Question: 
I know this doesn't pertain to help with coding, but I needed to ask this question in a sub where I can get productive answers from a lot of experienced programmers.

I'm still in high school and over the last couple of days I've been really trying to find a career that I want to solidify as my goal to reach. I've bounced back and fourth between a couple professions that I've had in mind, but ultimately I wanted to choose something that I would enjoy. I'm a nerd whose always been deeply interested with computers a technology since I was a kid. People might say that I've got plenty of time to choose, and that most people don't even have a major set in college when they first enroll, but this is something I'd like to set my eyes on early.

So what is there to programming? What's the gist of everyday life for you? How rigorous was school? Did you find learning code difficult? How much would you say you enjoy your job (if you do programming professionally)? In general, I really just want you to try and convince my why programming is the way to go. I'd love to see some perspective.

Edit: I've been reading all the responses. Thank you to everyone that chimed in! It's hard to reply to everyone without saying the same thing. You guys have really changed my outlook on programming. I'm still not sure if it's for me though. I'm glad you all love your jobs. I will definitely try my hand at learning code in my spare time. Thanks once again, and if you've come upon this thread late, I don't mind seeing more points of view on the subject!

Answer: 
I love programming because it is incredibly empowering. Learning programming takes a love of learning, and great curiosity. You ask why things work, and by learning how a system works, you learn how to manipulate the system. And suddenly, you're the one in control. You're no longer a helpless victim of the computer, forced to just deal with it when something isn't to your liking. If you wish something was different, if you wish some app or program existed, you can MAKE it exist. You can go out and MAKE things happen. You are god.

To truly love programming, you need insatiable curiosity, creativity, and two beliefs: that failure is exciting, and that nothing is impossible. Curiosity is what will drive you to want to learn more about HOW and WHY things work - which is essential, because before you can manipulate a computer system, you must understand it. Creativity will allow you to come up with NEW things, it's what makes you the innovator. Programmers don't just solve problems - we solve problems by CREATING. Programming is a creative act.

Finally, I'd like to share a quote by Lord Kelvin - "When face to face with a difficulty, you are up against a discovery." Programming, more than the average hobby I think, consists of near-constant failure. To not let this be discouraging, you have to really adopt an attitude where every failure is EXCITING, because it means you are on the verge of discovery - of learning something new - something that will change your understanding of this system, the way you see the world. This attitude, combined with a belief that nothing is impossible, will drive you to finish your projects and really try things that no one has tried before.

And that, I think, is why I love programming. It's challenging, yes, but I am learning every day, and also getting to make things that people might enjoy or use! The end result of this skill is just so empowering - you can come up with an idea, some wild idea, and MAKE IT HAPPEN.

I'm currently a Computer Science major in college, so I haven't started coding as a job yet. As with all jobs, I've heard it isn't as enjoyable as just doing it as a hobby. However, it's one of the most high-paying jobs there is, which is a huge plus.

Currently, classes at my school (Carnegie Mellon) are TOUGH. They are extremely rigorous and hard, but this is also the premier undergraduate CS program in the world, so that is to be expected. I honestly think the rigor of the school depends a lot on the school, and, while you can benefit from going to a more rigorous school, programming is one of those skill-based industries where you can get a job as long as you're good at it - regardless of your schooling. Formal schooling definitely helps, though, of course!

Learning code, in general, can be a frustrating experience. Coding in general is mostly time spent debugging, which can also be very frustrating. The best way to find out if coding's right for you is to try to do it. It's definitely something you can teach yourself by learning from online tutorials, for instance, so try it out and see if it's something you enjoy. Good luck and hope this helps!

By Eric Westervelt
Education Correspondent

A handful of nonprofit and for-profit groups are working to address what they see as a national education crisis: Too few of America's K-12 public schools actually teach computer science basics and fewer still offer it for credit.

It's projected that in the next decade there will be about 1 million more U.S. jobs in the tech sector than computer science graduates to fill them. And it'sestimated that only about 10 percent of K-12 schools teach computer science.

So some in the education technology sector, an industry worth some $8 billion a year and growing, are stepping in.

At a Silicon Valley hotel recently, venture capitalists and interested parties heard funding pitches and watched demonstrations from 13 ed-tech startups backed by an incubator called Imagine K-12. One of them is Kodable, which aims to teach kids 5 years old and younger the fundamentals of programming through a game where you guide a Pac-Man-esque fuzz ball.

"As soon as you can start learning [coding] you should, because the earlier you start learning something, the better you'll be at it later in life," says Grechen Huebner, the co-founder of Kodable. She's working two computer screens to demonstrate how the game works.

"Kids have to drag and drop symbols to get their fuzzy character to go through a maze so they learn about conditions, loops and functions and even debugging," she says.

So should kids who've barely shed their pull-up diapers really learn to code? Huebner thinks it's vital. "We have kids as young as 2 using it. Five is just kinda the sweet spot."

(My daughter's behind, I think. She's 4 and hasn't started coding. Bad parent.)

Even if kids aren't offered game-based computer science concepts in pre-K, there is growing consensus students should get exposed to basic computer science concepts early. Kodable and other startups hope to make a profit filling this enormous void in American public education.

"Ninety percent of schools just don't even teach it. So if you're a parent and your school doesn't even offer this class, your kids aren't going to have the preparation they need for the 21st century," says Hadi Partovi, co-founder of the nonprofit Code.org. "Just like we teach how electricity works and biology basics, they should also know how the Internet works and how apps work. Schools need to add this to the curriculum."

Through his "Hour of Code" initiative, Partovi is working to get kids, parents and schools interested computer science curriculum.

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Third-graders at a public elementary school in Baltimore recently took part in a game-based Hour of Code to start to learn the very basics of coding even though they don't realize it.

"So you're moving three blocks and then you press start," one third-grader says.

Gretchen LeGrand with the nonprofit Code in the Schools is trying to bring computer science fundamentals to underserved, low-income kids in the city. She says it's a huge challenge in a district with few resources.

"The computers are old or outdated. We either can't install the software we want to use to teach computer programming or the connection's slow," she says. She's had to adapt to teaching about coding without a computer or what more teachers are calling teaching CS unplugged.

Partovi says teaching computer science is not about esoteric knowledge for computer geeks or filling jobs at Google or Microsoft. Most of these jobs are not with big high-tech companies. It's about training a globally competitive workforce and keeping most every sector of the U.S. economy thriving.

"Our future lawyers and doctors and politicians and businessmen — the folks in the other jobs — need to have a little bit of a background about how the world around them works," Partovi says. "It's all around us, and every industry gets impacted by it."

According to a study by the largest U.S. computing society, only 14 stateshave adopted secondary school standards for computer science. At the same time, there's been a sharp decline in the last five years in the number of introductory and advanced placement (AP) computer science classes offered in U.S. secondary schools.

Ironically, that decline comes just as states tout improvements to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) curricula. And several groups and corporations have voiced deep concern that the new Common Core state standards promote no significant computer science content in either math or science.

There are some bright spots: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Broward County, Fla., have all recently boosted their commitments to expanding computer science offerings. But there's a long way to go, says Chris Stephenson, who directs the Computer Science Teachers Association. She says a big problem is profound confusion about just what computer science is. Too many parents and administrators conflate gaming and basic point-and-click literacy with computer science — the principles and practices of computing and coding.

"I've had administrators actually say to me in all good intention, 'I know kids are learning computer science in my schools because there are computers in the schools.' And that is just not true," Stephenson says.

"I think that they just don't understand that having access to a computer isn't the same as learning computer science any more than having a Bunsen burner in the cupboard is the same as learning chemistry," she says. "There's a scientific discipline here you can't just learn by playing around with the technology."

Informational Divide

The "guesstimate" is that only 5 to 10 percent of schools teach computer science, based largely on data on students who take the AP test in computer science annually. The real percentage may be lower. Nobody tracks the figures nationally.

Some sobering stats from last year's AP data:

• In Mississippi, Montana and Wyoming, no girls took the computer science exam.
• In 11 states, no black students took it.
• In eight states, no Hispanics took it.
• In 17 states, fewer than 100 students took it.

"It's crazy small. I mean it would be absurd if it weren't so scary; that's how terrifying it is," Stephenson says.

So never mind the hardware-based digital divide, there's a growing digital information divide. Computer science education, it seems, is now privileged knowledge accessible mostly by affluent kids.

"The people that are most likely to succeed have access to it and other kids do not, and we really need to look at those facts and figures and be horrified by them," Stephenson says.

She says the Hour of Code — which has reached millions of students around the world — is a terrific start. But until more public schools offer computer science — for credit — she says the knowledge gap will only continue to widen.

They announced the coding requirement this past summer, and just last week formalized it into the PR-extravaganza known as “Year of Code.” The program is off to rather an inauspicious start, complete with a cheesy promotional video, one of its advisors quitting and publicly condemning the program, and a terrible BBC Newsnight interview in which the Director of the program admitted she didn’t know how to code.

Despite the shaky beginnings, though, the Year of Code still raises the question: What the hell, America? Silicon Valley is the biggest powerhouse of technology and entrepreneurship in the world. Every child in the United States — or at least California — should be learning how to code in school. Instead, our beautifully accented British brethren have beat us to the punch.

By September, all state primary and secondary schools will be rolling out the new computing curriculum, where children from early ages will be taught how computers work and how to make them do cool things.

According to a BBC report on the new UK program, Michael Gove, the country’s Secretary of State for Education, said, “[T]here was no alternative to making this work if we didn’t want the Googles and Microsofts of tomorrow to be created elsewhere.”

It’s a strange quote, given that the Googles and Microsofts of the world were “created elsewhere” to begin with. But Gove’s point is clear: the next tech giants are more likely to be built in places where coding is taught from childhood.

Here in the US, tech startups are core to five out of ten of our fastest growing industries (ranging from 3D printing to online eyeglasses sales). The “computer systems design and related services” industry is one of the American sectors with the most rapidly increasing wage and salary employment according to a December 2013 Bureau of Labor Statistics report.

Since the early dot-com days, American innovators have been building the technology platforms and tools that change the way the rest of the world operates. In recent years, Silicon Valley is seeing such rapid growth that there’s not enough programmers to keep up with it, and founders are facing a terrible talent drought which has made trouble recruiting engineers to keep up with the pace. What would solve this problem and ensure our continued dominance in leading the world’s technology industries? Making coding skills a priority in all our schools.

The fact that we should be teaching code to more students earlier in their education is not a new idea. A year ago President Obama said so himself, during a Google+ Hangout with selected citizens following his State of the Union address. Last fall, Harvard’s Ed. Magazine released its list of 30 tangible ideas worth spreading to transform education. Mandatory coding in schools was one of them. There have been charter schools and private schools dabbling with incorporating code into the classroom for sometime. It’s certainly a priority in any STEM focused programs.

But although the idea has been floated, it has never been formalized into action. The US Department of Education has been focusing on other huge, arguably flawed programs, such as the No Child Left Behind Act and the Race to the Top initiative.

With schools across the country struggling with drastic budget deficits, classroom sizes of 30 or larger, and more and more teacher pink slips every day, the idea of adding yet another educational requirement is wishful thinking.

It may wind up being wishful thinking for Britain too. Although the government is pumping out PR on The Year of Code, the devil will be in the details. Teaching everyone to code sounds great in theory, but in actuality it will be tough to roll out.

The program has already been criticized left, right, and center, for everything from its Director’s dottiness to its lack of board diversity. Of the 23 people listed as being part of “Year of Code,” only three of them have a technical background. Also, despite the fact that the program is aimed at state education, there’s no school teachers, members from any public sectors, academics, or any computer science researchers mentioned on said advisor page.

The British government also isn’t investing that much money in this program. It’s paying 500,000 pounds, roughly 820,000 dollars, to help educate teachers on programming. That’s in addition to a120,000 pound contribution from Google, two million pounds of public money the British Computer Society is already spending to send “Master Teachers” into schools to teach other teachers coding, and 1.1 million pounds for Computing at School’s online workshops and trainings for teachers.

How will such sweeping curriculum change happen so quickly with so little funding you ask? The answers aren’t entirely clear yet. Criticisms have been raised as to the tight timeline and whether teachers who have never done programming can really learn enough to adequately teach their students.

People hate that the director herself doesn’t know how to program and yet happily explained on national television that someone can learn how to teach coding “in a day.”

It’s understandable that we haven’t instituted such a sweeping change to our own curriculum in the US. It would be a hell of a difficult thing to roll out across 50 states.

However that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be a little nervous about the fact that Britain is attempting to get there before us. Even if they fudge up the operations massively for the next few years, at least they’re trying.

[Illustration by Hallie Bateman]