Beautiful. There's a bit of poetic justice in this.
Programmers have been callously obsoleting various careers (and thus people) for decades now. In fact, it's likely that programmers are currently hard at work trying to obsolete careers that your little sister may already be considering!
It's wonderful that the programming field is about to get disrupted. Wonderful! Programmers about to see their skills become as common as basic reading or writing.
Programmers, fear Codecademy. You're about to taste your own medicine. Expect your irrationally high salaries to drop — that's justice.
The coding job salaries and the barriers to entry have been driven down for years via outsourcing, the easy-to-write mobile frameworks, and other factors like downturns in the first-world economies combined with a glut of CS students that were chasing the previous wave.
There's always going to be value in really knowing what you are doing across the full stack, and that is not going to be killed off next year with tutorials.
I share the excitement with having more people in the field, which will help drive it forward. But your glee in programmers "getting what's coming to them" (my words, not yours) is odd.
Programming is becoming more complicated over time. The increase in complexity will offset the increased availability of basic literacy. We see this in Law as well. Though most people can read and write the language of Law, they do not understand the implications of what they read and would write. Similarly, though someone may read and write code, they may not understand the implications of what they do. Same for scriptwriters or novelists.
Programming is as singular a profession as "writing" is a singular profession; instead of the future you seem to imagine, I foresee something else entirely.
Just as there are lawyers, scriptwriters, journalists, novelists, biographers, bloggers and tweeters, so too will there be an increased societal understanding of the differentiation already happening within code-writing. Embedded, Systems, Application, UX.
Further, programming (like law) is a profession whose mastery requires an understanding of an ever-increasingly complicated system. While there is a glut of fresh law grads, there is also high demand for lawyers with niche skill sets.
In short, yes. Low-end programmers will continue to get paid less but high-end programmers will probably get paid more, and there will be more of them, but not as a percentage of all programmers (but as a percentage of the population as a whole.) Also, more people will program as an adjunct to their existing responsibilities.
Programming is becoming more complicated over time. The increase in complexity will offset the increased availability of basic literacy
Is it? Python will do in a few lines what would take forty lines in Fortran. I was programming for the Mac in 1995, when you'd spend thousands of lines just trying to get the machine to do things which a new Xcode project now does by default without any lines of code.
No doubt Python is more expressive than Fortran. Programming languages, tools, and software engineering has gotten better.
If we were write the same software as 30 years ago, it would be an easier job. But we aren't. We have more powerful processors, more memory, more data and more connectivity. The kind of software that is in demand now is more complex than the software from 30 years ago.
People develop to the limits of their technologies and their own ability. Smarter technologies allow us to make much more complex apps, which require more effort. I don't have to create my own windowing framework anymore, but that doesn't mean I'm not still working to the limits of my ability 20 years later.
Hah. I won't downvote you...but you're wrong. I remember when people were telling me that web designers wouldn't have a job because everyone could just use Microsoft Frontpage.
Coding takes effort. Really good coding takes smarts + effort. An awesome application takes effort, smarts, a great idea, luck, good design, lots of time, etc. Codecademy should be encouraged because it gets people an entry point to developing, but I suspect you're underestimating the effort required to produce Call of Duty or Google Docs.
As I've learned to program, I found that the language was the easy part. The hard part was learning to think like a programmer, which requires a complete mental shift, for most of us anyway. That's the hard part.
> effort, smarts, a great idea, luck, good design,
Also End-to-end, top-to-bottom knowledge of the technology and knowledge of the problems you're trying to solve with the technology (aka 'Domain Expertise').
I applaud your enthusiasm, and while I look forward to a future where some degree of logical reasoning and programming skills are commonplace, looking around at a world where it's rare to find a human who is literate with their own spoken and written language, I have no fear of my programming skills becoming common.
Learning a few basics of syntax is one thing, but learning to actually develop software is a skill that is not entirely common even within the subset of mathematically and logically inclined people who are currently programmers.
MIT (and I assume other top CS schools) doesn't teach coding 'skills' (6.00 aside, and its not required for a cs degree, or the first two weeks of 6.005), but instead teaches you knowledge about how to solve problems that a coder will encounter while... coding... IMHO, thats what the salaries are for.
That said, lowering the barrier to code also means lowering the barrier to encountering these types of problems, thus hopefully making more/better solutions. The more the merrier!
I've heard this argument in a variety of professions--that an influx of new talent is going to destroy things for the incumbents. The part people don't get, is that the reason these fields become exciting is because demand is widely expected to increase and therefore more people take that as a signal to get into the field.
So, millions of people are going to get into programming as demand increases by the equivalent supply of millions of people. Prices, if anything, will stay the same or go up. And yet still, there is a wide difference in wages between 1st world and 2nd, 3rd world devs. As far as I can tell, there isn't a particular difference in talent, so I suppose there's some artificiality built in there.
In any case, I think things like code academy are great, I'd urge more people to learn to program, it's a great skill.
I hope more people do follow those signals and get into the field!
The challenged faced in other countries (such as Spain where I live) is that it's easier than ever to pump highly qualified programmers and engineers out of state-sponsored colleges, but businesses rely on software and technology from other countries (like the US) - hence there's not the same level of a national job market demanding these skills. Too much supply, so to say.
Codecademy and similar stuff are great for strong programmers.
Why?
Strong programmers doesn't compete with weak programmers. The stuff they can do, and the speed they work is at a totally different level. see the 1000X productivity debate.And it does take years of training to stop being a weak programmer.
To strong programmers, codecademy(and similar tools) will open a lot of opportunities.It would be easier for them to collaborate with business and domain experts.It would be easier to talk with domain experts, easier to prototype and domain experts could offer more help in the development process which will help building partnerships.Those collaborations would open many new collaboration opportunities , and business opportunities.
The day someone can code as well as me and my fellow computer science graduates for <= $10 / hour will be a great day (if it ever arrives) - I'd be happy to code alongside a team of a couple of people on a new startup idea (or hire a few at $10 an hour for my own startup).
Programmers have been callously obsoleting various careers (and thus people) for decades now. In fact, it's likely that programmers are currently hard at work trying to obsolete careers that your little sister may already be considering!
It's wonderful that the programming field is about to get disrupted. Wonderful! Programmers about to see their skills become as common as basic reading or writing.
Programmers, fear Codecademy. You're about to taste your own medicine. Expect your irrationally high salaries to drop — that's justice.
Love the site, guys. Keep it up. :)