Do college kids know how to program?

[alarmist]

I am a college student in North Jersey, and I have - what I consider to be... - a pretty good idea for a startup. My issue, however, is that I can't find a single kid in the area who knows squat about rails or php.

I don't know very much about either language enough to make a real workable product, and since I am in school, I don't have the money to hire a free lancer, so I'm not really sure what to do. Aside from learning how to program, which I have been doing in every free second I have, and emailing every professor in the CompSci department, which turned up no leads, what options am I left with?

[mechanical_fish]

Sounds like you might not be ready to do a startup. Remember, it will consume most of your time.

Keep learning. Put up a prototype of your idea as soon as you can. Being able to wave a prototype at people will help attract talent -- hackers want to work with other good hackers.

Don't worry about losing the idea. There will be other ideas. As you've discovered, the secret is not having the perfect idea... it's having the skills to execute one idea after another.

Finally, don't expect profs in a CompSci department -- or any other academic department, really -- to have the first clue how to find someone who actually ships products for a living. ;) That's not really their job.

[alarmist]

Good advice! As far as the profs go, I was hoping they might know of a club on campus that was doing something other than C and Java, but it was a bust anyway. :-(

And I have seen other people try my idea in limited form, but they all sucked. Really what this is, is a way for me to help MYSELF out. But I am definitely going to stay at it and make it work one way or another.

[mechanical_fish]

You need to do what I did, which is what you're doing right now: Find the people online who are doing PHP and Rails, and hang out with them there. Use IRC. Join an open source project. Since you were crazy enough to mention PHP in your list of higher aspirations, let me point out that the Drupal project could really use good coders, to say nothing of good documenters. ;)

You'll always find better hackers by traveling to them online then by traveling to them in real life. The work is all on the screen. I learned web development because I started reading Greenspun's website and just kept going. Now you've got PG's essays and this site, which would have been like heaven if they'd been around when I was an undergrad. Now that the podcast, the screencast, Youtube, git, Sourceforge, and Trac have been invented you can have a flourishing career without ever meeting a teacher, a collaborator, or a customer in person. They could all be in completely different countries.

Of course, you might still want to meet your collaborators in person if you want to do a startup. You could switch universities. :) You could plan to get your first job in a startup hub where you can seek out news.yc readers. You could take some trains to NYC and attend the Rails user group there. They were still a happening thing, last I heard. Zed Shaw might turn up, and that guy is a trip.

Meanwhile, I have a physics degree, so before I say any more my guild requires me to issue this advice: "To heck with C and Java, and with PHP and Ruby for that matter; you're in college, so spend your spare time taking all those physics courses (or econ, or linguistics, or molecular biology, or art...) that you can't get anywhere else! The web isn't going anywhere, and it's better at teaching you web technologies than any school."

UPDATE: I left out statistics. You want to learn a really valuable, somewhat tedious black art that most people don't understand, to their peril? Take an intro statistics course.

[aneesh]

Don't be so stubborn about finding someone who knows php/Rails. Any programmer who knows something like C or Java can learn php or rails really well in a couple days max. Plus, maybe rails isn't the best choice for what you have in mind. Be flexible!

[himanshu]

I think programming is a necessary skill for Computer Science students. However, that is not the only thing we are required to learn because it only complements knowledge in other areas ranging from theory of programming languages to computer architecture. Students might get to do the occasional programming project or two but usually they will not be involved in anything close to real life software development. I am not trying to discourage you but that is the reality I find myself in.