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Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

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Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#131

Post by Clubber »

wildmusings wrote: post #68
austenallred wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really no different than any university. A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country. The signaling factor is as important as the education, often times. Bootcamps are this weird space where, because they're so short and so expensive, even the most legitimate are considered mediocre by most employers because you can only teach so much in three months. So you can m…

Another part of the value of a university is that they factor in SAT scores heavily into admissions. SAT scores correlate strongly with IQ. Hiring based on IQ tests is illegal, but hiring mostly from certain universities is not.

From what I understand SAT grades what you've learned and ACT grades what you are capable of learning. At least that's what I understood years ago.

Edit: Oh yea, don't believe me? Here's a link. Apparently I got it backwards though. :)

http://www.educationplanner.org/parents/act-sat-scores.shtml

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#132

Post by Clubber »

brooklyn_ashey wrote: post #67
bovitclan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country. The difference between the people who go to Harvard and those that don't has much more to do with money. Hire people with this assumption at your own peril.

I'm glad someone said it. Merit= very short bootstraps. This is a much denied truth here in the US, where everyone is so desperate to believe in our national mythology of anyone who works hard can do anything and be anything they want to. This myth can't even carry an aroma of truth these days. No one who has "achieved" anything ever wants to get real and admit how they really got it--- they'd rather tell you and the…

I absolutely agree with what you are saying, but I also believe most hugely successful people who work, work (or worked early in their careers) just as hard as anyone else, they just happen to be working at the right thing with the right people. Of course once you are successful, you can hire people to do most of the work for you while you just monitor.

Finding the right thing with the right people is where the socioeconomic status comes in, particularly having a well connected family.

On my graduation year, my university created a slogan, "It's not what you know, it's who you know." Having just spend 5 years getting a degree from said university, I thought that wasn't a very good slogan for such an institution. It was absolutely correct though.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#133

Post by Clubber »

learc83 wrote: post #83
phillc73 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how undergraduate University education works in Australia (at least it did when I attended. Perhaps someone younger than me can comment if things have changed in the last 20 years). Effectively the government pays your undergraduate university fees. There is then an additional tax applied against your salary, after it reaches a certain threshold. This of course results in jokes that Arts graduates may as well…

That's effectively how it works in the US as well for most people. Federal loans (90% of all loans) come with income based repayment plans that charge 10% of your disposable income and are cancelled after 20 years if you don't pay it off.

I don't believe they are cancelled ever. There is a special condition that if you work for the federal government for 20 years, they can be cancelled after 20 years if they aren't paid off, but AFAIK, that's it, and you have to attempt to pay them off during those 20 years.

If there is a new exception, please let me know. My wife has some.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#134

Post by wolco »

factorialboy wrote: post #107

Who needs bootcamps? All you need is a decent machine and an internet connection to learn. That's how we learnt "web" back in the day. Cynical me hopes all commercial (and often spammy) bootcamps and conferences and meetups die a quick death. Also death to the hipster culture in tech. /rant over

In my day we didn't have the internet and we learned by writing code and looking up function calls in books and bugging the guy at the computer store.

With all of the free learning materials online you can literally get a university education from top schools for free.

If I was starting out now I would considered it because it's a fast track to employment. When I started out I knew how to program but no one would consider you without an education. That forced me to go to college and learn fun things like COBOL and jcl and many other languages in a short period of time. In the end I rarely use most of those language but if a mainframe opportunity comes up I'm ready. Being forced to learn so many things at once was the real education because it helps in the real world where you are expected to pickup new languages. For some reason my mainframe dev resume bullet points have never been mentioned during an interview. If you can develop for a s/390 that should somehow give you a slight boost for your next javascript role in my opinion.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#135

Post by tootie »

skylark wrote: post #21

I find bootcamps to be an interesting industry. The general perception is that they're learning institutions, but that couldn't be further from the truth. In reality, bootcamps are technical recruitment agencies. Companies are realizing that smart, motivated people with no CS degree can still oftentimes excel in the majority of positions (primarily app development.) The problem is finding those people. Bootcamps have…

I think the students build confidence at least as much as they learn practical skills. Having an experienced technologist watch you work and say "that part is good, this part needs this change" is enormously valuable for any sort of advanced amateur. The kind of person who maybe builds sites and apps, but doesn't know what they don't know and have never received validation.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#136

Post by driverdan »

panorama wrote: post #80

It always frustrates me when commenters are overwhelmingly undereducated about a topic but continue to make broad, sweeping generalizations. There's a ton of negativity, outright assuming, and misinformation being thrown around here. It happens in every bootcamp-related thread (and topics in other subjects of course). No, not every bootcamp was legit. No, making assumptions about all bootcamps based on a handful of b…

As a hiring manager who reviewed many bootcamps and interviewed bootcamp grads, DBC was top tier. I hired a few DBC graduates. The people who went through their program tended to be extremely smart and motivated. The program itself was very thorough and demanding.

Out of all the bootcamps I expected to fold DBC was at the bottom of the list.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#137

Post by archildress »

skylark wrote: post #21

I find bootcamps to be an interesting industry. The general perception is that they're learning institutions, but that couldn't be further from the truth. In reality, bootcamps are technical recruitment agencies. Companies are realizing that smart, motivated people with no CS degree can still oftentimes excel in the majority of positions (primarily app development.) The problem is finding those people. Bootcamps have…

You've also just described MBA programs.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#138

Post by driverdan »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #12

Good. The idea and intention behind bootcamps is a good one but the current implementation is suspiciously like university of phoenix.

I downvoted you because you're generalizing and have clearly not researched the topic.

As a hiring manager I reviewed many bootcamp programs and interviewed grads. DBC was one of the best and produced consistently good junior candidates.

There are a lot of crappy ones but DBC wasn't one of them.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#139

Post by driverdan »

phrowaway21231 wrote: post #34

Shereef Bishay sold out his staff and sold out his mission and he's going to the do the same to his staff at Learner's Guild in Oakland! He sold it off to Kaplan for 80M and his staff (with equity) got nothing!!! I interviewed for a role at Dev bootcamp in 2016 and got an odd feeling from the place and the woman who interviewed me. She took several months to get back to me after I followed up multiple times and wow a…

> He sold it off to Kaplan for 80M and his staff (with equity) got nothing!!!

Source?

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#140

Post by JohnTHaller »

phillc73 wrote: post #101
learc83 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's effectively how it works in the US as well for most people. Federal loans (90% of all loans) come with income based repayment plans that charge 10% of your disposable income and are cancelled after 20 years if you don't pay it off.

I did not know that. So why all the noise about how expensive tertiary education is in the US?

Cost of university education has risen much faster than inflation for decades primarily due to easily obtained loans and increasing bureaucratic overhead. At the same time, the job prospects for many degree-holders have decreased. Additionally, student loans are for life and can not be cancelled by filing bankruptcy now. The 20 year thing mentioned by the above comment only applies to very specific government jobs.

So education is more expensive, student loans are more expensive, student loans can't be cancelled, and job prospects and real income are worse.

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