Today there has been a lot of publicity about the announcement from many tech companies, including Google and Microsoft, about the poor teaching of Computer Science. The BBC reported it as such: http://bbc.in/txcz7a.

I really agree with the premise of this article, in that we don’t really teach the right things to our kids. I have long argued that teaching touch typing would be one useful starting point: http://www.artificialgold.com/blog/2010/11/16/touch-typing-cure-for-saving-front-line-service-in-government/

However teaching programming is an over simplified concept. I think teaching databases and some simple scripting is appropriate. However I would think that for most young students, they simply don’t have the appetite for programming whilst at school, even during their A levels. Getting Maths, English and Science is much more important. I didn’t really learn programming until I was 22, I had good exposure to it before then, part of my Maths Degree, including a very useful placement year as part of my degree but still didn’t get the fire.

I think that people do realistically need to be taught on the job, with better structures in place. There is definitely no harm in refining the school courses but I think the real problem exists with the path into work.

An accountant, lawyer, engineer, HR professional, purchasing professional, doctor etc all have a fully planned route into the profession. Programming is less defined and subsequently less suited to this structure but as a career is currently at the other extreme; read a book on your own and try and find a job. In fairness there are some graduate schemes and certain companies that really look to do this right. However I have been to quite a few talks by noted people in the London Tech Scene and none ever think about this as a key issue. Indeed at one talk by Fred George of Forward, on Programmer Anarchy, it was clear that a new developer would really struggle to survive. The definition of a junior developer was someone contributing to user groups or open source projects. They just wanted to leach the best programmers from other companies (and it would be tempting for most!).

I think we should consider formalising graduate progression into development but it wont be easy. A good start could easily be the great and the good at least spending more time thinking about this.

The reason it is not happening is that training someone up takes time and can be a distraction from the day job. However not doing it means you are going to have to do a lot more yourself. There are even things in the way we code that could make things easier. Actually adopting simpler coding architectures could be one (technical point I agree).

Overall, great to hear this initiative but I think we need more focus on progression into developer careers too. It is not an easy proposition though.