My wife fell into programming. She was offered some training after applying for a job as an accountant. (Illustration from Canva.)
This was in 1981.
Over the years she learned Assembler, Cobol, some C++ and Java as well. She found her calling in organizing and writing as computing moved from mainframes to the cloud. She now translates between what her bosses say they want code to do and what the programmers need to know to make the code do that.
Her employer helped her get a Master’s, and the training she needed at different stages of her career. In exchange she gave them 40 years of loyal service. It was a win-win.
Is this not happening anymore?
Computer science education seems to have become as specialized and useless as journalism education. My journalism courses at Northwestern were all about the process of putting together newspapers, magazines, and TV shows, processes I knew at the time would be replaced in an online world. I now see computer graduates focused on specific languages or applications, the idea being that they can’t comprehend the whole of what’s in front of them.
Tech companies used the greed of universities to offload the entire cost of training people onto these inadequate programs. They recruit for specific skills, for specific jobs. They take the people they get and plug them into slots. Some grow into managers, and the rest must come back, at their own expense, to learn new skills.
What’s happening in AI today is a revolution, and Big Tech is going at it in the French style. They’ve got out their guillotines and are chopping heads. Meanwhile, the few people who can claim specific AI skills, with degrees that may be far removed from computer science, are treated like little Napoleons.
Workers of the World Unite
If you like puns, they’re Russian into trouble.
The approach is asinine, as computing education has been asinine for decades. (This is the best Microsoft Co-Pilot with Dall-E could come up with after six attempts.)
Computer education shouldn’t focus on coding, on specific languages or specific applications. It should teach critical thinking. It should teach people how to learn, and it should teach communication skills. You need to know as much about business as math. You need to know how to organize, to work in teams, and how to learn.
What’s going on now is crazy. We don’t yet know what specific skills will be needed for jobs running the AI world. The jobs right now are all going to people who’ve engaged in studying AI. We need people who will implement it. AI needs people trained in databases, interface design, and social skills. The new experts should be on the current staff. What they’re getting from Big Tech is the shaft.
By saving money on programmers, tech has angered an entire generation of talented people. Trained professionals in their their 30s and 40s have been laid off. They can’t get new jobs as the skills they bought in college are obsolete. People like Andy Jassy and Marc Benioff, who once called programmers the “creative class,” are laughing at these people on their way to Wall Street, where they’re begging for equity to build Nvidia data centers.
What Happens Next?
The result is class division as companies spend trillions on data centers and dump code jockeys. Add all the other political conflicts in tech right now and you get an unstable 19th century world in which tech moguls are kings and those who do their bidding, even if educated, are seen as peasants.
This won’t end well. The moguls won’t wake up. Labor won’t remain disorganized and helpless. Even Indian programmers are getting their backs up. This is going to become a political struggle.
