I think you're more wrong than right, and it's selection bias that gives you confidence here.
There are people from all sorts of backgrounds that can become very good developers, but their common feature seems to be that they were already the sort of person who could become a good developer, not any methodology used to train them.
For example, I'm confident most talented physics Ph.Ds[1] can make decent developers of numerical code, but that says more about them than it does about my skill at training.
Given a random person, hell given a random person who is already decent developer in a different domain, my confidence in their ever becoming very good at that domain is much lower.
[1] the problem then being, that pool maybe smaller than the one you are trying to populate....
> Given a random person, hell given a random person who is already decent developer in a different domain, my confidence in their ever becoming very good at that domain is much lower.
I don't think anyone was saying a random person but someone wanting to get into the field or is already in the field but perhaps not in the right spot when you pick them up.
I can't imagine anyone would mean a random person here, that wouldn't make sense as development is a skilled position. not everyone can do it and OP was talking about interviewing developers not random people.
There are people from all sorts of backgrounds that can become very good developers, but their common feature seems to be that they were already the sort of person who could become a good developer, not any methodology used to train them.
For example, I'm confident most talented physics Ph.Ds[1] can make decent developers of numerical code, but that says more about them than it does about my skill at training.
Given a random person, hell given a random person who is already decent developer in a different domain, my confidence in their ever becoming very good at that domain is much lower.
[1] the problem then being, that pool maybe smaller than the one you are trying to populate....