The Fallacy of ‘Everyone Should Learn to Code’
Some people should be code literate, but not everyone needs to become an engineer.
If you are even remotely involved in the tech industry, you’re aware of the strong ethos that exists to educate the rest of the world about our coding wizardry. Yes software, excuse me, mobile is eating the world and we should be able to harness it.
Logically this makes pure sense, technology continues to infiltrate the world in every way and code is the force that powers it all. You know what else infiltrated the medieval world in every way a few hundred years ago? War. What was the force that powered war? Swords. Most people were not armorers or skilled in smithing, yet a large majority of the population (In Europe) used swords and probably had a good general understanding of the process. Showing that you don’t need to possess proficiency for the knowledge to be applicable.
People write apps and exponentially more people use apps. Now while being able to code might let you push your idea into practicality, it doesn’t stop the fact that learning to code takes a lot of time, and to become useful and applicable to modern problems, even more. Is it really worth it? For something that doesn’t apply to most things in the world.
Does the fact that a fashion designer knows how to code help her design better dresses? Probably not. Does understanding the jargon coming from her web engineer because she is code literate help?
You bet it does.
Being Code Literate
Let’s start off with a familiar example.
This will take four days
Let’s face it estimating how long things take to code is some dark art and mostly luck. Every engineer to ever deal with a non-technical manager at some point has been asked: Why? Can you do it faster? Why isn’t it done yet? Or other questions of the sort.
Dealt with a manager who understands why coding is hard, understands the underlying components at work, understands how bugs are big, enigmatic, digital jigsaw puzzles and gave you leeway when that authentication task took a few days longer than expected. Give that person a hug.
Currently, the best way to become code literate is still learning to code and this isn’t bad, but figuring out a better, streamlined, less confusing way to address the same topics could be a step forward. Usually the results you get from learning to code won’t be worth it (ie being able to write software), but the journey definitely does.
Because if you are a butcher and learning how to code has brought you more value than you put into learning it. Call me. We should talk. And cook some churrasco.
All this being said it still only applies to those that code literacy will help, learning to code can be a fun and mentally enriching process and am in no way advocating against it. Though if you know what your passions are you should probably focus on those instead of learning a generalized skill, after all we’ll see how often mitosis will help me with filing documents with the SEC.
This is a deeply controversial subject and I would love to discuss replies and different opinions to this. Please contribute.
This post was revised on June 25th to better express some of my ideas as well as clearing up the overall syntax, which was a bit sloppy upon first publication.
Daniel is the CEO & Co-Founder of Bond Labs, Inc. Bond connects you with the people you should know and will be introducing you to great people later this year. He has a strong aversion to writing his thoughts in favor of speaking them, but if you think they are of some value it would mean a lot to him if you recommended this post.
