[RosieA]

Our operating theory right now is that the best (and most useful) evaluator of developer talent (particularly new developers) is the projects they did for themselves. Or their solutions and learning through a single-dev job.

Thoughts?

[king_magic]

I'm sorry, I'm literally terrified of the people coming out of your organization after watching the video at the end of your post. I really question your organization's judgement in evaluating developer talent if you're seriously suggesting things like this (literally from your video):

- "Googling for solutions is key" - "Marketers are the best at research" - "#2 is copying cool things"..."this is a key philosophy for you to understand how to use other people's code"

Ah yes, because that's exactly how professional software engineering works. I don't disagree that what people build is an effective way to judge them, but I question your organization's ability to effectively judge a project through the lens of professional software engineering.

[RosieA]

Well I appreciate your investigation into the entire article and associated content, that's awesome. Your dedication to the discussion is also key here because again, its not that I'm disagreeing with you in principle, but I think we're talking about about slightly different things.

Please please correct me if I'm wrong, but your perspective as I understand it right now is that if you code at all, anything, what you should adhere to is an equal practice of social concerns and responsibility as someone coding international train schedules that manage thousands of lives in transit. Anyone who doesn't teach, or doesn't want to learn that way... ?

Emil's quotes from the video speak, from my perspective, more to the reality of learning from the standpoint of no infrastructure. No real previous experience with code. We want to get people excited about technology, excited about learning to code. Part of that is making easy to grasp, making it easy to problem solve. Teaching people in ways that keeps them energized and self-sufficient to make quick progress, and see that progress happening. We want people to grow and study, to explore their interests in code and perpetuate their own learning. I don't see how what he recommends in the video goes against any of those principles as they are starting points to becoming a developer. Ways of investigating new code, ways to problem solve when you're stuck. Coding complex and life-changing pieces of software is not where it starts, its not what we're trying to, or claiming to teach.

But lets flip that. Lets assume I'm still totally off base here (that's alright, you don't have to assume, you can just keep thinking it! ;-)). How would YOU motivate and excite people to learn code. How would YOU educate them, help them take the first steps from total beginners towards being able to build pieces they can be proud of? What are the basic and easy to grasp, easy to understand "go do it"s for you within the context of software development as a total noob?

[socialmatchbox]

People do have to start somewhere. He is right about the copy and paste stuff, but there is a principle he is getting at not a prohibition. Everyone looks for answers online, but not everyone has the same capabilities and mental horsepower.

It is great that there are so many options for people to learn to code, whether it is for web development or for software engineering which is the real fault line.

Here is a collection of learn to code resources that I put together recently: http://socialmatchbox.com/wp/learn-to-code-learn-programming