Coding is a Privilege

medium.com

3 points·impostervt··3 comments

I self learned to code at 12 on pentium 100 Mghz with 8 megs of RAM. Without internet. And when I had it was on 33.6 Kbps dial-up modem. While living in impoverished family in Eastern Europe. Oh the privilege. As did all of my IT peers.

Coding is NOT a privilege.

Why should "the path to becoming an engineer should be wide open and accessible for everyone — particularly young people — regardless of their background, what their parents do, or how much money they have" and not the path to becoming a lawyer, a nurse, a doctor, an architect?

I understand that HN is an echo chamber for developers and software people, but enough with this "everyone should learn to code" BS.

Everyone sells coding skills as a way to get more money and more freedom, but don't you understand that if everyone knows how to code the opposite will happen? Don't you see that companies push this crap down everyone throat to make sure they have access to a large pool of talent and can drive salaries down? Who keeps asking for "coding classes" for toddler? Who keeps pushing to raise the limit on H1B visas? Who finance coding bootcamps?

We need talent and smart people in all fields, not just software.

Agreed. I actually do believe that it's a pretty easy field to get into (I started learning freshman year of college having never coded before, and picked it up well enough by graduation to be successful in HFT) -- but there's no way in hell I'd want to give the impression to the general population that this is an easy discipline and everyone should flood in.

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