Why is it so hard to become a programmer?
For about six months, as a voluntary "laboratory assistant" I have been participating in the work of the club of novice programmers. I want to share my results of these observations and my own thoughts about why not everyone is able to master this profession. I once read that no more than 9% of people in any society are able to deal with IT-technologies. When our club was created, I had a real opportunity to refute or confirm this thesis and understand why there are so few “IT people”.
Study environment
Everyone can visit our club. The bulk of them learn about it from advertising courses for novice PC users. Many come from there. These are very different people and all of them, of course, have heard of high salaries in the IT industry and are full of enthusiasm to master such a financially profitable profession. But reality quickly cools the heat of most of them.
')
Study programming is not easy
Programming includes a set of complex disciplines, for the development of which requires an extensive amount of specific knowledge. This is nothing new for an IT person, but for neophytes this is amazing and unpleasant.
It turns out that despite the enthusiasm and a great desire to earn good money in the future, in order to assign one variable to another, master a couple of operators and perform some actions with them, many do not need a couple of hours, but several months. Moreover, they only go to an understanding of these very, at first glance, rather primitive actions.
Why is this happening? I think it’s because people who haven’t had anything to do with logic, mathematics and programming have a hard time rebuilding their own thinking. Usually, after all, a person gains experience by studying the surrounding environment and building on existing knowledge. But in this experience there is no place for conditions, cycles, binary reckoning and much more that is required for programming. In everyday life and ordinary life, all this is not used. That is why some of the “novice programmers”, when confronted with completely incomprehensible things, drop out of school in the first days or even hours.
It is necessary to learn how to use PL tools, to remember all their scanty knowledge of mathematics (and many of them, in principle, do not use it, except perhaps for calculating bills), to expand them to the required level. And this is only at the "start". Further it is necessary to master technologies based on the chosen programming language. I am already silent about the need for more English, at least at a technical level. That is why the chances of an applicant who has no special abilities, who was not fond of computer science at school and who did not encounter programming in high school, are quite small.
Of course, there are talented people who receive new knowledge fairly quickly. But, as shown by my observations, this is a very rare case. In my eyes, a lot of potential “specialists” passed through the club. None of them reached the finish line. Before the overwhelming majority of new students, after a month or two of intensive study, it turned out that programming was not at all their subject matter. And the most capable understood it much faster.
Of the approximately two hundred people who have passed through the club, so far only two talented and stubborn techies, who have pressed their lives, have managed to become a programmer. This is only 1 percent, and not 9, as the study read by me once said.
So what is the club?
The club continues to work, it turned out to be a great place to meet and communicate with people who would like to learn something new without too much stress. For example, a middle-aged scientist, already retired, decided to take up programming languages. There were mothers with children, married couples - young and not so much, laboratory assistants and university professors, active officers of special services, engineers of factories and even athletes. Who just was not! But for most, I repeat, programming was difficult or impossible, in general. However, no one bothered himself too much. Homework, for example, was ignored in principle. After a while, most people threw lessons.
Why is this so?
Everything is quite simple. It seems to many that they will be able to master a new profession in passing, having worked a month or two in an easy comfortable mode. Almost no one wants or wants to work and study seriously, spend months or even years of his life on mastering a new business. Here is such a picture.
Study environment
Everyone can visit our club. The bulk of them learn about it from advertising courses for novice PC users. Many come from there. These are very different people and all of them, of course, have heard of high salaries in the IT industry and are full of enthusiasm to master such a financially profitable profession. But reality quickly cools the heat of most of them.
')
Study programming is not easy
Programming includes a set of complex disciplines, for the development of which requires an extensive amount of specific knowledge. This is nothing new for an IT person, but for neophytes this is amazing and unpleasant.
It turns out that despite the enthusiasm and a great desire to earn good money in the future, in order to assign one variable to another, master a couple of operators and perform some actions with them, many do not need a couple of hours, but several months. Moreover, they only go to an understanding of these very, at first glance, rather primitive actions.
Why is this happening? I think it’s because people who haven’t had anything to do with logic, mathematics and programming have a hard time rebuilding their own thinking. Usually, after all, a person gains experience by studying the surrounding environment and building on existing knowledge. But in this experience there is no place for conditions, cycles, binary reckoning and much more that is required for programming. In everyday life and ordinary life, all this is not used. That is why some of the “novice programmers”, when confronted with completely incomprehensible things, drop out of school in the first days or even hours.
It is necessary to learn how to use PL tools, to remember all their scanty knowledge of mathematics (and many of them, in principle, do not use it, except perhaps for calculating bills), to expand them to the required level. And this is only at the "start". Further it is necessary to master technologies based on the chosen programming language. I am already silent about the need for more English, at least at a technical level. That is why the chances of an applicant who has no special abilities, who was not fond of computer science at school and who did not encounter programming in high school, are quite small.
Of course, there are talented people who receive new knowledge fairly quickly. But, as shown by my observations, this is a very rare case. In my eyes, a lot of potential “specialists” passed through the club. None of them reached the finish line. Before the overwhelming majority of new students, after a month or two of intensive study, it turned out that programming was not at all their subject matter. And the most capable understood it much faster.
Of the approximately two hundred people who have passed through the club, so far only two talented and stubborn techies, who have pressed their lives, have managed to become a programmer. This is only 1 percent, and not 9, as the study read by me once said.
So what is the club?
The club continues to work, it turned out to be a great place to meet and communicate with people who would like to learn something new without too much stress. For example, a middle-aged scientist, already retired, decided to take up programming languages. There were mothers with children, married couples - young and not so much, laboratory assistants and university professors, active officers of special services, engineers of factories and even athletes. Who just was not! But for most, I repeat, programming was difficult or impossible, in general. However, no one bothered himself too much. Homework, for example, was ignored in principle. After a while, most people threw lessons.
Why is this so?
Everything is quite simple. It seems to many that they will be able to master a new profession in passing, having worked a month or two in an easy comfortable mode. Almost no one wants or wants to work and study seriously, spend months or even years of his life on mastering a new business. Here is such a picture.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/292092/
All Articles