Programming, Education, and the American Dream
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Abinante, Liz
The learn to code movement has popularized the idea that coding is a skill everyone can and should learn. It's the American dream: learn the desirable skill and you'll succeed financially. Those who master the skill and achieve the goals are held up as prime examples of just how easy it was. But if it was that easy, why are there so few victors encouraging hoards of hopefuls? I'll discuss the history of the American Dream, how new programming education endeavors have repackaged it, and how the lack of awareness and analysis of this privileged rhetoric is damaging our culture and workforce.
 Hey everyone! There's a lot more of you here than I expected, given that Jay Ruby is happening at the same time. So welcome. My name is Liz Abanante. I am an engineer at New Relic up in the land of Portland. A little colder than here and a lot weirder than here. So I'm going to talk to you today about programming, education, and the American Dream. And everybody that I've told about this talk has told me, that seems really nebulous, Liz. That's kind of a big topic, Liz. What are you going to really talk about, Liz? Come on, Liz. And I got really tired of hearing my name. So I made an outline for you because I'm an academic at heart. We're going to go over a few different things today. The Learned Code Movement, Education in America, what the American Dream actually is, and then how this all comes together when we educate the programmers that we work with today. So I'm going to kick it off with a little overview of the Learned Code Movement. How does this all get started? It's a little difficult to give a straightforward explanation. As with anything in our history, things are more complicated than just one event. It's never just one thing. But I do want to focus on a few different things, these four specific things. And while there's more than four, these are big factors. These are things that we all deal with on a day to day in our work lives. I'm going to start with startup success stories, the availability of the new curriculum, what it means to have a lower barrier to entry for these new technologies, and the end result of Obama telling us all to do an hour of code. So while the stock market doesn't always love software as a service companies or social media companies like Twitter, people love them. We love them. We work on them. This is what we do for a living. And we all love a good story about a programmer or just nobody who comes up with nothing, makes a company, and is super successful. We love it so much that Facebook got its own movie. Facebook became part of American drama because we made it into a movie. Like, that's how excited people are by these startup success stories. They're so excited they'll go pay $13 to go see a matinee in New York City of this movie about Facebook. Makes sense, right? I don't get why they're excited. Mark Zuckerberg is super rich. He's worth $33 billion. He was ranked number 22 on the Forbes 400 list just last month. And this year, Forbes did something new with their list. They added this self-made score down here. His wealth is self-made. Well, what exactly does that mean? So Forbes decided it was kind of silly to put Silver Spooners, a level one on the self-made score, people who grow up with a lot of money and do nothing to make that money grow on the same scale as someone, as say, Oprah. And so they invented this scale just this year. And they gave Zuckerberg an eight. So for some perspective on that, one means born wealthy. Ten means unbelievable life hardships. Zuckerberg is an eight because he came from a middle upper class family and had no real help bootstrapping himself other than, you know, lots of ECs. Oprah is a 10. Her life was only two points harder than Mark Zuckerberg, according to Forbes. According to Forbes. So there's that. But they also did a look back at the old data and they found that in 1984, less than half of the list was self-made. And just so we're all on the same page, self-made is a four or higher. Not like a five or higher, where you think it would be and like it right in the middle, but it's like a four or higher because three is wealthy and actively working to improve your wealth. So now in 2014, almost three quarters of the list are self-made. There are at least a four or higher. We really like what happens when we make our own fortunes. I mean, it would be easier if we just had it. But, you know, another big factor is the availability of curriculum. It's just plain easier to learn something if there are more ways to learn it because not everybody has the same learning style. In-person courses started popping up that were a little bit more affordable than say, going to MIT or Harvard or even a University of California school like I went to, not for CS. And so these classes ranged from one day workshops, nonprofits like Girl Develop it offered affordable workshops across the country in major cities. And then development courses started popping up, things like Dev Boot Camp, things like Hackbright that were a little longer, a little more expensive, a little bit more of a time commitment and very focused. But regardless of the types of programs, the fact that these in-person courses were available outside of a four-year CS program made it a lot easier for people to learn new things. But where a lot of people, myself included, get started these days, I sound like an old person, is through free and affordable online curriculum. These interactive video tutorials or where you talk to the computer and it talks back to you. Those things are oftentimes the first four A into coding. It's your introduction to Ruby, it's your introduction to JavaScript, it's how you learn HTML, the very, very basics. And these online resources are amazing because they can teach you those foundational principles without you having to drop a couple thousand dollars on a university course or an intensive program. And that makes it a lot more accessible to people who don't have the wealth to afford expensive programs or who don't have the time in their day or can't afford to quit a job to quit a full-time program. And after that, in the past year or so, I've been seeing a lot of these, we now have online curriculum that includes mentorship. So you get one-on-one kind of office hours, almost like you would if you were a student at a university. You would get to spend time with your instructor, you would get to learn at a one-on-one level. So if you're having a really, really hard time understanding recursion, you can sit down and talk to somebody about it for a couple hours on your schedule. This means if you live in North Dakota, you can get the same quality of education in theory as someone who lives in San Francisco and has a lot more options available to them. And this makes it much easier for people who work jobs with odd hours, can't afford to quit a job or can only do part-time commitments to learn these skills. And so we have all these different options and a big factor here in this curriculum being so popular is that now there's a much lower barrier to learn these new technologies. We've started with these cloud development environments, which as professional developers, not a ton of us would work in on a day-to-day, but they alleviate cost and complication. This computer, my wonderful work computer, I never could have bought when I was in college. I could not afford this. But say a Chromebook or an old PC that I got second hand for free from a friend, I could have done cloud development and I could have learned on a cloud. It's also helping to lower the number of things you need to learn right out of the gate. You don't have to manage a dev environment. You don't have to deal with conflicting versions of RubyGems. It's all just there. It's all set up for you. And while it's super important to learn maintaining an environment and maintaining different versions of things eventually in your career, it's sometimes a barrier. It's sometimes a blocker. It's really frustrating to not be able to write code because you can't figure out why your server won't start. What's more important? They're both important, but learning one at a time is more effective. And the cheaper equipment, like Chromebooks, really makes those cloud development environments useful to people. The Y Web Academy in Wisconsin is a free program for underprivileged youth and for people of color to learn full stack Rails and JS development. And they're doing it on $300 Chromebooks. It's a nine month program. And they're learning everything that they can learn on that Chromebook and cloud development environment. That's awesome. $300 as opposed to $2,000 or so. Like, that's pretty cool. We're also learning simpler languages. And I say simple because it's all relative, but Ruby and Python don't have a lot of that syntax. And when I teach JavaScript to beginners, they don't have trouble understanding the concept of, say, conditionals, but that syntax is a bear. They cannot figure it out. And you give them a linter and they're like, but I don't understand. Where does it go? And then get so confused and so frustrated. Syntax should not be a blocker to learning. And while syntax is an important part of programming languages, while it is the thing that calms my soul when these parentheses all match up and the curly braces are all there and I love it, it makes me so happy and I find joy in that, it was a huge blocker for me when I started learning because I couldn't figure out where the damn parentheses go. And you don't remember what order they go in. That's a blocker that we can get rid of now if you learn Ruby or Python and then move on to new language when you've mastered these concepts. We've also given people more options of things to learn. With this emphasis on user experience and responsive web and mobile apps, people can now learn what they're interested in instead of the thing that has jobs. You don't have to learn about DevOps and securities and servers if it's not your interest. You're more than welcome to if that's what you're interested in, but sometimes that stuff is really hard for a beginner. Maybe learning how to do responsive CSS is really your jam. And there are a shitload of people out there who would love to hire you so they don't have to write that CSS. Your job is not just writing code. Your job is building user experiences and that's just as technical as running the server. So these opportunities are newer, the last I'd say five, maybe eight years and that makes it easier for people to get into the field and find where they belong. And lastly, it's a small thing, but it matters. In December of last year, Obama gave a speech about jobs in the U.S. And one thing he said was that youth should learn how to program their phone instead of just playing with it. And he encouraged everyone to do an hour of code a day for a week in December. It was this big challenge that he issued. And a ton of people did it. People did it in classrooms with pen and paper. They did it on computers. They did it at work. They did it at home. I even got an email from my CEO at my last job that says I did my hour of code. Did you? It's like, yes, I did. I actually did my eight hours of code today. But it still changed the way a lot of people approached it because they had the leader of their country tell them that it was something that they could do. And that's not something that everyone had initially thought of. But now that we're telling you anyone can learn to code, you can program your phone. We're starting to discover that there's a little bit of a discrepancy between this type of marketing and the actual lived reality. And I do have to pause for two seconds in this talk to tell you a little bit about myself because it does inform a lot of what I say about this topic. I was going to be a high school teacher because there's nothing more exciting than teaching high school students, right? They are soulless monsters. But I was convinced that I could be the teacher that would make them love to read and be super interested in history. But I didn't. I went to a code boot camp. And instead, I'm not really sure if it's an instead because they still teach people programming. And I went to a code boot camp because I fell for this marketing of anyone learning to code and getting an awesome job and making a crap load of money. I was at a dead end startup. And I hated my job. And I wanted something more challenging. I knew HTML and CSS. And I was like, it can't be harder than CSS, right? It's not. I'm going to say CSS is easier. So I learned my first programming language in 2013. And because I didn't come from a technical background, it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. And I grew up with a DOS computer that I practiced spelling on. It was my dad's work computer. I still don't know to this day what type of work he accomplished on this computer because he worked in the field for Pacific Gastroelectric here in California, like climbing poles. Why did he have a computer at home? But I still learned to type at a really young age. And that was my exposure to tech prior to probably late high school when I started inspecting the code on my favorite in sync fan pages so that I could change the colors of the fonts to make them more readable. And that was how I learned HTML and CSS. I really tried to find my in sync fan page that I made when I was like 12, but I couldn't find it. Web archive let me down. But I never saw tech as a career. I just didn't because my parents were working class. My mom didn't work because she couldn't afford to work and send both of us to daycare. And my dad worked in the field. He came home dirty and sweaty and smelly every single day. And my friends' parents were teachers or social workers or they worked for the garbage collection service. Like everybody I knew was working class. Everybody I knew didn't work in this field. It just wasn't where they were. And even when I got to college and used email, my comprehension of email was I hit the send button. And then there's someone that grabs my email and walks it over to that person and gives it to them. Like it's a manual process behind the scenes. And I didn't understand how tech worked even when I was 19 and 20 and was using it every day to do research, to write papers, to send emails. It just wasn't my thing. And then I started working at a startup and that was where my eyes got opened. And I realized the internet was not powered by Excel spreadsheets. I did not know what databases were. I found out very quickly. And then I decided to learn how to program. But really I decided to learn how to code because that's what everybody told me to do. Everybody said learn how to code. Anyone can learn how to code. Here's how you do it. Here are the different ways to do it. Here are all my opinions on things. Run with it. But it turns out that learning to code is not the same as learning to program. And those are two very different things. Nobody really tells you this when you're typing away on code academy and you're writing your first Ruby method. Nobody tells you that code and programming are two different things. And so really it's like learning to read. You can learn to read as pattern recognition or you can learn to read as a rich understanding and deep analysis and comprehension of your subject matter. And so if you look at it from that perspective, writing code is really nothing more than typing from a prescribed set of syntax or prescribed set of rules. So we're all just really overpaid typists that have very specific rules we follow when we type. And that's what it is if your job is code. But if your job is programming, it's not just typing. It's more than typing. And just like becoming a good writer or a good literary analyst comes from learning from others and gaining strength from what they've done and what they haven't done, so it's being a good coder. We learn a lot when we work with other people. And this learn to code movement, while wonderful and we're all learning these new things, sometimes we're learning them from people who are not prepared to teach us. They're either not prepared because they don't have the right curriculum or they're not prepared because they don't have the right training. So you end up having a very frustrating experience for students. And what could start as learning to program actually just becomes learning to type code. And when you're learning from these unprepared instructors or if you're having a bad learning experience, it's not just clicking for you, you'll hear people tell you it's easy and they'll grab your computer and they'll type some shit in your terminal and magic stuff will happen. And you have no idea what the hell they just did, but you know, you know at the very bottom of your soul that it's fucking magic. Like it is the most magical thing you've ever seen and you're just, your brain is overwhelmed by how cool it was. But you can't forget how to do it. And they keep telling you it's easy, it's easy, it's easy. And they're saying it's easy, I did it, so can you. But as a learner as a new person coming to programming, what it actually sounds like to me when I try to do what you tell me is easy, is that it's easy and I did it. If you can't, it's your fault. Sometimes you hear you're stupid, depending on the tone. And this is not a really rewarding experience for students, whether they be adults learning to code or kids in elementary school. And phrases like this are really common, not just in education of developers, but in school itself. You're teaching kids algebra and they're really stumped by it. Teachers will say it's easy, just do this. But those phrases put the responsibility for learning among the student. They take the responsibility away from the institution, away from the instructor. They're no longer responsible for the quality of their education, the quality of their instruction. You're responsible for it. You're responsible for absorbing the way they're teaching you, regardless of whether or not it works for you. And that sucks as a learner. You don't learn a lot and you don't learn well. Because different students do not excel or fail because of innate abilities. Yeah, sure. I'm sure we've all read studies that say people born with this type of brain are better at this type of thing. But at the end of the day, you're better at something because of your exposure to it or because you were raised with it. If you have a great education and you're exposed to computers from age two and up and you can type faster than I can at age two, it's likely that you're going to work with computers and you're going to be really damn good at it. Not everybody has those type of exposures when they're young. Because of the way we teach kids. So shifting focus a little, we're going to talk about educating youth in America, not with coding, but in regards to just education in general. And there's a lot of different ways that we teach kids, but in general, it's focused on achievement and lectures. And in the recent past from kindergarten on through high school, we did this system called leveling. And it was kind of crappy because instead of being challenged to learn new skills, you were placed at your level. And if you're at your grade level, that's cool because you're learning new stuff. But if you're a student in the fifth grade and you read at a third grade reading level for your entire fifth grade year, you will continue to read at that third grade reading level. And when you go to the sixth grade, maybe they'll bump you up to the fourth grade reading level if you pass the test. And this was leaving a ton of students behind. Are really good example of this was in a junior high English book or English history book, they were learning about the founders of the United States. And there's a sentence in this book, very simple sentence. Ben Franklin was one of the founders of our nation. And in the at grade level book, that was what it said. Ben Franklin is one of the founders of our nation. In the low reading level book, it said Ben Franklin started this country. Because apparently founder and nation are too complicated. And so when you're not getting a new vocabulary, when you're not being challenged because you're already underperforming, you're not learning. And so this was the state of education in the U.S. until a few years ago when they introduced common core standards. And I'm sure if some of your parents, you may have heard of common core and you may have seen those like math problems that are ridiculous like I have $5 and Jimmy has three figs, how many mice can I buy? Like that's kind of what it's like. But what common core really is is a set of standards. They were created so that students could go from kindergarten to high school and acquire the skills that they needed for their career or for college or for life, no matter what school district they're in. And they were created with international educational practices in mind because the U.S. school system is really bad. So we looked at countries that had better school systems than we did and we developed these standards using research and evidence and we made them clear and we made them understandable. There's lovely outlines and there's codes for every single skill like CCR 430 describes a reading skill. Cool. And these standards have been adopted in 43 different states and Washington, D.C. But the problem is we made these standards and once again we did not prepare our teachers. We did not train them. We did not teach our teachers how to teach our kids. And so parents are pissed because their kids come home with homework about figs and dollars and mice and they don't know how to help them solve it and the teachers don't know how to teach it. So really when there was this article in the New York Times about common core that was published just recently, it was written by somebody who helped form the mathematical standards for the common core that get the most flak. He said in the hands of unprepared teachers the reforms turned to nonsense, perplexing students more than helping them. So we're back to where we were before. We're back to students not really learning the thing they're supposed to be learning and students not really being challenged because how can you be challenged if your teacher can't teach you? And they're still leveling students within common core. They're still levels. You can still be below your grade level which is kind of not the point really. And so common core isn't the solution because it reinforces the check box learning. If you can do score or if you can do skills, CCR 430, you've mastered that reading skill and now we can move on and teach you more stuff. Common core doesn't revisit skills. It doesn't emphasize skills. It doesn't encourage you to keep working with those skills. It just drops it in there. Can you check the box? Yes, no, cool, move on. If you can't check the box, it doesn't matter. You're screwed. Next grade level. That's common core. And it doesn't address the disparity in educational quality or dropout rates in the nation's poor schools. It just kind of says they're there which is not really a good way of fixing things. But when we talk about student demographics and we talk about teaching students, we talk about poor schools and good schools and like what does this all really mean? So I dug up some numbers on the top five STEM high schools in the US. Turns out it's super easy to find information about the best schools in the country. US news ranks schools every single year for high school and college based on their standards. And so I only chose the top five STEM high schools because I wanted a relatively small sample size to work with because the numbers get kind of scary after a while. So it's about 5,700 students a year that they educate and that's not the students that graduate. That's students that walk into the school every year. About I'd say a quarter of those given that they're four grades graduate every year. So if you look at the minorities, it's actually better. It's actually more representative than what the US has. The US has about 50% of the population as part of a minority group according to last census. So this is pretty good. This is pretty cool. 63% of the students at the top five of the very best STEM high schools in the US are a minority. That's pretty awesome. That's really good. Go us kind of. There are 12 Native American students at these schools. All of them, all five total, 12. 15 Hawaiian or Pacific Islander kids. And so are you really educating the representative minority group in the United States? Not really. And schools here for this statistic, they report what percentage of their student body falls into these racial ethnic group categories. And when I did the math, a lot of the schools had 0.6 students that were Native American or Hawaiian or Black or Hispanic or whatever minority I was looking at. 0.6 students, like from your neck down, like a neck down student or like a waist up student, like whatever 60% of your body mass is, which is, I mean, it doesn't really matter if it's 0.6 or one student. It still sucks to be the only one. And it sucks even more if you're poor. Of the 5,700 students at these schools, less than a percent, less than 1%, a single percent, are impoverished. And that's really sad. But like how many kids is that actually? Is that many? So like this section of the room, that's you guys, I guess? 37 kids. And this is the national number. But it's actually only the number for one school, because only one school reported having any impoverished kids at their school. So really it's one school is working to correct some socioeconomic disparity in the U.S., while the other four don't serve socioeconomically disadvantaged students. And so I decided I wanted to do some comparisons to the worst schools in the U.S. and see how they stack up to the best high schools. There are no lists of the worst schools in the U.S. They don't exist. I Google best high schools in the U.S. I look in education statistics for the Department of Education. I look at state statistics. Can't find it. Can't find bad schools. They don't exist. And I kind of understand this because no parent wants to know that their kid is going to the worst high school in the U.S. You don't want to be like, I'm sorry, little kid, you're going to one of the worst schools. And tears. Like you don't want to tell that to your kid. And the only list that I could find was actually created by a neighborhood researching company called Neighborhood Scout, which based on the information on the page, I can only imagine is created to help white people avoid poor neighborhoods. So I didn't trust the data, so I didn't use it. So I have no statistics on the worst schools in the U.S. because nobody will tell me what the worst schools in the U.S. are. So instead, I decided to look at the nationwide literacy rates. I started with fourth graders. And these are fourth graders who take the national reading test. This is across all states in the U.S. This is every fourth grader. At or below basic, a third of students. Basic, depending on the state, either means at your grade level or one level below. So you should be reading at a third or fourth grade level to be in the 66 percent. Or yes, sorry, that was confusing. And so a third of our kids cannot read at the grade level in the fourth grade. About half of black, Hispanic, Native American and impoverished students read below basic. So they're like reading at first and second grade level in the fourth grade. When we test them in eighth grade, it doesn't improve that much. Only 7 percent of the students that were reading at or below basic can bump up in those four years. Four years. And 7 percent of students in the U.S. can't improve their reading enough to read at their grade level. It doesn't get better for minorities and impoverished students either. They're still hovering right around the 39 to 40-ish percentile. It's pretty bad. It's not fair. It's really crappy. And so now that we're looking at this picture of education in the U.S., why are we pushing computer science? Why are we being told that anyone can learn to code when we have fourth graders and eighth graders and high school students who can't read at their grade level? They're not meeting the standards for reading and math. Why are we trying to teach them another subject when they haven't mastered the basic subjects? This is a terrible idea. Oh, you're doing really bad at paying your mortgage. How about you buy a new car? That's not philosophy. That's a terrible philosophy. And how do we expect our students to achieve anything or to even dream that they can achieve anything if when they graduate high school, they can't read the Great Gatsby or they can't solve an algebraic equation that the state expects them to, that the state says declares they're competent after graduating high school. How can they expect themselves to do well in life if the state is telling them that they are a failure and we're not doing anything to help them? And so transitioning kind of quickly into the American dream, which is kind of the big overall thing about this talk, I'm going to talk really quickly about what it is. I'm going to share with you a super scientific study I did. So the American dream, no surprise, was coined right at the beginning of the Great Depression. It was coined by an author named, well, it doesn't really matter, his last name is Adams. He wrote a book and a bunch of essays about it. And he was so proud of this thing that he came up with that he said that it was the most important thing that we'd ever done. It was our unique hour being the United States, our unique contribution to the civilization of the world. Like so pompous, but also really, really true. And so I asked some people when I was proposing this talk and researching this talk, what do you think the American dream is? And this is super scientific. I only asked my friends. I only asked people that I knew. So these are some of the responses I got. White picket fences owning your own house, striking it rich and becoming a millionaire, being an entrepreneur or being your own boss. And this one was from my working class mom, whereas being an entrepreneur was from a software developer. So another person said, nuclear families and not worrying about money. Someone who moved here from Norway recently said, coming to America with nothing and becoming rich because of your own will to succeed. My husband said, Elon Musk. I mean, he's right though. And then last person I asked said, I'm not sure. Really? I'm just, I'm not sure. But it seems like a lot of rich white men know and they don't want to share it. And all of these people are right. They're all components of the American dream. But the thing that I really want to focus on is what Adams had to say about it in this one paragraph. And it's a lot of text. I'm going to read to you because I don't want to have to force you to read. The dream is a vision of a better, deeper, richer life for every individual, regardless of the position and anxiety which he or she may occupy by the accident of birth. Accident. He were accidentally born into this sad position or this great position. Don't worry about it. It has been a dream of a chance, a chance to rise in the economic scale. But quite as much or more than that of a chance to develop our capacities to the full, unhampered by unjust restrictions of caste or custom. Or if you're that really rich developer in Silicon Valley, splitting up California into six different states, so Silicon Valley can have different legislation. So this last part is really the part I want to focus on. The chance to develop your capacities to the full without any restrictions. And that's really kind of when people talk about the American dream, striking it rich because it's something that they did on their own, that's what they're focusing on. It's about that individual achievement and unlocking your own potential. Who cares about the barriers? And this is startups. This is what it means to be innovative. And this is what it means to be a hashtag thought leader. Oh, no! It went away. Ha. There we go. Never leave your calendar open. Apparently I'll warn you about meetings that you're not at because you're in San Diego. And so this is what it means to disrupt. This is what it means to be Uber. This is what it means to be any startup company that is trying to change things. They don't care that it's unethical to threaten journalists. Barriers be damned, they're going to be successful no matter what. That's how the American dream has been realized by startups. And it's starting to impact how we educate programmers. And maybe starting might not be the best word there because it's been going on for a few years. And so we're talking about whether or not anyone can really learn to code. But unfortunately, we are leaving people out of this when we say that anyone can learn to code. When you think about brand new computers, and I don't mean brand new in that I just got a shiny MacBook Pro, I mean when computers first became a thing you could put in your own home. And the internet was a thing that was brand new. There wasn't a computer science major. You couldn't go and major in computer science at most of the universities in the U.S. People taught themselves. Or they had a friend teach them. They learned from someone else. And this is what makes our industry so amazing. The ability as an engineer to learn a new programming language because you taught yourself. You found the resources and you taught yourself. We're autodidactic learners. We really like to absorb new knowledge. We really like to try new things. And this is so important in our industry that we're actually amazed. People that we admire become more awesome because we found out that they're self-taught. Somebody tweeted this on the first day of the conference, they met Sandy Metz and found out that she was self-taught and they were so amazed that they said hero level up. So we value being a self-starter so much that it levels up your hero status. And this is cool. This is awesome. But because we value this self-starting so much, we are unfortunately increasing barriers to entry in formal CS programs. The rising popularity has made a lot of universities implement or re-implement depending on the school caps into classes and GPA requirements for the major. Which, you know, makes sense. You only want your best students graduating from this program because you want the best reputation. But that means the students who need the most help, the students who have the least technical background and can't get it because there are 500 people in CS 101, that means they're not going to get the knowledge they want, they're not going to get admitted into the major, we're increasing the barrier to entry for this field. Because you can't learn to code no matter what age if you don't have the right tools. I'm not talking about a computer and an internet connection. You can learn to code with a pen and paper. A girl, a woman that I know, is teaching underprivileged kids in Las Vegas how to code with a pen and paper. She's been doing that for a while. And now they have computers and they're writing code that's probably better than my code because they learned the logic before they learned the language. And that's huge, that's awesome. But having a computer doesn't automatically mean that you're going to be better than everybody else. It's about your educational foundations. And if you're one of those kids that graduated from a school where you can't read and write at your grade level, the likelihood of you being able to succeed in a CS program at a big university is probably not in your favor. And so to succeed as this industry, we have to stop expecting people to be able to teach themselves every step of the way. We still need to value this skill, but sometimes we need a little bit of help when we learn. And so if you really think about it from an individual person's point of view, can you say that anyone can learn to code to someone who has a developmental disability? My brother has Asperger's and there's no way that he could do this. But that doesn't mean that someone else who has Asperger's wouldn't be able to. Can you say that as somebody who doesn't have a home, doesn't have access to electricity, doesn't have access to a pen and paper? Can you say this to someone who lives in America and does not speak English? Can you say this to a single parent who has no time for themselves? No, probably not. Unless they're Superman and then maybe. So what we really mean when we're saying that anyone can learn to code is that anyone with sufficient privilege, educational background, and access to the right tools can learn to code, which is not as catchy. It's not great marketing. So we don't say that. We say anyone can learn to code and then we don't care about the people that the statement doesn't include. We don't care about the people we've forgotten. So it's not really for everyone. It's for the people who have the privilege of the access, the money. And that's where this all comes back together, the money. It's always the money. Because remember when everybody was talking about the American dream, everybody was talking about striking it rich or having a house. There's a lot of money in startups. October was the fifth largest investment month for the past two years. This last October, as in like two weeks ago, 1.2 billion with a B, billion dollars were invested in startups. That's so much money. And then when we talk about these boot camps, they all talk about how much money you're going to make when you graduate. You don't graduate, you don't get a certificate when you're finished. They say junior developers make $73,000 after leaving Dev Boot Camp or $110,000 after leaving Hack Reactor or more than $70,000 after leaving Flatiron School in New York and Good Luck Living in Manhattan on $70,000 a year. And code.org after Obama told us all to go there says that there are going to be $500 billion up for grabs and $1.4 million computing jobs. So clearly, the future is here, but we're not equipped to start it unless we go to Dev Boot Camp or we can change the world if we go to Starter School instead of selling sugar water. Or we can get the CS degree for the 21st century from the Harvard of Code Academies. We can get digital skills that transfer to job skills. And if that doesn't translate into a job in three months of learning, they'll give us our money back. And this is a big reason why there's so much Boot Camp backlash. They're promising the American dream and they're not delivering. And of course not. It's a dream. You can't deliver the dream for everyone. It's just repackaging something that's been sold to us again and again and again. And it's there. It's waiting for us. The future is now. We just have to be equipped to get these skills. Give us your anywhere from $8,000 to $20,000 and we'll give you these skills. But you don't hear a lot about what happens if you're not successful after one of these programs. They don't talk about the students who are asked to leave because they're not good enough. That happens. They don't talk about the students who leave because the teachers aren't teaching them in a way that's productive for them. And so for these students, they don't have anything to say to them. And so they get this message that if they can't learn, it's their fault. And that this dream of a well-paying job and all this stuff is not broken. It's not unattainable. It's not privileged. You're the problem. You can't learn this thing. And that's a really bad way to teach people. And there's ways to fix this. There are a couple things we can do. We can set realistic expectations for job seekers and skill seekers. If you're learning to code, make sure you know that you're not learning to program. You're learning to code. Improve our schools by education-focused initiatives and maybe volunteer to teach some kids how to read. I'm sure we've all got maybe, you know, five minutes free a week that we could help a kid learn how to read. Cut the hype and don't buy into the hype. The hype is part of the reason why these code schools are having such a hard time. They're promising a dream and delivering a reality. And the American dream shouldn't be something bad. It shouldn't be something that, oh, no, I didn't make it. Oh, no, I didn't do it. Oh, no, I failed out of this program. The American dream should be a positive thing. It should push us to do better. It should push us to try harder. It should push us to try new things. But when we promise the moon and never deliver it or only deliver it to one or two people, and it's the same one or two people that you see over and over and over again on these websites, we're not using the American dream effectively. It should be a tool that pushes us to be better at what we do. So I hope that wasn't a superdowner. I'm sorry if it was. So, yeah, thanks. you
 Hey everyone! There's a lot more of you here than I expected, given that Jay Ruby is happening  at the same time. So welcome. My name is Liz Abanante. I am an engineer at New Relic up  in the land of Portland. A little colder than here and a lot weirder than here. So I'm going to talk  to you today about programming, education, and the American Dream. And everybody that I've told  about this talk has told me, that seems really nebulous, Liz. That's kind of a big topic, Liz.  What are you going to really talk about, Liz? Come on, Liz. And I got really tired of hearing my name.  So I made an outline for you because I'm an academic at heart. We're going to go over a few  different things today. The Learned Code Movement, Education in America, what the American Dream actually  is, and then how this all comes together when we educate the programmers that we work with today.  So I'm going to kick it off with a little overview of the Learned Code Movement.  How does this all get started? It's a little difficult to give a straightforward explanation.  As with anything in our history, things are more complicated than just one event. It's never just  one thing. But I do want to focus on a few different things, these four specific things.  And while there's more than four, these are big factors. These are things that we all deal with  on a day to day in our work lives. I'm going to start with startup success stories, the availability  of the new curriculum, what it means to have a lower barrier to entry for these new technologies,  and the end result of Obama telling us all to do an hour of code. So while the stock market doesn't  always love software as a service companies or social media companies like Twitter, people love  them. We love them. We work on them. This is what we do for a living. And we all love a good story  about a programmer or just nobody who comes up with nothing, makes a company, and is super successful.  We love it so much that Facebook got its own movie. Facebook became part of American drama  because we made it into a movie. Like, that's how excited people are by these startup success  stories. They're so excited they'll go pay $13 to go see a matinee in New York City of this movie  about Facebook. Makes sense, right? I don't get why they're excited. Mark Zuckerberg is super rich.  He's worth $33 billion. He was ranked number 22 on the Forbes 400 list just last month.  And this year, Forbes did something new with their list. They added this self-made score down here.  His wealth is self-made. Well, what exactly does that mean?  So Forbes decided it was kind of silly to put Silver Spooners, a level one on the self-made  score, people who grow up with a lot of money and do nothing to make that money grow on the same  scale as someone, as say, Oprah. And so they invented this scale just this year. And they gave  Zuckerberg an eight. So for some perspective on that, one means born wealthy. Ten means unbelievable  life hardships. Zuckerberg is an eight because he came from a middle upper class family and had no  real help bootstrapping himself other than, you know, lots of ECs. Oprah is a 10. Her life was  only two points harder than Mark Zuckerberg, according to Forbes. According to Forbes. So  there's that. But they also did a look back at the old data and they found that in 1984, less than  half of the list was self-made. And just so we're all on the same page, self-made is a four or higher.  Not like a five or higher, where you think it would be and like it right in the middle,  but it's like a four or higher because three is wealthy and actively working to improve your wealth.  So now in 2014, almost three quarters of the list are self-made. There are at least a four or higher.  We really like what happens when we make our own fortunes. I mean, it would be easier if we just  had it. But, you know, another big factor is the availability of curriculum. It's just plain easier  to learn something if there are more ways to learn it because not everybody has the same learning  style. In-person courses started popping up that were a little bit more affordable than say, going  to MIT or Harvard or even a University of California school like I went to, not for CS. And so these  classes ranged from one day workshops, nonprofits like Girl Develop it offered affordable workshops  across the country in major cities. And then development courses started popping up, things  like Dev Boot Camp, things like Hackbright that were a little longer, a little more expensive,  a little bit more of a time commitment and very focused. But regardless of the types of programs,  the fact that these in-person courses were available outside of a four-year CS program  made it a lot easier for people to learn new things. But where a lot of people, myself included,  get started these days, I sound like an old person, is through free and affordable online curriculum.  These interactive video tutorials or where you talk to the computer and it talks back to you.  Those things are oftentimes the first four A into coding. It's your introduction to Ruby,  it's your introduction to JavaScript, it's how you learn HTML, the very, very basics. And these  online resources are amazing because they can teach you those foundational principles without  you having to drop a couple thousand dollars on a university course or an intensive program.  And that makes it a lot more accessible to people who don't have the wealth to afford  expensive programs or who don't have the time in their day or can't afford to quit a job to  quit a full-time program. And after that, in the past year or so, I've been seeing a lot of these,  we now have online curriculum that includes mentorship. So you get one-on-one kind of office  hours, almost like you would if you were a student at a university. You would get to spend time with  your instructor, you would get to learn at a one-on-one level. So if you're having a really,  really hard time understanding recursion, you can sit down and talk to somebody about it for a couple  hours on your schedule. This means if you live in North Dakota, you can get the same quality of  education in theory as someone who lives in San Francisco and has a lot more options available  to them. And this makes it much easier for people who work jobs with odd hours, can't afford to  quit a job or can only do part-time commitments to learn these skills. And so we have all these  different options and a big factor here in this curriculum being so popular is that now there's  a much lower barrier to learn these new technologies. We've started with these cloud development  environments, which as professional developers, not a ton of us would work in on a day-to-day,  but they alleviate cost and complication. This computer, my wonderful work computer,  I never could have bought when I was in college. I could not afford this. But say a Chromebook or  an old PC that I got second hand for free from a friend, I could have done cloud development and I  could have learned on a cloud. It's also helping to lower the number of things you need to learn  right out of the gate. You don't have to manage a dev environment. You don't have to deal with  conflicting versions of RubyGems. It's all just there. It's all set up for you. And while it's  super important to learn maintaining an environment and maintaining different versions of things  eventually in your career, it's sometimes a barrier. It's sometimes a blocker. It's really  frustrating to not be able to write code because you can't figure out why your server won't start.  What's more important? They're both important, but learning one at a time is more effective.  And the cheaper equipment, like Chromebooks, really makes those cloud development environments  useful to people. The Y Web Academy in Wisconsin is a free program for underprivileged youth  and for people of color to learn full stack Rails and JS development. And they're doing it on $300  Chromebooks. It's a nine month program. And they're learning everything that they can learn on that  Chromebook and cloud development environment. That's awesome. $300 as opposed to $2,000 or so.  Like, that's pretty cool. We're also learning simpler languages. And I say simple because it's  all relative, but Ruby and Python don't have a lot of that syntax. And when I teach JavaScript to  beginners, they don't have trouble understanding the concept of, say, conditionals, but that syntax  is a bear. They cannot figure it out. And you give them a linter and they're like, but I don't  understand. Where does it go? And then get so confused and so frustrated. Syntax should not be  a blocker to learning. And while syntax is an important part of programming languages, while it  is the thing that calms my soul when these parentheses all match up and the curly braces are  all there and I love it, it makes me so happy and I find joy in that, it was a huge blocker for me  when I started learning because I couldn't figure out where the damn parentheses go. And you don't  remember what order they go in. That's a blocker that we can get rid of now if you learn Ruby or  Python and then move on to new language when you've mastered these concepts. We've also given people  more options of things to learn. With this emphasis on user experience and responsive web and mobile  apps, people can now learn what they're interested in instead of the thing that has jobs. You don't  have to learn about DevOps and securities and servers if it's not your interest. You're more  than welcome to if that's what you're interested in, but sometimes that stuff is really hard for  a beginner. Maybe learning how to do responsive CSS is really your jam. And there are a shitload  of people out there who would love to hire you so they don't have to write that CSS. Your job is  not just writing code. Your job is building user experiences and that's just as technical as running  the server. So these opportunities are newer, the last I'd say five, maybe eight years and that makes  it easier for people to get into the field and find where they belong. And lastly, it's a small  thing, but it matters. In December of last year, Obama gave a speech about jobs in the U.S. And  one thing he said was that youth should learn how to program their phone instead of just playing  with it. And he encouraged everyone to do an hour of code a day for a week in December. It was this  big challenge that he issued. And a ton of people did it. People did it in classrooms with pen and  paper. They did it on computers. They did it at work. They did it at home. I even got an email  from my CEO at my last job that says I did my hour of code. Did you? It's like, yes, I did. I  actually did my eight hours of code today. But it still changed the way a lot of people approached  it because they had the leader of their country tell them that it was something that they could do.  And that's not something that everyone had initially thought of. But now that we're telling you  anyone can learn to code, you can program your phone. We're starting to discover that there's a  little bit of a discrepancy between this type of marketing and the actual lived reality.  And I do have to pause for two seconds in this talk to tell you a little bit about myself because  it does inform a lot of what I say about this topic. I was going to be a high school teacher  because there's nothing more exciting than teaching high school students, right? They are  soulless monsters. But I was convinced that I could be the teacher that would make them love to  read and be super interested in history. But I didn't. I went to a code boot camp. And instead,  I'm not really sure if it's an instead because they still teach people programming. And I went to a  code boot camp because I fell for this marketing of anyone learning to code and getting an awesome job  and making a crap load of money. I was at a dead end startup. And I hated my job. And I wanted  something more challenging. I knew HTML and CSS. And I was like, it can't be harder than CSS, right?  It's not. I'm going to say CSS is easier. So I learned my first programming language in 2013.  And because I didn't come from a technical background, it was one of the hardest things I've  ever done. And I grew up with a DOS computer that I practiced spelling on. It was my dad's work  computer. I still don't know to this day what type of work he accomplished on this computer  because he worked in the field for Pacific Gastroelectric here in California, like climbing  poles. Why did he have a computer at home? But I still learned to type at a really young age.  And that was my exposure to tech prior to probably late high school when I started  inspecting the code on my favorite in sync fan pages so that I could change the colors of the  fonts to make them more readable. And that was how I learned HTML and CSS. I really tried to find  my in sync fan page that I made when I was like 12, but I couldn't find it. Web archive let me down.  But I never saw tech as a career. I just didn't because my parents were working class. My mom  didn't work because she couldn't afford to work and send both of us to daycare. And my dad worked  in the field. He came home dirty and sweaty and smelly every single day. And my friends' parents  were teachers or social workers or they worked for the garbage collection service. Like everybody I  knew was working class. Everybody I knew didn't work in this field. It just wasn't where they were.  And even when I got to college and used email, my comprehension of email was I hit the send button.  And then there's someone that grabs my email and walks it over to that person and gives it to them.  Like it's a manual process behind the scenes. And I didn't understand how tech worked even when I was  19 and 20 and was using it every day to do research, to write papers, to send emails. It just wasn't  my thing. And then I started working at a startup and that was where my eyes got opened. And I  realized the internet was not powered by Excel spreadsheets. I did not know what databases were.  I found out very quickly. And then I decided to learn how to program. But really I decided to learn  how to code because that's what everybody told me to do. Everybody said learn how to code. Anyone  can learn how to code. Here's how you do it. Here are the different ways to do it. Here are all my  opinions on things. Run with it. But it turns out that learning to code is not the same as learning  to program. And those are two very different things. Nobody really tells you this when you're  typing away on code academy and you're writing your first Ruby method. Nobody tells you that  code and programming are two different things. And so really it's like learning to read. You can  learn to read as pattern recognition or you can learn to read as a rich understanding and deep  analysis and comprehension of your subject matter. And so if you look at it from that perspective,  writing code is really nothing more than typing from a prescribed set of syntax or prescribed set  of rules. So we're all just really overpaid typists that have very specific rules we follow  when we type. And that's what it is if your job is code. But if your job is programming,  it's not just typing. It's more than typing. And just like becoming a good writer or a good  literary analyst comes from learning from others and gaining strength from what they've done and  what they haven't done, so it's being a good coder. We learn a lot when we work with other people.  And this learn to code movement, while wonderful and we're all learning these new things,  sometimes we're learning them from people who are not prepared to teach us. They're either not  prepared because they don't have the right curriculum or they're not prepared because they  don't have the right training. So you end up having a very frustrating experience for students.  And what could start as learning to program actually just becomes learning to type code.  And when you're learning from these unprepared instructors or if you're having a bad learning  experience, it's not just clicking for you, you'll hear people tell you it's easy and they'll grab  your computer and they'll type some shit in your terminal and magic stuff will happen. And you have  no idea what the hell they just did, but you know, you know at the very bottom of your soul that  it's fucking magic. Like it is the most magical thing you've ever seen and you're just, your brain  is overwhelmed by how cool it was. But you can't forget how to do it. And they keep telling you  it's easy, it's easy, it's easy. And they're saying it's easy, I did it, so can you. But as a learner  as a new person coming to programming, what it actually sounds like to me when I try to do what  you tell me is easy, is that it's easy and I did it. If you can't, it's your fault. Sometimes you  hear you're stupid, depending on the tone. And this is not a really rewarding experience for  students, whether they be adults learning to code or kids in elementary school. And phrases like  this are really common, not just in education of developers, but in school itself. You're teaching  kids algebra and they're really stumped by it. Teachers will say it's easy, just do this. But  those phrases put the responsibility for learning among the student. They take the responsibility  away from the institution, away from the instructor. They're no longer responsible for the quality of  their education, the quality of their instruction. You're responsible for it. You're responsible  for absorbing the way they're teaching you, regardless of whether or not it works for you.  And that sucks as a learner. You don't learn a lot and you don't learn well. Because different  students do not excel or fail because of innate abilities. Yeah, sure. I'm sure we've all read  studies that say people born with this type of brain are better at this type of thing. But at the  end of the day, you're better at something because of your exposure to it or because you were raised  with it. If you have a great education and you're exposed to computers from age two and up and you  can type faster than I can at age two, it's likely that you're going to work with computers and you're  going to be really damn good at it. Not everybody has those type of exposures when they're young.  Because of the way we teach kids. So shifting focus a little, we're going to talk about educating  youth in America, not with coding, but in regards to just education in general. And there's a lot  of different ways that we teach kids, but in general, it's focused on achievement and lectures.  And in the recent past from kindergarten on through high school, we did this system called  leveling. And it was kind of crappy because instead of being challenged to learn new skills,  you were placed at your level. And if you're at your grade level, that's cool because you're  learning new stuff. But if you're a student in the fifth grade and you read at a third grade  reading level for your entire fifth grade year, you will continue to read at that third grade  reading level. And when you go to the sixth grade, maybe they'll bump you up to the fourth grade  reading level if you pass the test. And this was leaving a ton of students behind. Are really  good example of this was in a junior high English book or English history book, they were learning  about the founders of the United States. And there's a sentence in this book, very simple sentence.  Ben Franklin was one of the founders of our nation. And in the at grade level book, that was what it  said. Ben Franklin is one of the founders of our nation. In the low reading level book, it said Ben  Franklin started this country. Because apparently founder and nation are too complicated. And so  when you're not getting a new vocabulary, when you're not being challenged because you're already  underperforming, you're not learning. And so this was the state of education in the U.S. until a few  years ago when they introduced common core standards. And I'm sure if some of your parents,  you may have heard of common core and you may have seen those like math problems that are  ridiculous like I have $5 and Jimmy has three figs, how many mice can I buy? Like that's kind of  what it's like. But what common core really is is a set of standards. They were created so that  students could go from kindergarten to high school and acquire the skills that they needed for their  career or for college or for life, no matter what school district they're in. And they were created  with international educational practices in mind because the U.S. school system is really bad.  So we looked at countries that had better school systems than we did and we developed these standards  using research and evidence and we made them clear and we made them understandable. There's  lovely outlines and there's codes for every single skill like CCR 430 describes a reading skill. Cool.  And these standards have been adopted in 43 different states and Washington, D.C.  But the problem is we made these standards and once again we did not prepare our teachers. We did  not train them. We did not teach our teachers how to teach our kids. And so parents are pissed  because their kids come home with homework about figs and dollars and mice and they don't know how  to help them solve it and the teachers don't know how to teach it. So really when there was this  article in the New York Times about common core that was published just recently, it was written  by somebody who helped form the mathematical standards for the common core that get the most  flak. He said in the hands of unprepared teachers the reforms turned to nonsense,  perplexing students more than helping them. So we're back to where we were before. We're back to  students not really learning the thing they're supposed to be learning and students not really  being challenged because how can you be challenged if your teacher can't teach you? And they're  still leveling students within common core. They're still levels. You can still be below  your grade level which is kind of not the point really. And so common core isn't the solution  because it reinforces the check box learning. If you can do score or if you can do skills,  CCR 430, you've mastered that reading skill and now we can move on and teach you more stuff.  Common core doesn't revisit skills. It doesn't emphasize skills. It doesn't encourage you to  keep working with those skills. It just drops it in there. Can you check the box? Yes, no, cool,  move on. If you can't check the box, it doesn't matter. You're screwed. Next grade level. That's  common core. And it doesn't address the disparity in educational quality or dropout rates in the  nation's poor schools. It just kind of says they're there which is not really a good way of fixing  things. But when we talk about student demographics and we talk about teaching students, we talk about  poor schools and good schools and like what does this all really mean? So I dug up some numbers  on the top five STEM high schools in the US. Turns out it's super easy to find information about  the best schools in the country. US news ranks schools every single year for high school and  college based on their standards. And so I only chose the top five STEM high schools because I  wanted a relatively small sample size to work with because the numbers get kind of scary after a  while. So it's about 5,700 students a year that they educate and that's not the students that  graduate. That's students that walk into the school every year. About I'd say a quarter of those  given that they're four grades graduate every year. So if you look at the minorities, it's actually  better. It's actually more representative than what the US has. The US has about 50% of the population  as part of a minority group according to last census. So this is pretty good. This is pretty cool.  63% of the students at the top five of the very best STEM high schools in the US are a minority.  That's pretty awesome. That's really good. Go us kind of. There are 12 Native American students  at these schools. All of them, all five total, 12. 15 Hawaiian or Pacific Islander kids. And so  are you really educating the representative minority group in the United States? Not really.  And schools here for this statistic, they report what percentage of their student body falls into  these racial ethnic group categories. And when I did the math, a lot of the schools had 0.6 students  that were Native American or Hawaiian or Black or Hispanic or whatever minority I was looking at.  0.6 students, like from your neck down, like a neck down student or like a waist up student,  like whatever 60% of your body mass is, which is, I mean, it doesn't really matter if it's 0.6  or one student. It still sucks to be the only one. And it sucks even more if you're poor.  Of the 5,700 students at these schools, less than a percent, less than 1%, a single percent,  are impoverished. And that's really sad. But like how many kids is that actually? Is that many?  So like this section of the room, that's you guys, I guess?  37 kids. And this is the national number. But it's actually only the number for one school,  because only one school reported having any impoverished kids at their school.  So really it's one school is working to correct some socioeconomic disparity in the U.S., while the  other four don't serve socioeconomically disadvantaged students. And so I decided I wanted to do some  comparisons to the worst schools in the U.S. and see how they stack up to the best high schools.  There are no lists of the worst schools in the U.S. They don't exist. I Google best high schools  in the U.S. I look in education statistics for the Department of Education. I look at state  statistics. Can't find it. Can't find bad schools. They don't exist. And I kind of understand this  because no parent wants to know that their kid is going to the worst high school in the U.S.  You don't want to be like, I'm sorry, little kid, you're going to one of the worst schools.  And tears. Like you don't want to tell that to your kid. And the only list that I could find  was actually created by a neighborhood researching company called Neighborhood Scout,  which based on the information on the page, I can only imagine is created to help white people  avoid poor neighborhoods. So I didn't trust the data, so I didn't use it. So I have no statistics  on the worst schools in the U.S. because nobody will tell me what the worst schools in the U.S.  are. So instead, I decided to look at the nationwide literacy rates. I started with fourth graders.  And these are fourth graders who take the national reading test. This is across all states in the  U.S. This is every fourth grader. At or below basic, a third of students. Basic, depending on the state,  either means at your grade level or one level below. So you should be reading at a third or  fourth grade level to be in the 66 percent. Or yes, sorry, that was confusing. And so a third  of our kids cannot read at the grade level in the fourth grade. About half of black, Hispanic,  Native American and impoverished students read below basic. So they're like reading at first  and second grade level in the fourth grade. When we test them in eighth grade, it doesn't improve  that much. Only 7 percent of the students that were reading at or below basic can bump up in those  four years. Four years. And 7 percent of students in the U.S. can't improve their reading enough  to read at their grade level. It doesn't get better for minorities and impoverished students  either. They're still hovering right around the 39 to 40-ish percentile. It's pretty bad. It's not  fair. It's really crappy. And so now that we're looking at this picture of education in the U.S.,  why are we pushing computer science? Why are we being told that anyone can learn to code  when we have fourth graders and eighth graders and high school students who can't read at their  grade level? They're not meeting the standards for reading and math. Why are we trying to teach  them another subject when they haven't mastered the basic subjects? This is a terrible idea.  Oh, you're doing really bad at paying your mortgage. How about you buy a new car?  That's not philosophy. That's a terrible philosophy. And how do we expect our students to achieve  anything or to even dream that they can achieve anything if when they graduate high school,  they can't read the Great Gatsby or they can't solve an algebraic equation  that the state expects them to, that the state says declares they're competent  after graduating high school. How can they expect themselves to do well in life if the  state is telling them that they are a failure and we're not doing anything to help them?  And so transitioning kind of quickly into the American dream, which is kind of the big overall  thing about this talk, I'm going to talk really quickly about what it is. I'm going to share  with you a super scientific study I did. So the American dream, no surprise, was coined right  at the beginning of the Great Depression. It was coined by an author named, well, it doesn't  really matter, his last name is Adams. He wrote a book and a bunch of essays about it. And he was  so proud of this thing that he came up with that he said that it was the most important thing that  we'd ever done. It was our unique hour being the United States, our unique contribution to the  civilization of the world. Like so pompous, but also really, really true. And so I asked some people  when I was proposing this talk and researching this talk, what do you think the American dream is?  And this is super scientific. I only asked my friends. I only asked people that I knew.  So these are some of the responses I got. White picket fences owning your own house,  striking it rich and becoming a millionaire, being an entrepreneur or being your own boss.  And this one was from my working class mom, whereas being an entrepreneur was from a software  developer. So another person said, nuclear families and not worrying about money. Someone who moved  here from Norway recently said, coming to America with nothing and becoming rich because of your  own will to succeed. My husband said, Elon Musk. I mean, he's right though. And then last person I  asked said, I'm not sure. Really? I'm just, I'm not sure. But it seems like a lot of rich white men  know and they don't want to share it. And all of these people are right. They're all components  of the American dream. But the thing that I really want to focus on is what Adams had to say about  it in this one paragraph. And it's a lot of text. I'm going to read to you because I don't want to  have to force you to read. The dream is a vision of a better, deeper, richer life for every individual,  regardless of the position and anxiety which he or she may occupy by the accident of birth.  Accident. He were accidentally born into this sad position or this great position.  Don't worry about it. It has been a dream of a chance, a chance to rise in the economic scale.  But quite as much or more than that of a chance to develop our capacities to the full, unhampered  by unjust restrictions of caste or custom. Or if you're that really rich developer in Silicon  Valley, splitting up California into six different states, so Silicon Valley can have different  legislation. So this last part is really the part I want to focus on. The chance to develop  your capacities to the full without any restrictions. And that's really kind of when people talk about  the American dream, striking it rich because it's something that they did on their own,  that's what they're focusing on. It's about that individual achievement and unlocking your own  potential. Who cares about the barriers? And this is startups. This is what it means to be  innovative. And this is what it means to be a hashtag thought leader. Oh, no! It went away.  Ha. There we go. Never leave your calendar open. Apparently I'll warn you about meetings  that you're not at because you're in San Diego. And so this is what it means to disrupt. This is  what it means to be Uber. This is what it means to be any startup company that is trying to change  things. They don't care that it's unethical to threaten journalists. Barriers be damned,  they're going to be successful no matter what. That's how the American dream has been realized  by startups. And it's starting to impact how we educate programmers. And maybe starting might not  be the best word there because it's been going on for a few years. And so we're talking about  whether or not anyone can really learn to code. But unfortunately, we are leaving people out of  this when we say that anyone can learn to code. When you think about brand new computers, and I  don't mean brand new in that I just got a shiny MacBook Pro, I mean when computers first became  a thing you could put in your own home. And the internet was a thing that was brand new. There  wasn't a computer science major. You couldn't go and major in computer science at most of the  universities in the U.S. People taught themselves. Or they had a friend teach them. They learned from  someone else. And this is what makes our industry so amazing. The ability as an engineer to learn a  new programming language because you taught yourself. You found the resources and you taught  yourself. We're autodidactic learners. We really like to absorb new knowledge. We really like to  try new things. And this is so important in our industry that we're actually amazed. People that  we admire become more awesome because we found out that they're self-taught. Somebody tweeted this  on the first day of the conference, they met Sandy Metz and found out that she was self-taught and  they were so amazed that they said hero level up. So we value being a self-starter so much  that it levels up your hero status. And this is cool. This is awesome. But because we value this  self-starting so much, we are unfortunately increasing barriers to entry in formal CS programs.  The rising popularity has made a lot of universities implement or re-implement depending on the school  caps into classes and GPA requirements for the major. Which, you know, makes sense. You only want  your best students graduating from this program because you want the best reputation. But that  means the students who need the most help, the students who have the least technical background  and can't get it because there are 500 people in CS 101, that means they're not going to get the  knowledge they want, they're not going to get admitted into the major, we're increasing the  barrier to entry for this field. Because you can't learn to code no matter what age if you don't  have the right tools. I'm not talking about a computer and an internet connection. You can  learn to code with a pen and paper. A girl, a woman that I know, is teaching underprivileged kids in  Las Vegas how to code with a pen and paper. She's been doing that for a while. And now they have  computers and they're writing code that's probably better than my code because they learned the logic  before they learned the language. And that's huge, that's awesome. But having a computer doesn't  automatically mean that you're going to be better than everybody else. It's about your educational  foundations. And if you're one of those kids that graduated from a school where you can't read and  write at your grade level, the likelihood of you being able to succeed in a CS program at a big  university is probably not in your favor. And so to succeed as this industry, we have to stop  expecting people to be able to teach themselves every step of the way. We still need to value this  skill, but sometimes we need a little bit of help when we learn. And so if you really think about it  from an individual person's point of view, can you say that anyone can learn to code to someone  who has a developmental disability? My brother has Asperger's and there's no way that he could do  this. But that doesn't mean that someone else who has Asperger's wouldn't be able to. Can you say  that as somebody who doesn't have a home, doesn't have access to electricity, doesn't have access to  a pen and paper? Can you say this to someone who lives in America and does not speak English?  Can you say this to a single parent who has no time for themselves? No, probably not. Unless  they're Superman and then maybe. So what we really mean when we're saying that anyone can learn to  code is that anyone with sufficient privilege, educational background, and access to the right  tools can learn to code, which is not as catchy. It's not great marketing. So we don't say that.  We say anyone can learn to code and then we don't care about the people that the statement doesn't  include. We don't care about the people we've forgotten. So it's not really for everyone.  It's for the people who have the privilege of the access, the money. And that's where this all  comes back together, the money. It's always the money. Because remember when everybody was talking  about the American dream, everybody was talking about striking it rich or having a house. There's  a lot of money in startups. October was the fifth largest investment month for the past two years.  This last October, as in like two weeks ago, 1.2 billion with a B, billion dollars were invested  in startups. That's so much money. And then when we talk about these boot camps, they all talk about  how much money you're going to make when you graduate. You don't graduate, you don't get a  certificate when you're finished. They say junior developers make $73,000 after leaving Dev Boot Camp  or $110,000 after leaving Hack Reactor or more than $70,000 after leaving Flatiron School in New  York and Good Luck Living in Manhattan on $70,000 a year. And code.org after Obama told us all to  go there says that there are going to be $500 billion up for grabs and $1.4 million computing  jobs. So clearly, the future is here, but we're not equipped to start it unless we go to Dev Boot  Camp or we can change the world if we go to Starter School instead of selling sugar water.  Or we can get the CS degree for the 21st century from the Harvard of Code Academies.  We can get digital skills that transfer to job skills. And if that doesn't translate into a job  in three months of learning, they'll give us our money back. And this is a big reason why there's  so much Boot Camp backlash. They're promising the American dream and they're not delivering.  And of course not. It's a dream. You can't deliver the dream for everyone. It's just repackaging  something that's been sold to us again and again and again. And it's there. It's waiting for us.  The future is now. We just have to be equipped to get these skills. Give us your anywhere from  $8,000 to $20,000 and we'll give you these skills. But you don't hear a lot about what happens if  you're not successful after one of these programs. They don't talk about the students who are asked  to leave because they're not good enough. That happens. They don't talk about the students who  leave because the teachers aren't teaching them in a way that's productive for them. And so for  these students, they don't have anything to say to them. And so they get this message that if they  can't learn, it's their fault. And that this dream of a well-paying job and all this stuff is not  broken. It's not unattainable. It's not privileged. You're the problem. You can't learn this thing.  And that's a really bad way to teach people. And there's ways to fix this. There are a couple  things we can do. We can set realistic expectations for job seekers and skill seekers. If you're  learning to code, make sure you know that you're not learning to program. You're learning to code.  Improve our schools by education-focused initiatives and maybe volunteer to teach  some kids how to read. I'm sure we've all got maybe, you know, five minutes free a week  that we could help a kid learn how to read. Cut the hype and don't buy into the hype. The hype  is part of the reason why these code schools are having such a hard time. They're promising a dream  and delivering a reality. And the American dream shouldn't be something bad. It shouldn't be something  that, oh, no, I didn't make it. Oh, no, I didn't do it. Oh, no, I failed out of this program. The  American dream should be a positive thing. It should push us to do better. It should push us  to try harder. It should push us to try new things. But when we promise the moon and never  deliver it or only deliver it to one or two people, and it's the same one or two people that you see  over and over and over again on these websites, we're not using the American dream effectively.  It should be a tool that pushes us to be better at what we do. So I hope that wasn't a superdowner.  I'm sorry if it was. So, yeah, thanks.  you
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