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> "You can teach everyone to be a great programmer" They tried this during the dot-com boom of the late 90's... I don't think it worked out too well. They hir

> "You can teach everyone to be a great programmer" They tried this during the dot-com boom of the late 90's... I don't think it worked out too well. They hired just about anyone and paid crazy rates. You could point them out for showing up their first day carrying a "learn ASP in 24 hrs" book. Fortunately, the dot-com bust weeded them out. Most of these people went back to sell cars or whatever they were doing before while we had to clean out their messes.

fsloth 11y ago
"They hired just about anyone and paid crazy rates" I don't think this proves your point. Just hiring someone to do a job does not equal teaching them. Teaching means not only practice, but also well constructed feedback and sufficient time and space to learn, and to learn from ones mistakes. Kludging an ASP application together after reading "learn ASP in 24 hrs" does teach something, but there is so much noise that you need expert guidance to interpret the results correctly and point into things that need improving.
- beat 11y ago
  Back in the late '90s through the dotcom boom, we were teaching ourselves as we went. There was a running joke about HR looking for "someone with 10 years experience with HTML". In the mid-1990s, I was working on data transport stuff that involved hand-rolled socket code and daemons in C, and parsing the data stream in lex and yacc. We didn't have Apache, or ssh, or xml. A few short years later, I was working on really early Java application servers - technology that wasn't even imagined five years before. It's hard to even describe what a change in productivity all this stuff was. Using an ORM to get data from a database and dumping it into html tables, and there was a browser that could format it all for display with nothing but some tags that were generated on the fly? Amazing! I taught myself html, because there wasn't anyone to teach me. I taught myself server-side includes and cgi - no one to teach me. I taught myself Java. Etc. And I still do this today! If someone can teach you how to do something, it's already mainstream.
  - fsloth 11y ago
    What interesting times to live through! "If someone can teach you how to do something, it's already mainstream." I don't think collaborative learning should be undervalued, though. There are several colleagues without whose example and input I would be a much worse programmer. Not in technical details, but harder to define things, like attitude that leads to success and how to make designs simpler. 'Mainstream' does not mean obsolete. Reading and writing and Roman alphabet have been mainstream for centuries, yet people utilize them with an amazing variance of productivity and value.
- Avshalom 11y ago
  In addition to the difference between hiring and teaching: the dot-com bust did not happen for lack of technical savvy but for lack of business savvy.
kafkaesq 11y ago
Actually things were quite different back then -- a lot of people found themselves in the position of needing to hire programmers, who until then had almost contact with that stratum at all. Nor any familiarity with names of programming languages or other buzzwords. And IT in general was much more slow-moving since then -- even companies with lots of technical staff couldn't (easily) find people to adapt to the crazy quilt of languages (and yes, paradigms) that burst onto the scene. So if you had even the slightest idea how a website worked -- your were like a gift from high heaven, and treated as such. These days -- especially in larger cities, near everyone has social contact with some of the programming persuasion; many have dabbled in some form of scripting, at least, themselves; and you can't walk into a coffeeshop or ride a subway train without being immersed in techspeak. So things have changed quite a bit, and correspondingly, the bar has been raised.

fsloth 11y ago

"They hired just about anyone and paid crazy rates" I don't think this proves your point. Just hiring someone to do a job does not equal teaching them. Teaching means not only practice, but also well constructed feedback and sufficient time and space to learn, and to learn from ones mistakes. Kludging an ASP application together after reading "learn ASP in 24 hrs" does teach something, but there is so much noise that you need expert guidance to interpret the results correctly and point into things that need improving.

beat 11y ago
Back in the late '90s through the dotcom boom, we were teaching ourselves as we went. There was a running joke about HR looking for "someone with 10 years experience with HTML". In the mid-1990s, I was working on data transport stuff that involved hand-rolled socket code and daemons in C, and parsing the data stream in lex and yacc. We didn't have Apache, or ssh, or xml. A few short years later, I was working on really early Java application servers - technology that wasn't even imagined five years before. It's hard to even describe what a change in productivity all this stuff was. Using an ORM to get data from a database and dumping it into html tables, and there was a browser that could format it all for display with nothing but some tags that were generated on the fly? Amazing! I taught myself html, because there wasn't anyone to teach me. I taught myself server-side includes and cgi - no one to teach me. I taught myself Java. Etc. And I still do this today! If someone can teach you how to do something, it's already mainstream.
- fsloth 11y ago
  What interesting times to live through! "If someone can teach you how to do something, it's already mainstream." I don't think collaborative learning should be undervalued, though. There are several colleagues without whose example and input I would be a much worse programmer. Not in technical details, but harder to define things, like attitude that leads to success and how to make designs simpler. 'Mainstream' does not mean obsolete. Reading and writing and Roman alphabet have been mainstream for centuries, yet people utilize them with an amazing variance of productivity and value.
Avshalom 11y ago
In addition to the difference between hiring and teaching: the dot-com bust did not happen for lack of technical savvy but for lack of business savvy.

kafkaesq 11y ago

Actually things were quite different back then -- a lot of people found themselves in the position of needing to hire programmers, who until then had almost contact with that stratum at all. Nor any familiarity with names of programming languages or other buzzwords. And IT in general was much more slow-moving since then -- even companies with lots of technical staff couldn't (easily) find people to adapt to the crazy quilt of languages (and yes, paradigms) that burst onto the scene. So if you had even the slightest idea how a website worked -- your were like a gift from high heaven, and treated as such. These days -- especially in larger cities, near everyone has social contact with some of the programming persuasion; many have dabbled in some form of scripting, at least, themselves; and you can't walk into a coffeeshop or ride a subway train without being immersed in techspeak. So things have changed quite a bit, and correspondingly, the bar has been raised.