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Comment by Omnius | Hacker News Reader

Most trades can be taught to anyone i think programming requires a certain kind of mind set to begin with or but another way an already analytical thought process. It's why a lot of grads that jumped into the field to make tons of money have trouble with the actual work. I am not saying it requires a special snow flake but it does require abstract thinking and that can't be taught to everyone.

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"Most trades can be taught to anyone"

This makes me suspect you haven't had much exposure to trades. Getting good... really good... at welding, or cabinetry, or stairbuilding, takes at least as much dedication and skill as getting good at programming.

Omnius didn't say that this anyone will be good. The same applies to welders, woodworkers, and all the rest of craftsmen.

Note that there are plenty of programming jobs and tasks that are boring, repetitive, easy to do, and of little impact to the underlying system, that really need to be done by human. Things along the lines of modifying a report, extracting some data on a request from other departments, or adding a button to an Android application.

Somebody still needs to do them, because they're often virtually impossible to automate away, but you don't want to waste a really good programmer on something like that, and a really good programmer usually will not want to do them either.

I disagree. There are crafts people who do awesome woodwork, but woodworking is a hell of a lot easier to learn that software development. Also, my dad was a welder, a very good one, but most of the welders he worked with were drunk fools and did 'acceptable' enough work. If you have half a brain you can learn to weld and even fabricate metals. I've been in that world and I know exactly how smart those people all are (hint: most dropped out of high school).

The principle of programming is really trivial, so I am unsure that it can't be taught to everyone.

We are able to teach basic math to everyone, if badly at that. I doubt programming is such big of a jump.

I do believe that the very basics of programming can be taught to everyone, like you said. I think everyone should be able to learn the basics in school (or elsewhere). We are surrounded by software, coding is like a new literacy. But I also think not everyone will like coding. It is kind of abstract but also creative. People have different interests and silks: writing, coding, drawing, taking pictures, sports,... and that's ok!

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