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As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

nytimes.com

21–30 of 289 posts

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#21
Good riddance.

Once recruiters figured out that placing these under qualified people into jobs was not a good thing, the bootcamps started to train people how to fake their resumes. Just like how people figured out that if they want a specific job, they only need to update their resume to include all the keywords in the job description.

When I was hiring and screening hundreds of people, applications would show 'projects' completed on them as if they were real work. Hired.com was full of this for a while until they started blocking them there too. People would go so far as to make a domain name for a class project appear as if it was a real company. You'd go look at their github and realize they only made a few commits towards the 'project'. How is that a demonstration of skill?

I'm sure a few people have come out of these bootcamps with some real knowledge and skills. But this is the edge case, not the norm. You can't shortcut your way to a well paying software engineering career by spending a ton of money.

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#22
post #10

Here in Minnesota we went from getting almost no developer applicants and unable to fill seats to a TON of absolutely under qualified applicants who went to boot camps. I'm not sure it's an improvement. We've hired a few, but only one has actually worked out.

Do you remember from what boot camps these people were from? I understand you don't want to shame people but curious as to whether there's been much success from even the bigger, more well known camps

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#23
Most coding bootcamps are a complete waste of money. Ever since I launched https://edabit.com, I've noticed a ton of traffic coming from these bootcamps and I'm not sure what to think of it. On the one hand, I like the free promotion but on the other, I can't help but feel as though these people are getting ripped off (considering they can access the site for free).

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#24

Good riddance. Once recruiters figured out that placing these under qualified people into jobs was not a good thing, the bootcamps started to train people how to fake their resumes. Just like how people figured out that if they want a specific job, they only need to update their resume to include all the keywords in the job description. When I was hiring and screening hundreds of people, applications would show 'proj…

Folks gotta start somewhere. If someone is sufficiently capable and motivated to put together a basic app why not count that experience? Surely if they built it then their work is exactly a demonstration of their skill.

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#25

Sort of off topic, but in the second picture the whiteboard says "Ajacks" (and not ajax, for asynchronous JavaScript and xml). Makes me wonder how fast and loose they were playing with instructors, unless this is just a staged shot, or maybe a joke I didn't get. Not that you need to know what the acronym stands for (hell, no one I know uses the technique to get xml anymore anyways!), but it is weird to see the detail…

I dont know if it was meant to be a joke but I'm laughing.

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#26

Most coding bootcamps are a complete waste of money. Ever since I launched https://edabit.com , I've noticed a ton of traffic coming from these bootcamps and I'm not sure what to think of it. On the one hand, I like the free promotion but on the other, I can't help but feel as though these people are getting ripped off (considering they can access the site for free).

Awesome, thanks for sharing. This looks like it'll fill out some of the missing parts of freecodecamp for me!

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#27

Sort of off topic, but in the second picture the whiteboard says "Ajacks" (and not ajax, for asynchronous JavaScript and xml). Makes me wonder how fast and loose they were playing with instructors, unless this is just a staged shot, or maybe a joke I didn't get. Not that you need to know what the acronym stands for (hell, no one I know uses the technique to get xml anymore anyways!), but it is weird to see the detail…

I think it's a joke. I doubt that the instruction is exclusively verbal; they must have seen "AJAX" somewhere along the line before whiteboarding Web applications. They're just having fun.

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#28

Sort of off topic, but in the second picture the whiteboard says "Ajacks" (and not ajax, for asynchronous JavaScript and xml). Makes me wonder how fast and loose they were playing with instructors, unless this is just a staged shot, or maybe a joke I didn't get. Not that you need to know what the acronym stands for (hell, no one I know uses the technique to get xml anymore anyways!), but it is weird to see the detail…

There's a node library named like that[0], though by reading the flowchart I doubt they're using it... It's about time they're closing.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/ajacks

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#29
I think it's just natural consolidation in an early-stage market. There's only going to be room for a few major brands in the space, and then some niche players in particular regions and specialities. A lot of also-ran bootcamps are just trying to cash in in the meantime.

I remain a big believer that bootcamps will continue to supply a lot of the talent in the tech world, particularly in app development. I know too many success stories to think otherwise.

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#30

Sort of off topic, but in the second picture the whiteboard says "Ajacks" (and not ajax, for asynchronous JavaScript and xml). Makes me wonder how fast and loose they were playing with instructors, unless this is just a staged shot, or maybe a joke I didn't get. Not that you need to know what the acronym stands for (hell, no one I know uses the technique to get xml anymore anyways!), but it is weird to see the detail…

No, it's completely on-topic! These bootcamps are not teaching these people how to be effective developers when they skip the "hard stuff" and bring in the lowest common idiom in lieu of that. It's so difficult to try and re-teach people this exact concept--try explaining to someone who knows nothing but jQuery and AJAX that a promise has nothing to do with fetching data.

Sure, our UX/UI guy does "AJAX" to create working prototypes of his designs before handing it off to be stuffed into React / Ionic / WhateverJS (which is quickly becoming the standard requirement for a UX person), so it's not obsolete tech by any standard. But let's not act like "boutique" web dev shops are actually still a thing... stay relevant people, especially if you're paying those sorts of fees to show up and learn how to build an Angular2 app on headless Rails in 2017.

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