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Comment by GFK_of_xmaspast | Hacker News Reader

One thing I'm a little uncertain of is the ideology behind these kinds of things, it seems like the primary purpose here is to keep people out of the field.

Also I think those are some pretty weak quantitative results, and good exhibits for argument against p-values.

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Codeup CEO here: For our purposes we want to only take students we know we can help and will eventually succeed. If we bring in people who fail during and after class, it's bad for business.

It may be controversial but running this place has shown me that not everyone can program competently or is cut out to be a professional programmer. Anyone who says "everyone can code" is mistaken.

That might be overly cynical. IF it's true that there is some fundamental way-of-thinking or personality trait that is both in a large minority of people, and necessary to be a proficient programmer; it is extremely valuable to know about it.

A lot of people in the field, myself included, get a hint of intuition that some people either have it or they don't.

If we could get at (or closer to) some basic principle, we could both help people focus on their strengths (by identifying those who show this trait, and being transparent with ones who don't).. and hopefully learn how to cultivate the underlying trait itself.

Wouldn't it be funny/cute/useful if just practicing a bunch of algebra word problems made proficient programmers even better?

Why do you think the results are quantitatively weak? My first critique is just the small sample size with ~60 students and the tests, which appear to be different between the students.

The OP alluded to p-values, and I think this may be relevant:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OL1RqHrZQ8

(In short: p-values are pretty much useless as an indicator of "this experiment can be reproduced".)

Not that this necessarily refutes the original article, I just thought it might be relevant to discussion.

If you look in the methods, the experiment has been successfully reproduced twice after the initial trial with distinct cohorts of students.

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