Developers! Developers! Developers!
The old cry: “We need more coders.”, then “Let’s train more coders.” Well, okay, we did train a lot more coders. What do we get now? Most coders are so bloody useless, interviewing them is a waste of time. But all the resumes look exactly the same, so what are you going to do?
I am not blaming the coders themselves, because if coding is where the money is, why not try your hand at it.
What we employers need are qualified programmers. Now, there is only a percentage of the population that can program worth a damn. Everybody else is wasting their time trying to be a professional programmer.
It is like training painters, the artistic kind. Or musicians. Whether we like it or not, most people can’t tell whether they are wearing the right combinations of colours. And yes, many people are tone deaf. Nothing wrong being either of these people. That is just the way it is. We are good at different things.
My daughter plays the piano (and other instruments). I went to piano competitions with her. Well, what did I find out? Most kids can’t play the piano. Worse, most adjudicators can’t tell a good piano player from a bad one even if their lives depend on it. That is just the way it is.
So, how do you know whether you have trained enough programmers? Well, maybe it is possible. But it is not going to be easy.
Like it or not, programming is closer to an art form than an engineering discipline. Well, okay, most modern engineering. We can still get beautiful engineering products. Like some bridges are certainly more beautiful that the others. So, you will still hire the right bridge builder if you want to have a beautiful bridge. And you pay them as much as you need to.
Training tons of bridge builders won’t get you that many good bridge builders. How many Christian Menn are we going to get by training a few thousand more civil engineers?
Of course, the aim of training programmers is not to get a Christian Menn equivalent out of every one of them. But flooding the market with people who really should not be programming does not really help.
Don’t get me wrong, it is a good thing if we all can program a little. It is like the art class in high school. It is a good thing. But how many of us wanted to be a professional commercial artist after taking high school art classes?
