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0 pointsMBCook10y ago0 comments

You're right there are problems earlier, but things can still be improved now while the rest of the pipe is fixed.

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Improved, maybe, but the fundamental problem is at the beginning. If we had a need for concert violinists, encouraging college students to take up violin is pretty late in the game. We need a technical prodigies and the people who can start late are few and far between.

josegonzalez10y ago

Why is that? Just a personal observation, but I only actually started to understand programming my junior year of college and would find myself to be pretty technically proficient, and I know plenty of terrific developers who started of programming after a career in something completely unrelated (selling phones, painting, vet school).

Yeah it's hard to start learning how to program and become efficient at it, but there is no reason that we can't attack the issue at later stages in the pipeline.

protomyth10y ago

Because by the late stages, people's loves and hates have already been defined. Things are cool or "I don't like X" has set in. If you don't love STEM early, you won't want to do it late. Attacking the issue later in the educational pipeline is like adding a cron job to restart the web servers because of crappy programming. The correct answer is to actually fix the problem. We've tried enough patches by now and it disgusts me that we are talking about diversity in tech when we are not talking about diversity in pre-K and K-8.

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protomyth10y ago

josegonzalez10y ago

Yeah it's hard to start learning how to program and become efficient at it, but there is no reason that we can't attack the issue at later stages in the pipeline.

protomyth10y ago

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