The ‘Coding’ fallacy

Over the past few years, the idea that computer programming or “Coding” is the key to Africa’s unemployment and development problems has bloomed across the continent.

In Nigeria, the bug catches on in real time. The desire to make coding a “new basic” skill for all Nigerians has driven the formation of coding schools, non-profit concerns and policy cultures.

It’s amusing to see governors presiding over states with inadequately funded schools, barely stocked and mostly empty libraries, underpaid teachers, make a public show of giving indigent pupils scholarships to participate in coding workshops.

Coding is just another gimmick from the digital cult of distraction. As Rojek points out, it masks the real stagnation of life, hiding its decomposition behind thick layers of sheen and contrived glitter.

The coding movement, like previous forms of distraction, seduces us to engage in imitative but ill-suited enlightenment. It asks and deflects in one breath, what Hedges would call, the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperial wars, economic collapse, and political corruption.

We live in a world were education is continually mauled and reconstructed to be market-friendly. Thus the recent fascination with coding, the notion that Africa and Nigeria’s children and youth will profit by the over-hyped precepts and algorithms of programming – it’s all part of a corporately-managed Nirvana, tentacles of the same calamari.

Critics of the coding train allege that its primary goal is to increase the number of programmers on the market and thus trigger a regime of dismal wages, even as tech companies smile to the banks.

Many parents, too, are encouraging their children to learn to code. The recent boom in kids coding classes draws attention to public perceptions that coding is a crucial part of children education.

The attainment of coding skills by children, the girl-child and housewives, in particular, has been fetishized as the panacea to societal problems even though the promoters of such cause are aware that the provision of well stocked libraries, stable electricity supply, standard school science laboratories, well-paid teachers, food security, and humane public health policies, among others would the cited beneficiaries greater good.

Coding, as promoted by STEM-based learning programmes, is sold as the major guarantee of employability now and in the future in an industry that seems to be growing and evolving more rapidly than we can keep up. But is this the reality? As Myranda Leigh Harris would ask, how many more coders could we possibly need?

The fact remains that barely half of high school and university students who major in science, technology, engineering or math-related subjects secure employment in their field after graduation.

That certainly casts doubt on the idea that there is a “skills gap” between workers’ abilities and employers’ needs, notes Kate Miltner Ph.D candidate in Communication, University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Speaking on America’s coding culture, she says: “Concerns about these disparities has helped justify investment in tech education over the past 20 years. As millions of dollars flow to technology companies in the name of education, they often bypass other major needs of U.S. schools.

“Technology in the classroom can’t solve the problems that budget cuts, large class sizes and low teacher salaries create. Worse still, new research is finding that contemporary tech-driven educational reforms may end up intensifying the problems they were trying to fix. Who will benefit most from this new computer science push? History tells us that it may not be students.”

Indeed, the jury is out over the real beneficiaries of the coding train. A cursory look around would reveal that most of the non-profits advancing the coding train are affiliated to big business and trust funds’ handout list. There has to be something wrong in that, right?

Yet the frantic quest to acquire programming skills may be unnecessary. Using traditional terminology, data scientist, Kady M, analyses why programming newbies comprising students and 30-something-year olds, learning to code, would be switching jobs before they turn 40 or 50 perhaps.

The obsession with coding, it would seem, is ill-informed and misdirected. Kady traces society’s never-ending digital shuttles on the coding train. The basic development of programming language, she notes, occurred in the 1950s-60s, when mainframe computing, starting with many different vendors entered the marketplace. The period ends with the IBM 370 being the de facto computing standard, and COBOL being the de facto programming language.

In the 1970s, minicomputers entered the venue, triggering a resurgence in the use of FORTRAN alongside COBOL. Personal computing emerged in the 1980s and computer programming shifted to the IBM PC/Microsoft combination. Program development was primarily done in BASIC.

Client/Server computing emerged in the 1990s. Object oriented computing begin to appear, with C++ being the most prevalent. Programming tools such as IBM’s VisualAge also appear, and 4th generation computing languages are developed.

In the 2000’s, internet technologies took hold. HTML became the internet’s common language. Java also became the core computer language of the internet.

As you read, the core internet technologies are supplemented by cloud computing and microservices, which are single-purpose programs running in the cloud to do very specific things for programmers.

Through these periods, there had been a large but temporary increase in the number of programmers needed, but the number employed per unit of output rapidly decreases near the end of the period.

“Bottom line: In the beginning of the period you needed a lot of programmers to develop a given output; at the end of the period, you needed a lot less (like, maybe one) to do a job that previously took maybe a hundred to do,” says Kady.

Today, companies are pushing economies of scale by moving computing functions off their own premises and into the Cloud. This is requiring a load of new programmers aka “Coders,” fluent in microservice technologies over the next decade or so, as existing programs are re-tooled and modernised.

But coders, data scientists warn, should learn from history as software companies are already working overtime to put them on the unemployment line. They want to decrease how labour intensive the re-platforming to microservices is; experts argue that if you are writing scripts to drive and link these services today, you won’t be doing that in a couple of years. Somebody with much less skill than you, but who understands the higher level programming tool, will be doing your job.

Also, there is a new player that makes the above even more drastic in terms of shortening coding careers: Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The coding skills that children acquire today will be outdated by the time they are ready to enter the workforce, educators argue, and stress that, the more meaningful purpose of a good STEM education, is to help students develop skills in critical thinking, exploration, and problem solving-?skills that are emphasised in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics classrooms and approaches.

These are the skills that will guide youth toward becoming more employable in the future in any profession, any position, any field. And while we can use coding as a platform for STEM-based learning, coding is not?—?and should not be?—?the only hands-on activity to develop and harness these skills.