Our Secret: Code

If El Paso really wanted to be on the leading edge in the jobs market, the schools would teach coding.

Not Medical Coding, which is really just a system of filing. Coding. Writing computer code.

According to this story on NPR.org,

Republicans and Democrats don’t see eye-to-eye on much these days, but there is one aspect of the future that they can agree on: “Becoming literate in code is as essential to being literate in language and math,” says House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Republican from Virginia.

President Obama agrees: “Computers are going to be a big part of your future,” he predicts.

Computer programmers and software developers already make more money than the average American — and while many jobs aren’t coming back, the job outlook for programmers is great. Cantor says that coding is “the necessary tool of this century.”

Teaching El Pasoans to code could alleviate our employment situation, if you believe this story from the Wall Street Journal:

[T]he Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that there will be one million unfilled jobs for programmers in the U.S. by 2020. And that may be an underestimate, says Mr. Partovi. He adds that the more software and hardware humans create, the more jobs in software there are, as new platforms like smartphones and drones spawn their own software ecosystems.

The beautiful thing about coding is that the World Wide Web is worldwide. People could live in El Paso and work in cyberspace for companies all over the world. Of course, many El Pasoans might take their coding skills and move to Des Moines, or some other hipster mecca. But they might stay here. Wasn’t that the rationale for the Medical School? That tomorrow’s doctors might fall in love with El Paso and never leave?