It sounds very novel and interesting, but for me for example I know I need _some_ structure to learn something. It doesn't have to be a formal university degree structure, but some kind of arrangement of material, mentorship, progress tracking, experience sharing, feedback, etc. is necessary for me.
I kind of doubt that giving a person with no programming/CS experience Google and a task like "write a concurrent distributed high-performance database system" would lead to a good outcome. There is a lot of trade lore, experience, knowledge of what works and what doesn't, etc. which is better passed by a teacher in an carefully constructed narrative than by random discovery by an uninitiated person.
But it is interesting to see what comes out of it, maybe they prove me wrong.
I kind of doubt that giving a person with no programming/CS experience Google and a task like "write a concurrent distributed high-performance database system" would lead to a good outcome. There is a lot of trade lore, experience, knowledge of what works and what doesn't, etc. which is better passed by a teacher in an carefully constructed narrative than by random discovery by an uninitiated person.
But it is interesting to see what comes out of it, maybe they prove me wrong.