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The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

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Re: The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

#11

Post by whamlastxmas »

jdhawk wrote: post #2

Has anyone done a coding bootcamp? With the plethora of relatively cheap/free resources out there from Universities, to professional institutions, all the way to YouTube, what is the appeal? Do the certifications count for anything to hiring managers? Do you need someone to kick you in the ass on a daily basis to keep moving? Do you need the higher touch Q&A thats not available in Forums/StackOverflow type places?

Doing hard things as a group helps you stick to it. It's why meditation retreats are a thing, even though you can sit and do nothing at home without any problem. I think paying the amount these places charge for it is ridiculous, but there's a valid reason for some people to want the group setting.

There's also lots of people that don't know how to problem solve with Google. The concept just doesn't exist for them.

Re: The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

#13

Post by s0uthPaw88 »

I attended a coding bootcamp 3 years ago, and this was a major concern of mine going into it. The instructor had only taught one small class previously, so there was not much of a track record to trust. I spent quite a bit of time researching the instructor's background and speaking with his former students. Even with all that, there really was no way of knowing going into it whether it would deliver what I was hoping for. Ultimately I decided the risk of losing my $3k was worth the potential upside of a career as a software developer. Luckily, it worked out.

Re: The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

#14

Post by rosalinekarr »

jdhawk wrote: post #2

Has anyone done a coding bootcamp? With the plethora of relatively cheap/free resources out there from Universities, to professional institutions, all the way to YouTube, what is the appeal? Do the certifications count for anything to hiring managers? Do you need someone to kick you in the ass on a daily basis to keep moving? Do you need the higher touch Q&A thats not available in Forums/StackOverflow type places?

I've worked as a teacher/mentor for an online coding bootcamp, and from my experience, the advantage of these kind of programs is moving very, very fast. Self-teaching takes a lot of time because you often have to figure out what to learn about next, and university programs tend to take of lot of time because they expect you to take a broad range of classes (a little assembly, some webdev, a bit of high level math, etc). These bootcamps on the other hand, take you from your first HTML file to fully working Rails/Django/Node apps in about 6 months.

Re: The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

#15

Post by manarth »

throwsincenotpc wrote: post #3

I don't get it, people paid $100k to this guy to get courses through slack and online videos ? The article says 19 students, who paid $5k each for that ? are you kidding me ?

I'm guessing many of them paid the $5k fee for the promise of a $55k job at the end of the course.

Re: The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

#16

Post by danso »

throwsincenotpc wrote: post #3

I don't get it, people paid $100k to this guy to get courses through slack and online videos ? The article says 19 students, who paid $5k each for that ? are you kidding me ?

Yeah, this was a crazy story, but the fact that people were paying what amounts to college tuition for learning-via-Slack-from-a-guy was the biggest shock to me. And I am a fan of bootcamps and think that there are bootcamps where you will get far more out of your $10,000 than you would for a year in college.

But those bootcamps are physical places, with hands on instruction from a variety of instructors. I don't keep track of the bootcamp scene but I imagined it to be saturated by now with a bit of the race to the bottom, in terms of quality and pricing. A teacher-via-Slack isn't shocking, the prices he commanded are. But maybe such an arrangement is the only resort for folks who don't live in big cities like New York, or growing hubs like Omaha?

Re: The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

#17

Post by [deleted] »

jdhawk wrote: post #2

Has anyone done a coding bootcamp? With the plethora of relatively cheap/free resources out there from Universities, to professional institutions, all the way to YouTube, what is the appeal? Do the certifications count for anything to hiring managers? Do you need someone to kick you in the ass on a daily basis to keep moving? Do you need the higher touch Q&A thats not available in Forums/StackOverflow type places?

[deleted]

Re: The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

#18

Post by nickpsecurity »

throwsincenotpc wrote: post #3

I don't get it, people paid $100k to this guy to get courses through slack and online videos ? The article says 19 students, who paid $5k each for that ? are you kidding me ?

I want to know how he marketed that. I got plenty of shit I still remember that I could teach them for $5k. I'll give them a whole, damned CompSci education for $100k per set of students never leaving my house.

Re: The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

#19

Post by stale2002 »

rosalinekarr wrote: post #14
jdhawk wrote: post #2

Has anyone done a coding bootcamp? With the plethora of relatively cheap/free resources out there from Universities, to professional institutions, all the way to YouTube, what is the appeal? Do the certifications count for anything to hiring managers? Do you need someone to kick you in the ass on a daily basis to keep moving? Do you need the higher touch Q&A thats not available in Forums/StackOverflow type places?

I've worked as a teacher/mentor for an online coding bootcamp, and from my experience, the advantage of these kind of programs is moving very, very fast. Self-teaching takes a lot of time because you often have to figure out what to learn about next, and university programs tend to take of lot of time because they expect you to take a broad range of classes (a little assembly, some webdev, a bit of high level math, e…

Well, except the ones that have you working 80 hours a week, instead of 40 hours of week. Those do it in 3 months.

Re: The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

#20

Post by danso »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #11
jdhawk wrote: post #2

Has anyone done a coding bootcamp? With the plethora of relatively cheap/free resources out there from Universities, to professional institutions, all the way to YouTube, what is the appeal? Do the certifications count for anything to hiring managers? Do you need someone to kick you in the ass on a daily basis to keep moving? Do you need the higher touch Q&A thats not available in Forums/StackOverflow type places?

Doing hard things as a group helps you stick to it. It's why meditation retreats are a thing, even though you can sit and do nothing at home without any problem. I think paying the amount these places charge for it is ridiculous, but there's a valid reason for some people to want the group setting. There's also lots of people that don't know how to problem solve with Google. The concept just doesn't exist for them.

> There's also lots of people that don't know how to problem solve with Google. The concept just doesn't exist for them.

I currently teach at a university, and to be fair, learning via Google and Stack Overflow is not such a straightforward proposition. This is directly related to the screeds that are occasionally written about how complex JavaScript, etc. has become.

Yesterday, I was Googling around for answers on Bash minutiae -- how to read arguments with flags, the difference between single- and double-bracketed conditional statements, how to assign a heredoc to a variable -- but finding those answers was easy because I knew exactly what to look for, and more importantly, how to filter out irrelevant answers, because even with good Google queries, I had to read more than a few erroneous StackOverflow pages to get what I wanted.

Beginners in programming do not have similar advantages. Assuming they even know what they should be searching for, which in my experience they don't, they lack the ability to formulate what they need as a Google-friendly query. And they're pretty much completely lost when it comes to judging the content of competing "solutions". The hardest part are the unknown unknowns, e.g. beginners don't know to be aware of software dependencies, platform-specific behavior, etc. etc.

Google is invaluable to folks who are reasonably competent in their fields. But I wouldn't say that it's obviously adept for problem solving, especially for beginners.

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