How You Can Get the Most in-Demand Job Skills for Free: Websites offer lessons in HTML and CSS but some techies aren’t having it
Web developers are in high demand, and a host of websites now teach huge audiences some of the profession’s most in-demand skills for free. And some in the web development community aren’t happy about it.
What’s not to like about learning or sharing a free skill set without spending a dime? W3schools, for example, boasts 19 million pageviews per month and calls itself “the largest web developers site on the Internet.”
But all that free coding comes with a caveat. Some of the loudest complaints surrounding the movement argue that it sends a misguided message that web development knowledge is a necessity. In around two months this year, CodeAcademy signed up over 400,000 eager pupils for its CodeYear program, one of them being New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
“If the mayor of New York City actually needs to sling JavaScript code to do his job, something is deeply, horribly, terribly wrong with politics in the state of New York,” wrote software developer Jeff Atwood in a blog post this month titled “Please Don’t Learn to Code.”
That post was circulated widely, appearing on Gizmodo. “I would no more urge everyone to learn programming than I would urge everyone to learn plumbing,” he wrote.
At w3fools.com, a community of web designers and developers have penned a screed against W3schools, condemning the utility of a w3schools education, not to mention errors in some of its lessons.
“W3Schools offers certifications whose value is highly debateable … No employers recognize or respect W3Schools certificates. Unlike Microsoft’s MCP or Cisco’s CCC [two certification programs], W3Schools has absolutely no authority over the technologies for which they claim to provide certification,” they write.