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They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

nytimes.com

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Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#101

Post by Uptrenda »

mothsonasloth wrote: post #45

[Warning Exremely Controversial Post Ahead] I am currently working for a big corporate in the UK, who have been showing off their "pioneering" and "visionary" strategy to focus recruitment from code boot-camps. All I can say is that as a senior developer, it has made my life misery. I've gone from writing code and producing features, to a full-time mentor and babysitter. Half of the boot-camp graduates I believe have…

Honestly, I agree with you. I don't mean to discourage anyone trying to learn software engineering but: IMO its something that takes years to learn the fundamentals. There are so many small details that aren't what you expect them to be that I see no way bootcamps could prepare you.

Things like how file systems work, what system calls do -- how write() works -- does it write data or not? How do blocking / non-blocking calls differ? What concurrency models are there in programming? How does parallel execution really work? How do you (properly) handle I/O, networking, and other events? How do you evaluate and compare the efficiency of algorithms? What kinds of security threats lie in different types of code? Practically, how do you prevent them? How do databases work? How do you design applications to avoid corruption? What are the different isolation levels in a database? What parts of the database are 'locked' for a given query, what 'order' are transactions executed in? How does the OS allows multiple programs to run?

Cryptography. Sessions, encryption, hashing, salting, peppers, verifiable delay functions, public keys, symmetric vs asymmetric crypto. Signatures. Mutual authentication. Message integrity. I guarantee you most developers have screwed up their handling of I/O, security, db use, or concurrent code at at least once in their career. These are deep concepts that can be "learned" in 10 minutes from a tutorial, but have tons of weird, undefined behavior that only shows up if you don't completely understand what you're doing.

IMO, what seems to have changed recently is there's now more ways to shoot yourself in the foot. I.e- more open source libraries that are usable right off the bat as black-box-plugabble, square-peg-in-circular-hole type deals. Kind of like how people trick themselves into feeling like experts from reading wikipedia -- a little knowledge can be just as dangerous as no knowledge at all.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#102

Post by rndmize »

erentz wrote: post #20

The “anyone can code” and “just learn to code” phenomena needs to die in a fire. This reminds me of many other scams in our education system, it’s disgusting how much money is being leeched out of people on private “schools”. This “anyone can code” idea is actually an easy thing to test if we were serious and honest about it. But we are not. And I believe boot camps give a false sense that more people are successful…

> It really seems boot camps are in reality is a very expensive filtering system to separate those with some ability to teach themselves coding from those who can’t.

One could say the same about college in general.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#103

Post by mcguire »

jen20 wrote: post #53
mothsonasloth wrote: post #45

[Warning Exremely Controversial Post Ahead] I am currently working for a big corporate in the UK, who have been showing off their "pioneering" and "visionary" strategy to focus recruitment from code boot-camps. All I can say is that as a senior developer, it has made my life misery. I've gone from writing code and producing features, to a full-time mentor and babysitter. Half of the boot-camp graduates I believe have…

> developers have an easy life, getting into work whenever they choose Why exactly is that the wrong reason?

It often comes with wanting to go to lunch whenever and leaving early to make up for it all. With the result that work never gets done.

Don't get me wrong, I'm the biggest fan of getting in at 10:00 or 11:00, but I also try very hard to get things done. If you come out of your boot camp without understanding that you still have a shit-ton to learn and you aren't willing to put in the effort to learn it and do the actual work (which isn't easy), and, yes, put in the time required, then you are a liability.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#104

Post by mothsonasloth »

sideaccount wrote: post #99
mothsonasloth wrote: post #45

[Warning Exremely Controversial Post Ahead] I am currently working for a big corporate in the UK, who have been showing off their "pioneering" and "visionary" strategy to focus recruitment from code boot-camps. All I can say is that as a senior developer, it has made my life misery. I've gone from writing code and producing features, to a full-time mentor and babysitter. Half of the boot-camp graduates I believe have…

They could still administer a coding test to the bootcamp certificate holders. Just because you have a CS degree does not mean we hire you without a coding test. Some of the least productive coders I have worked with have had degrees. Most degrees only prove that you have some ability to memorize things, practical application is a very different skill.

Coding tests are effectively a benchmark, and as Goodhart's law says about metrics. They cease to become a useful measure.

That's why I am interested in someone's portfolio, if they don't have a portfolio, then why?

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#105

Post by jen20 »

mothsonasloth wrote: post #97
jen20 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No - I was 5 or so when I started programming - however when I chose a degree leading to a math-based degree vs studying music (which I would have done otherwise), job prospects for an easy life were very much top of mind.

There we go, it was curiosity then. I was a late bloomer and didn't program till I was 12 and that was modding Command and Conquer. If you don't have intellectual curiosity, then I think your career prospects in software engineering will be limited. Perhaps I should have articulated it better above. What I meant is that many of these bootcampers don't have that curiosity or drive to have touched code before their cou…

> If you don't have intellectual curiosity, then I think your career prospects in software engineering will be limited.

This part I fully agree with.

Do not equate "boot camp" and "would rather sit at a computer than mine coal" for a lack of intellectual curiousity though. I have personally met grads _from the boot camp in question in this article_ who clearly do have it - while spending their work days writing Ruby for web apps, they were spending evenings learning C, assembler and the operating system fundamentals that their particular route into the industry meant they missed out on.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#106

Post by mcguire »

caprese wrote: post #94
mothsonasloth wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong with that, but if I ask you why did you become a developer and you list that as a main reason, then I will immediately dismiss you as not being serious.

I can pretend for an interview I’ve blended in pretty well all through upper management

Two thumbs up! If you can move fast and talk loud, no one need notice you have never produced a deliverable.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#107

Post by jdhn »

coconut_crab wrote: post #83

My experience with code bootcamp trained developers is positive, due to the follow reasons: - Most of them have engineering background: electrical engineering, civil engineering, petroleum engineering. - Since they lack formal education in IT, they have to train twice as hard, which our company encourages (2 months of probation = 2 months of training, it's almost impossible to find developer with Scala experience aro…

>Most of them have engineering background: electrical engineering, civil engineering, petroleum engineering.

That's great, but what about the people who come from a non-engineering background? I feel like people with a technical background will be able to pick up coding a lot quicker than people who don't have a lot of engineering aptitude.

>We work with the Bootcamp to improve their program: giving reference to 'hard', 'theoretical' books such as Algorithms & Datastructure or Database Design and cutting down some unnecessary parts.

That's great that you guys do this. I'm a real big proponent of this private/public model since it benefits both businesses (they get people who are trained in key business areas) and colleges/bootcamps (they can brag about knowledgeable grads whose job placement boosts their numbers).

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#109

Post by mcguire »

voidhorse wrote: post #51
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #5

I know I'll catch flak for this, but where did this idea that "anyone can learn to code" come from? Coding requires a certain drive and curiosity, without delving into the capability side. What makes anyone think that they can take a bunch of people who never or barely passed highschool and have been working in a mine for a decade+ and teach them this? By all means subsidize a laptop and point them at some great onli…

I disagree. I think with the right levels of exposure at the early stages of education “coding” can become a proficiency just as common as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Of course, just like those skills, people will pursue programming to varying depths, some will determine to study advanced topics while others will remain “coders at the 6th grade level”. Not everyone will go into CS and develop new data structure…

You do realize that every time you enter a line of code in an editor, you are developing new data structures and algorithms, right?

Edit: No, really, I'm serious! There is literally nothing different between gluing APIs together, or whatever you think you are doing, and building the snazziest large-scale distributed statistical model of whatevers. Literally.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#110

Post by mcguire »

i_am_proteus wrote: post #100

> She doesn’t know the motives of the people at Mined Minds, she said, whether they had bad intentions or were just “incredibly sloppy” with good ones. Is there a term for this kind of hustle? Raising money from unsavvy investors for a technically-complicated effort, then "failing" in a way that isn't obviously fraudulent.

A "start-up". :-)
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