It seems to me to be rather disingenuous to state that the entirety of startups is writing code or that the code writing itself is to be the source of all of the learning. The major education in a startup is the fact that you are forced to, through whatever methods necessary (be it copious research, learning from somebody who knows better, randomly stumbling upon an answer, what have you) learn more or less everything relevant to the startup, from business skills to people skills to infrastructure to, yes, code itself.
Maybe this is insufficient as an alternative education (I'd really love to see some numbers for that but, then again, wouldn't we all?), but it's silly to bring it down to "writing code".
The other reason it's shortsighted is because you learn a lot from seeing the consequences of your decisions. Usually, the only way to see the consequences of your decisions is to write code. Nobody else is going to do it for you.
There's something very different between looking at the consequences of other people's decisions vs. having to weigh the evidence yourself, pick a course of action, commit to it, and then deal with the results.
Yep, you learn little by "writing code", you learn a lot by developing an ass kicking product/service in a very constrained environment, working with great people and pushing yourself to the limit. It's about the people, the [human] experience not just the code.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 16.7 ms ] threadMaybe this is insufficient as an alternative education (I'd really love to see some numbers for that but, then again, wouldn't we all?), but it's silly to bring it down to "writing code".
There's something very different between looking at the consequences of other people's decisions vs. having to weigh the evidence yourself, pick a course of action, commit to it, and then deal with the results.