Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Advice for Coding Bootcamp Graduates

thinkfaster.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 69 posts

Re: Advice for Coding Bootcamp Graduates

#11

Post by FLUX-YOU »

This article treads lightly around calling bootcamp grads inferior on average, when actually, very little is standing between the company itself turning the bootcamp grads into the engineers that they want.

After all, you already have ample evidence someone can learn software development concepts on a compressed timeline compared to college, surely another week or so covering time/space complexity and data structures topics is worth the time if the candidate is otherwise a good fit.

But I don't know, maybe their idea of junior development tasks is "find and fix deadlock or race condition that occurs 0.00001% of the time"

Re: Advice for Coding Bootcamp Graduates

#12

Post by axvk »

foroak wrote: post #8

After going through a web dev bootcamp myself where we actually devoted a decent amount of time to algorithms and their time/space complexity -- this has been the thing I have used the least in my professional career.

Developers who learn about time/space complexity view code in a different way. They can reason about code in new ways and it also helps discuss code between devs.

When I work with large data sets, It's difficult to explain why something is taking a long time without thinking of it in terms of O complexity.

Re: Advice for Coding Bootcamp Graduates

#13

Post by kitanata »

mnm1 wrote: post #9

In over a dozen years as a professional web developer, I've never once needed to use Big O notation outside of an interview. Sounds like this guy doesn't know how to interview, knows that he doesn't know, but still doesn't want to admit it. No wonder he can't find anyone.

I think it's less about the notation, and more about thinking around computational complexity. You should know when to use a set vs a hash vs a list vs an array. You should know what different sorting algorithms do, and why you might use one over another. In some cases having exposure to more esoteric data structures like persistable tries, minimal spanning trees, red/black tries, bloom filters, etc can come in handy. Knowing why things like that are useful is worth knowing. But I agree with you, judging a bootcamp graduate on skills that can be taught with experience and continual study is probably not the best way to go about hiring people.

Re: Advice for Coding Bootcamp Graduates

#14

Post by ganonm »

mnm1 wrote: post #9

In over a dozen years as a professional web developer, I've never once needed to use Big O notation outside of an interview. Sounds like this guy doesn't know how to interview, knows that he doesn't know, but still doesn't want to admit it. No wonder he can't find anyone.

I think it's more about simply having an awareness of algorithmic complexity. I'm talking about writing a doubly nested 'for' loop and being able to realise that you've just written an O(N^2) algorithm if you're iterating over the original collection again. This sort of stuff is blindingly obvious to experienced programmers but for bootcamp grads who haven't built up that intuition, a short course on Big O notation exposes them to it.

Re: Advice for Coding Bootcamp Graduates

#15

Post by matty22 »

The advice to include online MOOC courses on your CV runs counter to every piece of advice I've ever received in regards to putting online courses on a CV. I've always been told that that is seen as a red flag and that you might get docked 'points' for having something like that on a resume.

Re: Advice for Coding Bootcamp Graduates

#16

Post by DylanBohlender »

mnm1 wrote: post #9

In over a dozen years as a professional web developer, I've never once needed to use Big O notation outside of an interview. Sounds like this guy doesn't know how to interview, knows that he doesn't know, but still doesn't want to admit it. No wonder he can't find anyone.

I think your experience is largely true for professional web developers, but with the advent of things like Node that brought JS into back-end land, there are a lot of traditionally front-end people spilling over into back-end and "full stack" roles, which often do require some basic level of competence with complexity analysis.

When you make the switch from writing code to support UI elements to writing code to handle data processing, for example, you're going a bit beyond the standard coding bootcamp's toolkit. I think this is the author's point, and why he recommends that bootcamp grads (who may end up in situations like these) take extra steps to be prepared for whatever curveballs come their way in their careers.

Re: Advice for Coding Bootcamp Graduates

#18

Post by stayman »

mnm1 wrote: post #9

In over a dozen years as a professional web developer, I've never once needed to use Big O notation outside of an interview. Sounds like this guy doesn't know how to interview, knows that he doesn't know, but still doesn't want to admit it. No wonder he can't find anyone.

I agree and I don't. For the record, I'm a (2014) bootcamp grad. I don't use Big O directly, and still struggle routinely to talk in those terms, but also consider considering performance one of the most important parts of my job.

I think it's important that bootcamps teach about complexity, and that they don't do a great job of it. I also think asking anyone to speak in terms of big o may or may not be the most comfortable way for the candidate to talk about it.

I do a lot of interviewing now, and prefer to check to make sure that they understand how to optimize their solutions in a coding context, rather than asking about the "description" of that optimization, personally.

Re: Advice for Coding Bootcamp Graduates

#19

Post by DataWorker »

Coders who don’t have enough statistical expertise is a problem why? I understand the importance of O notation, but didn’t know that stats/probability was important for things like web design and other coding jobs. Can someone help me understand this part?

Re: Advice for Coding Bootcamp Graduates

#20

Post by moate »

ganonm wrote: post #14
mnm1 wrote: post #9

In over a dozen years as a professional web developer, I've never once needed to use Big O notation outside of an interview. Sounds like this guy doesn't know how to interview, knows that he doesn't know, but still doesn't want to admit it. No wonder he can't find anyone.

I think it's more about simply having an awareness of algorithmic complexity. I'm talking about writing a doubly nested 'for' loop and being able to realise that you've just written an O(N^2) algorithm if you're iterating over the original collection again. This sort of stuff is blindingly obvious to experienced programmers but for bootcamp grads who haven't built up that intuition, a short course on Big O notation e…

Or, since you're hiring Junior devs, someone could like, take 10 minutes to explain why what they did is wrong and point them towards some resource to help them get on the right track.

This whole thing is part of the circular logic problem with hiring: you have people making these hiring decisions that aren't trained in hiring, so they just go with "what makes sense to them" or hiring a younger version of someone who looks exactly like them for a junior role. It's fine, it works for the company, but it's why people will miss long term talent.

Post reply on HN