As someone who interviewed dozens of bootcampers I can give some insight. 1) Most of the bootcamps teach the basic of front-end, and a lot of them, teach by doing without explaining a lot of basic concepts. They are basically money grabbers and throw these people out of the door as fast as possible to get their money back. 2) A lot of the students are in for the money, not for the love of the job. Sorry, but it's tru…
I agree with 3, the disclaimer being that I myself am self-taught. However, in college and now 7 years later in my career the best problem solvers I met were self-taught. My senior project lead, who's younger than me, doesn't have a CS degree like me but constantly impresses me by his breadth and width of knowledge--more than my own in many cases.
For almost everyone else I've worked with it's just a job. No Github account, no personal projects, no dev environment setup on any home computer.
As someone who interviewed dozens of bootcampers I can give some insight. 1) Most of the bootcamps teach the basic of front-end, and a lot of them, teach by doing without explaining a lot of basic concepts. They are basically money grabbers and throw these people out of the door as fast as possible to get their money back. 2) A lot of the students are in for the money, not for the love of the job. Sorry, but it's tru…
I agree with all the points you made, except for a part of the third one. This "started coding in middle/high school or college" is a misleading metric since it assumes everyone has equal access and support to learn that way. As some one from India who never had own computer until finishing college (the early 00's), along with no internet or cell phone, I find it hard to accept/respect those people who gloat about ho…
> but without fixing this attitude of "earlier you learn, better you are" attitude
This mindset seems to work rather well for more objective areas like athletics. I don't see any reason why an intellectual pursuit like programming would be any different.
As someone who interviewed dozens of bootcampers I can give some insight. 1) Most of the bootcamps teach the basic of front-end, and a lot of them, teach by doing without explaining a lot of basic concepts. They are basically money grabbers and throw these people out of the door as fast as possible to get their money back. 2) A lot of the students are in for the money, not for the love of the job. Sorry, but it's tru…
For #3, I know a lot of people who started this way and then used a bootcamp to build modern skills. To me, that's a really solid combo. Having a bootcamp be your first intro to the field is a much tougher road.
Firstly, I work with a ton of people who came out of the Recurse Center (formerly Hacker School) and I've been consistently impressed by them. It seems to be a pretty self-paced thing, so maybe the people who do well there are the sorts of people who are excited about what they're learning, and I'm sure there's a layer of filtering at the hiring level. Just my personal experience.
Secondly, I think that while learning specific skills (app development, web development, etc) are really good things, they should totally be a layer on top of a core foundation of good computer science concepts. "Learning web development" ideally means "learning how to apply the concepts I know to the web environment", not "learning how to build a website The Right Way™". I totally blame inflexibility in these bootcamps not from their inability to adapt their course material fast enough, but on their lack of good conceptual foundations.
> A lot of the students are in for the money, not for the love of the job. Who cares? Can they do the job or not? Do they have the work ethic and professionalism to continue to do so? The vast majority of people, including those who excel at their respective fields, don't love their jobs. This industry needs to stop using "passion" as a lazy signal for work ethic. > The most boring developers I work with, the the one…
There is a third category here too: 1. In for the money, no love for the job 2. In for the money, but also love the job, codes on spare time 3. Category 2, but no more free time (family, older parents) I was in Category 2 but now on category 3. I show up to work early, work intensely, do not waste any time, and try to leave at a normal hour. On weekends, instead of open source projects, I'm spending the time with my…
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Embrace the time you have left with your mother. Work will always be there, and there is no job more important than your family. Do not give on your boundaries.
I spent the last 2.5 years of my mother's life (she passed away suddenly last month at the age of 59 from a brain hemorrhage) working for a startup, not making more time to spend with her because I thought I'd have at least another 5-10 years with her, and my heart hurts every day thinking about how I didn't spend more time with her. Do not make my mistake. It's just code, you're not saving the world.
As someone who interviewed dozens of bootcampers I can give some insight. 1) Most of the bootcamps teach the basic of front-end, and a lot of them, teach by doing without explaining a lot of basic concepts. They are basically money grabbers and throw these people out of the door as fast as possible to get their money back. 2) A lot of the students are in for the money, not for the love of the job. Sorry, but it's tru…
I went to a smallish private university and in the first year, there were about 50 people who intended to go for a CS degree. By year 2, there were about a dozen left. Every single one that said 'I heard there were good jobs in it' was gone. CS and writing code is not like many different arenas in that if the homework takes you 8 hours to understand, then it takes you 8 hours to understand. If you don't understand it, it is an order of magnitude more difficult to 'wing it' or get 'partial credit' when there is absolute proof of your lack of understanding with non-compiling or non-functional code.
I studied CS and Philosophy. I could phone in a philosophy paper if I wanted. I could not phone in a linked list implementation. I know companies loathe the idea like no other, but software engineering is a skill that is difficult for most people to acquire and is likely to remain that way. Mostly it boils down to peoples understanding and value they place on logic. Anyone with a good grasp on, or even just a high value for logic, can learn to code. No one who sees logic as 'nitpicking' can learn to build systems that function predictably, reliably, and accomplish a defined goal.
As someone who interviewed dozens of bootcampers I can give some insight. 1) Most of the bootcamps teach the basic of front-end, and a lot of them, teach by doing without explaining a lot of basic concepts. They are basically money grabbers and throw these people out of the door as fast as possible to get their money back. 2) A lot of the students are in for the money, not for the love of the job. Sorry, but it's tru…
> The best developers I worked with are the self-taught guys/girls who learn on their own before they even hit the college I think this is the crux of the issues I had with bootcamp candidates. They were reasonably strong in the areas that they'd been taught, but there were gaping holes in their knowledge wherever they hadn't been taught. They could explain how to build a site with a Node backend and an Angular front…
I recently wrapped up teaching a bootcamp course. In the timeframe for teaching bootcamp students, there's no realistic way to cover load balancers or teach the event loop holistically
You underestimate the time a self-taught developer would spent figuring these things out. I'm self taught, and though I think nothing of it I easily spend 4 hours on trivial things -- it had never mattered until family obligations made it obvious that I needed to cut down since I was also teaching on top of my full time job.
I started teaching the bootcamp precisely because I disagree with the mentality that junior web developers need to understand load balancers or the event loop or any number of other things. These things WILL come to experience, and all you need to get started is grasp the basic syntax and be able to follow the execution path of anything you write.
It's a job, as much as people like to believe that it's a craft, and many other people are fully capable of doing this job even if their decisions look different from our own. Most of my students are at the same place I was when I landed my first Jr role, a handful (about 20% of the class) are far ahead of that point.
Interest usually correlates with the desire to learn and explore on one's own time. If you have a team of interested developers/hackers, then the lack of enthusiasm can drag the team down, both in knowledge and culturally. This isn't always true, of course. Some developers can have excellent skill and have no interest in programming outside of work. I have a coworker that does virtually nothing outside of work, doesn…
> Interest usually correlates with the desire to learn and explore on one's own time. I don't agree. Interest in doing a good job (i.e. work ethic) usually correlates with this, but I do not think work ethic corresponds very well with interest in the field. > If you have a team of interested developers/hackers, then the lack of enthusiasm can drag the team down, both in knowledge and culturally. I think part of my pr…
> I don't agree. Interest in doing a good job (i.e. work ethic) usually correlates with this
I wasn't expressing a 1:1 relationship. I also expressed an example where this wasn't the case: interest in the position and the work we do, but not a personal interest outside of work.
> Your statement implies a team that is interested in tehcnology for technology's sake rather than as a tool to solve a business problem.
I just happen to be a hacker that was hired by a business. That wasn't why I was hired---I was hired because of certain qualities that so happen to be a consequence of my being a hacker, and because of fundamental interest in certain topics (which also included side projects).
I'm certainly not interested in technology for technology's sake: I'm the author of a large system on which one of the core parts of my company (the company I work for, not a company I own) is based (raters for an insurance agency), and it was made using practical, business-conscious decisions. My coworker (he doesn't identify as a hacker) is Technical Director.
I realize everyone is generalizing but it's easy to lose sight of something really simple: Different jobs require different skills. Not everyone on the team needs to know how to make complicated architecture decisions or write the most efficient sorting algorithm. Personally, I'm happy when there is someone on my team who can do the things I find boring...even if they don't have a "passionate" interest in learning mo…
> Not everyone on the team needs to know how to make complicated architecture decisions
depends on what you work on. on my team everyone does need to (at least with guidance). that said, we only really hire those with significant experience OR college grads who have already proven themselves as interns on the team.
Another reality check for the boot camps: students are finally getting wise to some of the issues. A major camp in NYC decided not to offer another web dev course because enrollment was so low. As the raging issues in tech with respect to ageism, sexism, and racism get more play, prospective students think twice before leaping. I can only offer NYC observations, and not an official study, but employers won't hire much over 35 here. And if you are a woman or of color to boot--- forget it, its like trying to be a famous actor in terms of opportunity for you. The bootcamps are more than happy to take the money of people of color, women, and over age 35 beginners without a word to newcomers who ask these questions before they enroll- these concerns are brushed aside. What is worse is that if you look at the employees at several of these boot camps, the faculty is under 35, and often 95- 100percent white and male. Often, if there are women employed there, the women are not just young, but the youngest. Or perhaps they have a woman faculty member, but she is kept off their website. (specific NYC example- can't name names, but just look at the boot camps' websites in nyc and you will find the one. - the one with no women listed as faculty- they do have one woman- they just keep her from public view on their website) This kind of blatant discrimination looks very amateur in NYC where companies who have already been sued try to be a bit more subtle about discriminatory practices) these bootcamps staff themselves in a mini replica of this industry as a whole- not w an eye toward positive change re:inclusion. But they preach it all day long. Perhaps they think they are really helping without taking a good look at themselves. I'm trying to err on the charitable side. And I'm not saying no one at all hires women or people of color or people over 40, but nearly all the boot camp founders tend to be middle aged and then hire staff and faculty who are under 40, white and mostly male. If asked, I'm sure the words "culture fit" would get uttered. I'm frustrated at watching too many exceptional programmers in these categories who have lots of valuable experience get passed over for younger, whiter, and more male folks w no experience. A former restaurant server with zero teaching experience/ability/empathy should not be hired as faculty at a bootcamp over a CS grad w teaching experience who former students love. I was "taught" by such a person at one of the top bootcamps. He and many others there had no clue how to teach. Their idea of teaching is to verbally code up a project while a student listens. He was not an exception - he was the rule there. The lawsuits are already in the pipeline, and that will provide an official data set soon. Whoever escapes these will get to move the model forward and hopefully do something about these issues and drive some positive change- not just give it lip service.