[mdorazio]

I'll offer a counter-argument that teaching non-technical skills is at least as hard as teaching basic development skills. You just generally get more years of "free passes" to develop non-technical skills (ex., negotiation, conflict resolution, self-management, etc.) on the job than you do if you're expected to be productive doing technical work.

I've taught non-developers to produce, or at least understand, basic code typically in a few weeks while they were working on other stuff as well, but teaching developers to be good managers has always been much more difficult in comparison. I think it's easy to assume that since a lot of people aren't interested in writing code, it's fundamentally difficult to learn.

[uka]

Well - I consider teaching non-technical skills even harder. That fact does not make teaching programming easy. Author is trying to solve problem of developer shortage. There is a huge gap between "being able to produce basic code" and being a developer that can solve a class of problems by him / herself.

I mentored few non-developers into becoming full time developers - but it took a year of their full time commitment to achieve the level where they could get hired as a developer and continue to develop their skills themselves.