What I’m
about to say is a POV that’s being repeated more and more often these days. Please, before knee-jerk responding, read an
academic paper about the so-called ‘tech talent shortage’: http://www.epi.org/publication/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill-labor-market-analysis
Having
worked in HR for years, I can’t tell you how many software developer resumes I’ve
looked at in various contexts, from recruiting at job fairs, hiring, and
reviewing. For each job, we get hundreds of applications. The lack of tech
talent is simply overstated--there is an abundance of coding talent, but a dearth of skilled programmers.
When I
worked at my last company, we had 1,200 applications for one software
engineering job. We were also hiring in machine learning; for those roles, we
were looking for Ph.Ds in natural language processing doing truly novel and
niche research. These people are a dime a dozen and we simply couldn't pay them
enough to leave Uber/Amazon/Microsoft/Google.
I can’t
speak to technical details, but my contention is that the AI developed by these
extremely smart people will actually constrain the market for software
development. Computers will simply become smarter at talking to each other, and
the rate at which they get smarter will only accelerate. We(developers and companies) will be stuck with
the English language, a clunky amalgam of syntactic structures and root
languages that resists change at every turn.
Concurrently, AI will find the shortest path to
the problems we drum up, and as these algorithms create more algorithms, our
human capacity to understand what machine learning is doing will diminish. Companies simply will not have the incentive to hire a fallible, exhaustible,
and expensive engineer to solve these sorts of problems. Human teams will
diminish in size and cost; meanwhile, self-improving machines would only become
smarter and more efficient over time. This has happened to almost every industry that could be automated--resist it or become unemployed.
Don't take my word for it: https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/future-of-employment.pdf
In my
doomsday scenario, the engineers who would survive would be the ones behind the
machines and the ones who do art. I’ve
seen this in the real world. At my last company, we hired technical artists who
were able to meld the world of art and programming. They made games that humans
would enjoy.
As I’m
teaching English, sometimes I feel I have to make the case for the humanities.
Why learn Shakespeare when you could learn Python? Why analyze and exfoliate
themes from To Kill a Mockingbird rather
than learn Java and build a program? Every hour spent reading is an opportunity
cost, after all.
We see this
influence everywhere, as reading by the general American public diminishes
every year and more of our attention is constrained to smartphones.
And yet, I
think of the engineer I met who remembers lines from The Prince by Machiavelli, our 10th grade text. I think
of highly technical people who love reading and intellectual stimulation, who
think of problems in the context of the holistic; I think of executives who, on
average, read a book every week; I think of my fellow English teachers who
teach activism and feminism and tolerance of immigrants; I think of the readers
I’ve met in my personal life who truly understand the world and the people in
it in a non-technical sense—in an emotional sense—in a humanistic sense.
I want my
10th graders to stay well-rounded.
When I was
enrolled in business classes about a year ago, I took this course called ‘Executive
Leadership.’ It was an interesting class and introduced me to the world of
organizational development (a term that basically means applying psychology to
business).
On our
first day, the professor gave us an interesting exercise to complete. It was
basically this: “Think of the most influential leaders in your life. What
qualities do they have?”
We wrote down three qualities each.
He then
asked, “How many of these are technical skills?”
0.
The silence
made the point.
You shouldn’t
learn to code. You shouldn’t learn technical skills for the sole purpose of getting a good job. You should learn human
skills, including compassion and empathy and leadership and
discipline, and apply these skills to all facets of your life. You will learn
how to inspire people, an algorithm that computers have yet to
understand (who knows; someone is working on this now).
You will build your passion and in the process, create a community
that helps you accomplish your goals. That kind of slow development of
character doesn’t have an immediate payoff. But anything worth doing takes years
to foment and ferment. These are not technical skills; these are life-skills. And yes, maybe you pick up how to build games and computer programs along the way. But in this approach, you do it the right way, in a sustainable manner, with qualities that distinguish you from your peers. A life well-lived. Socrates would be envious.
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