<p>The author is president of PubMatic, an advertising technology company, and he used to be president of digital for Time, Inc. He mentions Python as one language to learn and says candidates should be familiar with at least two programming languages. There are sites such as Codeacademy with online tutorials.</p>
<p>“Sorry, college grads, I’m not likely to hire you as a nurse unless you know how to take someone’s blood pressure… Please don’t place knowledge of Python on your resume.”</p>
<p>What a useless article. What kind of dumb, nerdy failure thinks that the skills that he wants in his company are universally desired by all employers? It’s almost like this guy is really unsophisticated and doesn’t understand that “media” is a broad field.</p>
<p>" According to one recent report, in the next decade American colleges will mint 40,000 graduates with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, though the U.S. economy is slated to create 120,000 computing jobs that require such degrees."</p>
<p>This piece of information is interesting. I saw a thread recently stating that there is no shortage whatsoever for programmers.</p>
<p>There’s no shortage of computer programmers. There’s a shortage of 20 year old computer programmers that the tech companies want to hire because they don’t have to pay them as much as experienced programmers, and they want them cheap and expendable.</p>
<p>Programming is an important skill for many people who are not classified as “programmers”, just as many white collar workers need to write but are not “writers”. People working in analytics will program in languages such as Stata, SAS, or R, engineers may use Matlab or Excel with VBA (or C or C++ or Java if programming is a bigger part of their job). People in corporate finance and investment banking use Excel a lot, sometimes with VBA. If you have an idea for a web business, it’s good to be able to create the initial versions of your site on your own.</p>
<p>College can be very expensive. I’d rather have my children learn the basics of programming (variables, loops, conditional statements etc.) on their own than pay $5000 for CS 100.</p>
<p>It has been noted that productivity in computer programming can vary by more than an order of magnitude between good programmers and typical programmers. And it is likely that there is a shortage of good programmers but no shortage of typical programmers. In theory, you’d pay the good programmers an order of magnitude more than typical programmers, but that does not seem to be the case in the actual labor market, perhaps because it is not always obvious before hiring who has high and who has low productivity.</p>
<p>Typically, companies don’t differentiate good programmers vs typical programmers since there is no way to estimate who is a better programmer unless they are a small group and intend to stay that way.</p>
<p>We have one of the biggest IT departments in the nation if not the world. We estimate the amount of work needed to be done for each project (we have hundreds if not thousands happening at once). Each project is estimated for specific amount of resources based on manhours and we use contract staff to augment the shortage. A group with 20 projects might define a need for 20 programmers with specific skills for a 6 month duration and hire 10 from outside on a contract basis because we have 10 already. However, the 10 we hire may not have the same level of productivity or speed but they average out.</p>
<p>As far as I know, most big companies follow similar practices since many of the contractors we hire have been finding projects on a regular basis.</p>
<p>The guy is saying that if you want a job in a company in the tech or media area, even if your job is not mostly programming you should know a bit about programming. You should at least be good with Excel, and learning Python will never hurt.</p>
<p>In tech, perhaps. In media? You can’t be serious. There are tons of jobs in advertising / media where programming would be completely superfluous.</p>
<p>Then I will happily find a job in a field where I don’t need to learn how to program. Because not everyone is good at programming. Just like not everyone is good at writing.</p>
<p>Well…here is the good news. According to the OP, his kids can learn this on their own…which means so can anyone else! Get out those self help books! Sky is the limit!</p>
<p>It’s ludicrous to suggest that a media planner at an agency needs to “know programming.” Or even more ludicrous – a strategic planner or an account executive or a creative. Honey, companies hire other companies to do all that dirty work. This is reminiscent of that terrible '80’s advice – “go into computers, you’ll make a lot of money!” As far as I could tell, all those people who “went into computers” made a little bit more money out of the gate, and then stalled big time.</p>
<p>My neice just graduated from a very good new media program with job offers. She’s trained in journalism, promotion, marketing, etc. Don’t believe “programming” was part of the program.</p>