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

Yep, ready for a job in coding

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> the site is a bit lacking in the usability department

Yep, that'll get 'em ready for a job in coding. You really don't need any of that new-fangled usability crap to win customers or support people anyway - if it was hard to write, it oughta be hard to use.

Re:Yep, ready for a job in coding

[amicusNYCL]

I like this quote:

"It's remarkable to me that people have figured out how to use it."

That is a truly self-aware software developer saying that. Sometimes I feel the same way, I'll design something that will work really well, but once I put it in front of people I realize it doesn't make a lot of sense. But still, there are people who can dive in and pick it up from the start. It's remarkable to me as well when people can figure out how to use my software.

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?

[oodaloop]

If all that's keeping your salary high is that people haven't gotten minimal training off a website, maybe your salary is too high.

Re:How is that supposed to work?

[gstoddart]

LOL ... the hacker nature which can be taught is not the true hacker nature.

Re:How is that supposed to work?

[amicusNYCL]

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

Probably exactly the same kind of people who answer questions on Stack Overflow or any of the other multitude of programming fora. Believe it or not, but some people like to help just because they enjoy it. I do it because answering random questions can be a nice break in the middle of work and it keeps me thinking about programming (especially problems that I wouldn't encounter in my normal work flow). It helps keep me sharp instead of only ever thinking about what I'm working on.

Re:How is that supposed to work?

[Archangel Michael]

The hacker nature starts when a kid is six years old and takes apart a bicycle (or whatever). This is where the dad takes the kid and makes him put it back together. And then takes the bike apart, and does it again, only this time, letting the kid "modify" the bike. Hacker Nature is often drilled out (WTF are you doing, hope your happy, have fun not riding your bike because I am not helping you fix it) of kids by parents who are too busy to encourage it. I've seen plenty of parents ruin their kids with attitudes of "no".

Re:How is that supposed to work?

[meta-monkey]

My salary probably is too high. But don't tell my boss.

It's really easy to say "Oh, that'll never be a threat to me, because I'm so skilled!" Do I think some website is going to turn out good coders? No, but I think that combined with the other 1500 "teach kids to code" initiatives it'll produce enough "good enough" to be death by 1,000 cuts.

My wife is a photographer. A really good one...degree in photojournalism, been all over the world with the Army covering stories for them, then got into weddings and portraits, has a studio, is a PPA Master Photographer and Photographic Craftsman. Digital came out and it looked "easy" and every 23 year old girl with a camera and a dream suddenly wanted to "follow her passion" and be a photographer. And entire industry sprang up to take these girls' money and teach them photography, but mainly sell them cameras and photoshop actions and cute camera bags etc etc. Well all the old school photographers looked at this and laughed. "The work they do is terrible! The people teaching them are terrible!" Very true. It's like 98% garbage from any kind of a technical standpoint. But there's a ton of them. And they're cheap. And it's "good enough." And the photo industry has been just destroyed (I mean the part that sells pictures to clients. The part that sells shit to photographers is doing great). There used to be 10 full-time studios in my town. Now there's 2 full-timers left and 30 part-timers. The average quality of work has gone way down. But it's cheap, there's lots of it, and it's good enough. And the death of photojournalism has been covered many times on Slashdot, with what magazines are left using cellphone pictures because they're "good enough."

Companies still outsource work to India and we know what the quality of code that comes out of there is like. But they do it because it's cheap. Now imagine they can get cheap, "good enough" code without having to deal with the language, culture and timezone problems?

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.

Re:PHP would be nice...

[__aaclcg7560]

If you have the discipline to write good code, you can write good code in PHP.

Coding isn't the problem...

[ndykman]

Sure, it looks like it, and there are plenty of people with jobs out there that can lash something together. I worked with somebody at a startup would was struggling to get a web page working. After a few minutes, I realized the problem. She had no idea that you could loop through an array backwards.

We don't need more "coders". We need more software engineers and computer scientists.

Actually, maybe not. Maybe we need a workforce that is organized and that would stand against employers who insist on completely devaluing our field in a search for easy money, tossing aside qualified people in search for exploitable labor. That's the problem. I think we should be defending our industry and those that have the proper skills to do it well. Just because the latest, most visible trend is to hack together a mobile application or web site for a quick buck doesn't change the need for fundamentals.

Things like data structures, algorithms, discrete mathematics, computer architecture, etc. do matter. Not having a basic understanding of computers and computation leads to an astonishing amount of bugs, security holes and wasted effort. Some people have just accepted this as the cost of business. I say it's past time that we really stood up and say, no, things should be better. But since we can't collectively bargain, we are stuck.

I know, who cares, the money is awesome. It'll be like that forever, right? What does it matter that nobody can count on having a career after ten years because they are seen as too old with an outdated skill set.

This isn't about school, although I think a proper CS education is still the best way to learn this stuff. But you can get it with diligent self study and experience as well. In the end, real programmers have the conceptual understanding to adapt and excel in the long term. That's what we need more of. Real careers, not just jobs.

Face Palm

[lsllll]

Looking at their example conversation, I had no choice but to face palm. Having never looked at Ruby code before, I was able to deduce perfectly well what the first iteration was doing. Do we really need to expand a function that can accomplish its task in one line into a function that may be a little more readable?

I wonder how today's programmers would make do with resources that were available in the early days of computing, or even when the IBM PC came out. Having to deal with small amounts of RAM caused programmers to be extremely creative in their programming. Granted that we do not have to go to such extremes today to write programs, reading about such practices is still very inspiring.