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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

I guess people believe what they want to believe, but it should be obvious that if programming is really something you can learn in a few months in your spare time, it’s not going to be a very valuable skill. Either programming requires extensive education and experience to be really proficient (read: employable) in, or it’s going to be a minimum wage “we can throw a rock and replace you this afternoon” call-center job.

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You can learn it in a few months in your spare time if you're cut out for it, which the vast majority are not. CS education for programming jobs is mostly a very expensive formality to convince hiring managers you know what you already knew before enrolling, or at least it was in my case.

"You can learn how to be a lawyer in a few months in your spare time if you're cut out for it" would be considered a ridiculous statement. Perhaps you could learn enough to be an assistant to a legal secretary.

The same applies to programming.

They're not the same thing at all. Being a lawyer involves cramming in an enormous volume of rote information over many years and passing an exhaustive exam; programming is just a combination of problem solving, being able to deal with abstract concepts and how computers work, and learning a relatively small amount of syntax and general concepts. You can easily get a grip on all that in a few months if it's your thing.

I disagree that it takes just a few months.

I'd say there are tons of hidden dependencies you have to learn in writing programs. Stuff that the tutorials and books often leave out. And that most developers take a few years to learn these dependencies, because there currently is no widely-known easy way to learn all this "tribal knowledge".

And when universities try to systematize ways to learn this tribal knowledge, they come up with a curriculum that takes most people 4 years to get through. (Yes there are many smart developers who could learn the curriculum faster.)

> learning a relatively small amount of syntax and general concepts

In what programming job?! Junior frontend dev churning out React components? Even there you're dealing with a dizzying array of HTML, CSS, and ever-changing JavaScript/Babel/Webpack/etc. insanity. In a few months you can barely produce some simple, low-quality code. It takes a lot longer for the concepts of good quality code to sink in.

junior PHP dev. basically on the job training.

it's always very costly, because it requires a very involved supervisor.

There was a time when it was possible to sit for the bar exam without having to pay rent to a law school, but naturally the law schools lobbied to change this.

Law is similar to programming in that you can learn a lot of the principles in a few months, and you can also learn how to do a lot of the day-to-day work in a specialty area.

Learning large volumes of case law is analogous to learning the details of low level programming; both fields require years to master. But those details are not required for a lot of work in either field.

Its both - programming is bimodal and becoming more so as we automate. A ton of programming is not really difficult, and cloud/SaaS keeps getting better to make those simple tasks trivial - eg setting up a small ecommerce store or a blog.

Meanwhile the hard stuff is out there, but increasingly being done by a few companies that sell it to the rest of the world.

So programming is becoming more bimodal and if you’re not on the hard curve it is going to become a lot less lucrative and a lot more competitive.

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