Learning to code can't fix capitalism
Is anyone else feeling wistful about the tech industry right now? I know I am. It feels like the end of an era. I read this post by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic today, and I think it echoes this feeling, while ending with a tiny bit of optimism.
One mistake that a journalist can make in observing these trends is to assume that, because the software-based tech industry seems to be struggling now, things will stay like this forever. More likely, we are in an intermission between technological epochs. We’ve mostly passed through the browser era, the social-media era, and the smartphone-app-economy era. But in the past few months, the explosion of artificial-intelligence programs suggests that something quite spectacular and possibly a little terrifying is on the horizon. Ten years from now, looking back on the 2022 tech recession, we may say that this moment was a paroxysm of scandals and layoffs between two discrete movements.
There’s a part of me that is also hopeful, not necessarily about AI or evolving technology, but about the new ways of working that could emerge as the economy changes and tech is no longer dominated by the cultures of the biggest players.
However, I also know how capitalism works. I know the squeeze that comes with continual re-structuring, budget cuts, expectations of increased velocity, and the prioritization of revenue growth over people. Companies can’t grow up and to the right forever, and the ones that try usually lose touch with their values in the process.
Tech for me has felt like a safe haven from the squeeze. Not because it is insulated from the demands of capitalism (ha, definitely not!), but because the growing job market meant that I always had the ability to move on when the company I work for stops working for me. I do hope that once the dust settles a bit, this continues to be true, but I know that nothing in this life is a guarantee.
Anyway, I wrote this as a Medium post back in 2019, and it is speaking to me again today. When the solution to the problems with capitalism is… more capitalism, it rarely ends well.
I remember the first day I started learning JavaScript. I was living in Guatemala teaching at an international school, and filling every spare minute I had with writing and blogging and building a community on the internet. Code looked so weird to my eyes — I didn’t understand the syntax, or why there were so many brackets and parentheses and semicolons in seemingly random places. It took me a long time to grasp loops and conditionals and data structures. When I didn’t understand it at first, I told myself that it was to be expected. After all, I was the artistic one in my family. Math and science and technical skills were my brother’s thing, not mine. But yet something was fascinating about it that kept me plugging away at it day after day. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn.
Four years later1, this is my story: I was a music teacher who learned to code, and it changed my life. I paid off college debt and have affordable health insurance. I have the job security I never had in the education field — or at least the reassurance that if everything goes south I have a savings account and lots of job options. I have mentored new engineers, spoken at conferences in the United States and internationally, and done my part to spread the gospel of JavaScript. I am the person who the “learn to code” industry would consider a great success story.
I know lots of others who can tell similar stories. In my last job, nearly all my coworkers started in another career field. My office was filled with formerly underpaid teachers and non-profit workers, burnt-out academics, and office workers who had never been treated like a human before this job. Like our romantic visions of 19th and 20th century America, tech is the great melting pot where people from everywhere else come seeking a better life.
People sometimes ask me whether they too should learn to code. In a day-in-age when tech seems like the last viable career option that allows you to retire before you’re 90, it’s a valid question. It worked for me, so why shouldn’t it work for everyone else too?
Recently the answer to this question hasn’t felt so obvious, and some part of this narrative has begun to feel uncomfortable and worn-out. We’re living in a world where learning to code is the best solution we can come up with for the under-resourced teachers going on strike, the non-tenured academics, the journalists who are being laid off due to the clickbait economy, the minimum-wage retail and food service workers who can’t support themselves without federal assistance, and everyone else who is suffering from the effects of capitalism.
My career change has done a lot of great things for me, but it has also taught me the language of racial and gender bias. Working in tech has forced me to advocate for myself in ways I couldn’t imagine in the days when I was learning to code and dreaming about my first tech job like it was a great white city on a hill.
Sometimes I don’t know how to live in a world where the best solution to an industry that doesn’t support you is to leave it. The best response we can give to someone who just lost their job is “learn to code” — as if we don’t still need teachers and artists and academics and journalists to inspire the world while we obsess over improving the click engagement of a single button. We talk a big talk about reinventing and disrupting every other industry while replacing or re-purposing the people who are already doing the work in the industry we’re busy trying to revolutionize.
Today, jobs are plentiful and highly-paid2 and the barrier to entry is comparatively low, but I wonder if someday we’ll be talking about the good old days of the tech industry with the same wistfulness as the factory workers in the rust belt who talk about the good old days at the plant.
I don’t know what the answers are, but I know that learning to code can’t fix capitalism.
Now seven years later!
This might be less true today than it was in 2019.