> If you can do that reliably, you should be making zillions of dollars.
I disagree to a degree; I've met many people who were simply fantastic with figuring out problems but didn't know much software development and they ended up being awesome software developers.
It's certainly doable and I don't think it's so difficult that someone who can do it should be making an obscene amount of money but they are not cheap either; that's usually a really good development lead.
I think Thomas is saying that, if the process is repeatable, then the person who possesses a black box which ingests smart person on the left end and outputs a programmer can rent that box to industry and charge, well, billions of dollars for its use. (Fermi estimate; cost of college education to credential the number of engineers AppAmaGooBookSoft will hire this year was on the order of 10^5 * 10^4 = a billion dollars.)
I think you're more wrong than right, and it's selection bias that gives you confidence here.
There are people from all sorts of backgrounds that can become very good developers, but their common feature seems to be that they were already the sort of person who could become a good developer, not any methodology used to train them.
For example, I'm confident most talented physics Ph.Ds[1] can make decent developers of numerical code, but that says more about them than it does about my skill at training.
Given a random person, hell given a random person who is already decent developer in a different domain, my confidence in their ever becoming very good at that domain is much lower.
[1] the problem then being, that pool maybe smaller than the one you are trying to populate....
> Given a random person, hell given a random person who is already decent developer in a different domain, my confidence in their ever becoming very good at that domain is much lower.
I don't think anyone was saying a random person but someone wanting to get into the field or is already in the field but perhaps not in the right spot when you pick them up.
I can't imagine anyone would mean a random person here, that wouldn't make sense as development is a skilled position. not everyone can do it and OP was talking about interviewing developers not random people.
I disagree to a degree; I've met many people who were simply fantastic with figuring out problems but didn't know much software development and they ended up being awesome software developers.
It's certainly doable and I don't think it's so difficult that someone who can do it should be making an obscene amount of money but they are not cheap either; that's usually a really good development lead.