Democratic presidential contender and Joe Biden has some advice for the recently disrupted: learn to program.
At a rally in Derry, New Hampshire on Monday, per the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel, Biden talked about how unemployed miners and coal workers who have lost their jobs in recent years can find “jobs of the future” if they “learn to program.” Referencing his role in a Barack Obama-era programming skills initiative in schools, Biden commented that “Anybody who can go down 3000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well… Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”
But Biden returns to the same point: “Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”
— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) December 30, 2019
What, exactly, these blue collar workers in the mining and coal-shoveling sectors should learn to code is unclear. A December jobs report by Challenger, Grey, & Christmas found that the mining and tech sectors are both shedding thousands of jobs nationwide. (So too is everything coal-related.) It’s fair to say the long-term prospects for IT workers are better, with the Bureau of Labour Statistics projecting that computer and information technology jobs will grow “12 per cent from 2018 to 2028, much faster than the average for all occupations.” Meanwhile, dirty energy jobs are dying left and right despite Donald Trump’s best efforts to slash regulations.
But the issue has less to do with whether programming is a desirable skillset—it is, in the same sense that speaking Arabic or having a master’s degree in mechanical engineering are desirable skillsets. To Biden’s point, there are plenty of success stories, including with laid-off miners. This instead has more to do with whether everyone has the desire or aptitude to learn programming to plunge into an ultra-competitive job market for developers, whether job retraining programs are actually effective or will be adequately funded, or whether advising someone to just get a much more lucrative job in a high-tech sector actually comes across as helpful.
Anyone can learn to code, and I’m glad to see recognition that you don’t need to be in your 20s to do this as a profession.
But Biden telling coal miners, “Just move to high tech!” is so tone-deaf and unhelpful. https://t.co/WIztRdMFkD
— Brianna Wu (@BriannaWu) December 30, 2019
There are a lot of things wrong with this but as someone who graduated into the recession with a bunch of other people with IT/CS degrees it really grinds my gears that there’s always an implication that “coding” guarantees you a job, my ex husband was unemployed for TWO YEARS.
— Cari (@eatinginmycar) December 30, 2019
If you want to learn HTML or CSS or PHP or whatever and make a website for fun do it. The barrier of entry is low and it’s free if you have access to a computer with internet, that much is true. But as career/life advice this is beyond useless to most people.
— Cari (@eatinginmycar) December 30, 2019
I would honestly love to hear more from Biden as to what he thinks we as programmers do. While quite a few miners could learn to code, they would face many challenges and obstacles in doing so. It would not be a trivial career change. https://t.co/luQVKNlFha
— Sampson ???? (@jonathansampson) December 31, 2019
As Weigel noted, being told what you really need to do is pivot to making smartphone apps or coding a payroll system can instead come across as callous indifference to the what is currently happening to workers right now. (Especially so, given the future is not synonymous with STEM jobs and the gaping disconnect between how the tech sector generates wealth and how it doesn’t really share it.) That’s exactly why “learn to code” became the far right’s taunt of choice when mocking laid-off journalists. Maybe, uhh, nip this particular line in the bud and instead focus on the infrastructure, clean energy, and labour organising stuff.