Jobs for Coders! (If Only More People Knew How to Code)

“Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find. There just aren’t enough people who are trained and have these skills today.” — Mark Zuckerberg

That’s just one of many quotes by prominent people on former Microsoft executive Hadi Partovi’s Code.org, a nonprofit dedicated to improving computer programming education in schools, which, according to stats on the site, nine out of 10 high schools don’t offer to teach to students. (Probably because there aren’t enough instructors who can teach programming in high school in the first place because there aren’t enough people who are trained with the skills — it’s a circle.) Although Partovi doesn’t know exactly how to fix this problem, he’s taking the first step of starting the conversation, and pointing educators to resources on his site (like Code Academy, which I’ve tried out before and liked). It should come to no surprise that the job outlook for computer programmers is very good. Back in my day (my day being the early/mid-’90s), we learned word processing and played Oregon Trail in the school computer lab. We might as well get some basic computer programming in there too.

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