You touched on something important here. The most important hurdle I have to overcome with students is making them feel empowered and needed so they care about coding. Afterwards, the problem solving skills become easier to teach.
If you are the only carpenter in town and your family needs a home, you can absolutely care enough to become a professional carpenter.
You can also develop the aptitude and interest to become a professional plumber if you feel valued and people around you needed a great plumber.
I had a similar realization many years ago but I have a very different (and lonely) perspective. Nobody seems to get it, maybe someone here will.
I realized this (unfair income) in 2011 as a junior in university, right after I got an internship at Facebook. They paid me $6000 / month and I had only been coding for one year (literally). Previously I dabbled in multiple other majors and my internship offer was higher than the full time salary of my peers in other majors (whom I respected deeply).
I saw this as an opportunity. During my internship and my senior year, I taught my highschool friend how to code while he completed his major in econ. I figured if it only took me one year to get into facebook, he could do it in two. A year after I got a job at a startup, he got a job (105k base).
My girlfriend at the time graduated with a stats degree and was doing customer support. I thought maybe I could get her into coding too, and I did. A year later she got a job (115k base).
Then I had an idea.… could I teach anybody coding? I reached out to a kid I knew back in high school who had a 2.0 GPA. I figured his life sucked and it did (he was a uber driver). Things didn’t turn out so well, I got impatient and I used my power as a senior engineer to get him onto my team at (105k base). Today, he is a much better software engineer making 190k base with alot of RSUs.
During my time at Google I decided to revisit my original question, could I teach anybody coding, no matter their background? So while I was working I reached out to my local community to see if people wanted to learn coding. 12 students showed up and I could no longer focus on my work so I left Google to teach full time.
Then things got interesting. Students wanted to quit because they needed to support their families. So I started paying them, 2000 / month. 7 students were paid, the remaining I made sure to tell them that I can help if they needed money. Thankfully, they did not need my money.
Within a year (2017-2018) I went bankrupt. I needed to answer the question, “could anybody learn coding, no matter their background?”, so I painfully cleared out my 401k. Thankfully, my wife got a job as a software engineer (135k base) so I was able to find a job myself.
Eventually, all the students got a job. Every single one, from one who is 40 years old without coding background to another without a college degree. The lowest offer was around 115k.
My RSUs are coming up in 4 months (90k). In addition to my salary, I’m going to use it to accomplish my goal in 2020: to create a coding bootcamp at public libraries so that anybody regardless of race and background could have a safe place to learn how to code and build cool things together as a community.
After I finish I will write about the experience, but not now. I just wanted to share my journey so far because I think it is important to know that you don’t have to spend what you earn. You can help the people you care about, only if its one person at a time.