Thousands of Veterans Want to Learn to Code But Can’t • Hacker News Board

Re: Thousands of Veterans Want to Learn to Code But Can’t

#141

Post by RealityNow » Sat, May 06, 2017, 4:14 AM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #128

narribbi wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fundamental knowledge of math and science that separates engineers from 'coders'. Only math. Furthermore, someone with years of coding instinctively develops such mathematical understanding, while the very same understanding will be lost on someone who just graduated, but has never coded.

> Furthermore, someone with years of coding instinctively develops such mathematical understanding FWIW, this isn't my experience. I have a CS/math background, spent the first few yrs of my career at Google, and then moved to a startup as the first employee. We had a lot of difficulty sourcing good candidates, and our first two hires were 1) a guy with no engineering experience and domain knowledge that had programme…

What are these basic engineering habits, and why was engineer #2 not able to adopt them?

Re: Thousands of Veterans Want to Learn to Code But Can’t

#142

Post by RealityNow » Sat, May 06, 2017, 4:15 AM UTC

40acres wrote: post #21

I don't see the need for Code Schools. Folks can learn almost anything using the resources of the internet. Provide the vets with books on coding for a specialized curriculum for fee and give them some specialized job prep. Many places would love to hire Vets.

You could apply the same logic to university.

Re: Thousands of Veterans Want to Learn to Code But Can’t

#143

Post by zild3d » Sat, May 06, 2017, 4:16 AM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #137

EduardoBautista wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need it if you don't want to work on cookie cutter applications.

Cookie-cutter isn't a bad thing. If it solves a real problem or addresses a real need, it will be successful. I mean Facebook started out as a cookie cutter app. Heck, it was a basic CRUD app. Look at where it is today. Outside of such unicorns there are also many examples of reasonably successful products that can be categorized as cookie-cutter. Basecamp. Trello. Snapchat. These apps don't do anything groundbreakin…

I agree except for Snapchat, the real time computer vision they (or at least the startup they bought) put out I would have to say was on the cutting edge. Real time facial recognition was standard, but the facial transformations and 3d modelling in real time stood (and still stand) alone

Re: Thousands of Veterans Want to Learn to Code But Can’t

#144

Post by Dangeranger » Sat, May 06, 2017, 4:16 AM UTC

blhack wrote: post #86

If you live in Phoenix, AZ I will personally 1-on-1 mentor you if you want to learn how to code. Come to heatsync labs every wednesday from 9:00am-3:00pm. (But you have to actually show up AND you have to agree to the curriculum. Email in profile.)

If you live in Vermont and want one-on-one help you can contact me via twitter: @high_rigour and I'll personally help you out. We have a strong group of engineers here who would like to help veterans free of charge.

Re: Thousands of Veterans Want to Learn to Code But Can’t

#145

Post by jhbadger » Sat, May 06, 2017, 4:39 AM UTC

grogenaut wrote: post #132

jhbadger wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm from Wisconsin and am currently reading "Janesville: An American Story", which is about the city of Janesville, WI and what happened when the GM auto plant closed in 2008. A lot of subsidies went to retraining the unemployed factory workers because that's supposedly how you are supposed to treat factory closings. But it turns out that when you compare the salaries of the workers who went back to school (tech scho…

Got any sources for that from the book I can peek at?

The book itself contains an appendix which shows the analysis. It doesn't seem to have been published as a journal article, but it is based on publically available data and basically the same argument was put forth by the author of the book in an article on ProPublica.

https://www.propublica.org/article/rare-agreement-obama-romn...

Re: Thousands of Veterans Want to Learn to Code But Can’t

#146

Post by combatentropy » Sat, May 06, 2017, 4:42 AM UTC

I would recommend a good internship over any other way of learning, and I would vote for extending the GI bill to help pay for them.

Code school won't turn you into much of a coder, nor will an Ivy League university. They will establish some sort of foundation, but I think the benefit-per-month and -per-dollar is not the best. And this is coming from someone who loved school, mades As and Bs, and graduated from a university.

Books and online resources are not the whole answer either, not for a beginner. You need a jump start. Maybe school would get you jump started, but an internship would be even better. And this is coming from someone who read thick books cover to cover on JavaScript, Apache, and SQL. I seem to do well with books, not needing a class --- but I wonder if I could have done it without some solid real-life problems to sink my teeth into. I didn't get an internship. I got even better: a job where I could learn on the job --- basically a paid internship.

Humans learn best through apprenticeship, on-the-job demonstration, using more than one of their five senses, question-and-answer. It was true in the Middle Ages, and it's true now. We haven't changed.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a human face-to-face interaction.

Re: Thousands of Veterans Want to Learn to Code But Can’t

#147

Post by mratzloff » Sat, May 06, 2017, 4:45 AM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #128

narribbi wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fundamental knowledge of math and science that separates engineers from 'coders'. Only math. Furthermore, someone with years of coding instinctively develops such mathematical understanding, while the very same understanding will be lost on someone who just graduated, but has never coded.

> Furthermore, someone with years of coding instinctively develops such mathematical understanding FWIW, this isn't my experience. I have a CS/math background, spent the first few yrs of my career at Google, and then moved to a startup as the first employee. We had a lot of difficulty sourcing good candidates, and our first two hires were 1) a guy with no engineering experience and domain knowledge that had programme…

I would invite you to consider the possibility that you are coming into a situation with a pro-academia bias that creates the reality you find yourself in. That's not at all unusual for someone who's worked at Google. As long as we're trading anecdotes, I have some that could easily show the opposite.

In my experience, intellectual curiosity, intellectual openness, raw intelligence, initiative, and attitude are much better indicators of success as a programmer than having a degree.

Re: Thousands of Veterans Want to Learn to Code But Can’t

#148

Post by redthrowaway » Sat, May 06, 2017, 4:47 AM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #137

EduardoBautista wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need it if you don't want to work on cookie cutter applications.

Cookie-cutter isn't a bad thing. If it solves a real problem or addresses a real need, it will be successful. I mean Facebook started out as a cookie cutter app. Heck, it was a basic CRUD app. Look at where it is today. Outside of such unicorns there are also many examples of reasonably successful products that can be categorized as cookie-cutter. Basecamp. Trello. Snapchat. These apps don't do anything groundbreakin…

Cookie-cutter is also what 99% of programmers work on. Yes, it's nice that you were on the team at facebook that built the first react prototype, or that you were the first software engineer at oculus. The rest of us are building apps, adding an endpoint to an api, figuring out what the new database schema should look like, etc. And there are a hell of a lot more jobs openings for "blue-collar coders" than there are for geniuses.

I mean, it's great you're working on the latest computer vision algo to make the billboards in Minority Report a reality. I just spent the day wrestling with Google's client API registration and authentication nonsense so I could get per-page bounce rates.

Re: Thousands of Veterans Want to Learn to Code But Can’t

#149

Post by eclecticsceptic » Sat, May 06, 2017, 4:58 AM UTC

USAA, a financial institution made by the military community for the military community, has a program called Vetfit = veterans for IT. It puts them through an intensive 14 week bootcamp.

Perhaps there's not enough knowledge about this program but 1/4 of USAA employees (~31,000) are vets.

Re: Thousands of Veterans Want to Learn to Code But Can’t

#150

Post by WalterBright » Sat, May 06, 2017, 4:59 AM UTC

aphextron wrote: post #50

polpo wrote: post #3

Whether you believe code schools are good or bad (I lean somewhat towards good), I wonder if we have not fully learned the lesson from the rash several years ago of fly-by-night for-profit colleges preying on vets and providing substandard education and inflated job promises, all on the GI Bill's dime. I worry that if the GI Bill was extended to code schools, we'd see the exact same thing happen again.

> I worry that if the GI Bill was extended to code schools, we'd see the exact same thing happen again. This is dead on. I am a veteran currently going back to school for an engineering degree on the GI bill. When I got out of the service I didn't even consider going back to school, and just taught myself how to code and started working as a web developer. Once I made it to the point of working with other software en…

> knowledge of math and science

Right. You cannot solve engineering problems with programming skills unless you also know engineering, just like you cannot write accounting software unless you know accounting, etc.

For another example, if you were coding the Shazam app, a good understanding of undergraduate math is needed to code of the fast fourier transform part. Even more so, one would need that knowledge to even realize that an FFT was the path to a solution.