Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

Re:Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship by adenozine on Thursday January 28, 2021 @11:50AM (#25944703)

Call me crazy, but I think if there's any HS classes or earlier, teaching algorithmic thinking, those kids are have a crazy head start if they choose CS.

I don't mean these classes where they get out and write

    class Dog(Animal):
      def bark(self):
        print("a Dog is barking!")

but if there's young people being taught the difference between quadratic/exponential/polynomial algorithms, that's going to stew in their brains and ferment into gray matter that will ACTUALLY make them better programmers.

I'm not an educator, nor am I educated ABOUT education, but it's just my hunch. I've seen many a young buck come around with a fancy degree or whatever, and not be able to see a skip-list shaped hole for his skip-list shaped peg. That's hard to deal with at a meta scale. I can't develop a way to quickly train people OTJ how to think algorithmically. They either learned to think about the problems that way, or they learned to rely on some stupid Haskell/Python/Elixir/Kotlin/Blub thing, and can't get any meaningful work done quickly.

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Re:Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship by DC1350 on Thursday January 28, 2021 @12:26PM (#25945222)

There’s already a trend in certain high schools where kids start doing competitive programming, hackathons, blog writing, etc. way before university starts. By the time they’re college freshmen they’re ahead of the average new grad already when it comes to interview skills. These kids end up interning for FAANG or unicorns in freshman or sophomore year. There’s thousands of them.

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Re:Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship by 908B64B197 on Thursday January 28, 2021 @04:45PM (#25949770)

> teaching algorithmic thinking

Even outside of CS this will give them a huge head start.

Functional decomposition is one of the most valuable skill one can have. Knowing what an interface is and being able to see a system as a series of layers of abstraction is too.

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