If kids in the NYC metro area don't have an opportunity to learn programming in grade school it's because the schools suck. Perhaps if parents cared about their children's education, they could just relocate to a more forward-thinking part of the country. I was tutoring AP Computer Science to the kids of Vietnamese immigrants in the midwest 12 years ago. I took "C" and "Hypercard" class in junior high school 20 years ago and I lived in a farming town in the middle of nowhere.
The real reason NYC has a shortage of engineers is because engineers don't want to live there. Aside from one or two cool startups and the Google office, most tech jobs in the area are in finance or "agency" style work.
"...selling digital media, trafficking ads in DART, negotiating CDN prices with suppliers, creating P&L's where the COGs is Akamai, tracking and filing bugs in Pivotal Tracker..." sounds like exactly the "Boiler Room" sort of startup most people with other employment options want to avoid.
I don't know if teaching code in school really matters at all. I never took a class in programming in elementary, middle, or high school. I didn't take a class in programming until junior year of college.
I got my first job at a startup writing code when I was a freshman in college.
I was an engineering major, and I taught myself how to program in middle school, but never did I ever take a class on it.
Of all the various things I have learned, learning programming has one of the lowest barriers to entry of any. I really think it is a waste of money to focus on it in school. Most of the kids that I knew who took AP Comp Sci were ruined by it. A multiple choice test for basic programming? Yuck.
I disagree with the rest, though. I would agree if I thought the other classes were worthwhile, but about 70% of my junior high and high school was filler at best. At least if there had been programming classes I could have taken those instead of truly pointless stuff like the JV girls volleyball coach teaching "social studies" via VHS tapes.
See in my opinion, with the limited resources they have I'd rather see them fix your social studies class than add programming. There just aren't that many people that are going to be doing software development, but we probably can agree if everyone knew more about history, politics, and government this country would be better off.
I think it helps. Being introduced at least, could make a difference. For example, I was a computer kid, but I didn't really know that programming existed. Had I been introduced to it in my teens, I likely would've at least toyed around in my spare time. Alas, I learned too late, and am trying to play catch up.
I don't think it's purely regional. I went to a talk about high-school CS education a few days ago by some NSF guy, and the statistics he was quoting were that only about 2-3% of U.S. high schools offer AP CS classes. So they're going to be rare anywhere in the country.
Looking at the College Board's numbers for test takers, there are about 19,000 who take the AP CS exam per year, less than one-tenth the number of students who take the calculus exam.
This is correct and both have both a small number of developers, pay very well, and have a really hard time at recruitment. Joel has blogged quite a bit on what a hard sell NYC is and all he has to do to sweet talk developers into even considering it. In the past I'd been offered very nice salaries to work in finance there and found there is no salary so high that it would compel me to move to NYC. Yes, many people love it there. Not many developers though. How many developers love the bar and party and media and high finance scene because they are massive extroverts?
The real reason NYC has a shortage of engineers is because engineers don't want to live there. Aside from one or two cool startups and the Google office, most tech jobs in the area are in finance or "agency" style work.
"...selling digital media, trafficking ads in DART, negotiating CDN prices with suppliers, creating P&L's where the COGs is Akamai, tracking and filing bugs in Pivotal Tracker..." sounds like exactly the "Boiler Room" sort of startup most people with other employment options want to avoid.