The hero’s journey
hero: both hack and hustler of any start-up:
Simultaneously and forever, you need to be both hacker and hustler to beat the odds. Reality is busted and you’ve got to patch it up. Think hammer, nails, and electric tape. Think quick.
In year 10…
(2000) I did the computer course in high school. It was taught by the substitute english teacher - widely condemned amongst students as the worst teacher in the school - qualifying for this subject either for her ethnicity, or because no-one else wanted it.*
We didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye, but she really was clueless. At the end of the term, I knew next to nothing. My conceptions of what a ‘programmer/coder/hacker’ was or did comprised of movies about unruly criminals taking down the system in front of a DOS screen, The GTMHH, and that my uncle had a job as one (programmer, not hacker).
It took a long time before any insight into the magic of what happens behind the scenes.
The scary thing is: I’m not sure the situation faced by today’s students is markedly different.
Despite the increasing prevalence of computers in life, and therefore the increased importance of computer literacy (including coding), there is a worrying trend downwards in students choosing to study computer science. In the decade since 2000, enrollments in university CS degrees have decreased 4% per year across tertiary Australia. Demand for CS graduates has risen approximately 25% per year for the last half decade.** In the local start-up community, coders hold all the cards.
Today, any /coder has access to tools and techniques that most of the population don’t yet get. The coding literate are much like early adopters of the printing press. An unfair advantage over the modern layman.
NOTES
* It is notoriously hard to fire people in the public education system. Although mine was a good school punching well above it’s weight, some institutions are just deeply broken.
** Stats came from the internet.
