The list is practically innumerable, but a particularly relevant pair: Trace Wax and Obie Fernandez. They took on a 17 year old intern with no web development experience outside of HTML/CSS, who could only work remotely, from out of state, for about 8 hours a week, trained him in Ruby on Rails through hours of pairing and paid for his trip to NYC to try working on site.
That experience has equipped me with what I've needed to land another internship, start freelance consulting work, win a major hackathon, and get accepted into a brilliant program. All because they took a chance on me.
I'm watching a brilliant, college age friend struggle through that initial "getting started" process in web development, and all I can think is: Thanks Trace, thanks Obie!
Edit: Also, thanks HN, for being the forum by which I found them! Though I'm still not sure that was the correct use of an AskHN thread (and I'm afraid to recommend the tactic to friends) it definitely helped me!
That experience has equipped me with what I've needed to land another internship, start freelance consulting work, win a major hackathon, and get accepted into a brilliant program. All because they took a chance on me.
I'm watching a brilliant, college age friend struggle through that initial "getting started" process in web development, and all I can think is: Thanks Trace, thanks Obie!
Edit: Also, thanks HN, for being the forum by which I found them! Though I'm still not sure that was the correct use of an AskHN thread (and I'm afraid to recommend the tactic to friends) it definitely helped me!