument for immigration restrictionism?
“And there’s a natural cap on the number of people who can enter the field: it’s hard to code. Not everybody can do it. It takes a certain degree of talent, and most people don’t have it. It’s a cognitively-loaded field in world where not everyone has the same cognitive gifts. “
My anecdotal evidence of being a college tutor and corporate trainer for a variety of STEM topics is that this is more true for coding than for many other things. Either that or I’m just better at teaching other things... but I’ve seen this story told by enough other people I think there might be something to it.
Well, yes, but there is also the issue that with more graduates in computer science we will get more code written, which is a good and necessary thing, and frankly *the* reason we wanted more people to go into CS in the first place, no?
I think one fact that skews the data is that supply and demand is also based on quality. For example the demand for coders who are highly skilled is different from the demand for coders who are not highly skilled. When an industry is in a boom, then even moderately or lowly skilled workers are in demand. But when the industry is in a slump then the demand for the less skilled coders plummets much faster than the demand for the highly skilled coders.
You can substitute "well connected" or "dedicated" or "willing to work extra hours" for "skilled". When you do statistics on a heterogenous group as if it is homogeneous then you can get results that are quite invalid for certain subgroups. This is what leads to arguments. People will say your analysis is not valid because they know people to whom it doesn't apply.
People who say that supply and demand does not apply to various professions usually are pointing to subgroups and not the profession as a whole. If you are in one of the subgroups then the general analysis may not apply to you, but people often assume they belong to a more attractive subgroup than they really do.
Of course. Right now quant traders make TEXA$, but if everyone knew how to design the latest trading algorithms to capture maximum alpha, just one of those things you learn by the time you're in middle school, then quant traders wouldn't make much more than burger flippers.
The folks who say "just learn to code!" know all that already, or at least they should, if "learn to code" were anything other than a smug PMC excuse to avoid having to anything about the fact that poor people are still poor.
"Let them eat cake!" for yuppies.
I don't know how true this is for other fields, but junior engineers are difficult to make significantly net positive earlier than ~1 year of experience and the productivity to pay ratio dramatically improves continually from year 1 through about 4 years of experience. As entry level salaries went up dramatically over the past several years, it's created circumstances where now that there isn't as much free capital floating around companies are really looking at costs rather than just output and juniors look really bad.
There is so much more to a career than just having some hard skills. There are so many soft skills required to be successful in your career, and over the years, I've seen more and more people coming into the job market without these skills. This applies to programmers and engineers (and other positions requiring technical skills) as well as people with business degrees, or non-technical backgrounds. In my experience, the people that have these soft skills do better (relatively) than the people that don't.
When I was a kid (late 70s/early 80s) there were all kinds of jobs that I could do - mowing lawns, shoveling walks before I was 10, paper route from the time I was 10 through 17. I got paid to do these jobs (good for me), but more importantly, I learned the soft skills needed to be a successful employee.
I had to get paid by my customers face-to-face, and most of my customers were not shy about criticizing my performance. I learned that I could be resentful of the criticism and have to listen to more complaining every week (ugh), or improve my performance and start getting praise (yay), but more importantly more work or better pay.
By the time I had my first real job (with a W2 and a pay check) I already knew how to work. I didn't have any hard skills yet, but I knew what work meant. It was not super fun playtime - it was work. I went to work, did my job, and got paid. If I did my job, I got more hours, and more money. If I didn't do my job, my hours were cut, and I got less money. (Needless to say, I'm not a big fan of the anti-work movement).
After college, in my first professional job (1985 or so), I started seeing a pattern. People that had worked through high school and college were much more prepared for their career than the people that didn't have jobs before.
And this is not a "kids these days" rant. This is an "adults these days" rant. Part of the problem is that we as adults made it virtually impossible for kids to get the kinds of experiences I was lucky to have.
There are no paper routes for kids any more, they are all car routes done by adults.
For the most part, kids can't mow their neighbors lawns anymore because we have landscaping companies that have taken on all of that work - same with shoveling snow. Even if that's not the case, there is a reluctance to let kids do things like this on their own.
I was able to work for a couple of different businesses when I was 13 and 14 (light janitorial work -emptying the trash, vacuuming the offices). That is nearly impossible these days.
The only opportunity that I see for young kids these days are the mandatory "community service" hours required for school. Unfortunately, most of these opportunities result in a bunch of kids pretending to contribute, while some adults do the real work.
And again, it's not the kids' fault, the adults won't let them do anything by themselves, and immediately take over if they see anyone struggling, so the kids never get to learn anything.
This is something that I think we need to figure out.
Another aspect is that not all coders are CS majors. For example, my physics professor/engineer (optics) husband codes in several languages and just taught himself Python so he could write the software for an optical device he's working on. Some people just pick up coding skills and languages as part of their skillset.
I have seen this first hand. I am retired. In 2018, out of interest, with no plans to leverage this into a job, I took a three year coding diploma at a junior college in Ontario. There were several in the program who were there to "get a job". We also had some really talented coders who had been coding on their own for years (many of my classmates had been in the work force, but not necessarily in IT jobs).
From what I know of them, the great coders had little problem being hired, many by the people with whom they did their work placement. One fellow I know, after a year with one employer, was offered double his salary at another firm. Others have not been as fortunate. I know at least one who still does not have a job and others who looked for up to a year before finding something.
You are right. Not every one can code and those who do it well are even more rare. A Comp Sc degree is no longer a ticket to a great job.