Comment by throwawayjava | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawayjava | Hacker News Reader

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As white collar automation starts to hit hard over the next 5-10 years, the number of desk jobs will massively decline. Also, most of the remaining people who work desk jobs will be doing some sort of programming.

> I refuse to bow to the notion that everyone should learn to code or become programmers...

Why?

Most programming isn't as hard as people seem to think.

I used to think that a perhaps some really smart middle schoolers can learn enough about programming to build a simple CRUD-based web app: a bit of Python or PHP, just enough SQL (the idea of tables, columns, rows, and cells; SELECT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements), and just enough HTML/Javascript.

However, after doing a few semester-long middle school enrichment activities with randomly (not self) selected students, I am now relatively certain that EVERY "normal" middle schooler can learn enough Python, SQL, and HTML/Javascript to build a CRUD web app.

> ...because trucking jobs will be gone.

Driving a truck is quite a bit more difficult than people seem to think. Frankly, I'm fairly confident that truck drivers will be better off than your average white collar worker, even if trucking is completely automated.

In the world where "everyone at a desk does some programming", any properly educated person within a std.dev. or two of average intelligence will be fine. The only question is whether there will be enough work to go around.

”any properly educated person within a std.dev. or two of average intelligence will be fine.”

I don’t think that is true even today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68–95–99.7_rule: ”in a normal distribution […] 68.27%, 95.45% and 99.73% of the values lie within one, two and three standard deviations of the mean”

So, your claim is that only the bottom (and, possibly top) 2.5% of the distribution need to worry. That corresponds with IQs of below 70/above 130 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient)

Also (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Job_perf...): ”The US military has minimum enlistment standards at about the IQ 85 level. There have been two experiments with lowering this to 80 but in both cases these men could not master soldiering well enough to justify their costs”.

Yes, 2 full standard deviations would be the higher (ie, lower) extreme of my "within a std.dev. or two" ballpark.

I use that ballpark because I'm told it's (very roughly) the population that my students were randomly selected from. My methodology isn't perfect, to be sure, but I'm not pulling numbers out of thin air :)

The specific criteria is that none of my students had an IEP. And, by definition, everyone more than two standard deviations from mean had an IEP.

Now, probably there are a lot of students with IEPs who are less than two standard deviations from the mean. Hard to know who those students were in terms of the IQ distribution. Probably a lot of them are on the lower end, but possibly learning disabilities are more smoothly distributed than that. And I also don't know how many students were excluded, so even if we knew where to concentrate their mass in the IQ distribution, it wouldn't help.

It's worth noting that this means I also never worked with students who tested above two standard deviations from the mean. "Gifted" students had their own special education that ran concurrently with the period of the day when the enrichment activities were done. I guess the assumption is they'd be fine, but I'm told by some teachers that's not necessarily the case.

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