I submitted a request for an invite, but I have a couple questions. Do you guys have a "light" mobile-version of your interface? What do you offer over Twitter and other would-be Twitter-killers?
Maybe someone who fails this test won't pass a class their first time through, but I find it hard to believe that any test can determine that someone, given time and practice, cannot be a programmer.
I just don't understand the 37Signals hate. Lots of entities on the internet share their experiences and opinions in a definitive voice, but 37Signals is the one that gets the flak for that approach.
As an employee in a state tech position, I find 37Signals' philosophy refreshing. I can't speak to its appeal as a business leader, but as someone who wants to just do the work that gets the results without the fluff and exhaustion, it sounds great.
Good point. I suppose to elaborate, I want to become a skilled hacker and I want to push myself in a project that I care about with people who are passionate about what they do. :)
Then you will gather those skills based on what's interesting to you, not based on what's marketable to a startup.
I have never gone out of my way to learn a computing skill specifically for a job (or even for a "dream"). All was always out of personal interest. By that method, I have accumulated a skill set (including Ruby/Rails programming) that has allowed me to start my startups when the opportunity was there.
You should be wary of even being a programmer if your primary driver to learn new things is what might be useful to your career. All good programmers I know and know of would be learning and applying their programming skills whether or not there was money involved.
I agree with you, but I don't think it invalidates the OP's question. There are dozens of topics in computing I could learn right now that I would be interested in, and I think pretty much every HN reader could say the same. If some of those would help their career and others wouldn't, I don't think it would be fair to blame them for learning the one that would help their career.
I'm sure if Paul Graham had asked an equivalent of this community what he should learn to increase his market value, "Lisp" wouldn't have been the answer. At the time, probably C++ or Perl. Yet he used his knowledge of Lisp to gain a competitive advantage for his company, and it ended up making him rich. C++ and Perl may have helped him too, but that's actually less likely, since they wouldn't have given his company its competitive advantage of nimbleness and rapid changes.
You can't know in advance what will be worth learning. Except, you can: if you want to learn it, if you have a desire to understand how it works, and if that desire is storng enough to spur you to learning it, it's worth learning.
I'd add an extra indicator actually: if everyone tells you it's worth learning, chances are it's not. If everyone tells you it's a waste of time, chances are it's worth learning. Why? Because people in aggregate will point you towards popular options (duh) - and those will probably give you less of an edge. This makes the OP's question even less valid.
I started learning programming at 12 years old. An ideal year in my opinion. Experiment with everything you have the time to learn about. You may be surprised at what you can do with an otherwise bland tool or function.
