They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia • Hacker News Board

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#241

Post by commandlinefan » Sun, May 12, 2019, 9:35 PM UTC

z3t4 wrote: post #187

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…

I learned programming at 12 years old. I think its funny that people think you need a engineering degree. It does help to get a higher paycheck though.

Everybody I went to college with “learned programming” when they were 12 years old (or younger). They _also_ got college degrees on top of that.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#242

Post by gyc » Sun, May 12, 2019, 9:42 PM UTC

Don't they have community colleges with programming courses in Appalachia? I remember years ago I took a single 3-month long summer class at a local community college that taught C, basic data structures, and basic algorithms. Based on what I learned in that class I was able to actually pass tech white boarding interviews and get a summer internship at a local tech company.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#243

Post by Kalium » Sun, May 12, 2019, 9:44 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #222

clarry wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have noticed there is a massive disconnect from the reality of just how complicated modern software is. There's also a massive disconnect from the reality of just how complicated modern software needs (not) to be. That said I agree that some 3-month bootcamp probably isn't enough time to really internalize the basics of programming (unless you're really smart or have prior exposure), let alone learn to design and…

Well, if the bootcamp is going to spend 3 months teaching you how to make a website using the industry-standard tools and frameworks, you're going to know absolutely shit at the end. Consider a typical front-end developer setup - with IDE/smart editor, linters, transpilers, packers, package managers, project generators. These are all useful tools, but to be even a marginally competent developers, you have to know wha…

I encountered a particularly egregious example of this recently.

I was running a group of recent(-ish) hires through a training course recently. Part of it is penetrating-testing a dockerized application on their machines. One of the things the application is vulnerable to is various forms of form tampering attacks.

One of my students just stared helplessly at this. They were absolutely stuck. I had no idea why. I came to find out that one of my students had managed to make it through a bootcamp, and an interview process, and be on the job for several months all without learning a Chrome or Firefox developer console could be used to edit a page's HTML. Or that a page could be saved and edited that way.

I hadn't even considered the possibility that a professional engineer in a web development role might be ignorant of how to edit an HTML form by hand. It implies a shocking ignorance of how the whole thing works.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#244

Post by [deleted] » Sun, May 12, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

wool_gather wrote: post #127

Kalium wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where did this idea that "anyone can learn to code" come from? A better question, perhaps, is why this is assumed to equate to coding-based jobs. Anyone can learn to cook. This shouldn't be equated to everyone being equipped to become a chef de cuisine.

Good analogy. But to extend it, part of the disconnect is that management/business side wants a lot of coders that are the equivalent of line cooks at a chain restaurant: just competent enough, with someone more educated/competent overseeing, and most importantly: easily replaceable .

[deleted]

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#245

Post by lozenge » Sun, May 12, 2019, 9:58 PM UTC

freewilly1040 wrote: post #205

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…

Bootcamps don’t provide an adequate training to become an engineer, yes, but believe it or not there are plenty of very good engineers who have things besides work at the top of their value list. Your post reflects narrow mindedness and a lack of empathy.

When at work you should be ready and interested to learn about how to improved your work. It's as simple as that

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#246

Post by erik_seaberg » Sun, May 12, 2019, 10:09 PM UTC

lozenge wrote: post #224

erik_seaberg wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google did a lot of pioneering work and created a proprietary stack. This used to be a big competitive advantage, but the industry largely caught up and now the incompatibility is mostly just tech debt that everyone has to ramp up on.

Are you speaking as a Googler/Xoogler? They come out with impressive projects like Kube and their build system, I would be surprised if their in house stack can really be described entirely as "tech debt".

Xoogler from a few years ago. I'm not saying they have nothing cutting edge, just that the rest of the industry eventually reached parity with a lot of their everyday platforms. If you come in knowing HDFS and Cassandra and Spark and k8s, moving to CFS and BigTable and Flume and Borg involves learning a whole lot of minor differences that don't make you much more capable but screw up code reuse.

I was pleased to see Cloud Spanner hit the market, and trying to nudge the industry towards hermetic builds with Bazel.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#247

Post by 1123581321 » Sun, May 12, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

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.

Law is similar to programming in that you can learn a lot of the principles in a few months, and you can also learn how to do a lot of the day-to-day work in a specialty area.

Learning large volumes of case law is analogous to learning the details of low level programming; both fields require years to master. But those details are not required for a lot of work in either field.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#248

Post by redisman » Sun, May 12, 2019, 10:17 PM UTC

hhjinks wrote: post #142

gingabriska wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've no idea why coding should be anymore special than basic reading/writing skills. Code is a way to express solution to the problem which a computer can execute. If you can learn any language, you can learn coding too. Sure, not everyone can understand intricacies of the algorithm design and data structure gotchas but some of that can come as experience and curiousity. Question worth asking is that, does everyone n…

Coding is like math. You have a problem, and need to reach the solution. Often there are specific and concrete steps you need to take to reach the solution. Despite this, a lot of people just don't get math. Being able to go from an abstract problem to a concrete solution isn't just "write code until it works".

And like math, most people are "bad" at coding. By bad I mostly mean they get frustrated and don't see the point or don't get the rewarding feelings of solving something. They could get better, even great at it but they need to work very hard for a long time.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#249

Post by redisman » Sun, May 12, 2019, 10:20 PM UTC

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #13

The untrustworthy city slicker stereotype doesn't come from nowhere. Nobody ever engages with these people except to take their money or tell them they're backwards hicks and their way of life is somehow wrong/bad (this being an example of the former).

Some do care about people left behind but they usually don't care about a big social media boost to their ego so you don't really hear about their work

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#250

Post by throwawayjava » Sun, May 12, 2019, 10:27 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #210

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…

What is really disheartening is for those of us who went to camps.... we're painted with the same brush after people have experiences with our bad classmates. About half my coding camp class was unemployable by my estimation. At one interview I'm fairly sure they had interviewed a classmate or two before me and the questions they asked were painfully simple to start.... if they felt they had to ask that, I can't imag…

> I had another technical career previous to this one

This seems to be the huge differentiator.

I've had really good experiences with boot camp grads who had a previous technical career or came from a STEM phd. Camps are great for getting already well-educated people up to speed on how to hack together a website, which is an enormous value add to an existing skill set.