Highest Rated Comments


hadipartovi20 karma

In order:

Obstacle #1: people don't even realize it's a problem. (addressing this was our top goal, hence the video/etc, and you can help with that). People all know US is behind in math/science, but nobody realizes that 60% of math+science jobs are in computing, but in 90% of schools it's not on the menu

Obstacle #2: we need a great high-school-ready online curriculum, so that the training can be done by computers, with teachers as facilitators. Codecademy and CodeHS are both close

Obstacle #3: getting more teachers trained to either teach or at least facilitate. This is the hardest problem

Obstacle #4: making it more cool / acceptable for girls. This isn't an obstacle to your question, but I think it's a HUGE deal

Obstacle #5: getting all 50 states to count CS as a graduation credit. (only 9 do so far)

hadipartovi16 karma

You're already in the top 1% of the world when it comes to programming skills. If I were in your shoes, the two pieces of advice I'd give: (1) network with fellow students, so you graduate not only with skills, but with a base of awesome coders you can recruit to your next gig, whether it's a job or a startup (2) build some projects that you can point at on your resume - an app or a website, to showcase your work besides just Univ research projects or grades. That's the best way to differentiate yourself from other college grads

hadipartovi13 karma

We will add them soon, but we're mainly focused on helping people get started - so the harder languages (you forgot ObjectiveC) aren't really our top priority. Our goal is giving the early taste to the people who have absolutely no background. But we need to do a better job of graduating them to all the other tools and sites that teach everything else

hadipartovi11 karma

Our bank account and future vacation budgets!!! muahaha!

Just kidding. Roughly: 1) continued promotion of the problem, since most people don't even realize this is a problem, and you can't start a movement to fix a problem nobody knows about

2) efforts to convince the school boards of the 41 states that don't recognize CS as a real course to update their rules for the 21st centure

3) connect the 13,000 engineers who have signed up to be volunteer teachers (http://code.org/help) with the 4,000 schools who want help introducing CS (http://code.org/teach)

4) develop curriculum to enable #3, if existing tools don't suffice

hadipartovi11 karma

If only basic coding skills, you likely won't get hired at a software company, but:

1) almost every major non-tech company needs people with coding familiarity. Eg "web developer" or "technical support specialist"

2) you could write an iPhone app and make money on the side

3) computer science principles force you to think in a more structured way, how to break down hard problems into smaller parts, which I believe makes people better problem-solvers and managers (managing your time, or managing others)