[hej]

Today, nearly everyone has been coding for a long time. Everyone learns the basics in school. At college or university many will have a lot of further contact with many computer science concepts. It’s a lot like math, really: everyone knows the basics (or has at least heard them once and promptly forgotten them), but that doesn’t make everyone a mathatician.

(My dad, a construction engineer, learnt programming at college in the freaking late 70s. He never needed it during his long and successful career as a construction engineer, though, and has forgotten all about it. Today, anyone who studies anything to do with social sciences – for example – needs to have some coding skills if they want to do effective statistical analysis.)

There is a difference between that and building your own app.

[disgruntledphd2]

I'm sorry but as a graduate trained social scientist (psychologist), this is simply not true (for the social sciences at least).

I do know how to program (R mostly, some python and java) but I am an extreme outlier with my field. In fact, people are ridiculously impressed at my use of awk and regex to extract relevant articles from a CSV file.

I would agree that everyone who studies the social sciences should have some familiarity with coding, but SPSS refutes your claim that it is a necessity. In addition, I had never coded a line before the age of 28 (I'm almost 31 now).

[randomdata]

I'm 30 and I remember being taught the basics (in BASIC, no less) of programming in elementary school. My father talks about programming on punch cards when he was in high school. We both went to the same small rural schools, not even big city institutions.

Given that, I'm with the parent. It does seem kind of amazing that virtually anyone in the workforce today in North America didn't have at least some programming training. Whether they still remember is another matter, but I guess everyone comes from a different background.

[hej]

Hm, ok, then I guess my university is the outlier here. I do agree, though, that coding skills are essential for effective statistical analysis and that it should be part of every social scientists' education.

[apl]

  > Today, anyone who studies anything to do with social
  > sciences – for example – needs to have some coding skills
  > if they want to do effective statistical analysis.

Only if by "coding skills" you mean "Click somewhat appropriate buttons in SPSS". Realistically.

[hej]

That may be enough to get you through - realistically - but students are usually taught more. Data manipulation is frequently needed and doing that by clicking buttons is seriously no fun. Again: I was talking about what students are taught, not so much what they actually need to pass. I guess technically you don't even have to know how correlation coefficients are calculated (as in: have an intuitive understanding why they are calculated the way they are calculated), clicking a button in SPSS is all you need. But students are taught how correlation coefficiencts work in detail.

[granfalloon]

"Everyone learns the basics in school"

i don't know about this...i'd say that the majority of college graduates have had no programming experience, not even the basics. programming wasn't taught in any of my schools growing up