Learn to Code

"Learn to Code" was a slogan and a series of public influence campaigns in the United States and other countries during the 2010s that encouraged the development of computer programming skills among all citizens in an economy increasingly centered on information technology. The campaign led to endorsements from politicians and the proliferation of coding bootcamps to rapidly train people in programming. A backlash erupted in 2019 in the form of online harassment of laid-off journalists.

Economic context

The 2010s saw a shift in US stock market valuations that strongly favored information technology companies. In March 2010 the top ten most valuable US companies included Microsoft and Apple Inc. at #2 and #3 and Google at #9. The following year Apple displaced Exxon Mobil as the highest-valued US company. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape Communications and technology venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, remarked that "software is eating the world" and predicted that software would assume a central place in the US economy. Noting that unemployment remained high in the wake of the global financial crisis, he urged greater emphasis on education in all aspects of the software industry to avoid further unemployment caused by software-driven disruption. By June 2015 all three technology companies were at the top of the value ranking and Facebook at #12 had surpassed Walmart. By March 2019 Amazon.com had joined Apple, Microsoft and Google in the top four, Facebook stood at #6, and payment technology company Visa Inc. was at #8.

Codecademy and Code.org

Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski launched Codecademy in August 2011 with a mission to offer "crash courses" in computer programming to a broad audience. It received initial funding from several technology venture capital firms including Union Square Ventures, the venture arm of O'Reilly Media, Y Combinator and Chris Dixon's Founder Collective. The following January Codecademy launched a viral marketing campaign called Code Year that urged people to make "learn to code" one of their New Year's resolutions. The launch of the campaign's web site, which featured endorsements from Codecademy's investors, was promoted on social media by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and Washington Post reporter Ezra Klein, among others. Media outlets publicizing the launch included CNN, CNN Money, The New Yorker, Slate and Fast Company (with an article written by Sims).

Some commentators responded skeptically to Code Year. Personal computing journalist Matthew Murray countered that programming well enough to be professionally adept typically required years of practice and expressed reservations about the "commoditizing and corruption" of a difficult career. More prominently, Jeff Atwood, co-founder of the programming question-and-answer site Stack Overflow, argued that the supply of coding talent should be balanced with its practical demand, which was constrained by the applicability of programming to problems and the disadvantages of writing more code than necessary. Former software developer Ciara Byrne was similarly critical. Code Year was nonetheless successful at introducing the advocacy of code literacy into public discourse in the ensuing years.

January 2013 saw the founding of a permanent code literacy advocacy group, Code.org. Led by brothers Hadi and Ali Partovi, the organization debuted with an advertisement featuring Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and other technology businesspeople, as well as non-technology personalities like musician will.i.am and athlete Chris Bosh. Code.org launched the "Hour of Code" campaign in December, with endorsements from Barack Obama, actor/businessman Ashton Kutcher and singer Shakira, which featured workshops at the Apple and Microsoft campuses and urged school teachers to devote an hour of class time to programming education. The group did not disclose its initial funding, but in 2016 it raised a total of $23 million for teacher training and policy advocacy from Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan, Microsoft, Google and Infosys. Separately, in November 2013 NBC's Today show reported approvingly on a New York technology entrepreneur who gave a homeless man a laptop computer and JavaScript coding lessons.

In 2014 other programming education startups joined Codecademy for another Year of Code campaign that targeted the United Kingdom. Saul Klein, an early investor in Codecademy and Seedcamp, another participating startup, was on the campaign's board of directors. The BBC, a partner in the campaign, promoted it without consistently disclosing its involvement. Stirling University social scientist Ben Williamson has explored the development of a "learning to code" policy network in the UK at length, describing it as "not a coherent and stable network but a messy hybrid of intentions, ambitions, and interests." He identified Code Club as an early manifestation of the movement, founded in April 2012 and supported by Microsoft, Google and the Department for Education.

TechHire and coal miners

A significant policy result of the "learn to code" campaigns was the TechHire initiative, which the Obama administration announced in March 2015. A joint effort among federal, state and local governments and the private sector, TechHire pledged $100 million in federal grants for non-degree programs to train people in software development. The administration noted Codecademy and bootcamp programs at Flatiron School, Galvanize and Hack Reactor as examples of the accelerated training approach that would be supported. In a separate program, Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson spent $5 million to promote coding education in public schools and established an online training system for rural schools.

The TechHire initiative was deployed nationally, but its progress in the depressed coal mining areas of central Appalachia became the subject of widespread interest after optimistic reports in 2016 about Bit Source, a web development startup in Pikeville, Kentucky staffed with retrained coal miners. Subsequent reports suggested a more mixed record, with miners completing the program of one Appalachian training academy but not receiving their certificates or finding any jobs. A series of coding school closures in 2017 prompted a reconsideration of the model; a Bloomberg report found that several large San Francisco Bay area technology companies were unsatisfied with coding schools' results and did not pursue their students for employment. A broader survey in 2018 by Stack Overflow found that nearly half of bootcamp graduates were current software developers building their skills. Among the remaining 54.5%, 16.3% found a job immediately while 20% took three months or longer.

Despite such concerns, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden endorsed learning to code as a way forward for miners and other blue-collar workers during a campaign speech at Derry, New Hampshire on December 30, 2019: "Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine, sure in hell can learn to program as well, but we don't think of it that way. Even my liberal friends don't." Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel, who broke the remark on Twitter, commented that such exhortations to "just transition" had set Hillary Clinton's campaign back in 2016, and Democratic congressional candidate Brianna Wu called it "tone-deaf and unhelpful."

Harassment of journalists

In January 2019 Huffington Post, Gannett, BuzzFeed and Verizon Media announced layoffs of journalists. As the journalists confirmed their involvement on social media, strangers responded with a torrent of mockery and hate speech mixed with suggestions to learn to code. The harassment was found to be coordinated on 4chan, a lightly-moderated and anonymous message board that had previously coordinated the GamerGate campaign. Twitter responded by blocking accounts involved in the harassment, which was met with derision from Fox News personality Tucker Carlson and suggestively sympathetic messages from right-wing figures Ben Shapiro, Donald Trump Jr. and David Duke.

Aftermath

Technology companies continued to grow in value through 2020 and 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic created demand for online commerce and work arrangements while hampering other sectors, and investment capital flooded into the sector. At the end of March 2021, the five most valuable US companies were information technology companies, four had valuations exceeding $1 trillion, and Apple had a valuation exceeding $2 trillion. The reopening of workplaces in 2022 and the tightening of credit policy by the Federal Reserve counteracted both trends that had driven this boom. That year and the following year technology companies announced a series of layoffs that cast doubt on computer programming as a sure career bet.

See also

• Atari Democrat