Steve Jobs once stated that the Mac represented the intersection between technology and the liberal arts. Code schools are mirroring this evolution in the nature of technology by training web and app developers from liberal arts backgrounds.
16,000 code school graduates are expected to enter the workforce this year, which is a 138% increase from last year. At this rate, code school graduates from diverse backgrounds will cause a transformation of the tech industry. Here’s how.
Technology is only as good as what it can do, and the people who make it decide what it can do. At Flatiron School, the student body is evenly split between women and men. Most of us studied liberal arts, and many of us have worked as teachers, as designers, and as consultants. We can tell that we are a different breed from the current generation of programmers because we constantly find errors in sentence clarity and spelling in programming resources on the internet. We find gaps in those websites' instructions that obscure the point of certain exercises. To many of us, it is apparent that most programmers out there don’t have a background that lets them communicate their craft easily to non-programmers. By learning to code and pushing through those difficulties, we’re chinking away at a long-standing wall between science and humanities.
Steve Jobs’ Mac already bridged the user end of the divide between liberal arts and science. Flatiron School and programs like it (but not == to it) are bridging the divide on the designer end. What does this mean for the future of programming, which is the heart of the technology industry?
A friend of mine who studied at Flatiron School in an earlier cohort put her experience in the following way. Her university degree allowed her to follow her interests in the humanities, but it didn’t provide her with hard skills to translate her passion into her career. This is where Flatiron came in. Flatiron School gives a new group of people, with knowledge and interests uncommon among today’s web and app developers, a way to make something of their own. If the Mac provided the platform for the intersection of liberal arts and technology, Flatiron School and programs like it are graduating the people who will build upon that platform.