*This article appears in the December 2016 issue. But the real heroes are people who go to work every day and turn out good stuff-whether it’s cars, coal, or code. We’ve cooed over the billionaire programmers of The Social Network and the Anonymized, emo, leather-clad hackers of Mr. For decades, pop culture (and, frankly, writers like me) have overpromoted the “lone genius” coder. But that doesn’t preclude a new mainstream vision of what most programming work actually* is*. Now, to be sure, society does need some superstars! Serious innovators, at companies and in academia, are the ones who create new fields like machine learning. “We need to get more employers saying, ‘Yeah, we just need someone to manage the login page,’” he says. That’s a cultural albatross, CodeTN cofounder Caleb Fristoe says. Some students (and teachers) worry that the kids don’t fit the Zuckerbergian cliché. Meanwhile, the Tennessee nonprofit CodeTN is trying to nudge high school kids into coding programs at community colleges. That’s a solidly middle-class job, and middle-class jobs are growing: The national average salary for IT jobs is about $81,000 (more than double the national average for all jobs), and the field is set to expand by 12 percent from 2014 to 2024, faster than most other occupations. But any blue-collar coder will be plenty qualified to sling JavaScript for their local bank. Why would they need to? That level of expertise is rarely necessary at a job. These sorts of coders won’t have the deep knowledge to craft wild new algorithms for flash trading or neural networks. There’d be less focus on the wunderkinds and more on the proletariat.
You could learn how to do it at a community college midcareer folks would attend intense months-long programs like Dev Bootcamp. As my friend Anil Dash, a technology thinker and entrepreneur, notes, teachers and businesses would spend less time urging kids to do expensive four-year computer-science degrees and instead introduce more code at the vocational level in high school. Among other things, it would change training for programming jobs-and who gets encouraged to pursue them.
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