Posted on 06/03/2026 10:20:54 AM PDT by karpov
It was once common to suggest people who lose their blue-collar jobs should “learn to code.” This is no longer very good advice, if it ever was, since coding is now something you should definitely not learn if you want to keep up with progress. (AI tells me that the number of jobs for programmers has declined by 27.5 percent since AI came along.) But “learn to code” remains a pretty good metaphor for what we faculty will have to do if we want to keep doing our jobs. Higher ed is a broken thing, and if we’re going to do meaningful work in the ruins—and help to rebuild them—we need to develop some very different skills.
By “learn to code,” I certainly don’t mean we need to bring a bunch of new apps and devices into our classrooms to “upgrade our pedagogy.” That’s a lot of what broke us. We can talk about the demographic cliff and administrative bloat, but all that could go away tomorrow, and the deeper problem would still be there. I’m talking about the problem with the students. A few years ago, we read about “the elite college kids who can’t read books.” A few months ago, it was “the film students who can no longer sit through films.” It’s reasonable to be skeptical of trend-spotting pieces about “the kids these days,” but the kids in my classes really can’t read books, and they really can’t sit through movies, and every professor I know says the same about their own students. The simple truth is that their attention spans have been wrecked, and they’re no longer capable of receiving what we faculty are currently capable of offering.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
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I’ve learned that life is about breaking the code...
Learn to Think
Learn to realize we brought in millions of Indians to take just about every IT and tech job in America. From schools to hospitals. It has nothing to do with AI. It is one of the most massive gaslighting operations in history. Big tech and your government has emasculated white guys and nobody is allowed to talk about it.
That sentence is so ignorant, it negates the entire article.
"Progress" in the context of the article is driven by software, and the future belongs to those who understand how it works, not who or what writes it.
All software is eventually distilled into generated machine code targeting a specific architecture.
This is not new, it has been for decades.
H-1B was always billionaire welfare from the get go.
So explain why we need to import 100,000 STEM workers/year?
“Learn to Code” was never advice.
It was a 2019 Joe Biden insult to out of work coal miners.
Lear to mine coal.
Lean to wash windows.
The best business to be in is mowing lawns and those related items. It doesn’t take much to get going and there are now broker apps to use to get started and build your biz model.
Now that’s funny.
-PJA USAID wonk can't find work?
Welcome to the real world. Learn to mine coal.
Which is evident by the ridiculously edited "shorts" on YouTube.
I’ve been a professional programmer for over 30 years, starting when I was a teenager working for my uncle’s business as a consultant. AI is good, but it’s not great. It makes mistakes, it makes bad programming decisions. Sometimes it even makes things up. Over the past two years I’ve slowly introduced it into my workflow, and I would argue that it’s about as good as a junior developer - which means constant supervision and correction. Far cheaper than a H1B and just as effective.
A mass cultural crisis that was not caused by the Baby Boomers!
The Currys in IT are learning this message loud and clear as Claude Code and Vibe coding replaces them.
Many people “learned to code”, and that was their problem. Coding is HTML, style sheets, SQL statements, and so on. True software is not the same; and, it is called “programming” or even “software engineering”. If one calls himself a “coder”, that person is not a “programmer”.
AI can pump out C++ codes and PLC Ladder Logic code in seconds when it would take me a day.
Bkmk
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