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Show HN: Learn to code by being coached by an experienced developer for free

askadev.com

62 pointsab_thomas72 comments

I'm an experienced developer who would be interested in helping others. But I have no idea who it is I'm helping here, and also I'm not sure what the company's role is or how they benefit, etc. I'm happy to volunteer my time in some situations, but not if I feel others are profiting off it in some non-explicit way. Would love to see more info about who exactly you are, what your plans with this thing are, what your financial motivations are, how my contact info is to be used, etc. before I commit to offering help.

Excellent questions. I'd also like to see this answered.

Check local colleges to see if they offer tutoring to students in CS courses. Many universities offer the service free to students, but they still pay tutors.

It's worth noting that at most colleges, the pay is quite low and most of the tutors are older students.

Also, it's less "I'm motivated to learn something on my own and quite intelligent, but don't know how to code" and a lot more "tell me how to do this project so I can drink this weekend."

Yes, the pay is low if you're still a student. It goes up if you've already got a degree, and even more for a graduate degree.

If students ask you to do their projects for them, you can always refuse.

In some colleges, you can even lecture. That's what I did for a few semesters. However, be warned that preparing a lecture is a LOT of work, and pay is usually not that great.

Its a great experience though,

One of their tweets[1] seems to suggest they will be promoting(read: selling?) leads to companies who need freelancers?

[1]: https://twitter.com/askadev_/status/487288537579266048

Text: "Developers: Secure more freelance work and standout to the big tech companies by mentoring. We promote you!"

We won't be selling leads. We'd like to feature mentors on the site as a way to thank them for offering their time for free - it's optional upon sign up.

Yeah I may help out a non-profit team but nothing like this. When you work for a company teacher/student relationships are somewhat natural, its part of what the company is paying for (senior devs should mentor juniors). Even then there is the worry "this guy could take my job..." but you expect the company to reward your teaching ability and promote you. In a case like this it just seems like a way for the hobby market to steal more work from solid engineers.

I know guys who do this for $$ or for close friends knowing that they'll get something in return (help on a startup idea?) but teaching for free is odd -- tutors in other fields get paid, why should comp sci keep racing to the bottom?

I would be much more comfortable with "Code my startup project: I retain property rights, you get to learn". It's a much more even agreement. Not super exploitative given that the tutor probably could code everything they are teaching, but they let the student do it at a slower pace in exchange for some oversight (hopefully a lower time investment for the senior than coding the project themselves).

Is the last part of your post meant to be ironic? People should feel privileged for the purpose of coding for someone else's for profit company, for free?

It's essentially the concept of an apprenticeship as it works in the UK. The apprentice is paid a far below minimum wage salary, and is ostensibly trained by the company they apprentice with as part of their remuneration. The apprentice then works on commercial projects, again ostensibly with mentors.

Heck, throw in a ~$5/h wage and it's basically the UK apprenticeship model except with the guarantee of an actually qualified mentor. I agree that working for free is a bit of a steep ask, but I know I'd prefer to work for free with a properly qualified mentor than work at $5/h for someone totally unqualified (as my own apprenticeship turned out some years back).

EDIT: Yes, my last line is a false dichotomy. Ideally you'd be working for some sort of wage with a qualified mentor.

Facebook pays their interns over 5k/month. With how tight the market for CS graduates is, the idea of someone working for free for a company that makes a for-profit product is pretty crazy.

Unpaid (or, practically unpaid) internships are a sad reality of job markets where the supply far, far outpaces the demand - this is common in high prestige professions that do not require extensive qualifications - things like PR, fashion design, art galleries, magazine publishing, event organizing, etc.

Yes, but this is interns rather than apprentices. Interns are typically, as you've said, graduates. They're inexperienced, but they've had 3 years of theoretical training. Apprentices have had no training, much like the end user of askadev.

I agree it'd be fairly preposterous to hire a CS graduate for a very low or no wage salary. It just wouldn't be effective, what with the demand for CS at the moment.

EDIT: typo

I think the standard view is that this is exploitative, and I doubt you would find many students opting in.

The closest analogous scenario: there are pretty strict ethical rules against e.g. professors offering extra help to students in exchange for labor. Doing so would probably be grounds for inquiry and possible dismissal, even from a tenure position. I realize it's not exactly the same scenario, but it's probably as close as you can get where there are codified rules.

This seems to be exactly the case in psychology. Undergraduate students often assist with experiments in return for research experience on their resumes. Depending on the degree to which they were involved in a project, they may be thanked in a paper, but not listed as a coauthor.

Research is significantly different from private, for-profit business.

And those studies are always IRB-approved. The IRB takes into account the conflict of interest, and will sometimes protest if you don't pay the student subjects (e.g. if the study involves a significant time commitment).

I'm not talking about students who participate in experiments as subjects. The students who are research assistants are sometimes unpaid, and might not receive course credit for RA work, but contribute code to projects for research experience. It's relevant to working for a private, for-profit business in the sense that the alternative is often doing an internship for a private company.

The IRB only monitors study participants, not research assistant work.

Ah, I misinterpreted your comment. Sorry.

> It's relevant to working for a private, for-profit business in the sense that the alternative is often doing an internship for a private company.

I still think there's a pretty significant ethical difference between not-for-profit research and a for-profit business. Even without the student-teacher relationship, unpaid internships in CS are pretty ethically dubious and uncommon.

We want to help novice coders get advice from experienced people instead of what happens to most people - getting worn down and confused by an overwhelming amount of information. We want it to be free because money shouldn't stop you from learning. Maybe it's too idealistic but we're going to try.

Not to sound like a naysayer, but while the idea that education shouldn't cost money is laudable, it seems fairly untrue given the fact that education as a professional sector exists.

I think the site is a good idea, and it'd be great if it takes off. But I presume it'll briefly take off due to the novelty/pride value of being a mentor, and then see an exodus of mentors as they figure out on their second lesson that education is difficult, and that's why people usually get paid for it.

It's acting as a guide and less as a teacher, which is what students need. They need to figure most of it out for themselves and have a helping hand to get them over the humps.

Plans are to pair students up with mentors/teachers for one 30mins slots per week for free. We're hoping to extend it to 1 x 60mins or 2 x 30mins slots. We like to make enough to pay the bills and help students learn to write quality code.

I think what you're implying is that students could pay for extra lessons per week? You might want to work on making this explicit, it's really hard to tell what you're getting at here (I'm still not entirely sure). And to my original question: would the tutors get paid a portion of the additional time? Just really confused about what exactly the situation is you're presenting. I think you'll have a hard time rounding up mentors if you're unable to clearly explain it.

If you know C++ and Qt, shoot me an email. :) I need some help.

Good intentions, difficult scalibility for being free. Stackoverflow works because users who give answers earn reputation - something that they can include in their CVs. If there is not something that you can offer (material or inmaterial) to the ones who are going to make great your service - devs willing to teach - this will be just a good intentionated initiative, badly executed. Not trying to be negative, just what I see imho.

I would think the number of people who want to learn to code outnumber the people who know how to code and can teach it 10:1.

Without pricing to reduce the first number to manageable levels, how would you plan to succeed?

good point, but i guess they could differentiate between

want to know how to code (9/10 individuals)

willing to learn how to code (1/10 individuals)

I like the idea of some simple 'can you follow instructions' coding examples to get the basics out of the way (parenthesis, braces, int x = 1; etc). Make this test be the gate to taking up a humans time, and alter the difficulty of the test as you need to throttle.

Interesting idea. We brand new and were not expecting the several hundred signups. Right now we're 1:2(students:mentors) with signups.

Rather than direct learning assistance, I'd be interested in a review service as most of the time I can get stuff to work just fine, but there is likely a better or more idiomatic way. Particularly relevant in a new dev space and unfamiliar with respected frameworks and libraries already out there.

You mean like code review on stack exchange?

Possibly (I wasn't aware of that), however I'd prefer something a bit larger in scope, taking in the larger application and even the architecture.

I like that business idea too. This is such an unserviced area in business it may be a huge hit.

I like it, crowd sourced code reviews. And I'd definitely contribute.

I have over a decade of experience and I think the likelihood of solving someone's likely domain specific problem in 30 minutes seems unreasonable.

I like the idea, however I don't like that there's no transparency. Where's the privacy policy, what are you using my data for? Why is this free? Where's an example of how this works before I give you my info? Why should devs give up their time (as others mentioned), with examples.

I know that many experienced developers are willing to forgo their free time in order to answer questions for beginners, hence, stackoverflow, but I am curious how the psychological difference of committing 30 minutes to a single person in a one-on-one experience will play out. Very cool idea if it has enough liquidity.

As a Python dev trying to learn C++ and leveraging various IRC channels, it's been near impossible to get anyone to commit to even looking at anything bigger than a single error line. It's one of those things that I understand because you can't guage who's on the other end. (Complete newbie vs. I'm not sure the best way to structure this in <insert new lang>)

One of the nice things when solving things on SO or IRC is that your work is available for many others to benefit from. Also, since it's public, I can expect to be corrected if I'm wrong.

I'd see this as being the same as saying "Oh, you commit to open source projects, so you'd be happy to work on this private project for free!".

I think we already know that it won't scale well. This is akin to emailing a problem to one person and them emailing you back a solution. This only helps one person at a time. We can help a lot more people if you post your question on Stack Overflow instead.

The pairing idea isn't new although it does seem to be very successful - there's a company called Thinkful (http://www.thinkful.com) that does online learning by pairing a mentor who gets paid with every student who signs up and pays for a course. They apparently have a very good amount of traction with thousands of paying students. Should be interesting to see how askadev's free model compares.

I used Thinkful for a while, and the mentor who they paired me up with was top-notch. Extremely helpful guy, who helped me tremendously in the short time I was with the program.

I've encountered a flow error on your site. I successfully registered to "pair with a developer" and listed a few languages I don't know and would love to discuss with someone. Then, I saw the option to become a pairing developer and so I tried to sign up for that, but my email address was (obviously) already taken. Should there be an option to be both, or is each role, learner and teacher, mutually exclusive on your site?

You'll be able to do both in 48hrs. Email me your address at info@askadev.com and I'll add you as a teacher and student.

My guess is that the idea is you volunteer to help people for free for 30 minutes with the hope that some of them will give up and want to hire you. Or they will let you do the "hard" part. Or maybe they will get stuck and need you to bail them out.

Anyway I think the angle is this is a way to get leads for new clients. The part I am not sure about is, how does 'askadev' get paid? I am guessing they charge the coaches a small amount ahead of time for access to the noob programmers (leads).

Or maybe its simpler. After 30 minutes you have to pay.

I like this idea a lot. I really like it. But not for free.

Charge $5 for 20 mins and give $4 to the dev, take $1 for the biz.

I guarantee you there are plenty, millions of people in this world interested in a solution like that.

Oh, and make it tiered.

$5 seasoned international developer (cheap third world expert like me)

$20 seasoned american developer

$50 expert developer

$500 Patio11's godly level

Allow ratings so people can attest the expertise of the developer according to their rate.

Why you're implying that American developers are better than, let's say European developers? Or even cheap third world experts like you?

If you're expert - you're expert, country does not matter.

I am not implying they are better, just they know english better than the rest of the non-anglo world.

And great communication skills is a preferred trait in solving problems.

Btw, I can code fluently in over 10 programming languages, but my fluency in english is subpar. See? That's why I rather take a cut in the rate as long as they accept my deficiency in english.

There's several services with money per hour/mins rates and we don't want money involved.

Sounds great, but too bad their site is broken. I tried to sign up and got the following error message, which is inaccurate:

"Oops, sorry an error occurred! Either you left the languages field empty or <email address> might be already registered. Please contact us if you require further assistance."

Hmmm... first error like we've had. Please try it again and if you still can't sign email us at info@askadev.com.

I also can't sign up and get the "empty language" form error even though I put a tag in there.

I had this same problem. The error message was: Oops, sorry an error occurred! Either you left the languages field empty or <EMAIL> might be already registered. Please contact us if you require further assistance.

Can you still not sign up? Please email us with the address you use at info@askadev.com.

I could sign up to learn, but not to learn and teach apparently.

Thanks for signing up and we're adding that option shortly. Email me at info@askadev.com.

This is similar to http://hackhands.com/

also similar to hackerhours.

http://www.meetup.com/hackerhours/

hard to connect mentor to mentee efficiently for people of different levels from beginner to expert or domain specific problems.

I'm skeptical because it sounds too good to be true. How can this be a free service?

If you go to the About page, you'll they seem to be trying to tap into the community for this ("I can spare 30 minutes" option).

There's plenty of developers who will happily offer their time for free. We're bring them into one space we're we can connect them with students.

I remember when IRC was cool

Still is, but shhhh.

Doesn't appear that you can actually sign up to learn, keep getting error that I have not selected a language tag

Interesting idea, but how will it scale? How many people can one competent developer mentor?

I got a rails error when trying to to submit for a coach.

Can you still not sign up? Please email us with the address you used at info@askadev.com.

This is actually a real cool Idea. very nice.

The team has great facial hair

unable to register, keeps saying the email has been used.

We were updating the site which may have been the problem. Email me at info@askadev.com if you still can't sign up.

So, codementor?

community codementor

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