361–370 of 398 posts
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London COL is very similar to SF/NY I believe.
Thanks to trains you can commute into London fairly easily from somewhere more affordable. And it isn't driving so you can work or read as well.
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In a tiny town in the middle of nowhere middle america, where the cost of living is 90% the national average, we can't keep college grads starting at $75k with an assured 10% bonus. This is a town where all marble 4,000 square foot McMansions start at $240k. bestplaces.net puts this as a comparable salary to around $280K in San Fran.
Maybe, but $280K in SF pays off the student loans a hell of a lot faster than $83K in the middle of nowhere.
Holy shit. Is this some kind of a joke? > Otherwise, companies automatically categorize us into junior developer roles or tag us as “not enough experience.” ??? What do you think you are after a TWELVE WEEK coding seminar (no matter how intense it was)? It looks frightening to me that he doesn't even know what "junior developer" really means. How ignorant can someone be to NOT think to be a junior dev right after "gr…
I'm not saying that I was stronger on the data structures and algorithm side than top students who spent four years staying up coding during their nights and weekends but I was definitely ahead of most fresh grads I encountered. I don't know how that is, given what a typical CS curriculum (at least what I saw later on Open Courseware) but my guess is that a lot of CS grads don't actually practice what they're learning enough so that it sticks.
One thing it appears a lot of people on this thread are missing is that it's not a school for complete beginners. There are prep courses for people looking to enter the school. I had been programming simple things for my blog for years before I went. About 1/3 of my class already had CS degrees before entering.
The other factor is that intensity really does matter. The reason focusing on duration of 12 (well actually 13 weeks) is wrong isn't because nearly 1000 hours of instruction and work are packed into those 12 weeks. It's even more wrong because working at double the intensity leads to more than double the progress. I saw the same phenomenon with language learners when I was living in Taiwan. It's very common for someone who did a full four year degree in Chinese to speak poorly compared to someone else who did a much shorter, more intensive study at a top immersion program like ICLP.
Anyway, the degree of animosity here is a little surprising, even considering the cognitive biases that might come from having spent a fortune on a university credential. Large numbers of my peers from Hack Reactor went on to do well at YC companies and/or large companies like Google. One I remember well did both (was an early engineering hire at a YC company that got acquired by Google). I still consider the tuition I paid to HR one of the better investments I've ever made (and one that I easily recouped within the year.
Thank you Marcus and thank you, Shawn. You guys were fantastic instructors and project mentors!
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To be fair, for 99% of web development being able to select elements based on their CSS class is seriously way more useful than being able to explain and apply "engineering crap". Pretty much until you get to the point where you need to scale infrastructure you won't use any of your CS degree when working on most web applications.
Also to be fair, learning how to select elements by CSS class is so trivial that it doesn't effectively separate levels of developers. Whether you choose the basic JavaScript version or one from a popular framework, it should take less than a minute to look up if you don't already know it. I imagine that seasoned developers (and possibly recent CS grads, depending on school) are much, much less likely to waste time w…
Holy shit. Is this some kind of a joke? > Otherwise, companies automatically categorize us into junior developer roles or tag us as “not enough experience.” ??? What do you think you are after a TWELVE WEEK coding seminar (no matter how intense it was)? It looks frightening to me that he doesn't even know what "junior developer" really means. How ignorant can someone be to NOT think to be a junior dev right after "gr…
> work that wasn't too complicated
"complicated" is subjective. There are many talents and somebody could be better in for example JavaScript (and not HTML/CSS).
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I mean, call it what you will, but a lot of these people are getting offers, man. Good ones. Which is more than I can say for myself with my comp sci degree and two years experience. Although my location is likely to blame for that.
More than I can say for my BS CS plus 17 years. As I have had 7 different jobs for 12 different employers (due to mergers/acquisitions, by the most generous count), and have needed to run the entire interview gauntlet all 7 times, my primary career goal is no longer to earn more money. It is to never have to do another effing software-industry interview, ever again. But damn. For $120k/year, in the region where I now…
I feel exactly the same way, even though the existence of those interviews is probably the main reason I was able to get into kinds of companies I did.
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In a tiny town in the middle of nowhere middle america, where the cost of living is 90% the national average, we can't keep college grads starting at $75k with an assured 10% bonus. This is a town where all marble 4,000 square foot McMansions start at $240k. bestplaces.net puts this as a comparable salary to around $280K in San Fran.
Maybe, but $280K in SF pays off the student loans a hell of a lot faster than $83K in the middle of nowhere.
Are people in America seriously getting offers of $120k with no degree, no experience, and not even a side-project? That is mind-blowing. In London, probably the biggest/richest market outside of USA, that sort of salary is beyond what most experienced developers get, even some very good ones. I must be missing something here (some sort of bubble?) because I can't see how businesses can be profitable paying those sor…
I think the salary gap between US and UK programmers in the last decade has definitely increased.
One reason is exchange rate, only a few years ago GBP/USD is 1.5x, now it's 1.2x.
Another reason is that tech sector boomed in the US, big companies like google and Facebook are doing really well, there are also more successful small companies, fuelled by VC money. together they drive programmer salary up.
However, the UK economy is totally dominated by finance. And the banks are not doing particularly good after 2007.
Holy shit. Is this some kind of a joke? > Otherwise, companies automatically categorize us into junior developer roles or tag us as “not enough experience.” ??? What do you think you are after a TWELVE WEEK coding seminar (no matter how intense it was)? It looks frightening to me that he doesn't even know what "junior developer" really means. How ignorant can someone be to NOT think to be a junior dev right after "gr…
If we did make the distinction, the place of these bootcamps would be much clearer. They train technicians. Specifically software technicians. Their graduates can build things and fix problems using current technology, but they don't have the deep theory and sophisticated understanding of the field that lets them solve really hard problems (at least until they considerably augment their skills.)
The job that most closely fits those is usually called Software Engineer, as distinguished from Senior Software Engineer or Staff Software Engineer. Did the writer really land a job at the Senior level on the strength of ten weeks of instruction and three months of personal study? Sounds weird.
The only situation where I'd hire someone like that into such a position is if they brought a LOT more to the table, meaning probably domain experience. If someone spent ten years as a petroleum engineer and I am hiring a software developer to work on software for the oil industry, then yes, I might be willing to hire them at Senior despite a dodgy background in software.
Holy shit. Is this some kind of a joke? > Otherwise, companies automatically categorize us into junior developer roles or tag us as “not enough experience.” ??? What do you think you are after a TWELVE WEEK coding seminar (no matter how intense it was)? It looks frightening to me that he doesn't even know what "junior developer" really means. How ignorant can someone be to NOT think to be a junior dev right after "gr…
There is "some kind of joke" going on, but it isn't that guy. Its the rest of the industry that turns out script-mungers and form-fillers and calls them 'software engineers'.