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Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

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Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#291

Post by bambataa »

austenallred wrote: post #255
josephorjoe wrote: post #163

So, three years ago, I was attending DBC and getting my first exposure to web app development. Today, I write code for a living and am enjoying the work I do much more than what I had been doing before. Did DBC give me an education equivalent to a computer science degree? No. Did they teach me everything I need to know about data structures and algorithms? No. Did they help me get my first programming job? Sort of, b…

Wait, they didn't teach you data structures and algorithms? They seriously stop at "hey deploy a CRUD app?" That's rough. There's no way students are getting jobs with that in this environment. Maybe when they first started that was enough, but now the market is flooded with not-quite-competent junior devs.

I attended a (London-based) bootcamp and all we really covered was developing CRUD apps with a decent-ish UI and API integration. On the one hand it did feel very superficial but then a lot of web development jobs don't require much more in terms of skill.

Everyone on the bootcamp had a list of things they'd have liked to cover as well but there simply isn't time for everything. When planning the bootcamp's curriculum you have a difficult balancing act between giving people a firm grounding and teaching them things that are going to be directly helpful for getting jobs (which is most people's priority, given that they're not earning).

Students on my bootcamp who had been able to put together a portfolio of decent (albeit simple) websites that met users' needs didn't have trouble getting jobs. No, they weren't engineering roles at large tech companies but they're the first step in a new career.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#292

Post by shados »

morgtheborg wrote: post #283
shados wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can and they do. Which is somewhat problematics. A lot of companies are trying to scale, and with the demand for software developers being so high (plus the push for diversity), bootcamp "grads" are a pretty popular target. But companies rarely make the difference between a CS major (especially those with multiple internships or coops often spawning longer than the bootcamp on their own) and bootcamp graduates.…

Huh. I went through devbootcamp 3 years ago and stay in touch with a fair amount of people who did bootcamps. Haven't really heard this one before. The anecdotes I've heard are actually the opposite direction; that the bootcamp grads hit the ground running because they know the framework and general toolset for web dev (plus are usually spending a huge amount of time outside of work leveling up) and the CS majors tak…

People from good universities do co-ops, internships, and side work. They know the frameworks already too. And then you have some who don't, but come from MIT or CMU and pick that stuff up faster than I can link to the tutorial (well, once they're done complaining its not Haskell anyway, lol)

Though it does remind me of a company I worked for that hired a lot of bootcamp peeps, and it was hailed as a giant success by management. Meanwhile the rest of the team was grumbling about having to do 2x the work as they had to pick up the slack.

(Now, obviously, I do know some people who went through bootcamps that do amazing. I also know some 100% self taught engineers who are now Principal engineers or similar at Google or Microsoft. The above is just what I've seen to be the common case). Teaching React or how to build an API controller to someone we just hired is never the bottleneck. Interns pick that up just fine, no matter where they come from.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#293

Post by Tommyixi »

travisl12 wrote: post #268
Tommyixi wrote: post #171

So I graduated from DBC 3 years ago and I agree with most of the sentiments already stated in this thread. However, I think the red flag for me was seeing some of my cohort graduate and then immediately after become instructors at DBC. I don't care what you say, you cannot teach programming after being exposed to programming for 12 weeks. For one thing, a "good" teacher isn't just someone who has been coding for a wh…

I hear that, I remember being asked if I was planning on sticking around to teach at DBC and feeling inadequate at the thought of it. Mentoring perhaps made sense... BTW I finished in 2013 as well (Pocket Gophers SF!).

Nice! I was in the Red Admirals.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#294

Post by sarchertech »

magic_beans wrote: post #290
sarchertech wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Federal loans make up 90% of all loan disbursements. The vast majority of college students only have Federal student loans. >unless you're at a state school or community college Private colleges enroll about 15-20% of students. If you don't want $100k in debt, go to a public school, or go to a top tier school like Harvard that has very generous financial aid. If you can't get into a top tier school with excellent fin…

I'm from CA. Even with the resident discount, UCs are just as pricy as private colleges.

UC Berkeley tuition and fees comes to about $13k per year for California residents. The average private school tuition is over $30k per year.

Not sure why you think that it's so expensive. I went to school in Georgia (much lower cost of living area) and UCs are only about 15% more expensive than our flagship schools (Georgia Tech and UGA, and GSU).

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#295

Post by austenallred »

shados wrote: post #292
morgtheborg wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. I went through devbootcamp 3 years ago and stay in touch with a fair amount of people who did bootcamps. Haven't really heard this one before. The anecdotes I've heard are actually the opposite direction; that the bootcamp grads hit the ground running because they know the framework and general toolset for web dev (plus are usually spending a huge amount of time outside of work leveling up) and the CS majors tak…

People from good universities do co-ops, internships, and side work. They know the frameworks already too. And then you have some who don't, but come from MIT or CMU and pick that stuff up faster than I can link to the tutorial (well, once they're done complaining its not Haskell anyway, lol) Though it does remind me of a company I worked for that hired a lot of bootcamp peeps, and it was hailed as a giant success by…

I think the majority of it is sheer time. A bootcamp grad has generally been coding for three months. A CS grad has (ideally) been programming for four years.

Take a bootcamp grad after 3.5 years of work vs a fresh CS grad and it's (often) a no-brainer, up until you start running into the need for theoretical knowledge a CS grad has. I've never once heard a bootcamp talk about scaling or architecture in any real way.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#296

Post by Danihan »

michaelper22 wrote: post #264
Danihan wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, and I'm no expert, but isn't JSF 2 a formalized / built-in standard, rather than a relatively small framework? I thought most of what made Spring useful and popular was blown away by JSF 2.

Spring and JSF are to some extent mutually exclusive. I worked on a project that used JSF views with Spring EL that called Spring beans. However, the best practice, according to BalusC on StackOverflow, is to avoid mixing Spring components and JSF managed beans ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18387993/spring-jsf-inte... ).

Exactly my point. Why are bootcamps teaching Spring, when JSF 2 is built-in and does it all better? Or at the very least should be assumed to be the future.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#297

Post by LrnByTeach »

austenallred wrote: post #66
LrnByTeach wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two business models seems interesting. How do you track students once program completes? how do you know where are they working. How does the legal binding works ? https://www.holbertonschool.com/ https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science

I can only speak for Lamdbda School, of course. The original document is called an income share agreement (ISA). It's not a debt instrument or a loan, but is actually a legally binding "equity" stake in a student's future income under specific circumstances for a specific amount of time. Lambda, for example, takes a percentage of income for two years, only if they're working in a software-related field, and only if t…

Thank you for the detailed answer

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#298

Post by LrnByTeach »

sylvainkalache wrote: post #199
LrnByTeach wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two business models seems interesting. How do you track students once program completes? how do you know where are they working. How does the legal binding works ? https://www.holbertonschool.com/ https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science

On Holberton side: -How do you track students once program completes? We are working with http://vemo.com/ , they are specialized in Income Share Agreements (ISA) and the goto in the industry if you want to do ISA. Purdue University is also using them. Vemo request access to students tax return so that we can see their income. - How does the legal binding works? Students are supposed to let us know about their employ…

Thank you for the detailed answer

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#299

Post by lorenzq »

hrgradthrowaway wrote: post #230
lorenzq wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely the case. I got accepted to both HR and Dev Bootcamp. I chose HR because it had the better reputation and had released outcomes statistics. HR had tougher requirements to get in, you had to understand more programming than a freshman or sophomore college student. Dev Bootcamp accepted me with a logic puzzle and basic if statements and for loops. There was no competition. HR's recent purchase of Mak…

Fellow HR grad here. There was a point in time where completely unqualified students memorized and gamed the admissions process. Someone who did the remote interview copy and pasted the answers around the internet. This led to a very large amount of students that were just not prepared for the program in any way, and it also coincided with the window in time that HR decided that they weren't going to remove any stude…

They've started kicking those people out again (around 7%). They check performance on your daily problems, how much you contribute to the peer projects, and a hard cut at a midterm exam where they record your screen and make sure you're not just copying solutions. They also weed people out on behavioural teamwork issues.

Some of the people who got kicked out just dropped back to the next cohort though, which is severely disappointing, because on top of paying the full tuition they are likely to fail again. I checked and there's no way those people can catch up based on their code, they're the kind of people Jeff Atwood talks about. https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#300

Post by tannhauser23 »

smt88 wrote: post #271
tannhauser23 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What basis do you have for asserting that their contributions are bad? That their open source projects and promotions to team leadership aren't signs of competence? Look, you can go on believing whatever you want to believe about bootcamp grads - no one's forcing you to hire them. But it is interesting to me that my cohort mates keep getting hired by everyone from small startups to Google, and they keep progressing i…

> What basis do you have for asserting that their contributions are bad? That their open source projects and promotions to team leadership aren't signs of competence? I didn't assert that. I asserted only that "contributions" are not evidence of competence. Competence isn't even always sufficient to make someone a good hire. > That tells me the bootcamps have done a good job of prepping them to begin their coding car…

It's interesting that people who come on these threads to argue that bootcamps aren't effective, scams, etc. say, 16 weeks aren't enough to teach you everything about programming and that programming correctly requires constant practice and learn new things. Well, duh. That's true even if you spend four years majoring in CS, self-studied for a year, or got an associate degree in programming.

And yeah, that's because there's too much to know, especially in web dev where the frameworks and standards are changing all the time. And yeah, I think that a 12-16 intensive program backed by 3-6 months of pre-study (which was what my bootcamp was) is definitely sufficient to produce competent junior web devs. How do I know that? Because, again, I see people from my cohort and prior cohorts succeeding at their jobs.

You can keep saying, but! but! they need tons of support and hand-holding! They can't possibly know how to write clean code! (Because of course, new college grads are writing Code Clean-approved code from day one) They need months of training before they can fix a CSS issue!

C'mon. Yeah, if you hire a recent bootcamp grad and tell him to rewrite the whole backend, you're setting him up to fail. But if you hire him as a junior software engineer and give him tasks that are appropriate for that role? And what new hire doesn't require training? You think brand-new plumbers, air conditioning repairmen, accountants, salesmen etc. don't require training and mentorship?

Yeah, bootcamp isn't a magical potion that turns everyday joes into Linus Torvalds. But so what? It's an innovative program that's produced thousands of successful engineers in the Bay Area and beyond. The sauce isn't for everyone, but it's been a great way for many people to prep for a new career.

Edit: And what's even more amazing to me about the anti-bootcamp screeds is that this is an industry that celebrates self-learned programmers! Very often I see posts that say, bootcamps are scams, don't do it, you can't be competent coming out of it, just go study on your own for a while. Okay. So studying and making stuff on your own can make you a competent programmer, but intensively programming for 12-16 weeks with other people who share your passion while under expert guidance, is somehow not good enough? Never understood that one.

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