"It's More Important to Be Kind Than Clever" seems accurate, but obviously (and as this thread shows) it hinges on definitions of "Important", "Kind" and "Clever", and on context (in many circumstances clever > kind, of course).
It may be rephrased as something like "As a human being, it leads to a more fulfilling, meaningful life to be capable of empathy than to have a high IQ", but admittedly that's less catchy. And I'm not even sure it's sufficiently precise: maybe someone can come up with a better way to rephrase it.
I don't know why this needs to be controversial. To keep it simple:
Logic/algorithmic thinking skills -> good for most people, should be acquired at school, programming is one quite good way to acquire them (IFF done right)
Actual coding skills -> pretty much only useful if you plan to work in software; depending on your role, essential (sw dev, but that takes more than codecademy...); desirable (product/marketing: you will better understand the tech team, how to prioritise, what's possible etc.); "nice to have" (everyone else).
So, I guess these coding schools are good, either if you want to learn a new way of thinking (and have lots of spare time and patience), or if you are a non-tech product person (as long as you realise that you're only scratching the surface, and that if you're short on time, maybe you should focus on getting things done).
Very good post.
In fact, thinking in terms of smart / stupid is fairly pointless. Firstly, there are numerous forms of intelligence (as the first phrase of its wikipedia entry confirms). Secondly, sticking to the IQ kind of intelligence, most tasks require only a sufficient amount of it (say, more than 90 or so), more of it doesn't necessarily help. The guy with the highest IQ I ever met (180 or something) had a junior job (at 40yo) as a statistical analyst in a bank. This applies also to developers: for instance, getting things done is more important than being IQ-smart.
Thirdly, and I think this is the poster's point, the form of intelligence I came to admire the most (and I find most useful) is the one that makes you humble enough to know what you don't know, and capable of listening to and appreciating people who think differently from you. Hard to really learn anything new without that one.
These posts (of which there are plenty) rely on the extremely common and (I think) extremely flawed assumption that company = technology + marketing/sales. Hence, great tech + great network = $$$.
A company is first and foremost a product. Which involves understanding in a novel manner both your users and the technology to build it. Great product people can be techies, designers, "business people" (whatever that means), sales people, doctors and housewives. They are those who define the company.
Secondly, a company is a team of individuals. Getting many people to work well together is very hard.
Then there is technology, marketing, and finance and HR etc.
Of course there are many "nontrepreneurs", but it gets boring to gripe about them.
More importantly, I feel like an engineer who pidgeon-holes himself as a techie (and that's it) lacks ambition, and is unlikely to get senior in a successful startup. All techies I can think of who started a big one seem to prove this.
(Signed: engineer AND business person)
It looks like you're a developer (your site says UI/UX, Web, Flash). If that's the case, it sounds like you're in the wrong place (and hanging around very wrong people).
I am in London, and I hear from the manager of Stack Overflow for this region that the ratio is 3 jobs per developer. People here are desperate for developers. I take you may not be able to move easily one of the hotspots for now (not sure where you're based), but hopefully you can look for jobs (and a more positive environment) somewhere else. It sounds like a stable job would be good for you these days.
If that's not an option, you may try some of the freelancing sites, like elance, guru, freelancer, odesk, etc. I hear they work well. Or some site more tailored to designers, if you do that too.
Either way, you took a risk, at the moment it feels like it didn't work, that may seem different in the future... but none of that matters. What matters is what you're doing next. You'll look back and feel that you've learnt a lot from this phase in your life.
Many great comments. It is most commendable to want to maximise one's own positive impact on the world, but figuring out how exactly to do that is incredibly complicated - as the variety of opinions here demonstrates. In truth, many (or most) of the people or organisations that try to help out make virtually no difference, and sometimes make things worse. And to make things trickier, the best way to make the world a better place is incredibly personal, and depends on your skills, motivation, life stage, connections, preferences, etc.
Yet, that doesn't mean that it's impossible.
I've been there: now I am working on launching my own tech start-up (how unoriginal), but prior to this I worked in Africa and Latin America.for 4 years, designing projects to create sustainable jobs and to increase long-term income of small farmers. And I've seen so much waste, and incompetence, and worse... and a few pearls in unexpected places.
In short, it's not something one can improvise, creating something genuinely good is probably the most difficult thing in the planet, definitely not a little side project.
So, the best I can suggest is: read a lot, be suspicious of simple blanket solutions, develop your own opinions, and, most importantly, find 1-2 people with experience you can trust (not necessarily techies!), and learn from them.
It may be rephrased as something like "As a human being, it leads to a more fulfilling, meaningful life to be capable of empathy than to have a high IQ", but admittedly that's less catchy. And I'm not even sure it's sufficiently precise: maybe someone can come up with a better way to rephrase it.