A lot of the observations in this article are very interesting, but personally, I drew different conclusions.<p>The first one is the main thesis of the post which is that some people have an innate ability to program that others do not possess, and that this is a thing that cannot be learnt. As a result, telling people that it is &quot;easy to code&quot; is a lie.<p>Firstly, it is actually not clear to me that this ability to pick up programming principles cannot be taught. All we know is that our <i>current methods</i> of teaching yield a double hump distribution for programming ability.<p>Secondly, if people were actually saying &quot;you will find coding easy&quot; to anyone and everyone then I agree that they are probably concealing the truth. But actually, if you read the tagline on the example given (The Year of Code initiative) it says:<p>&gt; Start coding this year, it&#x27;s easier than you think.<p>&quot;It&#x27;s easier <i>than you think</i>&quot; (emphasis mine). This is quite a different statement to a flat out &quot;it&#x27;s easy&quot;, and it&#x27;s one I agree with. To most people, coding appears difficult because they simply don&#x27;t know the answers to a few key questions (E.g. Where do I write the code? What do I do to run my code? How does the computer understand what I&#x27;ve written?). The (basic) answers to these questions are comprehensible to most people, and furnish them with the ability to write code (maybe not well, but that&#x27;s a whole other story).<p>Next observation:<p>&gt; Folks, which industries&#x2F;professions give up their own free time to provide free&#x2F;open training to people wishing to enter the sector? Curious<p>The fact that only the software development industry seems to do this is painted as a negative thing in the article. Why is that? I ask because this is a fact I think we should be proud of. I personally enjoy what I do so much, that I happily spend time out of my week, teaching it to others for free. I don&#x27;t do this because I think all the people I teach will go on to become successful software engineers, but rather because I want to widen the net, and expose more people to what we do, because for some of them (maybe even just one of them) this might be their &quot;true calling&quot;.<p>I got into programming originally from watching a cousin of mine editing the themes of his Wordpress blog. He went on to study English Literature and Psychology; To him, coding was just this tool that allowed him to publish his views, but to my 9 year old self, watching him, it really struck a chord and I was hooked. Now, there is not a thing in the world I could imagine myself doing rather than writing code and loving every minute of it (And no amount of &quot;social status&quot; is going to turn me to a life of law, medicine or architecture). What an opportunity I would have lost if I had not seen my cousin working on his blog... Every week-long learn to code course, and every &quot;hour of code&quot; initiative works towards bringing such opportunities to the wider public.<p>Finally, on the role of Computer Science degrees: I am currently in my final year of a Masters in CS, which I have also enjoyed studying immensely. I would not say that it has contributed directly to my skills as a software engineer, but the things I have learnt have changed the ways in which I approach problems. Very few people write structural induction proofs, loop invariants or abstract specifications to prove the correctness of their programs, but I have found them to be great ways to think about how to write better code. These skills, however, are complementary to those that make a good software engineer, not a substitute. There&#x27;s no way to prove yourself out of a rat&#x27;s nest of class hierarchies and control structures.