Often times we hear news stories about how middle class jobs are slowly disappearing and making way for the tech revolution. Automated jobs are said to be leaving workers without a way to make ends meet as they suddenly won’t be needed anymore.
This, of course, is an extreme scenario and chances are that this won’t happen and if it did, it wouldn’t be sudden or over night.
We believe that coding teaches you way more than just how to code. It teaches you how to think! It teaches you that there’s always a solution to a problem and that collaboration for the sake of one end goal can result in extraordinary creations.
With all that being said, we believe that learning to code will create more jobs instead of taking them away. An article on WIRED titled “The Next Big Blue-Collar Job is Coding” seems to agree.
“When I ask people to picture a coder, they usually imagine someone like Mark Zuckerberg: a hoodied college dropout who builds an app in a feverish 72-hour programming jag—with the goal of getting insanely rich and, as they say, “changing the world.”
It goes on to say that this isn’t entirely accurate and that “The Valley employs only 8 percent of the nation’s coders.”
The reality is, with all the new technologies, courses, and ways to learn how to code (such as after school, in-person programs), that coding is becoming more accessible for people to learn.
It’s as simple as surrounding yourself with the right people. The environment around you has a much bigger impact than you think and surrounding yourself with people who have the same goal likely will accelerate the learning process.
In Kentucky, where you hear about a loss of mining jobs, Rusty Justice cofounded Bit Source, which is a code shop that retrains coal miners into programmers. 10-years ago, no one would have ever thought that a predominantly labor focused workforce could learn how to program but they are.
“Coal miners are really technology workers who get dirty,” Justice says. In due time, there will no doubt be more examples of this across other industries. Coding is a bridge to a new lifestyle and career. Don’t believe the media hype! Coding will only create more jobs, not take them away.