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Comment by schalab | Hacker News Reader

Maybe its not an education problem. Maybe the idea that everyone can be an engineer/coder is just as ridiculous as everyone can be a musician.

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And not everyone is interested in becoming a programmer. Not everyone wants to sit at a desk staring at a computer screen all day at their job.

And many of the ones that do want to sit around and code (older workers) find it impossible to finds job — throwing a monkey wrench into the narrative of some massive shortage.

Agreed.

Some people have the potential and some people don’t. Those who do have it, have it in wildly varying degrees.

I think the problem with American education at least is it caters to the dumbest kid in the class and doesn’t have any widespread notion of HS-level vocational education. So the smartest kid in the class winds up dumber than the smartest kids in other countries’ classes.

> as ridiculous as everyone can be a musician.

Why is this ridiculous?

If you don't have any friends that would make the answer to that question apparent, I can introduce you to a few of mine ;)

If you live in a culture where musical ability isn't ubiquitous, such as the western world decades after the invention of recorded music, this may seem obvious, but it's not. The 20th century saw a precipitous decline in musical ability in the general population of the western world.

Being a musician isn't an issue of talent but of training. Very, very few people lack the ability to play music. Most people who claim they can't carry a tune are simply missing a few foundational skills such as pitch matching.

It's not at the lowest levels of musical ability that not everyone has what it takes to be an excellent musician. It's at the highest. It doesn't just take being trained in the basics followed bypractice time; it takes very effective practice time which has a huge compounding effect. And you as an individual have to able to find out what that means for you. Not everyone can.

That is a truism for most fields. On the highest echelons of talent you have people with genetic predisposition. But OP was not suggesting that everyone can be a world-class musician, just that the vast majority of people can be musicians.

Of course, by definition, only 1% of people can be in the top 1% of something.

I was taking the original comment to be along the lines of maybe only x% of people have what it takes to be good enough to be professional computer scientists or engineers.

Being a good musician is absolutely a matter of talent. Anyone with interest can be a dabbler. But the people who really stand out have natural ability combined with passionate motivation.

Talent is the amount of work you don't have to do to be significantly better than the average person.

This applies to virtually every field, including software development.

I disagree.. And so does the book "Talent is Overrated". Did you know that Mozart's father was a world expert in... teaching music? Did you know Tiger Woods father would bounce a golf ball in front of Tiger when he was in a crib? Steph Curry's father was in the NBA; and there are videos of him hitting half court shots at 13 years old. The reason things like being technically good at music appear impossible; is because we either lack the proper language to describe physical mechanics (what is actually happening when Steph shoots a 3; What is actually happening when Jimi Hendrix hits a guitar string) or someone hasn't taken the time to make that knowledge widely accessible.

Having played guitar for more than 20 years (and recently having time to be able to play 4 hours a day) I've only just now broken past speed barriers and learning how to truly play the instrument. I've read and download HUNDREDS of books, seen many teachers, jammed with many people, watched so many videos; and maybe 1 or 2 books have hinted at what it really takes to play the guitar. I could easily explain it now that I know to anyone and have them at super speed within a year. I've heard the same story from others in regards to DJing, piano, producing and anything else. Unless the person has some obvious physical abnormality that allows them to do some skill; most people in normal physical shape can do what we would deem AMAZING things with the right teacher. Sure.. Maybe they won't develop PERFECT PITCH; but most of the greats didn't have that either.

> because we either lack the proper language to describe physical mechanics (what is actually happening when Steph shoots a 3; What is actually happening when Jimi Hendrix hits a guitar string) or someone hasn't taken the time to make that knowledge widely accessible.

In many cases the language is there, but you have to have developed some physical skill to understand what it means. We aren't born with high class intuition about our bodies in motion.

There's also a lot of technique out there which gets you some of the way...but not the rest. The difference between a swimmer at a regional club and a swimmer at national levels isn't primarily raw talent. They don't do the strokes the same way. Likewise, there are a lot of things taught in, say, Suzuki violin that I have found hold students back. On the other hand, Suzuki is amazing at producing students that actually play. I know how to teach a musician how to play violin, but I don't know how to teach a beginner to both music and violin how to do both in a way that wouldn't lead them to quit vastly more often than Suzuki does.

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