Hire Literally Anyone

An apprentice goes to a coding bootcamp, paid for by an company with a $2,500/month stipend. Then, the apprentice would work for the company for $2,500/month for one year, or otherwise the coding bootcamp tuition must be repaid.

This would work out to a cost of about $55,000 for a year of labor.

That would be significantly cheaper than hiring a coding bootcamp grad, and removes the economic risk from the apprentice. What if the market were to soften? What if they ended up being one of the graduates that could not land a job?

This offloads a lot of training to the bootcamp, which have job training as their core competency. Other commenters have pointed out flaws with the system proposed by the author.

In addition, it generally aligns incentives so that the apprentice is less likely to leave right after the initial training. As part of the deal, the coding bootcamp would help the apprentice with finding some other job, since they have already committed to an employer. If they did renege on that part of the deal, the employer only lost out on $7,500. And once the apprentice proves their worth (in the event that they do), the employer could offer a market salary that would start after the apprenticeship, along with a signing bonus of about $20,000 or so. The apprentice would probably want that signing bonus immediately, and sign that offer unless the candidate disliked the company.

If anyone wants to kickstart this concept, I think this would make a great nonprofit. Figuring how to implement such a program would be a distraction for the company, especially if they just wanted to dip their toes in the water with one apprentice at first. The nonprofit would get $10,000 per apprentice, and additional donations by companies could lead to higher priority in selecting potential apprentices.

http://www.makersquare.com/financialservices

I've known plenty of master programmers who could tell me nothing about mastery other than 'train hard, train long'. I think actually this comes from 'sacrificing' everything else in life to become good coders at a young age, and we don't take the time to see what mastering other skills looks and feels like. I call it "Master of one, master of none."

Every time you teach something you should get a little better at teaching it. Your materials should get clearer. Your understanding of the material should improve. At the end of the day you and your training material are better for having had the student, even if they bail on you just when they're getting interesting. But if you respect the student and the exercise I don't think you'll have that happen that often, unless there's something fishy going on elsewhere in the organization.

Conversely, I think going off and earnestly learning a martial art, cooking ('mise en place' is a concept every coder should know), an instrument, or Chess or Go, or preferably at least two of those, will do wonders not just for your coding but for your personality. First, you will have to get comfortable with being bad at something again. Then you will watch yourself think you have something figured out, and then the teacher will tear it all down and build you back up at a new layer, only to tear it all down again a year from now. Watching that rug get pulled out from underneath you over and over again makes you start wondering what other things in life you're comfortably dead wrong about, because you believed in a colorful fiction that was 'true' for you where you were but is not the objective truth. And maybe the objective truth doesn't matter because it benefits almost nobody anyway. There's just where you are and where you're going.