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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

#291

Post by slow_donkey »

hluska wrote: post #288

I’m not shocked by HN’s attitude towards bootcamp grads, but I am very surprised that so many here are blaming the grads and not the bootcamps themselves. Bootcamps use absolutely disgusting marketing techniques to appeal to people with little ability outside of being able to pay tuition. Their grads are closer to victims.

They absolutely are the victims but it's also a students responsibility to do due diligence on the bootcamps just like you would (should?) research an employer before signing the job offer.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#292

Post by paultopia »

deanCommie wrote: post #281
phillipcarter wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then they will remain a junior developer Isn't the point that they _are_ junior developers after completing a bootcamp? Juniors can be some of the best people in your organization if your org is willing to take them on and teach them things.

Juniors are great when their inexperience is correlated with youth, fresh outlook on the world, a burning passion for the subject, lack of fear with new ideas that seem controversial to the old guard, and frankly fewer family commitments such that succeeding at their job and learning and growing is their number one priority. Very little of this applies to people on their second career doing bootcamps for a leg up.

Hello culture of age discrimination in tech. Didn't expect to see you here.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#293

Post by pbourke »

Kalium wrote: post #120
auston wrote: post #57

Any ideas on how we (HN) could help these people that dealt with Mined Minds? Perhaps some free remote tutoring? Some interview coaching? Resume review? A whole lot of bagging on coding boot camps, the founders of Mined Minds & people looking for an easier life. I’m game to help myself! If anyone knows those folks & they want some help - I’m happy to connect & spend time doing any of the above!

It might be worth considering that the underlying question - does this model even work at the scale it was sold as? - goes unanswered. With that in mind, it sounds like what might be needed is the education they were looking for in the first place. Resume review, remote tutoring, and coaching are great ideas, born of a genuine blossoming of kindness and compassion. It may be possible that these well-meant ideas could…

The students in the article were taken advantage of. It sounds like nobody even got the chance to find out whether they would like or succeed at coding.

So many responses in this thread are written from a middle/upper-middle class context. Folks who had reasonably good schools, access to computers at a young age, a stable home environment in which to work with them, a culture (parents and/or peers) that supported them, an expectation and pathway to higher education at a young age. Maybe not all of those boxes are ticked for every successful software engineer but I bet a good number of them are.

The people in this article didn’t have as many of these factors. Maybe they had none of them. That doesn’t mean that they’re dumb, untrainable or not cut out to be coders. I think what it means is that an appropriate approach to training needs to be taken.

That approach is probably something akin to a gateway aptitude test to demonstrate ability and commitment followed by a significant period of apprenticeship combined with some formal classes at the community college level.

This is the way that people enter the skilled trades, and also seems similar to military occupational training. I don’t see why it couldn’t produce competent entry-level folks who are capable of working on 95% of business systems/websites/etc at the end of their training.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#294

Post by learc83 »

johnsimer wrote: post #184
learc83 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People regularly say this. But there is no way you made it through my program without literally paying someone else to do your entire degree without being able to code FizzBuzz. And I went to a no-name state school. I don't doubt that you've seen it, but my guess as that it either was someone from a very poor program, their degree was long time ago and they haven't been doing actual programming since then, or they ju…

I know a few current students who are about to graduate from a top 25 CS school, who struggle writing simple standalone methods (of analogous complexity to FizzBuzz). I personally just think these students "just don't get it"( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java... ). The ones I am talking about in particular are barely squeaking by, but still passing and graduating (without job offers) along…

I can see that explanation. Particularly with respect to those candidate's overrepresentation. I think that looking through their transcripts would generally reveal those people pretty easily though.

Also at some top tier schools it's actually relatively harder to completely flunk out, so that might have something to do with it.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#295

Post by burfog »

What we need is a relatively standardized degree that is like a Bachelor's minus the Associates. That is, we don't need the two years of useless filler classes. Taking two years (4% of career time, more of lifetime earnings) for that gunk is a huge opportunity cost.

I'm still waiting for my employer to ask me to do a Marxist literary criticism of a poem. When that day comes, I'm prepared!

These coding boot camps could have been what we need, but they are far too short and not at all standardized. I doubt the students ever write a boot loader, compiler, or kernel. I doubt the students do much analysis of algorithms or even know what a Turing machine is.

The same applies to non-coding careers that involve college degrees. We don't want surgeons with only a 14-week surgery boot camp, but cutting two years off of the lengthy education would increase the supply of doctors and reduce the cost (including opportunity cost) of their education. It's better than adding two years to every career.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#296

Post by zeade »

The HTML on minedminds.org is pretty sad for being a coding bootcamp site. Ignoring the basic badness of it looking like the output of Google+Stack Exchange copy-paste, it's not even valid (multiple head tags, div sitting outside of body/html tags, etc).

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#297

Post by wyclif »

hermitdev wrote: post #280
phillipcarter wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then they will remain a junior developer Isn't the point that they _are_ junior developers after completing a bootcamp? Juniors can be some of the best people in your organization if your org is willing to take them on and teach them things.

I'm not disagreeing, but I think the implication is that the bootcamps tend to leave their students without the fundamental knowledge to progress further in their career. Not saying you need a full 4 year program and a CS degree. I don't have a CS degree, but 2 degrees in electrical engineering and computer engineering. That gave me a very solid and low level concept of computing that most CS grads dont get. Programm…

I also don't have a CS degree, but I tend to agree with you that something quite serious in terms of scale and scope is missing in most bootcamps. For instance, it doesn't make sense to expose people who have never written a program before to RoR or Node if they haven't yet learned how to do basic tasks like command line functionality, learning the *NIX file system, text and data manipulation, etc, let alone if/then statements.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#298

Post by princeb »

cannonedhamster wrote: post #180
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>almost impossible to find developer with Scala experience around here anyway) I feel you. I think there is no pool more shallow than the one of C programmers that can work on embedded in my area. Regardless of what your background is, I’ve already had to commit to 6 months of training for anyone I hire.

There's no such thing as someone you're not going to have to train. Every single company does something different. To suggest that you're not going to have months of train up isn't feasible. I wish this mindset would go away. Training is, and should be an integral part of any workplace. It's what makes your whole team better, it's what makes everyone have a similar style, and shows people the expectations. This goes…

my experience is that you have to babysit the senior hires a little bit more because they bring their own baggage and habits into the team even if it doesn't support the existing workflow or even goes against.

they are also more resistant to change than a fresh hire, or may be a bit more convincing when they want things to move their way (to the team's detriment).

if you want to incorporate new cultural elements into your team, especially if your team has already strong, well-developed culture, you have to be aware of what is good and what is bad within your existing team, what to keep and what to give up, and be quick to nip any unintended side effects of a cultural/workflow change in the bud.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#299

Post by barry-cotter »

cannonedhamster wrote: post #180
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>almost impossible to find developer with Scala experience around here anyway) I feel you. I think there is no pool more shallow than the one of C programmers that can work on embedded in my area. Regardless of what your background is, I’ve already had to commit to 6 months of training for anyone I hire.

There's no such thing as someone you're not going to have to train. Every single company does something different. To suggest that you're not going to have months of train up isn't feasible. I wish this mindset would go away. Training is, and should be an integral part of any workplace. It's what makes your whole team better, it's what makes everyone have a similar style, and shows people the expectations. This goes…

> There's no such thing as someone you're not going to have to train.

Not for employees but for contractors or consultants they better be able to hit the ground running. That’s why they get paid 3x and up what employees get. If you need someone right now you can pay the premium for it and get it.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#300

Post by em-bee »

slow_donkey wrote: post #291
hluska wrote: post #288

I’m not shocked by HN’s attitude towards bootcamp grads, but I am very surprised that so many here are blaming the grads and not the bootcamps themselves. Bootcamps use absolutely disgusting marketing techniques to appeal to people with little ability outside of being able to pay tuition. Their grads are closer to victims.

They absolutely are the victims but it's also a students responsibility to do due diligence on the bootcamps just like you would (should?) research an employer before signing the job offer.

how would they do that?

if they are the kind of people described in the article, then they have no means with which to evaluate the school.

as a programmer, i can judge if a potential employer is doing proper software development, and if i am already in the field, i can judge whether the next class/school will teach me something that relates to what i am doing, but as a student completely new to the field i don't even know yet what and how i can best learn.

so i can't necessarily judge the quality of the school. i can look at statistics for past students, but those can be faked, so short of actually talking to a number of past students, evaluation of a school is hard.

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