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Comment by burgerbrain | Hacker News Reader

As I stated, this isn't an issue of learning how to contribute to open source. The skills they are teaching here are required for any job in industry, open or proprietary. And _yes_ it requires motivation, as I stated. These people lack it.

>That some people are not good enough to contribute to open source because of their learning style is a poisonous attitude.

You may not like it, but it's true. How can you expect someone who can't learn on their own to understand your codebase enough to make meaningful contributions?

The most important skill you can have is knowing how to teach yourself new skills. If you don't have that, there is a very real, and very low, limit to what you can realisticly contribute. This applies both to the industry in general, not just open source.

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I agree that open-source contribution requires a willingness for self-directed learning. But I don't see how you can draw the conclusion that these students are unmotivated.

Incidentally, I first learned subversion from a student-run session on contributing to open-source, similar to the one the author ran. I went on to spend hours deciphering and studying an open source project that I was particularly fond of. I've since contributed to several open-source projects, all by teaching myself the codebase and toolchain as required.

Dude, they're in school. Do you complain to their computer science teachers, because self-motivated students should be able to learn CS themselves? It may be true, but that doesn't mean that the teachers or students are doing something wrong!

As for the ability to learn on their own, perhaps they are spending their own time learning interesting things rather than learning shell scripting or how to use git.

Learning computer science is not about learning version control systems, or even programming. Computer science educations should focus on the theoretics and math behind all of that.

Teaching version control to computer science students is like teaching calculators to mathematics majors.

The devil is in the details. Creative and motivated teachers are part of them.

Teaching calculators to math students may lead to learning about infix, polish, or reverse polish notation.

Teaching version control to CS students may lead to deeper understanding of data structure or database architecture.

The problem with teaching CS like that is that there is a huge disconnect when joining the workforce.

Most employers expect a CS graduate to understand version control, bug tracking systems, IDEs and the like.

Most CS departments think that such things are beneath them.

The concept of a weekend extra-curricular course to bridge the gap seems ideal to me. The only problem I see is funding it.

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