The Site That Teaches You To Code Well Enough To Get a Job

HughPickens.com writes Wanna be a programmer? Klint Finley reports that software developer Katrina Owen has created a site called Exercism.io where students can learn to craft code that's both clear and efficient and get a lot of feedback on what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong. Exercism is updated every day with programming exercises in a variety of different languages. First, you download these exercises using a special software client, and once you've completed one, you upload it back to the site, where other coders from around the world will give you feedback. Then you can take what you've learned and try the exercise again. The idea was to have students not only complete the exercises, but get feedback. Exercism.io now has over 6,000 users who have submitted code or comments, and hundreds of volunteers submit new exercises or translate existing ones into new programming languages. But even Owen admits that the site is a bit lacking in the usability department. "It's hard to tell what it is just by looking at it," she says. "It's remarkable to me that people have figured out how to use it."

Comments

How is that supposed to work?

[0xdeadbeef]

Who is giving away their time to code review the work of thousands of neophyte programmers?

Sounds to me more like the blind leading the blind.

Re:How is that supposed to work?

[meta-monkey]

Also, people are grasping at straws. People want to get into coding because they heard it's good money, and nobody else is hiring. They don't necessarily want to be a developer or have a real interest in computing...they're just hungry and looking for a paycheck.

It's the gold rush. And you know who made money in the gold rush? Dudes selling the picks and axes. You want to make money in this bold new era where everybody codes? Make shit like "a website that teaches you to code well enough to get a job." That's where the money is. Devs are just going to find themselves in a race to bottom, just like every other profession. It's foolish to think this is the one career that's immune.

Re:How is that supposed to work?

[meta-monkey]

You are exactly right.

Starting about 10 years ago. There's a guy named Dane Sanders, who is a miserably bad "photographer," and he wrote a book called "Fast Track Photographer," which is basically a manual on how to be a con artist in photography. Dress well, act confident, "live your brand" all that bullshit. And then he dazzles them with the idea that they can charge $10,000 for a wedding and get flown off to exotic locations to shoot fabulous destination weddings. It's complete crap. There are a few extremely talented (or extremely well-marketed) people who can do that, but for the vast bulk of these girls living in Buttfuck, Alabama, that ain't happening.

He teams up with a guy named David Jay who makes slideshow software and websites for photographers, and they create this girl named Jasmine Star. Pretty (by some standards), exuberant, blogs prolifically about her *AMAZING* photographer lifestyle. They each post all over the internet about how AMAZING the other two are, creating a cyclone of bullshit. You too can have this *AMAZING* lifestyle...if you buy David's software, and come to Jasmine's workshop, and buy Dane's book...

This whole spiel is then copied by dozens of other hucksters who want in on the action, too.

Combine this with the for-profit trade organization, WPPI, publisher of Rangefinder magazine, who wants lots of people to attend their conventions, and the camera and equipment makers themselves, and it's just a feeding frenzy. How many dumb young girls can we sell on the idea that, without any real talent or experience, they can live this amazing lifestyle that, ya know, speaks to their soul and their passion. Every girl you can sell this to, you suck her into the industry and she's going to spend $30k on gear and seminars and shit in her first two years in business.

Then of course they never actually make any money, and get bitter and disillusioned. They either quit and go back to working at Denny's, or they realize the con and start their own series of workshops where, for the low-low price of $899 for a two-day course they can teach YOU how to live the awesome rockstar photographer lifestyle! In this world there is no place for the actual masters of the craft who try to tell people the truth, that it takes years of training and experience to make good images and that succeeding in this business is HARD. Nobody wants to buy that. They wanna be fabulous and get rich quick.

So, yeah that's pretty much the entire industry now. It's a pyramid scheme with the camera makers at the top, then the trade organizations and labs/album makers, then the workshop speakers, and then as many dumb young girls as they can suck up at the bottom.

The same thing is going to happen with programming. We're already seeing the advent of "rockstar programmers" who have blogs and webisodes about language features and concepts, code academy, this website here. The gold rush will be in training new coders who are super-stoked to score those $100,000/year jobs without having to get a degree or any real certification (not that I'm saying a good coder needs those things, I'm just saying the fact you don't need one is a nice selling point to people who want to get rich quick). Of course these people will mostly flood the app store with a bunch of shitty apps, but the better ones will take the low-hanging fruit jobs, flood the industry and drive down wages. In the end, the winners will be bosses who get cheap, good enough code and the people running the "how to code" websites. The losers will be...everybody who wants to make a living writing software.

Yep, ready for a job in coding

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't see a button to reply to the article as AC so I'll just reply here.

"Yep, ready for a job in coding"
- It would be more convincing (for a job, atleast if I was hiring) if the exercises were along the lines where you'd really need one of deques, ring buffers, sliding windows, tries, classification/sorting/statistics on streaming data. Because atleast personally I find those really important/widely useful yet rather tricky to get right. So for my own projects I'm shamelessly borrowing known working code. But if I was hiring I'd be more impressed if the candidate atleast had some experience using these.