[stlHusker]

"Do I enjoy decomposing problems into detailed lists of instructions? Am I good at abstract conceptual thinking? Am I comfortable being a digital construction worker?"

It is funny that these three questions appear one after the other in the article yet the author doesn't seem to understand the connection or the fallacy of the analogy.

Construction workers don't have to define what a 2x4 is, it simply exists. Translators don't create a new words. The developer has to work simultaneously in the world of the abstract and the concrete; the 2x4 doesn't actually exist in his world, he needs an abstraction to stand in for reality.

Very few people are able to simultaneously juggle both the abstract and the concrete. Which is why the majority of people quit; they do not have a mechanism for these mappings; how to take a requirement, represent it as a series of instructions, through the abstraction of a language.

So yes, academies are nonsense, but by using poor analogies, we simply reinforce the notion that predicated them in the first place.