Why don't English teachers learn to code?

That way you can get a gold card and stay.

Among the 21 major industries the survey targeted, more than half of the talent they need will be allocated to areas such as research and development, software development, engineering, information communications and system development, Shih added.

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well … not much of that stuff involves “coding”. It’s all really specialised engineering that requires not just academic know-how but years of ‘apprenticeship’ behind you, which is something Taiwan is spectacularly bad at.

Interesting that ‘food production’ is on the list. I wonder if they mean ‘farming’, or grinding up soy and corn and turning it into instant noodles? If the former they’re probably not going to get far with that - as @Explant has said in various places, there are too many stupid rules and entrenched behaviours that make it rather difficult for new entrants to improve the food landscape.

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AI is an “industry” now?

Not really.

Anyone can just go to a coding bootcamp and become a software developer, regardless of academic background. It doesn’t take that much.

There are edX/Coursera programs for AI anyone can take.

And the fact that you know English makes programming easier.

Because coding isn’t something anyone can just pick up. It takes a certain level of intelligence to be competent at it.

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I disagree. I’ve found that people are very biased about what they think is the average intellectual level of people because they’re often surrounded by people with similar intelligence from college and beyond. You’re obviously a smart guy, likely surrounded by other smart people that would be able to pick up coding.

I’ve picked up python. I don’t think anyone can do it. It’s hard enough learning it as a new language, but to be able to picture and implement ways to use it is another thing.

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Knowing how to code doesn’t make you a software developer. It makes you someone who’s going to churn out reams of unmaintainable, buggy code. “Coders” are the reason most stuff doesn’t work these days.

I was talking about the other jobs, though - shipbuilding, renewable energy, IC design, aerospace - these things have nothing to do with coding. And even the techie jobs (eg., communications, ‘smart’ devices, cybersecurity) require an immense amount of knowledge other than the obvious.

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Why don’t English teachers learn to code? Because they don’t want to be total dweebs. They’re already ostracized enough as it is.

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Why don’t coders learn to teach English?

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Not really.

Someone wouldn’t just be able to attend some coding bootcamp or online course, call themselves a software developer or AI expert, and get a gold card.

The gold card requirements for those fields are pretty strict, involving >3-5 years of experience and verifiable achievements like patents, papers, awards, etc., which are assessed by the Ministry of Science and Technology.

The idea simply wouldn’t work.

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Why don’t Americans become best selling writers? They know English makes writing easier.

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They ought to. The AIs are coming to take their jobs.

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easier to play sticky ball

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It is an equally valid question, since I believe they are doing a big push for English teachers for the Bilingual Taiwan initiative. Touche!

This AI push is pretty misled in my opinion. Taiwan just cargo culting in without any real analysis. I think this guy from the NDC is just mentioning the buzzword every time he does some press.

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It’s mostly not domestic firms doing it (Aside from AI medicine and smart manufacturing).

Most of the tech giants (Google, MS, Amazon, Yahoo, IBM) have their regional AI research base in Taiwan. And Google is training 10,000 people.

You can get an entry level programming jobs that pay you $30K US annually. Shouldn’t that be enough for a gold card?

That’s fine, and it’s clearly because they don’t want to pay San Francisco wages for AI engineers. But as we’ve seen with Google and other big tech in the past, they change direction at the drop of a hat.

Are you joking? The requirement is NT$160,000 per month, so more than twice the salary you mentioned. There are also other requirements in addition to salary to demonstrate you’re working in a relevant field. I don’t think some entry-level programming job would meet those, even if you multiplied the salary by 2.5.

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why do they need a gold card when they can easily get an ARC without learning to code?