The Coding Job Gap Follow Up

Neil Frasier, a software engineer at Google, recently visited Vietnam and came away with this conclusion...

"The result in America is a prefect storm of opposition from every level. Effecting meaningful change is virtually impossible. I work for the education department at Google and the stories our external educators return with are as shocking as they are unpublishable. We've been spending enormous resources with frankly minimal impact.

Whereas Vietnam is the exact opposite. Schools, teachers, parents, and students are eager in a way I've never seen here in the US. It took less than ten minutes to show Blockly's maze to the Vietnamese CS teacher. Her kids burned through it in one class, with most of them completing the first nine levels. They want more."

He goes on to say that "There is no question that half of the students in that grade 11 class could pass the Google interview process." 

The whole blog post is worth a read.

My son is taking Computer Science courses at high school next year and I'm really interested to see if the school teaches "real" programming or in Neil's words "word processing and website construction."

Kids all around the world love being able to program on the computer when given the chance.