Bonum Certa Men Certa

On "Learning to Code"

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 20, 2025,
updated Jun 20, 2025

Learn to Code

System administration and coding (programming, development, whatever!) are valuable skills. Writing good text is fine, but what if you then depend on hired contractors to fix any small technical issue, or to build tools? For many patent-centric blogs which we follow it was foreseen to be so expensive that they outsourced to platforms such as Blogspot or TypePad - a bad decision in retrospect. This morning we wrote about journalists who had outsourced to Twitter and then quit it, more or less because of and/or after MElon took over.

The "FEDERAL RESERVE BANK of NEW YORK" has new research data on "The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates" and the article above deduces that "Learn to Code" is very bad advice. Back in the 90s, when I was a teenager, this was considered very common, uncontroversial advice.

Is that still a valid or an invaluable advice? Well, with globalisation there's more and more competition from people willing to do the same work for a lower fee. I saw that in prior jobs that I had and that hasn't gotten any better since then.

There's another way to look at it: That is "because Microsoft has replaced once useful curricula with marketeering and fluff," argues an associate. Yes, many "programmers" in contemporary workplaces or settings use frameworks instead of coding, plus there is the issue of them relying on slop for code. Some employers demand the latter, as I explained some days ago. So quality may suffer, plus things get bloated (large chains of frameworks where none should be required and where none are actually needed).

It should be noted that on "learning to code", in general or as a general concept, we'd also like refer to the May post we wrote about bicycles vs handicaps. We recently saw a great deal of handicaps being promoted in the media - even earlier today - and maybe one can tie that into Richard Stallman's (RMS) goals of software freedom where the end user is in charge of what the machine does. Simplicity is a prerequisite and frameworks, rather than foster reuse, are contributing to bloat which is hard to audit. systemd is a good example of this. Various JavaScript "frameworks" (sometimes overused to accomplish something very simple) would be another.

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