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Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

That’s the thing. I know this sounds glib, but the barrier to entry is so low ($20 5th hand laptop will do just fine to do first-steps development), I can’t understand why the market isn’t flooded with coders. So many people say “oh I could never do what you do”, and I’m like “I’m a shaved ape who wanted to play computer games and accidentally ended up learning stuff, you absolutely can”. Then they just go on saying that they’re helpless.

Out of the hundreds I’ve had this conversation with, two that I’m aware of took my advice and just tried to start making stuff. One now runs a dev shop, the other is at alphabet making bank.

I think, more than anything else, learned helplessness is crippling people. so many are mollycoddled from cradle to grave and never understand their own capabilities.

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> I can’t understand why the market isn’t flooded with coders

I was able to excel at CS in college because my parents shoved a DOS computer in front of me when I was 5 and challenged me with math and general problem solving at every opportunity. My whole childhood was basically debugging and critical thinking. If you didn't have that growing up, it's really hard to start learning the skills when you're 30.

As a counterpoint, I never even had a computer until sophomore year in college. I made it through CS and then about 20 years writing code. Now I’m more of a manager but still save a few things in the sprint for myself from time to time.

Try volunteering to teach some college courses on an entry level technical subject. It'll help develop some empathy for why not everyone can code. For me it was physics. I was optimistic. I thought I could teach anyone physics. After investing many hours in some of the lower ranking students I realized my mistake. Not everyone has the kind of process oriented thought processes needed to think about math or coding. Nobody knows how to teach it. All technical subjects assume you can think in this manner because they don’t know how to teach it.

Anyone talented at something thinks everyone is like them. Some singers think this too, they’ll say all you have to do is X, Y and Z and you’ll be a great singer like me, easy!

Given the right teaching materials, it seems like almost anyone can learn programming. But the difficulty lies in motivation and discipline.

It’s like saying “I don’t understand why not everyone is fit, all you need is to eat less and go walk outside for free”.

I have taught a few people programming and almost everyone started picking up the basics and moving along well but some would just completely give up once no one was prodding them. This usually correlates with other things like health and general life situation. Some people just aren’t motivated to get up, go run, eat healthy, and learn a valuable skill.

> I can’t understand why the market isn’t flooded with coders

The market is flooded with coders, which is why you see coveted companies have the exhausting interview processes that they do. And that's where the big bucks are made.

Smaller companies with low or inexistent barriers to entry may appear appealing to your average bootcamp coder that lacks deep understanding that comes with a CS degree and/or years of experience, but they come with their own severe drawbacks one of them being the fallacy that one can jump from these to the FAANGs, another being the veneer of a career while in reality you're as expendable and replaceable as a minimum wage worker.

Sometimes I wonder if it is, partly, due to how software development is framed. E.g. on HN I’ve seen people describe software development as basically maths. But Grace Hopper described programming as like planning a dinner party, requiring “patience and an ability to handle detail”.[0] A C++ dev I know, who has a languages degree, said learning to code was similar to learning a very unfamiliar grammar.

If more software developers used examples like those, maybe more people would consider software as a career? If nothing else, seems like I should give it a go when I have those conversations with people.

[0] Adafruit have an image of a 1967 article in Cosmopolitan, which quotes Hopper. https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/03/12/a-1967-cosmopolitan-art...

To add to the other answers, it's also because most persons are bad at coding. They do understand the basic of an if/else/loop but can't create any kind of process with them.

No one starts our understanding it. I remember I spent at least a year reading Java books and tutorials without understanding it at all until I eventually stumbled on some content that was simpler and ground through the learning process.

If you are motivated and have the right material to learn from, you can do basically anything. This seems pretty true for me. I haven’t found any skill I can’t just grind through learning if I put the time in.

> I can’t understand why the market isn’t flooded with coders

let me guess: because not anybody wants to be a programmer? different people have different ambitions, not anybody needs to be a coder

and life would be pretty mundane if all people were doing is writing code

> because not anybody wants to be a programmer?

Almost anybody who works in retail, manual labor, etc would jump on a job offer for 5x more money, better hours, and better working conditions. The reason they don't is they can't get the offers because the skills are hard to learn.

I know plenty of people who learned to code and never cracked that entry level job.

I almost left programming because I couldn't get past the interviews or deal with no one wanting to hire juniors. I don't have a cs degree. What a night mare. Dumb luck I am where I am now

Congrats on making it through the great bottleneck.

Yeah for the average adult without much experience debugging and hacking other things, "learned to code" probably means something more like "can write fizzbuzz in 30 minutes with significant effort" than "can debug complex systems under pressure" or "can turn business requirements into production code efficiently." The former will obviously open far fewer doors than the latter two.

not everyone finds programming interesting. and not everyone is interested in learning. got to have both to really make it in this field.

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