Is Coding a Super Power?
No.
I don’t mean to come off as harsh or to dampen the hype people are building around coding and computer science as the next big industry, because it is, but super powers are rare and random; coding is a skill that can be learned by just about anyone with enough interest and commitment. The only reason people see coding as a superpower today is because not enough people are taught to code at an early age and we as a society see those who know how to code as an almost elite class that is separate from the world hiding in Silicon Valley mansions. Coding is not a skill you are born with or get by being bit by a spider. I didn’t start coding until college and I’m doing just fine.
When I tell people I am studying computer science, I often get a response along these lines. They think I’m a wizard or a genius or rain man. My favorite analogy for coding is the Wizard of Oz. To those in front of the curtain, what we do is mystical and magical and we seem all powerful, but behind the curtain we are just ordinary people. The danger in this paradigm is that it gives non-coders an over-inflated idea of the difficulty in coding, which in turn gives coders over-inflated egos. The obvious solution is that we as a culture need to pull back the curtain and increase the computer literacy of our society. Not everyone needs to grow up to be a software developer, but I firmly believe that everyone should be exposed to coding and technology as a basic educational foundation since we are moving towards such a tech heavy world.
Again, I do not mean to denigrate coding as an easy skill to master, it most certainly is not. I do, however, think that we don’t understand just how nascent the software world is. Coding has been around for roughly 70 years and it has led to some amazing technological advances already, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. The first ancestor of the modern automobile was built in 1770 and Karl Benz didn’t produce the first production car until 1888. Fast forward 100+ years and the automobile is a commonplace object in homes across the world and vastly more technologically advanced and complex than it was in the 19th century. Back then they were considered magicians and mad men and even had their inventions banned by whole countries because they couldn’t understand the technology. Nobody thinks of automotive engineers the way they do computer scientists now, partially due to a more mature industry, and partially due to not just the pervasiveness of the product, but the culture of user-friendliness surrounding it.
My dad can change a tire, change the oil, replace a tail light… all things many college kids would need to google these days, but when I set up his email-forwarding he looks at me like I just rebuilt an engine. Computers are as necessary in our world today as cars, if not more so now, and our culture has been too slow to change to reflect this and as a result, we get these ideas that coders are superheros when in reality we’re engineers and mechanics. Nothing fancy, nothing magic, just building and fixing things.