A Programmers Version of Pygmalion

Question

How long would it take and what resources would you need to train someone right out of high school and make them a 'technically' employable programmer? Granted they may not be mature enough to pass many inteviews, have the required time-based or domain experience.

Answer 1

6 months of hard training.

It really depends on a lot of factors, including your definition of technically employable. Assuming a reasonably well motivated highschool student with a respectable aptitude for programming (eg, the sort of person who would otherwise want to go to college for Comp Sci), I'd say 6 months as a gut estimate.

Having never trained someone to program, the best reference I have is my own school's curriculum. Skipping all the nonessentials (LA, sciences, calc, etc), and also the non-regular use programming classes (intro to AI, algorithm design, OS classes, etc), I'd say that you need at least the following to be functional:

• The intro CS sequence (fundamentals of programming): CS1, CS2, CS3
• The Software Engineering course (team work, oop, version control)
• Software Design (subsystem architecture)
• Personal SE (learning new languages/frameworks)

That's 6 classes- assuming an abnormally high work level, you could cram them into 3 months. Throw in another 3 months of on-project training, and I think you could pump out a programmer by the end.