[jaabe]

I completed the MIT and Harvard introduction to computation courses on EDX. I did it for fun, but both turned out to be truly inspiring on the subject on how to teach CS.

It depends on what you’re teaching though. If it’s bringing a new hire up to speed what works best for us is to give them access to a portfolio of how we do things and let them hack away at a problem on their own. If they have questions we help, and their mentor makes sure they aren’t stuck and afraid to ask.

The sad fact is that 95% of our learning curve is figuring out how the damn toolset is used, and it only 5% of what’s hard is actually programming. I’m sure it’s different if you’re a PhD at google, but in our shop we rarely invent new CS concepts, so it’s mostly about learning how to make tools work. We’ll get people who know JavaScript and .Net who have no idea how to deploy it on our IIS servers, or how to setup the config file so only a specific AD group has access to a specific API, stuff like that. I’m not sure where it all went wrong, but it did.

[vectorEQ]

sounds like you have a lot of programmers and little system engineers / 'devops' engineers. in my opinion it's a different kind of person who can fight environmental details into working with some programs (i.e setting up some environment / server and getting everything tested / deployed) than a person who can write the thing being deployed. Generally i think both have very different information to their disposal. Someone who makes a life out of tying things together, will know a lot of these 'things' he ties together, like ldap/ad,dns,okta,random_api_xxx,etc. where a programmer might know just as much sorting algorithm as and methods to make efficient linked data structures as this other person knows different apis and python modules...

[jaabe]

What good is a developer who can’t deliver outside of a debugging/development environment?

I mean, I get what you are saying, but who can afford people who are that specialised?

[gizmo686]

A lot of places. The role of "devops" not withstanding, develment vs operations is one of the first distinctions to specialize in.