Ask HN: Is an Autonomy Fund a viable business model?

I am not sure I get your second paragraph, but it seems to me that you want to build some kind of consulting company owned by top coders. Your offer would be to offer programming services, that only very competent programmers could do. My guess for such services would be: ultra scalable web apps, or creation of DSLs - it has to be something very advanced in order not to compete with the numerous consulting companies that are already existing, most of them doing mediocre stuff.

And I can see this taking off. Obviously not fast because most of your potential customers wouldn't even know yet they need your services, but that should be able to slowly bootstrap. And I suppose once you would have built a strong team and gotten some notoriety, you would be able to bootstrap your technological edge into some concrete product.

Having said that, I still have some doubts, mainly because I think we are in a coding bubble, and the future belongs less to the programmers than to the engineers who will build the new space rockets or the technology to exploit green energies from example, while with the standardization of functional programming and the development of various libraries it will be easy for a non programmer to start creating software components that are currently requiring programmers (IMHO there will be less "pure" programmers and more "X's who can program" as you once said here on HN).

Nevertheless I wish you can succeed with your idea, even though I don't think I'll be able to work in your company as I am not a top programmer.

If I was putting my own money in a project I'd definitely prefer the top 50% programmers with good organizational and interpersonal skills and concrete business plans over the top 5% developers who might just use their near-market salary to contribute to their favourite open source projects and work on esoteric problems that interest them. (I'd pay more attention to technical ability with "VC-istan" growth expectations and incentive structures)

I have a feeling that organizations part-funded by governments that hire intellectuals on near-market salaries to work on projects that interest them (and do the odd bit of teaching) already exist: they're called universities. I realise the plan here sheds a layer of bureaucracy and gives the productive a slice of potential profits they generate, but I think the comparison is reasonable, and I certainly wouldn't pump money into academia with the expectation of collecting returns on it.

Let's say that each programmer is responsible for a programming club at a public school. Reasonably the club would meet 3 times a week, and would be 2 hours per session. Homework would be assigned, which would need to be 'graded', so you could easily expect 10 - 15 hours a week for the teaching commitment.

Now, how many students would you be able to handle per mentor? I agree that teaching is part of leadership, but few team leaders have had to teach a 100 people at the same time. Maybe 30 per mentor?

Of course, after a year or two the senior students could help as mentors.

Who would join? Since it's a club, students will expect it to be fun. Granted, there are sports, band, cheerleading, etc where it is accepted that there will be hard work involved. They each have some kind of payoff, like games and concerts. I guess the club would be broken down into coaching and development sessions to teach skills, and then projects to develop them. You would want the projects to be something that the students could show the rest of the school, like a website or toy app. It would need to be small enough to be completed during a semester and could be done with the help of the art or A/V club.

How will a professional programmer feel about all of this? Yes, it is rewarding to teach, but at the same time you would be working with teenagers with varying levels of commitment. You're selecting for a very special type of person now, that is a programmer with vision, leadership skills, and that actually enjoys being around young adults.

I could see this working with small groups: 5 to 10 highly motivated students that already know the basics of programming hacking together apps with the help of a mentor. For those who don't know how to program yet, maybe work with the local colleges to open up programming courses similar to Vocational programs or Post Secondary Education Opportunities to learn the basics and earn college credit while still in high school.

But doesn't it cost more than $125k to pay a $125k salary? I've been told that it's about 1:1 if typical benefits are involved. So a $125k salary costs $250k.

I wonder if the Kauffman foundation would be interested in partnering. http://www.kauffman.org/