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You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

medium.freecodecamp.com

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Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#31

Post by cfreeman »

canterburry wrote: post #25

I too am a bit confused to why coding bootcamps are needed. I am sure they nicely compress lots of information into a short timeframe but even back in 1997 I was able to teach myself to code simply by sitting at Barnes and Noble reading book after book after book and then trying things out on my own. Today, this should be even easier since it's all online anyway. If it's too much work looking it up yourself, maybe yo…

The bootcamp I went to gave us a one-month internship and some job-seeking help/training. That plus giving us more networking opportunities and people to learn with was a huge help for me. We also spent most of the time pair programming. There is a lot you can get out of a bootcamp that is hard to do on your own. That being said, if you are motivated enough, learning on you own is still the most cost-effective method.

Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#32

Post by user5994461 »

kybernetyk wrote: post #21
rublev wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standard HN comment, and also absolutely insane. Have you met people with limited computer experience just getting 'into' it? Computers and code are literal magic to them. I mean people who's lives don't really entail a computer at all beyond social media. I taught at a local bootcamp. It had less to do with code and more to do with getting people to think in abstractions within a specific domain. If you can sit in a…

>Computers and code are literal magic to them. Ok, but why do those people think they just need to do a 5 week long $15k bootcamp to get a job as a senior software dev and make $100k+/year? I get that people want to expand their knowledge. But these bootcamps don't cater to this kind of people.

You need a course in negotiation to get a programming job at $100k, not in programming.

Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#33

Post by badminton1 »

I have over a decade of experience, and have worked with:

- computer science and engineering graduates

- people with a degree, just on another fields

- 100% self-taught people

- coding camp graduates with varying degrees of computer science education.

From all of them, I have to say that working with the coding camp graduates was by far the most stressful. Some coding camp graduates come from computer science programs, some others come from zero... so you get a lot of variance.

Some are good, some others might show proficiency in some areas... but they might have a lot of important gaps in their knowledge. So you might want to make a 3x longer technical interview just for them, and start a broad conversation covering subjects they are expected to understand.

Now, if you come from a camp, or are self-taught, or even if not... if you want to assess your knowledge I would suggest the following book: the IEEE SWEBOK (Software engineering Body of Knowledge). It's a summary of topics in Software engineering, and points you to other books in case you want to learn more. Now, you can use this book to assess your strengths and weaknesses.

Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#34

Post by Spooky23 »

RKoutnik wrote: post #22
falcolas wrote: post #12

If you could find a way to create a broadly recognized and meaningful certification, you wouldn't need school at all. You have the JavaScript certification? You know how to code. Doesn't matter if you went to an Ivy League school or (re-)created all of the fundamentals from scratch. Make the certification standards free as in speech, charge a minimal fee to cover administration of the exams, and go to town.

Hey there. I'm certified to the hilt: IC3, CompTia A+/Net+/Security+ & Microsoft Certified Professional. All before I left high school. These certifications were absolutely useless when it came to getting me a job whenever I interviewed somewhere where they knew what they were doing. All they proved was that I was particularly good at studying and taking tests. This may be a useful skill in another career but in IT (…

No offense, but those certifications are pretty low value. The A+, etc solely exist because the federal government requires them for contractors.

Code bootcamps do provide some usefulness, and you could problably look at that syllabus and come up with a more portable ciriculum that you could teach to people with aptitude but without credentials.

It would be great to use something like this in civil service and other areas to give disadvantaged folks a way to get into the industry without a four year degree in CS.

It's bizarre though. Companies won't even look at CS graduates from state schools, but will hire someone who went through a glorified training class.

Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#35

Post by SonicSoul »

canterburry wrote: post #25

I too am a bit confused to why coding bootcamps are needed. I am sure they nicely compress lots of information into a short timeframe but even back in 1997 I was able to teach myself to code simply by sitting at Barnes and Noble reading book after book after book and then trying things out on my own. Today, this should be even easier since it's all online anyway. If it's too much work looking it up yourself, maybe yo…

the book at Barnes and Noble won't give you 10 best tools to get the job done and help you configure them. It also won't answer any of your questions when you get stuck. It will also not give you insight form other people asking questions you didn't think to ask. Of course today you can get most of that with a $30/month subscription to pluralsight or frontendmasters. so yah, 15k seems a bit nuts. I remember back in the day they had these bootcamps for html/css also priced in thousands

Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#36

Post by Moshe_Silnorin »

menssen wrote: post #19

"'Teaching highly motivated students to code is actually not that hard.' — Dan Sofer" This broadly matches my experience. The hiring and interviewing of bootcamp graduates I've done has made me thing it's really just an intense vetting process for junior developer candidates. Which is valuable, but potentially could be replaced by something that costs less than $15k.

I've had a startup idea for this type of thing. We are forbidden, for nonsense reasons, to use IQ tests when hiring. This makes training your own workforce untenable for any cognitively demanding field, so we must use proxies like college education. However, one of the most important findings in psychometrics is the fact that scores on all cognitive tests are correlated. Thus there seems to be an opening for a company that is able to skillfully embed IQ tests in tests that are inarguably domain-relevant, and can be argued as such in court. If you can create an abundance of such tests for various occupations, this would seem valuable. Because psychometrics is both wildly unpopular and correct, this is exactly the type of secret, in Thiel's terms, one might expect to be under-appreciated.

Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#37

Post by ben_jones »

RKoutnik wrote: post #22
falcolas wrote: post #12

If you could find a way to create a broadly recognized and meaningful certification, you wouldn't need school at all. You have the JavaScript certification? You know how to code. Doesn't matter if you went to an Ivy League school or (re-)created all of the fundamentals from scratch. Make the certification standards free as in speech, charge a minimal fee to cover administration of the exams, and go to town.

Hey there. I'm certified to the hilt: IC3, CompTia A+/Net+/Security+ & Microsoft Certified Professional. All before I left high school. These certifications were absolutely useless when it came to getting me a job whenever I interviewed somewhere where they knew what they were doing. All they proved was that I was particularly good at studying and taking tests. This may be a useful skill in another career but in IT (…

What about a project based approach with testing similar to the AP exams (multiple graders, on a curve, with deviance from the mean singled out and examined)? I.E. implement a 12 factor web application using the python standard library that can handle x volume of traffic on n cores with y gb of ram where n and y are somewhat excessive? Could be interesting IMO.

Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#38

Post by bdcravens »

In 1999 I was a college "drop out" (financial aid probation due to poor discipline and depression, and I was too poor to pay for school for a semester), so I got my first "real" job doing ISP tech support in the little Oklahoma town I lived in. Had already learned basics of web dev (HTML via Notepad on Geocities) and some basic languages (Turbo Pascal, TI-BASIC, QBasic, Javascript, etc). Got into a little Perl, some heavy experimentation with ASP, and eventually, ColdFusion (learned via reading the manuals they shipped in the box).

Within 15 months of starting that job at $6/hour, I had my first development job in Houston at $30/hour. No degree, and there were no coding schools then. Just a hunger to learn.

Today there's resources like Stack Overflow, great open source editors like Atom and VS Code, and frameworks like Rails. I'd like to think it's easier, but maybe there's a greater depth of knowledge needed that makes it tougher.

Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#40

Post by bluedino »

SonicSoul wrote: post #35
canterburry wrote: post #25

I too am a bit confused to why coding bootcamps are needed. I am sure they nicely compress lots of information into a short timeframe but even back in 1997 I was able to teach myself to code simply by sitting at Barnes and Noble reading book after book after book and then trying things out on my own. Today, this should be even easier since it's all online anyway. If it's too much work looking it up yourself, maybe yo…

the book at Barnes and Noble won't give you 10 best tools to get the job done and help you configure them. It also won't answer any of your questions when you get stuck. It will also not give you insight form other people asking questions you didn't think to ask. Of course today you can get most of that with a $30/month subscription to pluralsight or frontendmasters. so yah, 15k seems a bit nuts. I remember back in t…

When I got stuck with Linux or C during my Barnes and Noble learning days, I just went on IRC
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