What do you think of this hot take?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/02/12/dont-let-kids-waste-their-time-learning-to-code/ "What do caddy butchers and diecasters have in common? They’re both occupations, once widespread, that don’t exist anymore. And maybe they’ll soon be joined by another: coders. Software developers are not feeling very loved right now as the tech industry continues to dispense with them en masse. January saw an increase in redundancies, according to the website layoffs.fyi. Leading the charge were Alphabet, Meta and eBay, which all announced fresh rounds of job cuts, while Amazon and Microsoft both slashed their games divisions. They add to the 164,969 tech layoffs publicly announced in 2022, and 262,682 last year. Many more were not disclosed in public. This may be more than a correction as the sector rectifies itself after the extravagant overhiring of the Covid pandemic. But perhaps something else is also going on, and that is that the world just doesn’t need so many software developers. Elon Musk’s experiment in running X, formerly Twitter, using just a fraction of the staff it once employed is now being copied, albeit not so radically. Patrick Shyu, a former manager at Google and Facebook, agrees that there has been an influx of developers. Perhaps something else is also going on, and that is that the world just doesn’t need so many software developers. Someone advancing this proposition is Patrick Shyu, a former manager at Google and Facebook. “Everybody and their dog is coding,” he declared recently in a widely-shared YouTube video. “Immigrants are coding. Fresh college grads are coding. ChatGPT is coding. It’s becoming a saturated field, and employers are realising they don’t need to pay you $300,000 and give you free cafeteria food for two hours of work a day”. The reason? We’re done building digital stuff, by and large. Businesses have completed their so-called transformations and many found themselves saddled with expensive software teams they don’t really need. Consumers have got the gadgets they need, too. Shyu describes the tech boom as a “fluke of history”, similar to when people rushed out to buy their first TV sets. Pretty soon, everyone had a TV. Then people needed something to watch – not a new TV. Shyu is a YouTube provocateur who frankly admits his “TechLead” character is a persona. He mocks tearful Gen-Zs filming themselves being fired and posting their videos on TikTok. They were delusional to imagine that they could stay at home and do very little work for such good money. But I wonder who gave them that idea. Perhaps it was the tech giants themselves. The dot.com era Silicon Valley firms like Google proudly touted the corporate office as a kind of leisure facility, a perpetual undergraduate playpen. TV crews visiting Google dutifully captured the bean bags and ping pong tables, the unicyclists in the car park, and of course, the canteen. The bosses may have had cynical motives – wanting to keep the software engineers in the office for as long as possible – but it blurred the personal and the professional. With that boundary fuzzy, no wonder younger employees now treat the workplace, and work itself, so casually. But another culprit in setting expectations of a career in software development unrealistically high is us. Or more accurately, the policy class, spending money on our behalf. A decade ago this month, the Government declared that 2014 was going to be the “Year of Code”. The ability to program a computer was said to be a skill as vital as reading, writing or maths. “Learn to Code!” became a mantra, typically made by well-off arts graduates to middle-aged employees being made redundant from manual labour. Now the optimistic 14-year-olds who were given coding classes that year are the disillusioned 24-year-olds who have discovered that there isn’t a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And in the background lurks generative AI, which has caused a great deal of excitement. There are pitfalls ahead – one recent study suggests that twice as much fresh code is being thrown away when AI is deployed and that the designs it throws up are hard to maintain. But experienced people should find some benefits: one systems architect told me he can produce three or four iterations of a design in the time it used to take to make one. Trade bodies like Tech UK complain that there is a dearth of technical skills that employers need. I don’t doubt them. Chief executive Aidan Fitzpatrick, and a critic of the technical education system, says it’s harder than ever to find outstanding staff for his UK app developer Reincubate. So what’s really happening? How can we have too many software developers and too few at the same time? One answer may be that they’re in the wrong places. Another is that the skills that employers really demand aren’t there. As Fred Brooks argued in his classic 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month, more developers doesn’t mean better results: what we actually need is fewer, elite software developers. All of which brings us back to education, and the misguided mission to get absolutely everybody coding. ICT is today seen as a soft GCSE choice, taught by disinterested teachers going through the motions. Perhaps instead of trying to introduce every single pupil to an arcane programming language, the curriculum could focus on initiatives like the international Bebras Competition, which sets puzzles that demand logical and creative solutions. It rewards more abstract technical skills, and problem-solving, and is much more motivating. We’ll always need coders – if only to maintain the systems we’ve already cobbled together. But surely far fewer than we thought. Stop blighting our kids’ teen years with this perverse obsession. They don’t need to learn to code."