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Comment by charliemil4 | Hacker News Reader

A threatening misconception is that you can’t teach people — the truth is: you can’t teach the ones who have have self selected out.

In these areas, young people have already decided - to either decided to move away, or become one who stays.

There are ways to change this — amazon taking a large risk is one, and encouraging the next generation to be powerful is another.

I won’t bet on Amazon, and I hope we could fix our education to value “how” people think over “what” they think.

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Oh, you can teach, but it takes 10-15 years to become a good programmer, and then another 5 years to learn all the tools and practices to get to the senior level, while Amazon needs them now.

That’s hogwash. You can take someone without professional experience but aptitude, put them in a professional environment and they will be cranking out decent production ready code and features faster than you’d think. Yes, even at Amazon level.

They won’t usually be FAANG level senior engineers in 5 years, but actual training when your organizations already knows the right way to do things already can take you really far.

Maybe but you have to put them in a professional environment. Amazon can’t magic up a professional IT environment in Mississippi from thin air for local talent to train up in, and you need senior talent there to create that environment from day one.

Sorry, I'm not buying it. I worked with enough bad engineers with formal education who caused all kinds of issues with the code quality, scalability, coding speed, etc. And here you are, suggesting to put completely untrained people who will magically start pumping out production-grade code. That's a pipe dream.

And i’ve worked with self taught professionals that outcompete formally educated ones. It’s not so simple, and one of our great sins is writing off people’s potential before they’re even given a chance to try.

"Not everyone can cook, but a good cook can come from anywhere."

So have I. But these are exceptional individuals. You can't base such a huge investment on a hope of getting a s##t ton of exceptional self-taught programmers.

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