Honestly, how stupid, it's called an NDA. Then if they do take it and make it successful, which they won't as most people aren't that smart, you sue the senses out of them and go and have a nice holiday on a yacht that someone else paid for. Fantastic! Ah, but that assumes you're smarter than the people you are hiring!
EasyLanguage is as good a place to start as any albeit a bit dated but I would personally recommend learning some programming basics outside of the context of trading in the first instance. No shortage of online courses to achieve this. Try Coursera. Once you have the basics of procedural programming (skip functional programming for now) you can return your attention back to trading. When it comes to automated trading there are conceptually two main parts: 1) infrastructure and plumbing and 2) algorithm. If you're a novice programmer trying to build 1) is not a wise use of your time and you are better off using a ready made solution such as NinjaTrader or one of the many other products on the market. These platforms take care of the infrastructure and plumbing to get quotes to your algorithm and also to execute trades when your algorithm wants to. As a novice programmer your focus should be on 2) which entails codifying your trading strategies with the language constructs you learned earlier. The actual language you choose is not that important at this stage. You have a long path to travel down before you start bumping up against the limitations of any particular language or platform. As such, choose a platform that has good community support and connections with the market data and brokers you want to use and then learn one of the languages that the platform supports. Good luck.