[zampano]

Why wouldn’t the millions of unemployed Americans train themselves to code?

I'd say this is exactly what my friends and I have done. We had been nerds growing up but the majority of us went into liberal arts majors in college. After graduating and finding out that our slips of paper were meaningless, a few of us taught ourselves how to program and a few of us built upon college IT jobs to go into system administration.

When we were younger, I think we generally had some pretty bad misconceptions about the software development as a whole, especially regarding relative difficulty compared to other careers. While the money and job security were the things that drove (most of) us in that direction originally, we've all become completely obsessed with a tech world that we generally misunderstood when we were younger. I've spent a lot of time trying to convince other out-of-work nerds to do what we did but I think most either don't believe you can get work without a CS degree (by assuming that we just got lucky) or think that it is well beyond their mental capacities. I'm not surprised a lot of unemployed americans are scared of trying something intimidating, but I think you'll see more and more young un(der)employed americans start learning code, especially as the learning resources become more and more available and more and more accessible.

[numo16]

I don't know about how other schools approached programming careers, but I know my school tried to make it out like you had to be some crazy math genius in order to do basic programming. Compound that with the fact that my school didn't offer any programming classes for people to even see if it was something they would be interested in, and we're left with me being the lone software engineer in from my school for the past several years. They scared everyone else away.