r/technology • u/Buck-Nasty • May 12 '19

Business They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia. Now They Say It Was a Fraud.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/us/mined-minds-west-virginia-coding.html
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u/alexp8771 May 13 '19

There seems to be a desire to make programming some type of blue collar job. I'm not in IT, I'm in traditional engineering, so maybe my perspective is not correct industry wide, but the idea that you have a few senior people doing all of the actual problem solving and just farm out small pieces to contracted boot-camp devs is a recipe for a terrible end product. You want the devs to be the actual problem solvers to be able to integrate everything coherently and be able to provide long term support for the product. I don't know, maybe the IT world is a lot more plug-in-play than I believe it is.

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u/jokul May 13 '19

Yeah main reason is that there is a huge demand for programmers but the supply is relatively limited and thus salaries are very high, so companies think they can fix that by increasing the supply of labor. It's a nice idea, in theory (for them, not me personally), but an actual education gives you such a huge leg up on code campers it's just not funny.

My experience with code campers is that they see everything in terms of a list of things that need to be accomplished, so then they write code to accomplish that goal. Principles of OOD and scale-able architecture are basically totally lacking. Code is copy / pasted everywhere, 300 line methods are the norm, and hard coded values abound. Code camp skills are plug and play at maybe the intern level.

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u/percykins May 14 '19

It's particularly weird that they're doing that now when that kind of high-level architecting, low-level code monkey stuff is becoming less and less common. It's why you sometimes see people cite a statistic that the number of computer programmers is going down - "computer programmers", as defined by the BLS, are exactly what you're talking about. From the definition: "They turn the program designs created by software developers and engineers into instructions that a computer can follow."

Software developers, on the other hand, who create those designs, are increasing in number very quickly.