I have at least 10 friends who are in the technology industry but don't know how to program. Every single one of them have been saying for years how they want to learn. None of them have.
It takes more sacrifice than you think to learn new skills.
That barrier is dropping. Years ago becoming a developer meant going back to school for another 4-year degree. Expensive, time-consuming, and necessary for most employers to take you seriously.
You could self-train, but having seen the insides of recruitment processes at most companies... that's a laughable thought. For all the wankery that comes out of our mouths about meritocracies, the vast majority of software companies are still extremely enamored with credentialing, especially from prestige schools.
But now we have hacker schools - hacker schools where there are actual employers with actual money who are willing to employ the results. I know two people who are going through it right now, and the interest in hiring them from local startups is much, much higher than I ever expected.
The level of sacrifice required is dropping, and it's dropping like a rock. We will see more and more conversions, and there will soon be a flood in supply.
The biggest barrier is making the choice to learn a new skill - which has been a huge barrier for humans since the beginning of time.
For example, learning Spanish would be a huge asset where I'm from (Texas). Hardly anybody does it, however, since it is hard to learn a new language. A new website that cuts the time to learn a new language from 6 months to 3 months wouldn't cut it for the vast majority of people.
Employers. It was never that difficult to become a novice developer, but convincing anyone to hire you was the hard part. No CS degree (or math, or engineering) was a death sentence to any resume at the vast majority of companies.
The new model is to skip the CS fundamentals and instead crash-course you on frameworks and languages that are being used in-industry, then toss you into the deep end. If you float, you've now got the "experience" part of the dreaded "experienced required" part of any job posting.
The hard part was getting employers to buy into the scheme. "We've got this guy who has next to no idea about algorithms and data structures, but will do fine as a low-level Rails grunt" didn't sound very attractive before, but considering how hard engineering hiring is right now, some companies are biting.
I for one am intrigued at the inversion of priorities and curious to see how this will play out. Up until now our educational process has been to fill your head full of theory and leave the practical application up to your own time. This has meant truckloads of CS graduates who aren't actually capable of performing real-life engineering. The new scheme is to get you working first and foremost, and assume that the fundamentals and theory you missed out on will be filled over time. As someone who never got their CS degree to begin with, I'm rather partial to the latter approach.
You honestly think programming will become such a vital skill in everyone's job that it'll be taught along side reading and math to young children?
Even at the high school level students are forced to learn algebra and calculus but they don't really learn it. They memorize a few formula and apply them on tests but how many people can even take a simple derivative a few years after leaving school? Just cause someone took high school calc doesn't mean they're challenging for the jobs of mathematicians.
> They memorize a few formula and apply them on tests but how many people can even take a simple derivative a few years after leaving school?
You're right about this. But the percentage of people that will learn will remain the same, the quantity of the population that were taught will increase. It will have an effect.
10 years matches my experience as well. That's about the length of time to become truly proficient at learning how to learn technology, which is probably more important than merely learning technology.
It takes more sacrifice than you think to learn new skills.