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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

While I think you are right, I also think in 2022 the required skills for the alternative should be part of everybody's education.

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While I think you are right, I also think in 2022 the required skills for the alternative should be part of everybody's education.

Pretty much everyone believes their own specialist skills should be part of general education curriculum. If you ask a lawyer if law should be taught in schools, or an accountant about accounting, or a translator about languages, or a mechanic, or a nurse, or literally any person in any job they all think their own skills are appropriate to be taught to everyone. Obviously that isn't going to work.

Oh come on. Scripting and coding is not some specialist knowledge in a world where a big chunk of people spend a good chunk of their time feeding data into bureaucratic systems. Most white collar jobs would immensly profit from knowing a little about scripting. Some of the tasks that take them days could be done in seconds if they just had a basic understanding how to transform data. And I will stand for it, this is something they should teach in school.

Given that even farmers have to spend more time behind the computer than anybody is willing to admit, a little bit of understanding ans ability to automate the boring things is just a basic skill that should be thought. Not to solve any specific problem, but to learn how to find your own solutions and be clever about work processes.

Any society that teaches this will massively outperform one where specialists put up walls because they are afraid of sharing the magic incantations. Or we could continue living in a society where clerks print out a form just so the other clerk can type it into another program, because they haven't even discovered the concept of copy and paste.

Everyone should know a bit about the law, everyone should be able to do their accounts, everyone should be able to mend their car (maybe less so with electric cars..), everyone should be able to do basic first aid and look after their health, everyone should understand a bit about politics, everyone should know how money works ... literally everyone believes their job is a special case that ought to be taught in schools.

The fact you believe everyone should learn some basic coding just shows you work in tech. It doesn't make it true. For a start, very few people actually apply the skills they learn at school until at least a decade afterwards (learning at around 10 - 12 years old, getting a first proper job where skills matter in their early 20s). Do you really think basic coding taught today is going to apply to a farming job in 2032 in the light of Github Copilot, visual programming, the death of filesystems and the rise of iOS/Android file pickers etc? Of course not.

It's always been very strange for me that people who use computers hours and hours per day don't customize their workflows in any ways. Same people who customize and spend a long time choosing their car because they sit an hour or two every day in those, who are always improving their efficiency in stuff like building things, cleaning, cooking etc.. Then they go to their 6-12 hour daily stint on computer and use Edit->Copy, Edit->Paste to copy&paste stuff and that's the level they stay on forever, only changing things when updates change it for them.

Perhaps because that kind of person only uses a computer for work, and never for themselves.

If their career won't see any benefits by improving their computer skills, they have no reason to care about inefficiency.

I mean I definitely have the skills to do these and have done it before. I even have my gaming pc connected to the tv all the time. But I don't want to fiddle with and maintain this setup for video consumption. I just want to turn on my TV, run the Netflix app and have dolby vision 4k video playing without issues.

I don't have any data but I feel like most people (technical or not) are thinking the same as me.

This was not my point. I said anybody should be thought the skills to find a solution for this themselves if they want to. Even if you end up hiring someone or pay for a finished product having a basic idea what a thing entails and how it could be made is a useful skill to have in any evolving techological society.

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