The relevant question for a politician shouldn't be "Can they program?" but rather "Can they program in a way that produces enough value to a company per day to justify a wage that the person can live off?".
One limiting factor in that calculation might be not just the speed/skill of the programmer, but the number of companies with such positions available.
Not sure what throwing coal in a furnace has to do with the mental exertion required to be a programmer, but maybe the point of being persistent makes sense.
It is very insulting to expect that the experience of working in a factory or mining environment will translate at all as skills necessary for programming.
It’s also very insulting to imply that all some group of people is likely doing all day is throwing heaps of coal into a furnace. Even most seemingly simple blue collar jobs are usually pretty detailed and complex in their own way.
Keep telling yourself that, and hire a mason to do some machining, or the machinist to do your hair, or the hair stylist to do your doctoring, or your doctor to do your roofing, or the roofer to do your stocking, or the stocker to do your books, or the bookkeeper to do your cooking, or the cook to do work on your car.
I assure you, human beings are not mere cogs. The sooner you divorce yourself from the notion, the better off you and any employees will be.
Thats the problem with todays workforce, everyone is a specialist now. Heck even Subway has "Sandwich Artists" now!
IMHO programming is even more specialized than most jobs, it requires constant learning to maintain a productive ability.
Eg. Before 2013 how many people were doing react native programming? How many people are writing Pascal code today?
BTW does anyone really believe Joe Biden is an athority on coding? He probably thinks a coder is a guy sending messages by tapping a CW Keyer!
He assumes "Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well" couldn't just do the opposite and go up 3'-30' for the massive amounts of residential solar roof mounting jobs required to quickly ween Residential Zoned surface area off of being fueled from things "thrown" in a furnace.
Class C truck pallet delivery, crane, climb, connect, organize individual or aggregated items weighing 5-30lbs. None of these is sit, type, wait, compile, ponder and I know many of them would not want that life.
However, without violating NDA I can tell you there are furnaces and "throwing" involved in making components for the Tesla Model 3.
You can find similarly silly statements about other skilled work. The bottom line is that humans can learn something; valuable experts are the priduct of an extensive training process.
I would argue for the benefits of retraining people of dying industries for work in growing industries.
This seems like the Dunning-Kruger Effect or maybe Pointy-Haired Boss Syndrome. Having never coded Biden miscalibrates the skill and effort required for competence. His words would have more weight if he took the time to learn to write FizzBuzz. After that he might want to qualify "Anyone".
He said "throw coal in a furnace", not mine coal. When I was a teenager I had a summer job keeping a coal furnace burning overnight. It's hard to underestimate the skill required for that. They probably could have trained pigeons to drop in coal chunks in return for bird seed. The best part of the job was the time it gave me to read programming books.
But he was talking to/about coal miners, not furnace stokers.
"They probably could have trained pigeons to drop in coal chunks in return for bird seed."
Yeah. Other than on very small scales, that job was automated out of existence a hundred years ago. I'm surprised to hear that anyone is still employed doing that, frankly.
"Throwing coal into a furnace" hasn't been a job for about a hundred years now. On other than the smallest scale (say, a home coal furnace) that's been done with machinery for longer than Biden has been alive.
Does he really not know the difference between being a coal miner (which is a skilled trade, if dirty, strenuous, and dangerous) and being a furnace stoker (which historically required nothing but a strong back)?
One limiting factor in that calculation might be not just the speed/skill of the programmer, but the number of companies with such positions available.