Stumbled upon this blogpost by Mike Haadlow - a software developer in the UK. He talks about the possible reasons why there’s a shortage of good programmers and what could be done to fix it. Summary: Programmes that promise to make you a good programmer in a short time are a lie
It’s a common theme in the media that there is a shortage of skilled programmers (‘programmers’, ‘coders’, ‘software developers’, all these terms mean the same thing and I shall use them interchangeably). There is much hand-wringing over this coding skills gap. The narrative is that we are failing to produce candidates for the “high quality jobs of tomorrow”. For example, this from The Telegraph:
“Estimates from the Science Council suggest that the ICT workforce will grow by 39 per cent by 2030, and a 2013 report from O2 stated that around 745,000 additional workers with digital skills would be needed to meet demand between now and 2017.
Furthermore, research by City & Guilds conducted last year revealed that three quarters of employers in the IT, Digital and Information Services Sector said that their industry was facing a skills gap, while 47 per cent of employers surveyed said that the education system wasn’t meeting the needs of business.”
Most commentators see the problem as being a lack of suitable training. Not enough programmers are being produced from our educational institutions.
You can’t compare a 27 yrs old programmer who has been coding since he/she was 9 yrs old to Another 27 yrs old programmer who started coding when he/she was 25 yrs old.
Learning to code takes a lot of time(years) and patience… The only part where the writer is correct is where he said
Learning to code is one half of the problem. The hard thing about software development really is figuring out how to write production grade codes that are maintainable, salable and relatively bug free.
Learning to code is DIFFICULT and at the same time EASY. Difficult in the sense that there’s a threshold(Data structures, semantics et al) you need to cross while learning to code. Once you cross that threshold albeit after much dedication and practice, things become easy. It becomes easier to code in any other language you choose to learn thereafter. But always have in mind that there’s a threshold to cross, and I bet you you’d know when you cross that threshold, it’s like a spiritual something.