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

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

#211

Post by denzil_correa »

snarfy wrote: post #205
greggman wrote: post #182

I would love for more people to code and I would love for veterans for find work but .... My impression is those who excel at coding (like everything else) love doing it. So, I would expect the majority to fail. It's doesn't seem like a skill like riding a bike where you learn it once and then it's just this thing you can pull out whenever (or maybe it just takes longer to get to that point). My point is, whenever I…

I've often felt this way in the past, but with experience I have to disagree. There is a large range of skill needed for various jobs. I've met plenty of people writing software for a living that don't care about software. It's just a job to them. You don't need a PhD to hide in a corner writing test automation for mega corp.

You are always going to be at least good enough IF you are good at it.

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

#212

Post by tyingq »

Inconel wrote: post #194
tyingq wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A special forces guy isn't the best example of someone with the kind of training I'm talking about. I mentioned the asvabs not as a comparison to writing a paper, but to note there is a bar to get into the highly technical jobs. Similar to the bar created by things like minimum SAT scores for some schools. Talk to an ex military person that had a highly technical job that required 6+ months of military tech school. T…

My only experience with anyone from a SOF background comes from a coworker who is a mechanical engineer but I would think that someone from a special forces background would actually be a fairly good example. It might not require the kind of very technical training that say Navy nuke school does, but assuming sandworm was talking about proper "special forces", as in Army SF, most of those guys tend to be older, more…

Just pointing out that their training is less read, attend lecture, write a paper. So, they could turn out to be good at that, but it's not something they typically do a lot. But, there are ex-military that have lots of experience with that pattern.

Also, FWIW, I don't buy the premise anyway. Some percentage of fresh HS grads do well at college, some don't. Same is true for military vets. I was trying to pinpoint a specific group that I knew would mostly do well to dispel the notion that vets are somehow not great candidates for it.

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

#213

Post by macspoofing »

philippoi wrote: post #197
greggman wrote: post #182

I would love for more people to code and I would love for veterans for find work but .... My impression is those who excel at coding (like everything else) love doing it. So, I would expect the majority to fail. It's doesn't seem like a skill like riding a bike where you learn it once and then it's just this thing you can pull out whenever (or maybe it just takes longer to get to that point). My point is, whenever I…

I'd suggest most people who excel at bike riding approach it with the same enthusiasm and drive as you attribute to the programmers who excel (to your credit, you mention "everything else" is the same, which would include cycling until you pick it out as an anecdote at the end of the paragraph) and that's before achieving a level where they can actually make money on their cycling ability. To run with your analogy th…

>There would be a significant portion of the working population that understood the idea of what their computers were made to do

You don't need programming for that. A good mental model of modern computing is important but programming is overkill.

>improve their ability ability to leverage these machines to assist them in achieving their tasks even more efficiently.

Ok but it doesn't work like that. I don't know what kind of utopia you are imagining but it is a pipe dream. I can one up you, society would be far better off if they were more financially literate. Or even better if we got the literacy rate up - you would be surprised by the vast number of people who are functionally illiterate (and I'm not speaking about those for whom English is a second language)

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

#214

Post by lithos »

giardini wrote: post #172

This is nuts. Only a small percentage of people can learn to effectively generate code. Thinking that veterans can be turned into developers is absurd - they'll get code-monkeys instead, with a few exceptions. I don't believe that, at this time in the USA or in the future, education will save people in software development from unemployment. The only thing that will do that is having some smarts. And if you're smart,…

I haven't seen a Nuke fail to learn to program enough to get stuff done, and the two that stuck with it were annoyed when they realized they were going faster by staying off the internet. (Though this is learning for a hobby).

They're going to also do better in a tech interview than most programmers. Mostly because they've survived a program where they have a half dozen or so knowledge interviews a year (that to me were more stressful than my actual job interviews).

Though most rates don't remotely compare to nukes, and nukes have more sure ways of getting SV like pay than tossing in with IT developers.

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

#215

Post by lucidguppy »

mikekchar wrote: post #59

One thing I was surprised about was the price. Can you really get $10K per student in a boot camp/coding school? Googling I found [0]. It's looking like about $1K per week . What kind of student to teacher ratio do they have? I assume they also take referral fees with their placement programs? It occurs to me that I'm in entirely the wrong industry. I'll be honest, I work with a few people out of boot camps, and I re…

Code coming out of the universities isn't that great either. That's why you need summer internships / coop education. People need to learn how to take PR criticism the right way - and to learn.

I wonder how much improvement you'd see if you handed out "Clean Code" by Martin to junior developers.

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

#216

Post by metaphorm »

crispyambulance wrote: post #199
jondubois wrote: post #191

There are already more coders than are needed. What there aren't enough of are leaders who are smart enough to recognize this. I cringe at the thought that software engineering could become a "blue collar" profession. Systems have become needlessly over-complicated and this is driving an increase in demand for coders. As companies hire more coders; their systems get more features but they also grow in complexity (par…

So you're taking a dubious theory (tech-debt => hire juniors => more tech-debt, repeat), applying it industry-wide and then using it as an argument against JUST VETERANS from pursuing a career-change into software?

where did he apply his argument against JUST VETERANS?

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

#217

Post by nkozyra »

fictioncircle wrote: post #154
nkozyra wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual algorithm is irrelevant, so looking it up wouldn't be helpful. The point is to find out if the developer understands complexity well enough that they won't build bad things, that they'll know how to avoid nested loop if they can, that they'll know what the cost of one approach is compared to another. If you look something up and the interviewer asks you what the O() of your approach is and you don't know,…

> The actual algorithm is irrelevant, so looking it up wouldn't be helpful. It isn't irrelevant if you are attempting to implement it correctly. > If you look something up and the interviewer asks you what the O() of your approach is and you don't know, how can they feel assured you grasp these fundamentals? That wasn't the original question in the comment I responded to and your attempt to re-phrase it as X when it…

> It isn't irrelevant if you are attempting to implement it correctly.

Exactly my point. Rarely is there one "correct" implementation. Understanding the choice you make and can support is the point of coding interviews. That's why they're so often done in pseudocode and/or on the whiteboard.

If you can look stuff up you're not demonstrating a knowledge of the fundamentals. If you don't understand complexity and optimization, you will make mistakes even if you can look stuff up later.

That's why these companies do these.

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

#218

Post by FLUX-YOU »

greggman wrote: post #182

I would love for more people to code and I would love for veterans for find work but .... My impression is those who excel at coding (like everything else) love doing it. So, I would expect the majority to fail. It's doesn't seem like a skill like riding a bike where you learn it once and then it's just this thing you can pull out whenever (or maybe it just takes longer to get to that point). My point is, whenever I…

>It's doesn't seem like a skill like riding a bike where you learn it once and then it's just this thing you can pull out whenever (or maybe it just takes longer to get to that point).

Sure it is, you just need to see it as a skill that you need to work on and be disciplined about it. There are still a lot of places that can use daily automation that also don't have time/money to go looking for a product.

Plenty of people are good at things and do not necessarily love doing that thing. I'm sorry, but having a bleeding-heart passion about programming is not a prerequisite for doing well and people that make it a prerequisite can turn into toxic, snobby elitists when working with others.

The people that go back to their real love just need more time to reach a given plateau compared to someone who does this stuff for 10-16 hours a day and gets a shot of dopamine every time they compile something. Nothing says you can't reach the top without loving it, it's just going to take a lot longer.

A lot of businesses just do not care about the extra quality you can put into a code base and when you try to put your passions into something and realize how little people care for anything beyond mediocrity, it can end up killing your passion.

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

#219

Post by metaphor »

psyc wrote: post #206
hasenj wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the passion but the ability to excel at it. I believe it's correlated with IQ. Most people want to believe it's teachable, because stating otherwise sounds cruel and elitist, but I see no reason to believe that it's not innate. If you have it, then learning and practicing can help bring it your potential. If you don't have it, you'll just be frustrated all the time trying to wrestle with the computer.

As a teacher, I think of innate ability and teachability as separate issues. Innate ability almost certainly (imo) sets an ultimate limit, but there's plenty of room for accomplishment before it's reached. I actually do believe that every programmer is ultimately constrained by individual neurological factors. But I've also taught 'normal' people to code. They may not have what it takes to independently arrive at usi…

I fail to see the relevance of comparing most working programmers to John Carmack.

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

#220

Post by OliverJones »

People who go to coding boot camps often get coding jobs. Many coding schools deliver what they promise their students, which is a job in return for their fee and the student's hard work.

It's silly that VA benefits can be used for intensive short courses in for-profit plumbing and truck-driving schools but not coding schools.

This is a screwup that needs to be fixed. The VA has screwups in it. SNAFU (situation normal, all f---d up) is a military acronym. They fix SNAFUs when they get pressure from Congress.

Of course there's a history of sleazeball entrepreneurs figuring out how to get paid with VA benefits in return for bad education. That's no good. It was already happening at the dawn of the computer age, and it's happening now. It needs to be dealt with, ongoing.

There's also a history of people being trained for work without the aptitude to do it well. That's also a waste. It happens in plumbing and truck driving too.

Making it hard for veterans to use their benefits to learn to code is not the way to deal with these problems.

Plus our industry can use lots more skilful hard working people.

You could write to your congresspeople and bring this article to their attention. I did.

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