Why everyone seems to be wanting to use INFERIOR tools in the tech world baffles me. Why in the world would you ever want to do development on the web? You have no control over your development environment. Its almost as bad as the iPad needing a special case so that it can have the same ergonomics as a laptop.
People tend only do things like this for people they actually know and not for acquaintances on the 5th or 6th degree of separation. Seriously, this isn't a startup. Its not a business. Its a potentially nifty tool that nobody is going to pay for.
There is nothing like free contract work. This is no different than the way Microsoft treated developers before the anti-trust hammer was brought down upon them.
The only real businesses affected by this are Instapaper and Dropbox. The rest are just cool applications that our bubble media props up as enterprises.
A company like this may deliver better education than traditional colleges and universities. However, it won't matter. It won't have the reputation, that matters more than anything else, which has been cultivated by elite schools for hundreds of years. Even if the University of Phoenix Online delivered a great service it would still give degrees from the University of Phoenix.
Whenever a business grows by hiring more and more people it won't scale well and be massively profitable.. People are expensive. They are always going to have razor thin margins.
I usually will create a new branch based on the TODO list item I am working on. Then I will checkout that branch and work on the new feature. When it is done I will merge it back into master and write a commit about what I changed. Then I push it to the master branch on origin. There are only two of us working on our project right now so we don't branch on Github. However, a large team should probably push to a new branch on the origin and then merge it there.
Okay I apologize then. There are tons of companies who can afford to pay who don't. I think that a good way to motivate them is to give them a broad thing to do and let them try to do it whatever manner they want. Make it clear to them that you want them to be paid with learning and building up their skills.
Seriously, just pay something even if it is only $10/hr or whatever service student jobs pay in the area. Not every kid can afford to work free for a summer regardless of the experience gained. Some people need to have a job with some income. Thats why some less privileged students get stuck working in restaurants and bars. Are you interns really not doing enough work to warrant minimum wage?
I find that most people just don't understand what being poor and living and rural place is like. Besides the need of a car for a job it is absolutely necessary in order to have any social contact. When you live in a rural place your friends live at least 30 miles away. This is why rural "hicks" get pissed off when the gas price gets high. It takes way there ability to socialize.
I am currently trying to find my first project post graduation to do. I am having a very hard time getting started in the freelance. So I would say getting the "first one" is a pretty large problem, at least for me.
Rails development on OS X is so nice if you use things like MacPorts and Passenger. Coupled with TextMate I would not want to Rails dev on anything else.
I do think the "leadership" bias is only really apparent in large corporations. I do think that small companies tend to value skill and hard work more, however I find, being in school right now, that it is the large corporations that are recruiting students at job fairs and not smaller companies and start ups. I think students who work, and and learn skills on their own are better off looking for jobs on their own outside of official recruiting. At least for people going into tech.
This is falls in line with one of the fundamental problems with college and that problem is that success is college is skewed towards those whose parents, or whomever, pay their way as opposed to those who pay there own way. Some kids are financially independent during schools so they MUST have a paying job. This means that they can't take an unpaid internship to get a resume boost. They have to stick with their bar tending or wait staff job to keep making it. Most kids like this are working 20 - 30 hours a week. This doesn't leave a whole lot of time to build up the resume in any real way. Kids who have to work don't have time to go out and join clubs and take "leadership" positions within them. Since leadership positions and work experience in the field is what employers look for these kids are at a disadvantage. Now take a kid whose parents pay for tuition, rent, books, etc. He has the time to work for free and become the president of the student union because he doesn't have to wait on the drunk college kids 8 hours a night on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
The story is pretty awful from a journalistic standpoint, however how much money does it really take allow three organizations to communicate with each other. I am willing to be its not even anywhere close to $14 million dollars.
This is best way to become a better developer. Even if you don't exactly know what to do to complete the project you must take it so long as it is possible for you to learn how. The acquisition of new knowledge to solve increasingly difficult problems is the essence of development.