That does sound like a disaster. I try to spend at least 6 hours a day directly available (working in the same room as them) even if they're just working on pro

That does sound like a disaster. I try to spend at least 6 hours a day directly available (working in the same room as them) even if they're just working on problem sets. I really love programming, and I want everyone else to love it too - so I worked really hard before starting this to make sure it was successful. I spent a lot of time with a few different teachers I hired to give feedback on my lectures, teaching method, etc. I'm trying to constantly evaluate what is working and what isn't. My biggest failure so far was the talk I was most excited for. I put together a talk that went from doing math with voltages, to building logic gates with resistors/diodes, to building adders with logic gates, to building a register and then a really small CPU, then doing some basic assembly operations using those available items, and then showing the higher level function that was comprised of those instructions. I've always wondered how 1s and 0s can do all of this stuff, so going from the bottom up (simplified heavily) was something I thought others would enjoy hearing as much as I enjoyed writing. I really underestimated the amount of assumed knowledge I put into this talk and I had never given it before so it was greeted with confusion. I've got some more talks I'm excited for I've actually tested out with my teacher coaches though who didn't know how to program. One of my favorites coming up is "comparative anatomy of programming languages". I told them to budget for 4 months, we're blasting through it pretty fast though. Pays $14/hr for projects that are for the company. So if I give a talk or they're in the office just working on a problem set, then that's not paid. But they have their apprenticeship project that will be delivered as part of the program, all of that is paid, and then any incidental projects (I may see if someone is around this weekend and wants to write some code that was really easy to abstract from something I'm working on for example). Any grey area goes their way -- for example company meetings they get paid for, or we have company training classes weekly that they've been going to and that's paid. I basically start every morning answering questions, then I give a talk of some type and a problem set. Problem sets are basically designed to make them better at googling and reading documentation -- I don't introduce every concept, but I try to give a broad overview and then if something is confusing or frustrating I'll go into more detail. Usually just being around to answer questions is enough. I've discovered presentation mode in pycharm and phpstorm so that has been great for coming up with random problems and just walking through my problem solving process including my google queries. Got 100+ applications (stopped counting after a while), I really wanted candidates so good I felt bad denying some of the others and that is basically what happened. I've got a really solid group of 4. Hope that answers some of your questions, I really do want to write up everything though and share it -- including my notes, problem sets, etc. It's just about finding the time!