Yes, you should learn to code

As the fourth industrial revolution picks up momentum, Generations X, Y and Z will need to adapt accordingly if they are to thrive

Late last year, I had to (ghost) write a series of articles about Australia’s tech talent shortage. Like many countries, Australia now has a serious shortage of tech workers. Historically, such supply-demand problems haven’t ever become severe because Australia has always been able to import tech workers, mainly from China and India.

Much to the distress of Australian tech companies, which have had to start offering higher wages to local workers, Covid cut off the supply of skilled foreign labour. Australian employers, especially in the tech sector, are now urging Australia’s political class to adopt something close to an open borders policy to make up for the lack of immigration between 2020-2022. As soon as the next federal election is out of the way (i.e. sometime no later than May 21), whichever party is in power will be under intense pressure to open the skilled migrant floodgates.  

But employers in Australia, and the rest of the developed world, may soon discover accessing relatively cheap and reliably compliant foreign labour is no longer as straightforward as it was in a pre-pandemic (and pre-Brexit/Trump) world.

As living standards in China and India continue to improve, Chinese and Indian software engineers may be less inclined to migrate, either temporarily or permanently. And the Chinese and Indian governments are deadly serious about becoming dominant players in the digital economy. Both governments will presumably do everything possible to encourage the local tech talent to stick around. Plus, if the cold war between China and the West heats up further, Chinese tech workers may be unwilling or unable to work even temporarily in Australia, Canada, the UK or US.

A brief history of learning to code    

Journalists – who are nowadays almost all university educated and frequently from upper-middle-class backgrounds – were never much concerned about the many millions of blue-collar men (it was mainly but not exclusively men) thrown under the bus once businesses in high-wage countries were given a free hand to export their jobs to low-wage countries.

If the much-diminished life chances of the lower orders were paid any attention at all, it was widely agreed among fourth-estate types that they should magically transform into well-educated white-collar knowledge workers or, more realistically, get over their ‘male privilege’ and accept a poorly paid, insecure job in hospitality or retail.  

In 2014-15, there was a media/political brouhaha over whether coal miners should learn to code. The then New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, insisted, “You’re not going to teach a coal miner to code. Mark Zuckerberg says you teach them to code and everything will be great. I don’t know how to break it to you . . . but no.”

Shortly thereafter, Wired ran an article explaining that it was not just theoretically possible to teach an old miner new digital tricks, but that some erstwhile colliers in flyover country were now making “mining wages” after having learned to code at various types of coding camps being put on in locales such as Appalachia.

Post-2015, whenever yet another industry-wide cull of journalists occurs, social media wits have great fun advising the laid-off reporters to learn to code. As anyone who’s picked up a newspaper in the last 15 years will have noted, journalists have not taken kindly to getting the same advice they have been so free in handing out to miners and manufacturing workers for the last few decades.  

A learning experience  

Given a choice between going on the disability pension then developing a raging alcohol/meth/opioid addiction or learning a skill that will make them employable, I believe blue-collar men should learn to code. Just like I believe white-collar types – untenured academics, accountants, bank tellers, bookkeepers, financial advisers, insurance salesmen, journalists, lawyers, market researchers, pharmacists, pilots, stock traders, salespeople, translators and travel agents – should do likewise if they hope to hold onto the income and prestige that comes with having a ‘good job’.    

If that sounds hardhearted, I hasten to add that, a decade ago, I was an unemployed and seemingly unemployable 40-year-old magazine journalist with a large mortgage and a family to support. My plight never attracted any public attention and I’m pretty sure nobody ever tweeted “learn to code” at me. But that’s what I did.

I never learnt to code in the sense of mastering C++ or Python. However, I did adapt to a world that had already undergone a profound digital transformation in the two decades since I finished my undergraduate degree. I stopped writing articles for dying magazines and newspapers and started producing online content for banks, government agencies, educational institutions, PR firms and multinationals. I made the effort to familiarise myself with the basics of HTTP and CSS. I took the time to educate myself about SEO. If a client wanted me to use a particular CMS or task management software, I learnt how to use it. And, ultimately, I started writing almost exclusively about technological solutions and the tech companies creating them. Albeit somewhat begrudgingly, I adapted to the world as it now was, not as I wanted it to remain.

End result?      

I’m now as happy an erstwhile coal miner working nine to five in an air-conditioned office and wondering how he is raking in six figures without having to do backbreaking labour while waiting to die of black lung.   

A life-changing opportunity

There is a lot of overblown punditry about ‘the future of work’. Pessimistic leftists like to argue we are one AI breakthrough away from a neo-feudal society. One in which a tech-bro aristocracy lord it over 99 per cent of humanity, who will be forced to eke out a miserable existence on modest UBI payments and risk being disappeared if they get restive, causing their social credit score to dip into the red.

A much smaller number of optimistic leftists like to fantasise that machines will soon free humanity from drudgery and that, under fully automated luxury communism, everybody will get to spend their lives writing novels and composing symphonies. Or at least consuming vast amounts of Metaverse porn and playing incredibly immersive VR or AR video games with no obligation to ever get off the couch and go to work.

I’m sceptical either scenario is likely to play out, at least within the next 10-20 years.

What I’m convinced of – because it’s what’s been happening for the last 10-20 years – is that many workers, including those located at the pointy end of the prestige-occupations pyramid, are going to either be entirely displaced by technology and have to retrain for a new career, or are going to have to hand many of their day-to-day tasks over to machines and concentrate on providing the kind of higher-values services that are currently beyond the scope of those machines.

For instance, accounting software will soon be able to handle all the bookkeeping and tax-return-preparation grunt work accountants have done for the last 7000 years. Accountants will have to reinvent themselves as business advisers, which is what the more prescient ones are now doing.       

The retraining conundrum

Those readers with mortgage payments to make and children to support will have already identified an issue with my breezy “Learn to code” admonishment. Acquiring digital skills takes time and energy. Time and energy that is difficult to find if you’re holding down a demanding job and raising a family.

While there are no easy solutions to this problem, the good news is that governments, private businesses and coding camps are increasingly offering mid-career workers stipends so they can quit their jobs in declining 20th-century industries – and a disturbingly large number of 20th-century industries are, or soon will be, in a death spiral – and digitally retool their skill sets.

For instance, the Victorian Government recently set aside $64 million to pay 5000 mid-career Victorians a liveable wage while they do a 12-week internship and receive training in a particular digital skill at a Victorian TAFE or university.

As the fourth industrial revolution accelerates and the West becomes even more worried about losing the digital arms race to China, I’d expect increasing numbers of mid-career and even late-career workers in countries such as Australia to be offered good money to spend 3/6/12 months retraining.

It’s an offer I’d recommend they accept, no matter how much they fear change.

Suggested further reading

If there’s one book about technological change I believe everyone should read, it’s The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future by Kevin Kelly. If you want to understand how the economy has changed over the last couple of decades and the trends that will transform it over the next couple of decades, I can’t recommend this tome, written by the co-founder of Wired, highly enough.