Ad Exec: Learn To Code Or You're Dead To Me 339
theodp writes "In a widely-read WSJ Op-Ed, English major Kirk McDonald, president of online ad optimization service PubMatic, informed college grads that he considers them unemployable unless they can claim familiarity with at least two programming languages. 'Teach yourself just enough of the grammar and the logic of computer languages to be able to see the big picture,' McDonald advises. 'Get acquainted with APIs. Dabble in a bit of Python. For most employers, that would be more than enough.' Over at Typical Programmer, Greg Jorgensen is not impressed. 'I have some complaints about this "everyone must code" movement,' Jorgensen writes, 'and Mr. McDonald's article gives me a starting point because he touched on so many of them.'"
Re:Moronic (Score:5, Funny)
There are thousands of occupations with no need for programming skills. Ah, how about nursing, for instance. This is just an ad salesman trying to give off the impression of being relevant in this day and age. He's an ad salesman. An idiot.
I agree!
I'm a technical recruiter and I can tell you that we need people who can program in askee! Really! Why the other day, I demanded an askee file from a candidate and he sent me a file with a ".txt" extension!
Really?
Are people that stupid?
I asked again, and he sent me a file with an extension of ".asc"!
Come on!
We just can't find qualified technology people!
Finally, this brilliant kid from Deli sent me a ".askee" file.
Finally!
We hired him to program SeeKwell in C+#.
Re:Fucking English Majors (Score:5, Funny)
And that's all there is to say about that.
Well, duh. Which of us can't think of an English major we'd like to fuck? But that's not what we're discussing...
Re:Moronic (Score:1, Funny)
I can't think of a single job on the planet where I can't come up with a place where coding wouldn't be useful.
You lack imagination and probably aren't going to be worth employing anyway, I'm guessing your comment is a denfensive response to your fear of becoming obsolete.
I'm confident that anyone born after today that can't code is going to be severely unemployable. He'll, even freaking construction works and garbage men could use coding skills to help them with vArious bits of their jobs. It's not all hammering nails and picking up garbage you know ...
Re:Basic html and css (Score:5, Funny)
<head></head>
<body>
I am an HTML coder.
There are many like me.
I can has job?
</body>
</html>
Re:Moronic (Score:2, Funny)
I can't think of a single job on the planet where I can't come up with a place where coding wouldn't be useful.
I can't think of a single job on the planet where being able to keep track of the "n't"s in your sentences wouldn't be useful. Also, just because there are occasions when being able to code would be useful doesn't mean every single person needs to be able to do it.
You lack imagination and probably aren't going to be worth employing anyway
[citation needed]
I'm guessing your comment is a denfensive response to your fear of becoming obsolete.
You do realise that people can comment on matters that aren't directly relevant to them, right?
Re:Fucking English Majors (Score:0, Funny)
Yeah, it's almost as though they make up for unemployability with sheer hotness. First girlfriend in college. English major. Hot. Liked to bang like no one's business. No idea what she planned to do with English. Unlikely to matter given that she could just pick some man take care of her.
Probably a rich housewife/socialite now.
Re:Moronic (Score:2, Funny)
He can develop a genetic program to solve the travelling salesman problem of his pickup route and optimize the amount of time it takes him to complete his run.
Re:O'rly? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Moronic (Score:2, Funny)
Lets say that you are a nurse. Part of your job is to move (one by one) all patients from the hospital database into dead or cured folders, depending on which flag they have on the database.
a) You don't know anything about programming, so you spend an hour every day doing this task.
b) You know a little about programming and you ask from yourself: I wonder could the computer do this task for me.
I'm a programmer and I see the world in a very different way than everyone else. When ever I see people at work, doing anything. I ask myself, could we automate that job or part of it. I think that automating repeating tasks is a very good idea, because it saves money and reduces errors (when properly implemented). We are currently teaching kids at school all sort of things that they often don't need later in life ever again. Why not spend a few hours for programming also?
There are two ways to solve this:
a) Hire a programmer to monitor people when they do their work and ask the programmer if there is something to be improved.
b) Teach non-programmers to view the world like that.
While the a) would perhaps provide better quality in short term, b) has the advantage of being adaptable and it can also help people at home.
Note also that there are many ways of doing programming. You can do it by learning a language, or you can do it by just drag&drop: http://scratch.mit.edu/
Re:Basic html and css (Score:5, Funny)
Gah!!! It's all wrong! Here, lemme help you:
There, now you're ready for today's web.
Re:Not a program per employee (Score:5, Funny)
Each garbage collector need not write a separate program. An employee of the company employing dozens of garbage collectors can write the program, and the team for each truck can load a map into that program.
You, sir, have obviously never worked on an open source project.