Getting With the Program: Code Year
So, two hundred thousand of us do not want to get silicon kicked in our faces, but how many of us will make the commitment to see Code Year through? The sign-up page does not advertise how much time is required, but Slate’s Farhad Manjoo reports Codecademy’s estimate that “it will take a person of average technical skill about five hours to complete a lesson, so you’re looking at about an hour of training every weekday.” That’s four times what Charles Atlas asks for to make YOU a New Man. Some of those ninety-eight-pound weaklings who sent away for Atlas’s free brochure must have become bodybuilders—but I suspect more of them became programmers.
- Web Editor Blake Eskin writes about the wildly popular Code Year campaign: http://nyr.kr/zidCm6
Image: Atomicsteve, Wikimedia Commons.
Listen, I like the CodeAcademy site, I signed up myself, but about 90% of the people who signed up for this will drop off after the first week.
Just because people signed up doesn’t mean they will “suddenly” know how to code. If you signed up for Chinese lessons (and you should, if you want to be involved in business post-2014) you would expect that you would be studying a shit-ass amount and almost crying in frustration 45% of the time. Computer Coding is the same thing. I just finished a quarter of ComSci at UCLA and the shit ain’t easy. I was able to do all the CodeAcademy lessons in the first level fairly quickly but that’s because I just spent every waking hour of the last 3 months studying the shit out of C++ (and almost crying in frustration 45% of the time).
I hope everyone who signs up for CodeAcademy follows through with every single lesson, but it’s just not going to happen.
