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What I Learned from Researching Coding Bootcamps

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Re: What I Learned from Researching Coding Bootcamps

#61

Post by whb07 »

kylethayer wrote: post #59
wikibob wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a post from you and her on what she did during that year between deciding to enter tech and getting the job at Microsoft would be incredibly interesting and helpful. Particularly, what resources did she use? More top down things (Udacity, FreeCodeCamp, jumping into building projects), or bottom up (online computer science classes, Berkeley CS61, SICP, etc). Thanks!

The article has a link to her blog in that first paragraph (though links on Medium don't stand out that much). FreeCodeCamp was one of a number of things she did.

I read both your posts and her series of blog posts which where interesting to follow along. It wasn't clear to the reader how it is that she got past the HR screening for Microsoft as a non-cs graduate. I'm starting to believe that maybe she made a good impression by doing that class under that MS engineer who then made her students interview with actual Microsoft employees?

Re: What I Learned from Researching Coding Bootcamps

#62

Post by sethrin »

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #57
sethrin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing trains people to program well. Colleges teach fundamentals like lambda calculus, but fail to teach practical skills. Bootcamps have the opposite problem, and the actual industry seems to assume that trained developers spring up out of the ground like sowing dragon's teeth. The requirement of 'not focused on a particular language' is actually something that I would be forced to disagree with. That leads to thi…

I didn't know abotu HAGGIS, thanks for that link. I vaguely remember that in the 1990's the US Advanced Placement test for CS was done in Pascal. The point has to be a focus on fundamentals. There are fundamental data structures and algorithms that any programmer is useless if they don't know, and I doubt people are learning these at bootcamps in 6 months. > Colleges teach fundamentals like lambda calculus, but fail…

> College CS programs in the USA are focusing more and more on appeasing recruiters and HR folk with keywords than in teaching CS fundamentals. And I think that's a tragedy.

If true, I am sure we would agree on that score.

> There are fundamental data structures and algorithms that any programmer is useless if they don't know, and I doubt people are learning these at bootcamps in 6 months.

I believe that what gets taught at bootcamps is how to tackle new things, and professional standards of code quality. More learning how to learn. I do dispute the idea of "any programmer is useless if they don't know X" for any X. It's too strongly worded, for one thing. If you qualify 'programmer' as someone with 4-6 languages under their belt then yes, if that person doesn't know their algorithms they're probably going to be less productive -- writing BASIC in every language. That is unfortunately far from useless. But the subset of coding tasks you'd assign to junior developers are probably not going to inconvenience you much if you don't know how to do an A* search.

Re: What I Learned from Researching Coding Bootcamps

#63

Post by scarface74 »

I've never gotten a good answer on another scenario: what if someone already has software development experience but no experience in a particular stack and they take a boot camp class to learn? Are they marketable if they know how to interview well?

For instance: a .Net full stack developer who takes a boot camp to learn how to develop for Android or iOS.

Re: What I Learned from Researching Coding Bootcamps

#64

Post by cheapsteak »

pacaro wrote: post #38
cheapsteak wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different guy here responding If you have a job, then you can only interview on lunch breaks or after work. If you have a shitty job then you have incredibly short lunch breaks and get off work late. You'll miss a lot of interview opportunities. You also might not have time to do the various different screener exercises that many companies require of junior developers to make sure you actually know how to do somethin…

Thanks for the answer. For myself, it is easy to forget this reality. Once your career is bootstrapped the story changes so much. I've changed employers only 4 times in 23 years, one of those was an acquisition, and the other three times I only interviewed with four companies (total, not each job change). Since getting my first job, I've never not gotten the phone screen/onsite interview/job offer. Ok that all sounds…

I'm actually on the other end of this, have had to design a few of those screener questions myself.

They're a pain but they do help with screening out those who can talk the talk but end up being overly confident spaghetti machines.

I know I'm missing out on people who are good but don't have time to prove it to me, but the cost of a bad hire is much more costly than missing out on a good one, and there are so many people to sort through

Re: What I Learned from Researching Coding Bootcamps

#65

Post by mlent »

scarface74 wrote: post #63

I've never gotten a good answer on another scenario: what if someone already has software development experience but no experience in a particular stack and they take a boot camp class to learn? Are they marketable if they know how to interview well? For instance: a .Net full stack developer who takes a boot camp to learn how to develop for Android or iOS.

I would guess yes, but you have to take a junior position as your first in the new field. A good developer can probably specialize in just about anything, but it takes time to learn the specifics. My 2c!

Re: What I Learned from Researching Coding Bootcamps

#66

Post by Double_a_92 »

scarface74 wrote: post #63

I've never gotten a good answer on another scenario: what if someone already has software development experience but no experience in a particular stack and they take a boot camp class to learn? Are they marketable if they know how to interview well? For instance: a .Net full stack developer who takes a boot camp to learn how to develop for Android or iOS.

If you are a good .NET developper you should be able to pivot to whatever language you want on your own.

Spending 30k on a bootcamp seems extremely expensive for that.

Re: What I Learned from Researching Coding Bootcamps

#67

Post by 1_800_UNICORN »

scarface74 wrote: post #63

I've never gotten a good answer on another scenario: what if someone already has software development experience but no experience in a particular stack and they take a boot camp class to learn? Are they marketable if they know how to interview well? For instance: a .Net full stack developer who takes a boot camp to learn how to develop for Android or iOS.

One of my developers was a CS grad who took a bootcamp to learn Ruby/Rails. She parlayed that into a $100k job out of the gate doing Ruby/Rails consulting work, and has been one of our top developers ever since. I've talked to her about her bootcamp experience, the main pain points for her were:

- Unsure about whether the cost and time spent were actually worthwhile, or whether self-learning might have been a better option - Bootcamps are not optimized for those who come in with basic programming skills

That second point was also exposed by a close friend of mine who decided to abandon her career in the aerospace/defense industry (she was an aerospace engineer) and do a bootcamp. She was top of our class in college, and she had done a fair amount of basic programming in tools like Matlab. She parlayed her bootcamp experience into a great job as well, but she often found that she was way ahead of the rest of the class. Luckily I've recruited from all of the bootcamps in my town, so I recommended a very good bootcamp with great instructors to her, and her instructors worked to put together a shadow curriculum of work to do while the rest of the class was still working through the main curriculum.

So, YMMV. If you can afford the cost of the bootcamp, it's a proven method to learn new skills and turn that into a new job, but the more programming experience you have, the more you'll find yourself far ahead of the rest of the class.

Re: What I Learned from Researching Coding Bootcamps

#68

Post by jaclaz »

With all due respect for the Author (and I don't doubt in any way that his results are correct) I am surprised that a research with 26 participants can lead to anything, even if the Author himself specifies that in the "Limitations" of the paper:

>Our research focused on a small sample of students in coding bootcamps in one part of only one country. Other students may have had different experiences, especially in other bootcamps, in other places, and in other times. Additionally, while our stratified snowball sampling provided a range of experiences, we can make few claims about the commonality of experiences or causality.

The sample is IMHO simply too small to give to the outcome any more relevance than anecdotal data.

Re: What I Learned from Researching Coding Bootcamps

#69

Post by kylethayer »

jaclaz wrote: post #68

With all due respect for the Author (and I don't doubt in any way that his results are correct) I am surprised that a research with 26 participants can lead to anything , even if the Author himself specifies that in the "Limitations" of the paper: >Our research focused on a small sample of students in coding bootcamps in one part of only one country. Other students may have had different experiences, especially in ot…

I don't have too much time to reply, but this is something I didn’t know before starting grad school, so I thought I’d write briefly.

As a qualitative research project, the goal was not to find out how many students have which outcomes or experience. The goal was to find a range of experiences and how those experiences are viewed by students. For a qualitative project, 26 is actually a large sample and I intentionally sought a range of demographics, bootcamp stages and outcomes to capture a large range of viewpoints. The goal here is depth on a few people rather than breadth across all bootcamps everywhere. I hope someone does a proper quantitative study as well, finding the size of groups and correlations between factors and success. I chose qualitative methods because I wanted to discover viewpoints, which is something quantitative research is not well suited for.

I believe my research demonstrated the existence of several groups and viewpoints. For example, some students successfully change careers and I found what it meant for them, while others struggled and I found what it meant for them. Similarly, I found that some people took a year or more to change careers, so I can say that this is the case for some people. I can't say how big these groups are, just that they exist. Whenever I cite numbers (such as at least four students married to programmers), that is not intended to show how many students are married to programmers, but to suggest future researchers, bootcamps, and students might want to consider it and look into this more.

Re: What I Learned from Researching Coding Bootcamps

#70

Post by kylethayer »

whb07 wrote: post #61
kylethayer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article has a link to her blog in that first paragraph (though links on Medium don't stand out that much). FreeCodeCamp was one of a number of things she did.

I read both your posts and her series of blog posts which where interesting to follow along. It wasn't clear to the reader how it is that she got past the HR screening for Microsoft as a non-cs graduate. I'm starting to believe that maybe she made a good impression by doing that class under that MS engineer who then made her students interview with actual Microsoft employees?

She has a new blog post, which may answer this more.
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