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>However, I made a deal with him where I would give him a little more money that what he asked for and he wouldn't need to pay me if he committed to learning ho

by grardb 9y ago

>However, I made a deal with him where I would give him a little more money that what he asked for and he wouldn't need to pay me if he committed to learning how to code (with my assistance). I would highly recommend against this. If you lend money to someone, expect to never get it back ever, regardless of the deal you made. I know this from personal experience. What I also know from personal experience is not to expect someone to learn how to code because you want them to. I gave my old laptop (which was still working well) to my cousin under the condition that he completed a single Udacity course on programming. I will tell you right now that he did not even come close to finishing the course. I don't know you or your friend of course, but if I had to put my money on it, your friend is not going to learn to code, and you're not going to get your money back for a long time, if ever.

zpallin 9y ago
Allow me to add. I have loaned people money in the past who never paid it back, but I also have a few friends who I will loan money because they always pay it back. But those people and I have strong trust relationships, ones that are very hard to build, and require the right circumstances to exist. These relationships truly are rare and I am lucky to have even one. So, in support of grardb's point, if you don't already have a trust relationship with this person, your offerings to pay for them and also help them learn will most likely end in failure and a loss of cash from you (OP).
laumars 9y ago
I'm largely of the opinion that if an adult really wanted to learn to program then they would already have made the effort to learn to program. Particularly these days with the abundance of free resources online. The key to learning any new skill is motivation and if an adult isn't motivated enough to start the learning process themselves then they'll likely always come up with excuses not to when another tries to instruct them.
- emsal 9y ago
  Finding resources online is not incredibly easy. I remember that I very much needed a teacher/class in my early high school years to get started to learn to code because trying to google things often led down very disorganized resources. I think the main problem at that point is that I didn't exactly know what to learn other than the fact that it was called "programming". Only after I was taught how to code that I was able to see the power of being able to write software and the applications that I could make. Also, in general, I don't think college students (adults) would be motivated to learn all of their field by themselves because when searching for the information it'll be way too disorganized; it's not curated and sequenced by instructors/professors. I recently took a hardware/architecture course and I realized that I learned bits and pieces of that stuff beforehand but never attained a holistic picture of how stuff worked at the OS level because I just didn't really know what to look up, and learning from my professor also gave me the ability to learn more things about the material by myself afterward.
  - laumars 9y ago
    I do agree with you to an extent but I wasn't talking about people mastering the language themselves. I was talking about them starting the process (bear in mind this is in relation to the GP comment about giving his cousin a laptop). Maybe I'm being unreasonable but 80% of what I know is self taught. Though I accept that I'm an edge case here as I -stupidly- decided to go into full time work instead of university. But that's a different topic entirely. However much of what I learned predates the proliferation of the web. In fact the first two languages I learned was in the 80s so literally do predate the web. Yet I managed fine with books borrowed from the library and a lot of trial and error. Perhaps things are harder now because there is too much choice in languages and too many blocks on the software stack you need to be aware of. I also don't particularly consider web development a good starting place to learn development because it's full of different technologies that work semi-independently (server side code, SQL, Javascript, CSS, HTML, different browser rendering engines, etc) and not to mention the complexities of writing stateless and secure code. One of the great things of being a child in the 80s was your personal computer made a great introductory programming system. You got a simple language to code in and instance results back. But I've now drifted way off topic so I feel I should apologise for the soliloquy.
- thephyber 9y ago
  I don't buy it. It simplifies motivation down to a boolean. BJ Fogg teaches a Persuasion Techniques course at Stanford. His model describes the threshold at which a person will perform an action as a curve on a motivation / difficulty chart. Persuasion (the act of making someone else more likely to do something) requires reducing the difficulty of that thing, increasing the motivation of the person, or both. If the guy might be interested in programming (or just being able to make a living for himself), perhaps having a mentor lowers the difficulty enough to put him over his threshold.
caseysoftware 9y ago
Exactly. People who know how to code underestimate what it takes - time, effort, understanding - for others to learn to code. It's not impossible but it's challenging and requires grasping abstract concept that some people can't. For many, it's not a matter of throwing more time at it. It won't work.
alexashka 9y ago
Well put. Road to hell is paved with good intentions they say. Younger people tend to vastly underestimate the complexity of getting someone back on track, after they've gone off the deep end, to a point where they're reaching out to non family members, asking for money. To me, that's a giant red flag. I didn't loan my brother money to pay off his car, because the sooner people learn financial responsibility, the better. Coddling people with hand-outs is only prolonging the pain.
bhu1st 9y ago
This: "not to expect someone to learn how to code because you want them to". Speaking from teaching experience, whatever you do, how many hours you put if it is not on other party's interest its never going to work. Advice on lending money just lend it by clearly setting forth a return time or better don't expect a return at all.

by grardb 9y ago

zpallin 9y ago

Allow me to add. I have loaned people money in the past who never paid it back, but I also have a few friends who I will loan money because they always pay it back. But those people and I have strong trust relationships, ones that are very hard to build, and require the right circumstances to exist. These relationships truly are rare and I am lucky to have even one. So, in support of grardb's point, if you don't already have a trust relationship with this person, your offerings to pay for them and also help them learn will most likely end in failure and a loss of cash from you (OP).

laumars 9y ago

I'm largely of the opinion that if an adult really wanted to learn to program then they would already have made the effort to learn to program. Particularly these days with the abundance of free resources online. The key to learning any new skill is motivation and if an adult isn't motivated enough to start the learning process themselves then they'll likely always come up with excuses not to when another tries to instruct them.

emsal 9y ago
Finding resources online is not incredibly easy. I remember that I very much needed a teacher/class in my early high school years to get started to learn to code because trying to google things often led down very disorganized resources. I think the main problem at that point is that I didn't exactly know what to learn other than the fact that it was called "programming". Only after I was taught how to code that I was able to see the power of being able to write software and the applications that I could make. Also, in general, I don't think college students (adults) would be motivated to learn all of their field by themselves because when searching for the information it'll be way too disorganized; it's not curated and sequenced by instructors/professors. I recently took a hardware/architecture course and I realized that I learned bits and pieces of that stuff beforehand but never attained a holistic picture of how stuff worked at the OS level because I just didn't really know what to look up, and learning from my professor also gave me the ability to learn more things about the material by myself afterward.
- laumars 9y ago
  I do agree with you to an extent but I wasn't talking about people mastering the language themselves. I was talking about them starting the process (bear in mind this is in relation to the GP comment about giving his cousin a laptop). Maybe I'm being unreasonable but 80% of what I know is self taught. Though I accept that I'm an edge case here as I -stupidly- decided to go into full time work instead of university. But that's a different topic entirely. However much of what I learned predates the proliferation of the web. In fact the first two languages I learned was in the 80s so literally do predate the web. Yet I managed fine with books borrowed from the library and a lot of trial and error. Perhaps things are harder now because there is too much choice in languages and too many blocks on the software stack you need to be aware of. I also don't particularly consider web development a good starting place to learn development because it's full of different technologies that work semi-independently (server side code, SQL, Javascript, CSS, HTML, different browser rendering engines, etc) and not to mention the complexities of writing stateless and secure code. One of the great things of being a child in the 80s was your personal computer made a great introductory programming system. You got a simple language to code in and instance results back. But I've now drifted way off topic so I feel I should apologise for the soliloquy.
thephyber 9y ago
I don't buy it. It simplifies motivation down to a boolean. BJ Fogg teaches a Persuasion Techniques course at Stanford. His model describes the threshold at which a person will perform an action as a curve on a motivation / difficulty chart. Persuasion (the act of making someone else more likely to do something) requires reducing the difficulty of that thing, increasing the motivation of the person, or both. If the guy might be interested in programming (or just being able to make a living for himself), perhaps having a mentor lowers the difficulty enough to put him over his threshold.

caseysoftware 9y ago

Exactly. People who know how to code underestimate what it takes - time, effort, understanding - for others to learn to code. It's not impossible but it's challenging and requires grasping abstract concept that some people can't. For many, it's not a matter of throwing more time at it. It won't work.

alexashka 9y ago

Well put. Road to hell is paved with good intentions they say. Younger people tend to vastly underestimate the complexity of getting someone back on track, after they've gone off the deep end, to a point where they're reaching out to non family members, asking for money. To me, that's a giant red flag. I didn't loan my brother money to pay off his car, because the sooner people learn financial responsibility, the better. Coddling people with hand-outs is only prolonging the pain.

bhu1st 9y ago

This: "not to expect someone to learn how to code because you want them to". Speaking from teaching experience, whatever you do, how many hours you put if it is not on other party's interest its never going to work. Advice on lending money just lend it by clearly setting forth a return time or better don't expect a return at all.