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Comment by uka | Hacker News Reader

Teaching people to develop software is hard. It requires commitment. In the framework author is describing if those people want to succeed they will not be able to do it part time while doing non-technical work for you.

Also rubber ducking with the actual developer takes a lot of developer's time (and it's hard) - so the organization will take a big productivity hit if developers work half time as programming teachers. This is not realistic. Basically - non technical people must work extra hours (not have a life) with people who work full time training them to succeed. And the programming camps do this - but most non technical people feel the effort is not worth it.

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I'll offer a counter-argument that teaching non-technical skills is at least as hard as teaching basic development skills. You just generally get more years of "free passes" to develop non-technical skills (ex., negotiation, conflict resolution, self-management, etc.) on the job than you do if you're expected to be productive doing technical work.

I've taught non-developers to produce, or at least understand, basic code typically in a few weeks while they were working on other stuff as well, but teaching developers to be good managers has always been much more difficult in comparison. I think it's easy to assume that since a lot of people aren't interested in writing code, it's fundamentally difficult to learn.

Well - I consider teaching non-technical skills even harder. That fact does not make teaching programming easy. Author is trying to solve problem of developer shortage. There is a huge gap between "being able to produce basic code" and being a developer that can solve a class of problems by him / herself.

I mentored few non-developers into becoming full time developers - but it took a year of their full time commitment to achieve the level where they could get hired as a developer and continue to develop their skills themselves.

If it is too hard to train anybody, if you don't have time to train anybody, that's okay. Just don't hire, and make sure you retain your current employees.

But if you want to grow, it's not reasonable to expect to walk down to the 7/11 and get someone who is perfect for your company. Training is hard? Growth is hard. Who promised you that running a business would be easy?

To be perfectly honest, teaching people to build software is a lot, lot easier than other engineering disciplines.

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