As the number of companies utilizing the cloud, smartphones and API’s grow, the demand for skilled programmers is increasing but there is a problem. There aren’t enough developers to go around. By 2018, there will be more than 1.4 million job openings in the IT sector. Companies are desperate to build their products yet the numbers of CS graduates, self-taught developers and number of H-1b visas to bring in overseas talent don’t add up. In fact, It’s not only Silicon Valley; the shortage of programmers is being felt worldwide. With 50% of higher education institutions planning to take their coursework online in the next ten years, how people learn new skills is rapidly changing. This panel of experts will explore the opportunities of learning to program, career options and the outcome of the growing online market for education.
Presenters
- Sasha Laundy, Education Strategy (Codecademy)
- @adriarichards Adria Richards, Developer Evangelist (SendGrid Inc)
- @noahkagan Noah Kagan, Chief Sumo (appsumo.com)
Resources
Notes
It’s not about everyone becoming a programmer. It’s about taking the magic away from technology by becoming literate about the language of computers. The continuum of tech literacy spans from general to specific. That makes it a fundamental, critical skill for the future.
The goal of general coding literacy is to have a better understanding of how tech works. (“To learn how the internet works is to learn civics“)
Saying that “not everyone needs to learn to code” because not everyone will become a professional programmer is like saying “not everyone should learn to write” because not everyone will become a professional writer. How can you know what is possible unless you understand the language of tech?
So where do you start? How do you get to the point where you can do interesting/helpful stuff with code? There are tons of entry points, the goal is to get there fast.
Follow-up
Literacy is more than about being a consumer. A literate person interacts in a community, and is a producer as well. To be a producer is to be a creator, and requires a understanding of the medium. Literacy is about how effective you are at keeping up with your cultural community, one that is increasingly global. As the medium that we use to exchange information becomes more complex, the barriers to being able to produce inside the community will be greater without a tech-literate population.
We teach people how to write so that they will be able to take advantage of opportunities that require them to understand the exchange of information. The idea behind building a tech literate population is so they will be continue to be able to take advantage of opportunities in the future. Not necessarily becoming a developer, but being a literate member of a globally networked world.