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Comment by leifg | Hacker News Reader

The answer to that is in the article. The information is accessible. It is possible to become a programmer without any formal certification, all the information is out there.

AFAIK all the jobs you mentioned need a formal certification. You can't become a doctor without going to med school. You can't become a lawyer without passing the bar.

Even if you don't (not sure about a car mechanic, depending on the country), it's a lot a harder to get your hands on a car to tinker with than it is to download some framework and watch a get started video.

That's what the author said with programming is accessible. It is very easy to get started which is often misrepresented as "it's easy".

No one would say "becoming a doctor is easy" because you're never gonna be a doctor from online documentation and YouTube videos so there is no incentive to frame it that way.

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Alright. Programming is like soccer. The barrier of entry is very low, but it doesn't mean every poor Brazilian kid will be a football genius. But they sure won't be golf world champion. I grew up relatively poor in Hungary. Programming has been a great path to a good job for me, while it would have been more difficult to earn the same as a lawyer without connections.

Programming levels the playing field compared to gatekept jobs where you must be born into a dynasty to really make it. In that sense it's easy. But it will still only be a part of the population who are well suited to do it.

Fair point. It's all relative. By that definition it's much easier to become a programmer than to become a lawyer. 100% agree.

Programming has a very appealing second property: there are tons of good paying jobs out there.

And I think this combination of "you can get started super easy" and "you will earn above average" are two dangerous properties.

It's definitely the poor man's "good job" (I say that as a poor man) - med school is just not accessible to most people. At the very least, it's not accessible to the poor without laser-focus and being very lucky for about 15 years between about 15 and 30. Oh, and living on scraps.

> it doesn't mean every poor Brazilian kid will be a football genius

This analogy always comes up in relation to programming, but I think it's not quite right: you don't have to be the equivalent of a "football genius" to be an effective programmer. If there was the same market for soccer players as there were for programmers, a lot more people would be professional soccer players - there are so few, and the ones that make it are so far ahead of everybody else, because there just aren't that many spots available.

Well, what regulates the amount of available spots in professional football? Why can't people create additional teams and play exciting matches that draw paying audiences? Is the bottleneck that spectator attention is already maxed out?

But yes, the analogy is faulty if the bottleneck in football is the availability of the spots, because in programming the bottleneck is rather the availability of good enough new hires. We may be around the point where CS programmes have grown so much over the years that the marginal additional student may not have that good potential any more (out of a combination of motivation and talent). But a potential reserve talent to tap into could be women, but attracting them to programming has been an uphill battle and is a can-of-worms topic why.

> what regulates the amount of available spots in professional football?

You're only allowed 11 people on the pitch per side. Believe me, if it were possible to replace Ronaldo with a thousand less-skilled players paid a fraction of his wages, somebody would have tried it.

You could even suggest hiring them for fractions of a match on an internet employment brokerage platform. Footballr.

Okay, I agree it's not a perfect analogy but the football:golf = programming:law still holds I think.

But I do agree that spectator sports are more winner-takes-all than programming jobs.

To be clear - I agree that programming is hard (or else I'm REALLY stupid), but comparing programming ability to athletic ability always seemed wrong because the world needs WAY more programmers than it needs athletes. I'd guess that there are more professional programmers in the world than professional athletes of any kind. If the "market" for athletes were as broad as the market for programmers, you'd see a lot more comparatively mediocre athletes making a comfortable living at it.

> Why can't people create additional teams and play exciting matches that draw paying audiences? Is the bottleneck that spectator attention is already maxed out?

People do create additional teams and play exciting for them matches. That is how amateur leagues work. People create whole additional sports and compete among themselves in them.

The spectator attention is really maxed out, because spectating sport is massively social thing. People do it because of excitement of who win, but massive part of it all is being part of culture, having common topic with friends, feeling like member of big fan club etc.

I'd say what regulates it is that the quality bar is so high, that the low level is just not exciting. We've become accustomed to the high quality, and now expect the extreme performance and wild stunts the pros manage to pull off.

The same happened with other artistic endeavors. Few people these days really want to see an amateur sing or play an instrument. We have so much high quality music that doing it "okay" doesn't really cut it anymore. Before an okay player/singer might have added to a party. Today, most of the audience will be just waiting for it to end and for somebody to put on some decent, commercial music.

Isn't this happening in programming too? Just like anyone can play Ed Sheeran on their wedding and pay one guy to handle the equipment, companies can buy (or download for free) lots of plumbing tools and frameworks made by the few star companies. It's not like the n+1th website needs professional programmers. For tons of (otherwise offline) businesses tweaking a WordPress site is more than enough.

And just like you can watch Ronaldo on TV from half way around the world instead of watching your town's crappy teams, you can also use Google and Microsoft software and services instead of hiring someone from your town. Even very custom software needs fewer and fewer people due to existing tooling.

So the bar is going higher and higher in programming too.

I don't think it's quite the same.

I'm saying sports, arts and music got to such heights, that an ordinary person can consume nothing but the best 0.1%. This in turn means the demand for the rest has plummeted, and being the guy who can play guitar "okay" doesn't really excite anybody anymore. There's a market at the very high end, and nobody wants to pay a cent for anything below that.

Programming is going the opposite way, if anything. There's lots and lots of programming grunt work that just needs to be done by somebody and doesn't take any particular skill. There's rather less need for wizards able to squeeze every possible bit of functionality into 64K, because at this point resources are cheap.

At this point a programmer can get by with being moderately competent and doing little other than gluing frameworks together. Things like music are the opposite. Mere competence is nowhere near enough.

Programming itself is relatively low on the ladder. Generic CRUD, and clue code doesn't require very specialised skills.

On other hand for that work to be useful proper software engineering and architecture is needed. And these hopefully take input from computer science.

But to effectively use the plumbing tools, the companies need programmers! And in the near future, there will not be any "automation" of your complex business needs. Every business is different, and every business has different programming needs. At a certain level of scale and complexity, i.e. no longer a mom and pop shop, you need to hire programmers.

You don’t have to be a football genius to make a living coaching a school team, etc. I think you are being needlessly pedantic

Programming is not like soccer and golf, because people with great talent and skill for soccer and golf are all over the media. People who do not have major skill can look at them and compare their own skill level.

But I think the OP (unintentionally) makes a telling point, which is that accessibility is confused with simplicity.

We're seeing this in medicine now. Anyone can Google whatever so they're go to their doctors with Dunning Kruger on max and and say things that are really really stupid.

Or they try to understand what's happening. And because they're spending hours on something the doctor spends a few minutes on, they - occasionally - manage to have an insight the doctor misses.

Either way, medicine isn't quite the ineffably mysterious occupation it used to be. Of course it's not really any less complex, but the wall has been breached a little.

The arts are similar. It's easy to buy some paint, so everyone has a go. It's easy to buy a guitar or synth and a DAW, so everyone has a go.

The skill and learning required to be an expert becomes invisible because beginners try things, get unsophisticated results that make them happy but are a long way short of the real thing, and think "Well, that's not so hard."

The problem isn't verbal gatekeeping, it's the lack of media representation of high levels of skill and professionalism. They're either portrayed as unimaginably mysterious, as soapy and trite (see most legal dramas), or as "And you can too..."

There are few realistic depictions of the skill, knowledge, and practice required to be a professional in any field. Or of the insights and perceptions that professionals experience, but which untrained people don't.

> There are few realistic depictions of the skill, knowledge, and practice required to be a professional in any field.

YouTube is pretty good for this, both educational channels and edutainment (like Computerphile) and candid videos of people sharing their professional experience. Or code-alongs etc.

> "because you're never gonna be a doctor from online documentation and YouTube videos"

You're not gonna become a legal doctor, but I assure you that online you have many many information and videos that teach you the same as they teach you in university. You just need to organize them - and probably some are already part of current pandemic forced online classes

The complicated part may be to obtain corpses to make the practices... /s

I would argue that those corpses(or whatever it is they do in med school) are quite important. I don't think any amount of "book-smarts" can override actual practical experience. At least for me, I can't imagine I would be able to write a program if I had read several books but never opened a code editor. I believe it must be similar for doctors. Even if you read about lots of diseases and their symptoms, how do you go about diagnosing diseases with complex, overlapping attributes without any kind of experience besides what you read in a book to relate to?

Yeah, that's the reason there is an `/s` in the comment, it was an ironic joke ;)

> You can't become a lawyer without passing the bar.

In states where you don't need to go to Law school and anyone can pass the bar, doesn't this make the field accessible? The bar cost $100-$1300 depending on the state + travel costs which is not that far from a good laptop cost to do any meaningful programming.

You'll probably need a $200 laptop and an internet connection. You can do paralegal freelancing in the same way you can do small programming jobs.

Edit: Writing is also accessible. Accounting is also accessible, though if you are becoming a CPA you need some college credits. Online marketing is accessible. Trading is also accessible. All of these can be done from the comfort of your couch and only need a laptop with an Internet connection.

Afaik, it is extraordinary rare to pass the bar without going to Law school. That test is quite difficult.

Test being difficult is not a problem, we want our lawyers to be competent, after all. The more important part is if it is fair. In Poland bar exam had been famous for near impossible questions, which were only answered correctly by applicants that knew them in advance, which typically were family members of already practicing attorneys/judges.

But that's beyond the point, right? The question is whether it is accessible. Which for some states it is, and could be done by reading material. The same can be said about programming and software development.

My point precisely is that you can't pass just by "reading material". It is too hard for that.

There are only 4 US states that allow you to take the bar without going to school: California, Vermont, Virginia, Washington.

These states don't allow a random to come from nowhere and take the bar exam. They require you to be an apprentice at a law firm:

https://barprephero.com/learn/take-the-bar-exam-without-law-...

This is CA, for example:

* Four years studying in a law office

* 18 hours per week

* Five hours of direct supervision

* Monthly exams

* Bi-annual progress reports

* Supervising attorney must have five years of active law practice in California

(you can see the reqs for other states in the article)

According to this article: https://priceonomics.com/how-to-be-a-lawyer-without-going-to...

Only 60 apprentices in the nation took the bar in the year discussed. 17 passed.

I'm not sure if I'd call that accessible.

The information is accessible for any other profession really - you talk here about politics not about knowledge.

You can learn to be a doctor or lawyer on the internet for sure. Can you practice it ? It depends. Some self learned programmers can't get a job in some companies too because they don't have formal education.

You absolutely don't need a formal certification to be a mechanic or welder.

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