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They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

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Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#151

Post by brian-armstrong »

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…

Given how little UK pays developers in general, is there any reason good devs shouldn't move away from there anyway?

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#152

Post by pmiller2 »

chickenfries wrote: post #95
mothsonasloth wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough but what you have said shows to me that you are most likely a 10x'er, therefore I would say you're in a different league altogether. Tell me, when you typed your first line of "Hello world" in C, Python etc. Was your motivation to have an easy life?

You can’t imagine that there are people who are smart enough to code, but wouldn’t otherwise be doing so if the salaries weren’t so good? The pay is really good right now. Lots of people I know who did boot camps were doing things like research in other STEM fields. They are definitely coding now because coding offers them a more comfortable life, not because writing enterprise software is more rewarding than say, re…

I definitely would be doing it if salaries were substantially lower. In fact, I’ve told people before that the main reason I’m a developer now is because it’s the only thing I know how to do that I know I can pay my student loans with.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#154

Post by rogual »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #151
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…

Given how little UK pays developers in general, is there any reason good devs shouldn't move away from there anyway?

Our visa options can be fairly limited if we don't have 4-year degrees.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#155

Post by pmiller2 »

chomp wrote: post #11
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…

To adapt a quote from one of my favorite movies: "Not everyone can become a great coder; but a great coder can come from anywhere ." That's what (in my opinion) you should take away from "everybody can code." I think it's obvious that not every single person in the world has the external characteristics to be a great software developer. But those with passion and curiosity will be able to make a great career for them…

Why does everybody need to be “great”?

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#156

Post by johnwyles »

Uptrenda wrote: post #101
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-blockin…

You should note that a bulk of your list is the knowledge that a senior engineer should require of his peers. To be productive writing a small feature in a React app it could be had under a week out from bootcamp with modest support sharing whatever tribal knowledge and documentation for onboarding.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#157

Post by joejerryronnie »

mothsonasloth wrote: post #54
mathattack wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did your company fall for this? The only logical reasons I’ve seen are an inability to hire otherwise, and staff moonlighting at the boot camps. Both are bad reasons.

I believe the main reasons were: * The local management are non-technical and have a rudimentary equation that 1 developer = 1 productivity unit * The bootcamp has some really great salespeople * Hiring is generally difficult for great dev talent, so their logic is just to hire anyone for the numbers, otherwise their budget gets constrained by kafkaesque finance practice from the companies HQ. * Local political and P…

Sounds like four political reasons. Better strap in for the long haul cause it doesn’t sound like things are gonna change quickly. Unless you happen to find that person who can understand and motivate developers while navigating the political power structure toward real solutions. Unfortunately, those people are even more rare than the 10x developer.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#158

Post by gcmeplz »

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…

> Needless to say, I will be leaving my company very soon to go to a place where there is a coding test and filtering to prevent most of these bootcampers from getting in.

I went to a bootcamp, and the first hour of every day was spent learning to solve the types of coding tests that companies use in interviews. So, when companies look at the graduates of these bootcamps, it's really hard to differentiate between people who perform really well on the interview but will require significant investment before they're useful (this was me) and people who have been programming and working with computers for years and simply lacked a little bit of polish & training (like some other people in my program).

All that's to say -- traditional coding tests & filtering doesn't necessarily work that well when you have people training for the test (rather than training for the ability to do the work that the test is supposed to be a proxy for).

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#159

Post by jimmaswell »

mratzloff wrote: post #130
jimmaswell wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can learn it in a few months in your spare time if you're cut out for it, which the vast majority are not. CS education for programming jobs is mostly a very expensive formality to convince hiring managers you know what you already knew before enrolling, or at least it was in my case.

"You can learn how to be a lawyer in a few months in your spare time if you're cut out for it" would be considered a ridiculous statement. Perhaps you could learn enough to be an assistant to a legal secretary. The same applies to programming.

They're not the same thing at all. Being a lawyer involves cramming in an enormous volume of rote information over many years and passing an exhaustive exam; programming is just a combination of problem solving, being able to deal with abstract concepts and how computers work, and learning a relatively small amount of syntax and general concepts. You can easily get a grip on all that in a few months if it's your thing.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#160

Post by learc83 »

y4mi wrote: post #31
learc83 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some truth to that. There definitely is plenty drudge work that can be done by supervised noivices. But I think we tend to overestimate how much of our jobs that work entails, and what exactly can be done independently. A master carpenter can have an apprentice do most of the physical work, but the apprentice is still very much working under the master and relying on them to guide their work. Good bootcamps c…

well, our chief architect at my day job (with a degree) "designed" a system with several points of failure, each of which would kill the whole platform if even one of them failed. honestly, a degree really doesn't show competence -- nor does experience from what i've seen. Its clearly hard to create a fault tolerant system, but its just as hard to quantify what makes people able to do just that

Yes, incompetent credentialed, experienced Engineers, surgeons, plumbers, programmers etc... exist.

>honestly, a degree really doesn't show competence -- nor does experience from what i've seen. Its clearly hard to create a fault tolerant system, but its just as hard to quantify what makes people able to do just that

Of course, but in experience hiring programmers, computer science grads from reputable programs (either programs I'm aware of, or programs where I thought their curriculum looked decent) are much more likely to be able to create fault tolerant systems than non graduates--assuming approximately equal work experience and age. This levels out at some point, e.g., I don't think the degree is the primary differentiator between 2 talented programmers with 10 years experience.

And there is definitely a very strong correlation between years of experience and the ability to create fault tolerant systems.

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