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Comment by JonWood | Hacker News Reader

I'm not convinced by the idea of heavily specialised high schools. At that age you should be discovering what you're passionate about, and sampling a wide range of subjects.

The focus here seems to be more on training kids up for a job - would anyone be so enthusiastic if we replaced "software engineering" with "assembly line work" or "street sweeping"?

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This notion that you should spend the first 30 years of your life figuring out what you want to do is a pretty recent one. Nobody ever questioned a 14 year old blacksmith's apprentice. I think for most of human history you just did pretty much whatever your father did.

It's not like the kids are being forced to go into this school. If you graduate at 18 and decided you don't want to be a programmer that's still plenty of time to do something else and having some knowledge of programming is going to be useful in just about any field.

Nobody ever questioned a 14 year old blacksmith's apprentice. I think for most of human history you just did pretty much whatever your father did.

I'm a little confused by your post, because the tone seems to suggest that this is a good thing.

I think it's good that people have more options than they used to. But for the vast, vast majority of people, their career will not be the fulfillment of some life-defining purpose, and trying to treat it as such is going to lead to disappointment.

Basically, I'm saying that it's ok if what you do for a living is not an all-consuming passion. I know if you're doing a startup, there's a good chance that it is, but there are other ways to lead a satisfying life besides through your job.

It's not so much that working towards a career is good, but I don't think it's the unmitigated disaster that some comments here are making it out to be.

By high school, I was already passionate about software. If an old, retired army colonel hadn't pushed his way into my school to teach computer science (thanks Mr. Mims!), I would have had to wait another three years to get any sort of formal CS instruction. Instead, I was able to test out of all of the introductory CS classes in college, which gave me more time to learn about the more advanced areas of CS.

The thing is, those aren't fair comparisons. Software engineers are in exceedingly high demand at this stage. This is just a reaction to that demand. In addition, software engineering is a very flexible field. You can engineer under or tangentially to almost any position or field and be a part of what makes those things interesting. Assembly line worker and street sweeper are not so similarly blessed.

> Software engineers are in exceedingly high demand at this stage.

When I was in high school, teachers were in exceedingly high demand. Because of this, teaching was a career highlighted often by our teachers.

The result is that most of my friends ended up choose teaching careers; along with a significant number of others in my age group. I have watched my friends really struggle to find work in the field and a couple have even chosen to leave the field altogether because there are far more people than jobs now.

Anyway, the point is that being forcefully reactive to the problem of career demands is never a good idea. You will just end up with a bunch of highly trained people who are unable to use those skills. I do not believe that software development is immune to this fact: Both teaching and programming are skills that are useful everywhere, but it still didn't help my friends.

The market will naturally sort itself out. As pay for programers rises, more people will become interested in the field until the pay declines again. The influx becomes manageable this way. Any additional incentives will cause the problems above. It is best to not mess with the market.

True, they aren't exactly fair comparisons, but I find them relevant. I recall just a few days ago, there was a discussion how "everyone" should be able to program, and a lot of the value comes from applying that programming to another, personally interesting field. I remember a quote "in 10 years not being able to program will be like not being able to...". No matter what that last word is, I agree with the above statements, a school so focused on one thing needs to give the students a chance to probe their other interests, ones they can use their software engineering prowess to excel at.

I think this is a great idea, but hope that in 10 years the kids who only have experience in software engineering do not become a commodity.

too much of a good thing is never good...do you really want to turn programming into a commodity? Do you want to be paid $10/hr for your work?

It's a supply and demand curve, there really only needs to be a few thousand too many developers looking for work and the entire thing will crash from the programmer perspective. Salaries/benefits will fall because people will be more eager to settle...and then there'll be in a race to the bottom taking less and less compensation in order to get a job

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