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I'd add reading other people's code. I picked up a lot of coding by osmosis as a kid just fumbling around existing codebases, just trying to get a program to do something I wanted. I literally had no idea what is a for loop or what are function calls, I just dived in and tweaked it. Of course it works better the more background knowledge you have. But the main point is to se real code, instead of the idealized stuff that a lot of courses teach, eg "design patterns" just for the sake of design pattern, unrealistic standards of code cleanness, like the very opinionated Clean Code etc. The best open source products from respected companies don't code like that, but get shit done. I'm not advocating for spaghetti code, just to get a taste for real, working codebases as opposed to toy examples with unrealistic elegance. By reading code you can pick up good or bad habits alike, but that's not a reason to avoid it.
I would put this into the "things that you probably should do" bin. Issue being there are a thousand things like this to be done. Read forums. immerse yourself in the culture, read open source code, read new papers coming out, read documentation for fun, etc.
It leads back to your initial point, motivation. Those who are motivated will naturally do all of those things out of curiosity. But I am not sold on the idea that making someone uninterested do those things will make them good. Nonetheless, reading other peoples code does have high returns relative to "things you should probably do aswell".
Also we don't demand this from Engineers or any other profession (maybe barring doctors). Electrical engineers are not prescribed looking at other engineers schematics in their free time (even if it made them better Engineers). Programming is in this weird zone where its not standardized enough that only the most passionate of autists are the ones who make it through all the hoops.
Someone who is uninterested will never become good anyway, so you might as well encourage them to do these things and find out if they are or not. I have worked 25 years in this industry and never met a developer I respected who was not in love with it.
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Well, maybe those professions are being held back then. But electrical engineers are close enough to programmers in culture, I'd say. Or at least they are in my bubble. And as for other engineers, there's less of an open culture and things are proprietary. Realistic projects can only be done on the company scale in industry, there no equivalent of free software or Github for those professions.
Also,I don't think that other professions are really as straightforward and standardized as these conversations make it seem. Programming isn't sooo unique. Generic IT admin stuff or network engineering, infrastructure design etc also has a lot of the same difficulties. And someone who mucks around their home router and built some PCs as a kid will be better at such IT work. You'll be a better car mechanic if you're in some car modding community since growing up. You'll be better at roofing, construction planning, flooring, plumbing design etc if you dive into it obsessively. People just don't do it that much for whatever reason.
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