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Can regular people learn to code?
With so many resources for learning to program, from a children's book that teaches basic computer science concepts to The Khan Academy's new interactive programming lessons, you have to ask: Do any of them work? Is anyone out there learning to program and, more importantly, are they applying those skills to real-world problems?
Corinne Salchunas thinks so. She's a data analyst at customer loyalty software company FreeCause. Earlier this year she learned to program in JavaScript and has already started contributing code to the company website.
Last February FreeCause announced its "Codinization Project" to teach all 60 of its non-engineering staff to code. CEO Mike Jaconi says the idea was inspired by a similar project at FreeCause's parent company Rakuten, which taught English to all its employees in Japan.
"I wasn't going to propose teaching Japanese to our English-speaking staff, but since FreeCause is a technology company, I wanted the employees to better understand the foundation that the company was built on," says Jaconi.
FreeCause partnered with Codecademy, a company that provides free web-based JavaScript programming lessons. FreeCause gave employees some work-time to learn their new coding skills, and assigned them a mentor from the company's engineering department. Jaconi says the project is already yielding some results, namely Salchunas' work.
Although "data analyst" may sound like a fairly technical title, Salchunas says her work didn't involve programming and she had little coding experience to speak of. "I was familiar with SQL queries," she says. "I use Excel on a daily basis and though I've never written a macro, I've edited them."
"My responsibility at FreeCause is to look through all of our data to find areas that we can improve," she says. She noticed that some of the site's notification sliders weren't producing the results she expected among a certain subsection of customers. She wanted to test out variations of the sliders in different locations and with different text. But because the variations needed to apply only to a subsection of customers, new code had to be written to target just those users.
Salchunas put in a request for the engineering department to write the code she needed, but then she and her mentor realized that she could actually do it herself. "We sat down and looked through all the code for [the sliders] and he showed me how to create them," she says. "Then I wrote the code on my own."
Salchunas says she has no plans to switch jobs or become a full-time coder, but she says she's looking forward to applying her skills to her work as a data analyst. She's continuing to handle A/B testing code on her own, and plans to write some MongoDB queries soon.
"I'm very happy that the company is investing in its employees," she says. "It makes me more well rounded in my job."
This was Codecademy's pilot project for helping a company train all its non-technical staff. Codecademy has gone on to work with several other companies since, but doesn't have permission to name names.
Obviously not every workplace will be able to benefit much, if at all, from teaching its staff to code. But in a world where software is finding its way into more and more jobs, from health care to machining, the benefits may crop up in some unexpected places.
*JavaScript photo by Dmitry Baranovskiy. *
