Interesting the Youth in Tech & CompSci: To What Problem Is It The Solution?

Recently, after having asked on LinkedIn what subjects my contacts might be interested in for a blog post, I got this reply from a former co-worker:

I would like to learn about your thoughts on our education system, what we could change to attract more kids into computer science and what are your inspirations for new thoughts once out of academia?

This got me thinking about the path of my own career so far: how did I actually end up here, and what would I do to get kids interested in my current field?

Trip Down Memory Lane

It’s worth mentioning that I did not dream of whatever it is I’m currently doing. Most of what I do and use on a daily basis barely existed a dozen years ago: teachers used to tell us you’ll be doing things that don’t exist yet. Apparently, they were right.

I ended up writing software for a living (and enjoying it, so far) as a first job out of university mainly because I needed to pay my bills — that was the only motivator for my first gig as a consultant. Originally I studied communication systems – learning about networks and computer science incidentally – as I was mostly interested in how the internet and wireless communications worked. Funnily, the choice was made way before the smartphone era, even befor the first iPhone came out¹. I was also into Physics, Math, Anthropology, Psychology and Photography for this same reason: how do things work?

Looking back, choosing a computer sciences related field depended on the fact that the subjects presented on the info-day for that faculty were the ones I enjoyed the most: I was not confident enough to go into maths or physics, so a field that would still have a lot of related subjects without solely focusing on them was awesome. I’m not entirely sure about why I did not go after other interests: with some hindsight bias I’d say that I probably thought that going into them from Sciences & Engineering would be easier than the reverse².

Emplyoment perspectives, while not the main concern at the time, certainly made the choice seem safe.

The Rest Matters More Than You’d Expect

I’m not mentioning the above to make a “I chose CompSci and it worked out well for me so you should too” argument. Rather, I’d like to point out that:

• I could have pretty easily ended up in another faculty because of some of my other interests;
• My other interests, both technical and non-techical, have generally helped me a lot.

Physics and Mathematics, for example, provide you with valuable intuitions about computing³, but also for everything that is around computing, as your programs run within and have influence on the physical world. Anthropology, Philosophy, Ethics, Art… these let you reason about the people who inhabit the physical world. Even considered through a narrow self-interested lense, they will serve you well: progressing in tech quickly becomes at least as much about people skills than purely technical ones.

Modeling The World

Putting it bluntly, getting the young into computer science sounds to me like we miss some coding monkeys. Indeed, we’re lacking people who understand how computers work and are good at programming them for an ever more varied list of tasks: but is an army of computer scientists and coders the answer? It might solve the immediate issue, but I have two points that make me question this:

• whatever the things we build with software, they always have at least an inkling of a relationship to the real world;
• predicting the future is hard and the range of possible tasks is huge: what exactly should we prepare the young for?

Given that software is at least partly about modelling the world, might it be smarter to teach our youth about the world before giving them the tools that, more and more, let them model and change it in profound ways? Code for code’s sake, in many cases, is a sterile mindset, and I personally don’t envy those who end up as pure coding monkeys, even when their pay is monumental.

To Conclude

Hence, please continue providing the young with a rich toolbox that will let them explore and understand the world independently as this is a true superpower. When they learn and discover how computers let us do this faster and deeper than ever, catching up with the subject might take care of itself⁴.

As for inspirations for new thoughts once out of academia, I guess the above is enough of a hint.