I am generally enthusiastic about teaching people to code. That said, I am ambivalent about the backing organization, "Code.org":
Every single person on their advisory board (http://www.code.org/about) has a vested interest in there being more programmers competing for jobs.
I feel like they are misrepresenting the nature of most programming jobs to the general public.
They prey upon people's fear of unemployment and cite numbers about there being fewer programmers than jobs. Nearly every single person in that video has explicitly said they only hire the very best. My guess is that we'd still end up with legions of unemployed people that happen to be mediocre-to-awful at programming.
They're backed by software people, because most software people think coding is awesome and want more people to do it. Also, it's really hard to find good programmers, so they want more people to start doing it, yes.... but teaching 10 year olds to code isn't going to get them any benefit for at least 12 years. I highly doubt they're thinking that far ahead.
I think it's much more likely exactly what you see - they want more people to code because they believe everyone should code, and many people will like it once exposed to it.
Every single person on their advisory board (http://www.code.org/about) has a vested interest in there being more programmers competing for jobs.
I feel like they are misrepresenting the nature of most programming jobs to the general public.
They prey upon people's fear of unemployment and cite numbers about there being fewer programmers than jobs. Nearly every single person in that video has explicitly said they only hire the very best. My guess is that we'd still end up with legions of unemployed people that happen to be mediocre-to-awful at programming.