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Coding Boot Camps Get the Boot: Why the Industry Is Shutting Down

thetechladder.com

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Re: Coding Boot Camps Get the Boot: Why the Industry Is Shutting Down

#61

Post by graphitezepp »

nonconvergent wrote: post #44
aecorredor wrote: post #34

"While coding boot camps had many course listings on JavaScript, Ruby, and web development, they had none that covered product management, wireframing, cloud computing, DevOps, or Agile methodologies" I have a 4 year computer science degree and I didn't learn any of the listed topics either, so I'm not sure if the article is implying that other institutions do prepare new grads for these topics. The main advantage I…

Ditto on the CS Degree. Closest thing I learned to the above skills that was part of the curriculum was Waterfall, UML, and making ERDs. Had to teach myself git.

I taught every single person I was on a group project with git, all the way up through senior year. My familiarity with it came from a damn hackathon of all places. It's actually gross how source control was just not a concept taught at all in the program.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Get the Boot: Why the Industry Is Shutting Down

#62

Post by leo79 »

nonconvergent wrote: post #44
aecorredor wrote: post #34

"While coding boot camps had many course listings on JavaScript, Ruby, and web development, they had none that covered product management, wireframing, cloud computing, DevOps, or Agile methodologies" I have a 4 year computer science degree and I didn't learn any of the listed topics either, so I'm not sure if the article is implying that other institutions do prepare new grads for these topics. The main advantage I…

Ditto on the CS Degree. Closest thing I learned to the above skills that was part of the curriculum was Waterfall, UML, and making ERDs. Had to teach myself git.

You joking right? I got my cs degree 15 years ago and back then i learned Waterfall, UML, and making ERDs...

Re: Coding Boot Camps Get the Boot: Why the Industry Is Shutting Down

#63

Post by pcsanwald »

thegayngler wrote: post #5

These bootcamps are too basic for starters. They never take you beyond the basics. Secondly, the industry has changed. You need to know more things than you did previously. Even computer science grads aren't necessarily "ready" for the workforce. Education is behind in general instead of ingrained into the community with which it wishes to operate. They are always lagging behind or even way behind. On some level I fe…

The industry has definitely changed, but a CS degree has never completely prepared anyone to be a professional software engineer.

There have always been a large set of practical skills that aren't really taught as core CS curriculum, but most professional software engineers are going to need to be comfortable with: the version control software of the day, ways of managing runtime considerations of an application (which has obviously evolved a lot recently), certainly programming languages as well.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Get the Boot: Why the Industry Is Shutting Down

#66

Post by jefflombardjr »

randomdrake wrote: post #6

I'm glad they're going away. > While coding boot camps had many course listings on JavaScript, Ruby, and web development, they had none that covered product management, wireframing, cloud computing, DevOps, or Agile methodologies. In other words, they don’t teach students the other important entrepreneurial tech skills. This makes sense seeing how their focus is coding. But as I stated in my last article, many recrui…

> Being a good software developer has absolutely nothing to do with "important entrepreneurial tech skills." Knowing how to tackle problems, envision loops and algorithms, write pseudocode, understand the basics of how requests on the Internet work, or how your computer accesses databases or files; these are skills of a good software developer.

I disagree. Knowing where to apply your skills at a company is just as important as having those skills. If your stakeholders aren't happy, it doesn't matter how beautiful the code is. You've failed to deliver. That being said, it's a balance you have to strike. You can't just focus entirely on making stakeholders happy, other wise you'd have a patchwork quilt of an application.

Also, that's why I like side projects, you're the stakeholder and can focus on the tech/what you think is important.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Get the Boot: Why the Industry Is Shutting Down

#67

Post by amrrs »

aecorredor wrote: post #34

"While coding boot camps had many course listings on JavaScript, Ruby, and web development, they had none that covered product management, wireframing, cloud computing, DevOps, or Agile methodologies" I have a 4 year computer science degree and I didn't learn any of the listed topics either, so I'm not sure if the article is implying that other institutions do prepare new grads for these topics. The main advantage I…

What they do in bootcamps is really good, a lot better than what they do in college. But the problem is what they charge and what they promise! Most people join bootcamps because they either want to pivot or they want a better job and that comes with a huge cost in everyone's life. If people join bootcamps purely for educational purposes then bootcamps are perfect, but people join there to up themselves. Bootcamps charging huge fees fail to well defined free MooCs

Re: Coding Boot Camps Get the Boot: Why the Industry Is Shutting Down

#68

Post by stanleydrew »

eric_b wrote: post #58

Why do people think a 12 week course will make a non-technical person ready for a junior developer role? Most developers I know have years of deep experience with computers before becoming professional programmers. (Things like fixing driver issues, installing linux, patching games etc). I have several friends who went to bootcamps had no deep technical interest beforehand. They just heard that computer programming w…

> Why do people think a 12 week course will make a non-technical person ready for a junior developer role?

I'm not sure many people do think that. But it was an experiment. If you assume that the tooling around "programming" or "product building" or whatever you want to call it will eventually be good enough that you can slot a generic human into a well-defined role then these bootcamps might make sense.

We may get to a point where building software is more like building a car, and we just need humans to work on the factory assembly line. But we're not there yet. So the experiment failed.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Get the Boot: Why the Industry Is Shutting Down

#69

Post by gumby »

Wow, they cost $26K!!?? For what they offer that seems like an outrageous amount -- and largely unaffordable for most of the target customer base.

Since the for-profit education industry had rushed in, I assume they just went for their typical milk-the-student-loan-system scam

Re: Coding Boot Camps Get the Boot: Why the Industry Is Shutting Down

#70

Post by stale2002 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #23
stale2002 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL! So your argument that what makes a person a good software engineer is the whiteboard coding algorithms? That stuff is EASIER to learn than actual software engineering skills. All you got to do is spend a couple months cramming from the book cracking the code interview. You learn that stuff in a singular CS class, that's called data structures and algorithms. You are right about one thing though, if we are in a s…

> That stuff is EASIER to learn than actual software engineering skills. All you got to do is spend a couple months cramming from the book cracking the code interview. You have got to be joking right? Not only is the intro-level algorithms class in universities a known-difficult class almost everywhere, MS and PhD students continue to try and discover better algorithms and new data structures. Sure if you're working…

The PhD and MS stuff is not being asked in interviews. Yes, that stuff is hard.

Tech interviews are 40 minutes max. There is only so much stuff that can be asked and programmed in such a short amount of time.

The stuff being asked in tech interviews is "traverse a tree in this interesting way". There are only so many ways to traverse a tree.

And no, I am not talking about crud interviews, I am talking about Google interviews, and similar. (Although Google hits the very high end of difficulty, most interviews are much easier).

Perhaps there really is a way to do the mythical, problem solving, IQ test of a whiteboard programming interview. But that is NOT the way the industry does things currently.

The way that the industry currently works is that literally half of interview questions are almost word for word listed in cracking the code interview (I counted!). And the ones that aren't are still quite common.

When I did tech interviews with a dozen or so companies just recently, a full 90%! of interview questions were ones that I had been asked or studied before. Interviewers are lazy, and whiteboard algorithms as things are CURRENTLY is just about who can cram the most.

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