Thanks for sharing this Elye. It is vital that anyone entering the field of software development has the capacity and the enthusiasm to keep learning and to have a good grasp of the underlying principles, as this informs new learning. As automated software generation becomes more and more widely used, a solid understanding of what is going on underneath (both in the code and around the technologies that are running the code) and of the workflows that the software is generating code for are just as important. There are many ways to learn, each suiting different mindsets but deep learning comes from experience and young developers need time to gain that experience through a sufficient variety of problems. They bring new ideas and new learning. Age (and experience) diverse teams should have the capacity to be more efficient and to make the most of current technologies.

We tell our learners that they need to learn the concepts and combine this with many, many, hours of practice, thousands of hours. We also provide opportunities for them to practice with others through our Code Canteen.

When my son was a young teenager he had aspirations to become a professional tennis player. His coach told him that any professional will have had well over 10 thousand hours of practice in the preparation for a career. They can build some skills by hitting the ball against a wall and working with a ball feeder but it is the training matches and constant competition that makes them highly competent at their sport. Whatever your field of work, it is practice that will make you the expert and good at what you do. Practice is hard and can be a lonely pursuit, especially if we don't have the resources to access opportunities to work with others (mentors, peers, etc). It is in the interests of the whole software industry to make opportunities for new software developers to practice, through training programmes, mentoring, apprenticeships, etc. There are some really supportive employers out there (firemind.io and 8th Light.com are just two that I have seen personally), with apprenticeship programmes in place and with scheduled time for their developers to mentor others. It would be great to see more of this, it must be good for business and for sustainability.