I'm reminded of a Bloom County strip where Steve Dallas, the town lawyer, is bemoaning his lack of clients. "What this town needs", he says, "is two lawyers".
More engineers means more widgets and platforms and shims and other NIH, so I am not worried about the sort of thing you describe.
> 'it's cute' when the janitor learns how to write web pages
All that matters is the quality of that web page. This is no different from the janitor also being a novelist or accomplished musician.
I wouldn't worry if I were you; most people will only ever learn enough to program themselves into a corner they can't get out of in a small number of lines of code, in some scatter-brained scripting language for imbeciles.
Algorithmic thinking is part of math, and quite important.
Anyone who learns pencil-and-paper addition and multiplication is actually following an algorithm, so you basically cannot even learn arithmetic without touching algorithms.
People need to understand what an algorithm is, because more and more circumstances which affect their lives will be determined by algorithms.
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, because it destroys the intellectual curiosity that is the reason HN exists. If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I'd be happy to, if you give me a reason to believe that this is a good faith question and not a hostile cross-examination. That game is no fun, and only leads to more hostile cross-examination—exponentially more, in fact, as each entry produces multiple replies. It is also a bad thing for HN, soaking up time that could otherwise go into making HN better.
(The short version, though, is that (a) turning this into a race war about white men is obviously off topic, and (b) when people comment like this, they're essentially copying pre-existing talking points, which is neither thoughtful nor conversation.)
Yikes! nah.. I wouldn't take it that far. This is basically a profession with a very high entry barrier and consequently large compensation slowly becoming a commodity. That was my point. No idea about all the right-wing/left-wing stuff you're talking about.
