Back to School 2017 – To Code or Not to Code, That is the Question

As summer comes to a close for many of us, and millions of kids head back to school, many do so with questions about where the jobs of the future will be. For the last few years, the answer seems to have been: “just learn to code and you’ll be guaranteed an exciting and high paying career.” Today that’s still the perception of many.

And although coders are in fact an elite group (about 18.5 million people out of total global population of 7.4 billion), not every software engineer is destined to be the superstar we imagine when we think about software celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Ada Lovelace, or Tim Berners-Lee. Coding is where I started and a valued talent of many of Pega’s staff, but it would be disingenuous for me to assert it’s a career for everyone.

Provocatively, a recent Wired article positioned coding as the next blue-collar job. Shared more than 100 thousand times, it set off an interesting debate on whether that’s an accurate description, a good thing, a bad thing, and if coding is destined for the same fate as yesterday’s manufacturing jobs.

For the record, I believe software engineers will continue to be in demand for many years to come because software is what runs the world, and frankly, because much of that software today depends on the same esoteric and labor intensive languages we’ve been using for years.  Six decades after the first programming languages were introduced, most of us still have to translate what we want to do into the arcane language of the computer. In fact, to most, a snippet of ALGOL from the 50s doesn’t look all that different from the dozens of programming languages introduced last year. Like it or not, in many environments, we’re stuck with this situation for the foreseeable future. 

Understanding how computers work is terrific. But telling our kids the answer to their career question is simply to learn to code is a disservice to them and to our ability to innovate and ultimately compete effectively on the global stage.  And will become even more so in the future.

Yes, we need more software engineers but what we really need is more thinkers and ultimately a way to improve how people and computers interact. We need to create metaphors and concepts that sit closer to the person who is trying to get something done and systems that are smart enough to translate those ideas into code. And we need people who understand how to think conceptually, above the code, to make that happen. 

We already have software that is smart enough to write software and that can adapt to a new operating system, hardware platform, or cloud environment without having to re-code. It’s not the majority of software being used today, but I believe it is the future. In fact I’ve staked my career on it. There are more than 4,000 smart, passionate people around the world at Pega today helping make that vision a reality with tens of thousands more working for clients and partners.

So if your child or a loved one is thinking about a future career, by all means encourage them to learn to code. But simply learning to code is not the answer to the world’s problems or a guaranteed job. Encourage them to learn how to think conceptually, work collaboratively, and understand context. 

Our kids, should not be separated into two camps, those on one side who imagine, innovate, and drive and those on the other side who code, test, and deploy. Here, it’s back to school 2017. Let’s give our kids the tools and skills they deserve and the world needs.