alt Hacker NewsThe whole "learn to code" and software bootcamp craze always baffled me. Like what other profession markets themselves as "Hey, our job is so easy that any schmuck off the street can enter the career with 4 months of training." Practically every other job I can think of at a similar salary level has entrance requirements (e.g. grad school admissions exams), extensive and expensive training, a lengthy apprenticeship period and follow on licensure exams.
And more directly, I believe good software engineering is really hard. I think it takes a certain mindset to begin with that many people just do not and will never possess, and it takes years of experience to get a good sense of what works and what doesn't, especially with respect to the entire relationship between code, business, people and teams. Yet we constantly see all this devaluation of the practice of software engineering ("code was always the easy part" - bull-fucking-shit), often times by our own practitioners of the craft.
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Good code apparent doesn't matter. Most software doesn't have real repurcussions for being bad. You just get a shittier oncall which doesn't seem to matter to some people
It's called suicidal empathy. It manifests in many domains.
I mean, the obvious thing is that the "learn to code quick, code bootcamps!" drive was driven by connected people who were, as they are now, attempting to drive down the cost of software development.
Management types really really really loathe software developers for making good money, and have spent decades now jumping at any advertisement that suggests it can undercut the salary of your current crop of engineers.
Devaluing software developers has always been the point. Whether you take the cynical view of "They resent us for being expensive" or the apathetic view of "Capitalism simply wants to eliminate any and every cost by definition"
> Like what other profession markets themselves as "Hey, our job is so easy that any schmuck off the street can enter the career with 4 months of training."
For one, the industry never did professionalize to begin with, certainly not in the way accountants, lawyers etc did. We never had any real body that could certify proficiency, which is what contributed to companies having to resort to leetcode and other such styles of interviewing.
Additionally, it wasn't software engineers doing this, but people looking to cash in on students looking to get a 6-figure job. They were business people, not software engineers.