Authored By Ashley Hopkins

I was eating at a Mexican restaurant yesterday in Dunlap, Tenn., and I started a conversation with a kid wearing an Assassin’s Creed (video game) T-shirt.

I randomly asked him if he was interested in computer programming, and his eyes lit up. He told me he was “messing around with building some websites in Java [a computer language],” but he really wanted to learn Python.

He pulled up a chair, and we started a conversation about computer programming. He told me he has always been interested in technology, but his high school didn’t teach it. After he graduated, he couldn’t get any loans for college, so he started working on cars. He said he loves to refinish old cars but would much rather work in the technology field.

If you haven’t heard about the computer programmer shortage in the United States yet, I will tell you firsthand, it is massive. And it is hitting every city in America. The few cities with enough programmers are already becoming the most lucrative places to start and relocate companies.

This summer at our business incubator, Lamp Post Group, we lost two 24-year-old, homegrown Chattanooga programmers to Seattle’s Amazon.com. Yes, that Amazon! Across the country, they are targeting and pillaging programmers to fulfill their demand. Did I mention that these two young programmers are now making well more than $100,000 a year and getting Amazon stock? Not too shabby for someone’s first real job.

Entrepreneurs Hadi Partovi and his brother, Ali Partovi, have started a massive campaign called Code.org. They are estimating that over the next decade, the United States will need 1.4 million programmer jobs to fulfill the demand. I beg you to watch the video on their website.

So what should we be doing as a community and a country?

We should be pushing our local schools to begin teaching computer programming at an early age.

We need to expose children to programming at an early age and see if it sticks. I have hired a tutor for my 9-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son to teach them coding. They are loving it! The other day, my daughter was supposed to make a poster for school about the moon, and she asked me if she could make a website instead (proud dad moment). She did, and her teacher at school was blown away. It is now more important than ever for our children to learn this language instead of other foreign languages. It incorporates math and serious problem-solving skills. There are so many free resources online now to learn and teach anyone at any age new skills. Check out https://www.codecademy.com/ and https://www.khanacademy.org/cs.

Get to know top local talent at our major employers, and engage professors at UTC, Chattanooga State, Covenant College, Lee University and Bryan College.

We need to start monthly learning and networking sessions. If any developers are interested, we host some of these meetings at Lamp Post and have people come in from all over town. Send me a message, and I can get you invited.

Programmers are helping each other all over town on specific problems. It is neat to watch unfold, but it also speaks to the potential of our tightly knit community if we are able to recruit programmers here and develop many of our own starting at a young age.

Join the movement to bring affordable housing downtown.

Almost all of the programmers that I know would love to find somewhere to live in our thriving downtown. They love the energy, electric shuttle and walkability of our city. We have to have a strong core to be a successful city, but the core can’t just have tourist attractions and great restaurants-it needs people who call it home.

Support our local forward-thinking library.

They have been leading the charge and getting teens involved with an awesome summer program. This is so next-level.

As Chattanooga begins to emerge as a notable startup city and searches for its niche in the tech world, what is stopping us from being the first city and the first county school district in the South to focus on producing great programming talent out of our schools? Why shouldn’t we be the place in the world that thought a few years ahead of the rest and began cranking out rock-star programmers so that high-paying jobs would swarm our community? Nothing is stopping us but ourselves. We are known for having an ability to build consensus around big ideas in Chattanooga. We talk about it a lot, so let’s live up to our reputation and do something bold for the future. In my opinion, this idea could rank right up there with putting Coca-Cola in a bottle for Chattanooga’s legacy, if we will make the necessary investments in our young people.

Ted Alling is a founder of venture capital and small business incubator Lamp Post Group. You can reach him on his blog or on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this column belong solely to the author, not Nooga.com or its employees.

Disclaimer: Nooga.com‘s parent company is Lamp Post Group, but editorial decisions for this publication are made independently of the Lamp Post Group.