Comments on: Startup Advice – Hire a Summer Intern

By: Jami Smith

Jami Smith — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:38:47 +0000

Don’t discount the 20 year old programmers. I work for a summer tech camp and my job is to hire CS students to teach kids programming. Our curriculum is extensive and I am always amazed at how much experience our camp instructors have. Kids are starting to learn object oriented programming at age 10 now. By the time they are a 20 year old college student, they’ve had 5-10 years of programming experience. You can find valuable students out there who can do more than fax and file.

Here’s a look at what we start kids on in programming at age 10 href=”http://www.internaldrive.com/courses-programs/programming-courses”>here.

By: blist blog » Blog Archive » Field Notes from UW Computer Science & Engineering Intern Fair

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 04:47:50 +0000

[...] I blogged previously, Justin, Matt & I from blist attended the University of Washington Computer Science & [...]

By: Kevin Merritt

Kevin Merritt — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 01:28:33 +0000

Thanks Mary for sharing your background. I think your experience is a little different than the typical “nerd” programmer. At my first startup MessageRite, I hired a 2nd year CS student named Ryan. He started coding at 14 while in high school and even had a vibrant consultancy through his last two years in high school. When I hired him at 20, he was near expert level at perl, PHP and SQL. My sense is that the code he wrote between 14 and 18 was crude and hard to maintain, but by the time I hired him his code was clean and solid. Ryan’s background is a lot like that of mine and my high school buddies as well. We were all coding actively by sophomore year of high school.

Regardless of when someone starts coding, it’s hard to argue that people are either good at what they’re passionate about or passionate about what they’re good at. Many really good programmers are hackers at heart and many of them start hacking as teens.

By: Mary

Mary — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 19:22:02 +0000

“The reality is, a 20-year old computer science student likely has 5 to 7 years of programming experience and at least two years of formal education to reinforce (or relearn) core constructs.”

Actually, I disagree. I never learned coding until I took the intro programming class at UW. Yes, when I was a 20-year-old computer science major, I only had just over ONE YEAR of programming experience.

But this doesn’t mean that you should discount any student who hasn’t been programming since they were in diapers or whatever. In fact, some of the brightest people I knew in my department were in the same boat as I was. Many of them are at working at the top tech companies, including myself.

So, really, it’s UNLIKELY a 20-year-old computer science student has 5-7 years of computer experience.