What Most Schools Don’t Teach
Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.
– I was 13 when I first got access to a computer.
– My parents bought me a Macintosh in 1984 when I was eight years old.
– I was in sixth grade.
– I learned to code in college.
– Freshman year first semester, Intro to Computer Science.
– I wrote a program that played Tic-tac-toe.
– I think it was a pretty humble beginning. I think the first program I wrote asked things like, ‘What’s your favorite color?’ Or ‘How old are you?’
– I first learned how to make a green circle and a red square appear on the screen.
– The first time I actually had something come up and say ‘Hello World’, and I made a computer do that. It was just astonishing.
– Learning how to program didn’t start off as wanting to learn all of Computer Science or trying to master this discipline or anything like that. it just started off because I wanted to do this one simple thing. I wanted to make something that was fun for myself and and my sisters. I wrote this little program, then basically just add a little bit to it. Then when I needed to learn something new I looked it up either in a book or on the Internet and then added a little bit to it.
It’s really not unlike kind of playing an instrument or something or playing a sport. It starts out being very intimidating, but you kind of get the hang of it over time.
– Coding is something that can be learned and… I know it can be intimidating… a lot of things are intimidating, but… you know, what isn’t?
– A lot of the coding that people do is actually fairly simple. It’s more about the process of breaking down problems than, you know, sort of, coming up with complicated algorithms as people traditionally think about it.
– You don’t have to be a genius to know how to code. You need to be determined.
– Addition, subtraction…that’s about it.
– You should probably know your multiplication tables.
– You don’t have to be a genius to code. Do you have to be a genius to read?
– Even if you want to become a race car driver or play baseball or… you know… build a house… all of these things have been turned upside down by software.
– What is it, is you know, computers are everywhere. You want to work in agriculture? Do you want to work in entertainment? Do you want to work in manufacturing? It’s just all over.
– Here we are, 2013. We all depend on technology to communicate, to bank… …information… and none of us know how to read and write code.
– When I was in school, I was in this after-school group called the Whiz Kids and when people found out they laughed at me and you know, all these things and I’m like “Man I don’t care! I think it’s cool and I’m learning a lot and some of my friends have jobs!”
– Our policy is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find. The whole limit in the system is that there just aren’t enough people who are trained and have these skills today.
– To get the very best people we try to make the office as awesome as possible. We have a fantastic chef– free food breakfast, lunch and dinner– free laundry– snacks– even places to play video games and scooters. There are always kinds of interesting things around the office, places where people can play, or relax, or go to think, or play music, or be creative.
– Whether you’re trying to make a lot of money or whether you just want to change the world, Computer programming is an incredibly empowering skill to learn.
– I think if someone had told me that software is really about humanity, that it’s really about helping people by using computer technology, it would have changed my outlook a lot earlier.
– To be able to actually come up with an idea and then see it in your hands and then be able to press a button and have it be in millions of people’s hands, I mean, I think we’re the first generation in the world that’s really ever had that kind of experience.
– Just to think that you can start something in your college dorm room and you can have a set of people who haven’t built a big company before come together and build something that a billion people use as part of their daily lives… It’s crazy to think about, right? It’s really, it’s humbling and it’s amazing.
– The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future. You know, you’re going look like you have magic powers compared to everybody else.
– It’s amazing. It’s, it’s the closest thing we have to a superpower.
– Great coders are today’s Rock Stars. That’s it!
