Why I spend my time training programmers

I was recently in Gisborne talking to folks about IT education and came up with one of the clearest explanations about why Enspiral is focusing on training programmers and launched Dev Academy.

DevAcademy-5250

It’s all about the economics

I found that it’s pretty easy to run this presentation with only a whiteboard, you just need to remember a few numbers.

How much money do you think New Zealand made last year?

It was about 60 billion dollars, $60,000,000,000 NZD. Less than some countries, more than most (we were number 57 in the world or 36th per capita).

How much do you think Facebook made last year?

It was about 17.5 billion NZD (12.46b USD). Nearly a third of all of New Zealand’s exports.

What about Google? That would be 92 billion NZD or a New Zealand and a half.

Apple? Just 257 billion NZD – four New Zealands.

How big do you think the global IT sector is worth?

Gartner reckons it is about 5.32 trillion (3.8 trillion USD) in 2015. That’s about 80 New Zealands.

IDC estimated that it will be about 7 trillion (5 trillion USD) by 2020. That’s nearly 2 trillion NZD of new business in the next five years. Another estimate from IDC picks that there will be 1.8 trillion NZD growth from just the Internet of Things sector.

If companies from New Zealand earned just a little piece of that it would change the life of everyone in this country. It’s definitely not easy and lots of countries are trying to do the same thing but it is absolutely something we can do.

Whether I was speaking with high school students, experienced business folks, community members or social activists this economic story worked pretty well at getting peoples attention and prompting folks to ask more about this “programming thing”.

I would then go on to emphasise that programmers are only a small part of the puzzle of launching a successful IT business and that lots of other skills were needed.

Why I spend my time training programmers

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