I think it’s important to critique the accessibility of learning programming in light of the widely marketed anyone can learn to code narrative and a recent influx of coding bootcamps. So thanks for writing about this, Alisha. Those who taught themselves how to code and hold this viewpoint that anyone can learn are speaking from survivorship bias and a place of privilege.

I’ve been privileged. Like you, I grew up in an immigrant family. Programming was the household’s bread and butter by high school and my opportunity to learn was made extremely accessible and practical. From reading my dad’s CS textbook to helping with my mom’s web development contracts, I was learning things that other teens my age with the same financial situation would not even think about putting time into — many teens in lower-middle class were working part-time in retail to save up, while I was able to invest after school hours into building a tech career and making some money out of it. My other high school friends who coded in their free time were from financially well off families and didn’t need to work after school.

When we tell people, whether children or adults, to simply strap down and learn to code, we’re excluding those who lack the economic conditions and support system to do so even if they’re interested and willing.

I recently taught basic web programming to a small group of friends abroad and I was reminded of an often overlooked barrier: Programming languages are in english, that adds another layer of complexity for non-english learners and especially immigrants. I remembered how painful it was for my mother to follow along in her university database class. Some days she stayed up late with my dad who translated her SQL notes line by line so that she could understand the meaning behind technical terms like LEFT JOIN. And my mom’s smart, she used to be a hardware engineer in China, but her career change into software in Canada cost her six years. She could only hope that her employers overlooked her poor English and saw that she had a masters degree to prove her competence.

If you learned to code in your free time and encourage other people to do so, it’s easy to assume that they have these prerequisites: fluency in english; time to invest in learning and absorbing the opportunity costs associated with invested time; access to a personal computer and stable internet connection (a lower-middle class family may only have one machine to share across the whole family, making it difficult for consistent access to learning); and ideally, access to community support, which could mean the time and patience of an experienced professional or a community of experienced professionals. Even bootcamps, considered to be the alternative to traditional degrees, aim at people who already have this level of access and some serious cash to burn.

So I think when we point fingers at the lack of diversity in tech, we’re often forgetting that the privilege to learn to code had already filtered out diverse individuals who are just as capable and willing as ourselves, but their survival and ultimate success in the field depend on much more that just sheer desire to learn.

If tech wants diversity, we need do better to open doors for these people.