I worked on two projects staffed with consultants from two Indian consultancies. They were minimally competent. On one project, the client had decided to build a website using Ruby on Rails. The project was struggling to deliver, so they wanted an independent view of the work that was being done. I got the contract, and knowing nothing of Ruby on Rails, started reading: Programming With Ruby, Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails, O'Reilly books on HTML, Javascript, CSS, and the DOM. I joined the project and after a couple of weeks I realized that none of the contract developers had read anything. They were writing J2EE code and translating word for word into Ruby -- creating hundreds of lines of code where ten would suffice. My prior experience on a C++ middleware project was similar.

With or without education, coding is a job that few can do, and even fewer can do well. I interviewed CS graduates for decades. About three out of four couldn't put ten lines of working code on a whiteboard. At Amazon they finally created an online assessment to screen candidates before spending $5K+ on a full day interview (8 hours of engineering time plus travel). This helped, but it was amusing to see candidates who tried to cheat on the assessment. One pasted a solution he found online, then realized that might not look so good so he erased it and retyped it. We also saw candidates manually copying solutions but making slight changes as they entered it in an attempt to avoid a plagiarism detector.

I was a programmer at Amazon for almost ten years and it was a great place to work. My managers were capable and caring. We had good work-life balance. On Friday afternoons directors would walk through the office and tell us to go home. On days before a holiday we were often dismissed at noon or one. We worked from home for three years during the Covid pandemic and we were more productive than ever. Then came the three day RTO mandate and we returned to less comfortable space than we had left before the pandemic. They tried "hot desking" which was absolutely horrible for anyone needing custom ergonomics. I was assigned a new manager who was less understanding, got PIP'ed and retired early, just before the full RTO. Now I wouldn't recommend working at Amazon.

It's not possible to produce programs without programming. Each advance in programming languages has increased the productivity differences between the best and the rest. The hard work is in the edge cases, determining what is wanted when the users themselves don't exactly know.

I don't think this will produce a lot of professional software developers. Currently a large fraction of MSCS graduates can't program. Almost no high school students can write a simple geometry proof. Adding a class won't change this.

Great, now the kids who don't fit in where they are going to be further isolated.

Don't you know that Bezos owns the Washington Post? When he bought it he promised that he wouldn't be making editorial decisions and as far as I know he hasn't.

It's not possible to estimate the time to write code unless the code is essentially already written, at least in one's head. If the solution is unknown, or the existing system is poorly understood and may have tech debt that must be cleared, then no estimate is possible.

Maybe 9th grade really was horrible. Public school is for many students. For me it was just a boring waste of time.

Almost all Amazon HQ employees hold some stock as it's a portion of everyone's compensation. For a long time cash compensation was capped at about $150K, so for senior employees stock is over half their pay.

I wonder if people will ever finally agree that there is no harm to minors from material they view voluntarily. I've never heard of an adult blaming their personal issues on some sexually explicit material they saw or read when they were a teen.

Many retail outlets in downtown Seattle have closed due to rampant theft and the decrease in traffic with so many people working remotely. I'm not at all surprised the Amazon Go stores downtown have also closed. I used to work very close to one and it was extremely convenient -- I could pick up lunch in under a minute.

The real world is complex. Software systems that solve real-world problems must reflect that complexity regardless of how they are written. Whatever "No code / low code" means, it's just another programming language. It will allow some people to build simple applications that they couldn't have otherwise, just as spreadsheets and relational databases have done in the past. The idea that somehow it will eliminate the need for skilled software developers is just wishful thinking.

Euclidean geometry was dropped as a high school subject about 40 years ago when it was understood that most high school students will never write a proof. But of course neither can their teachers. Anyone who can construct a proof can make far more money doing something else. Instead high school geometry is nothing but nearly useless formulas and completely useless vocabulary. When was the last time you used the terms "trapezoid" or "scalene" or "supplementary angle" ? I was a graduate math student and those terms were never used after high school geometry.

"Good teachers can offer a range of speeds in their classes" Yes, they can if the class size is 15. Not if it's 30.