Coding academies are nonsense • Hacker News Board

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#61

Post by abustamam » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 7:36 AM UTC

bjwbell wrote: post #12

captn3m0 wrote: post #2

While I agree with some of the premise of the article (you can't become a great developer in a few weeks), it tries almost too hard to scare people away from programming. >Would I like to type text files for hours a day? The bulk of my time is spent thinking, not typing. >Am I comfortable being a digital construction worker? Programming is a creative job that the author is trying to sound so mundane and boring. Yes,…

I like to think programming is about being creative...but reality has stared at me too long. The large majority of it IS mundane and boring. I just looked at the commit log for my current project, https://github.com/bjwbell/gensimd/commits/master (SIMD in Go), and ~90% of the commits are boring. I still feel very excited about it, perhaps I'm unbalanced.

Yes, there are very few careers and/or hobbies that are _not_ mundane.

I like to make paper figurines in my spare time. I like seeing how the designs work together. However, about 90% of the time is spent either cutting the figure out, or folding/creasing the figure out. I really hate those parts, but I know that it's necessary for me to make the figure I want.

It's 90% mundane, but the 10% I spend actually putting it together, as well as the finished product, makes it worth the monotony, in my opinion.

And I think that's where passion lies--in a person's ability to trudge through the monotony because of the end goal.

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#62

Post by franciscop » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 3:29 PM UTC

This article is plain nonsense amd I'm surprised it was published in Techcrunch. Saying this about programming: "Would I like to type text files for hours a day?" is like saying that writing a techcrunch article is pressing keys thousands of times. I have no idea why this article is so (negatively) opinionated, but as someone who learned programming because I love it, this strikes me as someone talking about something they have no idea about...

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#63

Post by greenyoda » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 7:15 PM UTC

apitaru wrote: post #30

marvel_boy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in a programming bootcamp and I can tell you that is a complete scam. Yes, everybody knows the wonderful feeling of having your code.... but this is related with a marketing scam where students pay thousands of dollars for nothing.

Yes, as in any field I'm sure there are scammers out there, or even just poorly conceived programs. So maybe what we need is a review site for these academies.

A review site would be great to have. But wouldn't someone who runs a scammy coding school be likely to pay someone to post a great review? To ensure accuracy, you would need a way of confirming that (1) the person writing the review actually learned to program at that coding school and (2) they now have the job and salary they claim to have. It seems like a hard thing to do, and the high monetary incentives for posting fraudulent reviews would encourage scammers to put a lot of work into gaming the system.

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#64

Post by stlHusker » Mon, Oct 26, 2015, 5:07 PM UTC

"Do I enjoy decomposing problems into detailed lists of instructions? Am I good at abstract conceptual thinking? Am I comfortable being a digital construction worker?"

It is funny that these three questions appear one after the other in the article yet the author doesn't seem to understand the connection or the fallacy of the analogy.

Construction workers don't have to define what a 2x4 is, it simply exists. Translators don't create a new words. The developer has to work simultaneously in the world of the abstract and the concrete; the 2x4 doesn't actually exist in his world, he needs an abstraction to stand in for reality.

Very few people are able to simultaneously juggle both the abstract and the concrete. Which is why the majority of people quit; they do not have a mechanism for these mappings; how to take a requirement, represent it as a series of instructions, through the abstraction of a language.

So yes, academies are nonsense, but by using poor analogies, we simply reinforce the notion that predicated them in the first place.