dwoot

This thought just hit my head. I know a lot of people participate in meet-ups to share, teach, and learn from others, in addition to networking, of course, but I've questioned whether the effort to make it out there has ever been fruitful for a pair or team of founding members of a large company/startup?

There are a lot of tech meet-ups in the SF Bay Area, but are they really worthwhile endeavors? I also wonder how many of the founding members of coveted startups/companies have ever participated in them BEFORE they were successful.

I find myself struggling to balance the networking/learning and the time it takes to get out to these things as opposed to diving into the material I'm already entrenched in.

If a potential software engineering candidate has interviewed with you and you found that this person was passionate about what it is that you're doing, but after tossing a couple of puzzles and technical questions at them, and not feeling that they're quite where you need them to be, would you be inclined to offer a contract-to-hire position if they asked (given that you'd enjoy working with this person)?

Do you think this is a decently good idea? Should a candidate ask?

Any big/well-known start-ups or companies willing to do this?

I have two younger cousins who are extremely interested in what I do -- building webapps. I've taught them how to make simple static pages. I think they have the capacity to learn much more, but I can't always be there to show them new and exciting things. They're glued to their iPads.

Anybody here familiar with applications designed to teach the younger generation, in a fun way, how to program and/or the fundamentals needed to think like a programmer on the iPad?