They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia • Hacker News Board

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#311

Post by wyclif » Mon, May 13, 2019, 7:02 AM UTC

MattyRad wrote: post #134

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…

I've shared this experience of being a mentor and babysitter for people who seek all the things you listed, although in my case it's inexperienced coworkers who are "self taught" (no boot camp even). Their charisma and our shallow interviewing process usually lands them a job and leaves me cleaning up after the messes they perpetually make. You would think proper communication would prevent these things, but often th…

Even to become a licensed land surveyor, which is a subset of civil engineering and not as highly paid as an engineer job, you have to pass the PLS exam. As an apprentice surveyor or surveyor technician, you can't sign off on your own work until you get licensed.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#312

Post by throwaway34241 » Mon, May 13, 2019, 7:12 AM UTC

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…

> I will be leaving my company very soon to go to a place where there is a coding test

Maybe that's your problem right there? I'm in SV and know someone who successfully did a bootcamp, but they certainly didn't get a special route through job interviews. They had to compete with graduates and pass regular technical interviews with algorithm questions (and they could do fairly hard ones that certainly many college graduates fail). BTW the bootcamp only charged on successful job placement, so it's hard to see how they could stay in business if it was just a scam.

> and filtering to prevent bootcampers from getting in

> its snobby, but I didn't study and spend my student loan on my passion just so I can train up a bunch of people

Why should the interview be for anything other than to determine technical competence and organizational fit? I'm sorry if you've had difficulty with your student loans but I don't see why it is relevant here.

There's plenty of mediocre programmers that managed to pass a CS program somewhere. Maybe their course material covered a broad range of topics but certainly not everyone retains it or can even answer basic questions. Assuming two people with no experience, I would strongly prefer to work with whoever performs better on coding challenges and computer architecture questions even if they went to a bootcamp. Probably especially if they went to a bootcamp. If someone has 4x as much time to study and still does worse, that's hardly encouraging is it?

To me it sounds like the hiring process at your company is what is at fault, and it would be better to fix that than to rely on expensive credentials (that can only set a low minimum bar anyway) as some sort of proxy. Maybe if you are overwhelmed with applicants you could filter by individual school, bootcamp, github portfolio, etc. But this seems to be painting with an overly broad brush.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#313

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, May 13, 2019, 9:23 AM UTC

jfarmer wrote: post #273

TeMPOraL wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once observed a "become a web developer quick" RoR-based course, where they made people write their "hello worlds" as full-blown RoR apps with full MVC project scaffolding - meaning dozens of folders, and having to create 3 files (M, V, C) and write a lot of code to put something simple on the screen. I realized then that people finishing this course lack what I consider one of the most fundamental insights in writ…

I can’t vouch for other programs, but I co-founded Dev Bootcamp (the first programming bootcamp) and the sequence you outlined is almost verbatim how we brought students into Rails. We’d explain it the way you described. We’d have them start with Sinatra apps after 3 weeks of modeling problems in CLI apps. After their 10th hand-written form with error handling, they’d see the value of Rails form helpers immediately o…

It's also good to hear that there are bootcamps who seem to do this right (and, importantly, want to do this right)! So thank you for doing it like this, and thank you for taking time to share it in a reply.

I read the whole excerpt you linked, and holy cows if you did not just significantly improve my base opinion about boot camps. The way you introduced AR is exactly the way I would do it, with the same digressions to hammer down things like "AR is ultimately just writing SQL for you", and "AR is ORM, there are many ORMs with different approaches", and "where does a concept live?", and "map is not the territory".

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#314

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, May 13, 2019, 9:32 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #302

Kalium wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

Having been in the situation, all I can say is that sometimes you have to expect "shocking" gaps when working with inexperienced people at not let it throw you. It's part of being a teacher. You have to remain positive. If they're quick to learn it when you teach it to them, it's fine. This is learning on the job and it's expected. That happened to me at Google for someone who didn't come in as a software engineer. I…

That's an important thing, I agree. Seen a few shocking gaps in my co-workers at previous jobs, and whenever time and energy allowed, I always tried to carefully (to not bruise egos) and positively[0] patch it with a quick mental model update. I don't fault people for being inexperienced, or for not growing up as a computer nerd like I did. I only start having issues if someone wasn't given knowledge they're supposed to by organized learning (hence my scepticism about bootcamps, but see jfarmer's comment in parrallel), or when they claim knowledge and competence they visibly lack.

Programming is a profession. As you say, learning on the job is normal and expected.

--

[0] - https://www.xkcd.com/1053/

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#315

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, May 13, 2019, 9:33 AM UTC

megaremote wrote: post #260

TeMPOraL wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> you have to know what they do and why Ah, bullshit. No you don't. Most people only understand a small subset of what they use. They are junior devs.

It's not about understanding everything thoroughly. It's about understanding, for most things they use, what does the thing do in general, what's the scope of it, and why that job needs to be done in the first place.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#316

Post by pas » Mon, May 13, 2019, 10:52 AM UTC

yawaramin wrote: post #198

jimmaswell wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thin…

> learning a relatively small amount of syntax and general concepts In what programming job?! Junior frontend dev churning out React components? Even there you're dealing with a dizzying array of HTML, CSS, and ever-changing JavaScript/Babel/Webpack/etc. insanity. In a few months you can barely produce some simple, low-quality code. It takes a lot longer for the concepts of good quality code to sink in.

junior PHP dev. basically on the job training.

it's always very costly, because it requires a very involved supervisor.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#317

Post by 0_gravitas » Mon, May 13, 2019, 11:22 AM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #197

cannonedhamster wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with this 100%, even as an experienced engineer I want to continue to give and receive ongoing training. Yet I've actually been told in some settings not to even mention the "T" word because it would be seen as offensive. Instead as an industry we have ridiculous expectations in hiring and an inefficient, informal training process in the form of production failures.

I bet the job post reads "Searching for self-starter that can hit the ground running!"

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#318

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 13, 2019, 11:29 AM UTC

jen20 wrote: post #113

mothsonasloth wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree, I would like to blame it on this dichotomy of "frontend and backend development". Most of the bootcampers did three months of "frontend" work and are oblivious to what goes underneath in the murky world of business logic and services. Until they have been able to demonstrate they are confident in: * Presenting data to a user * Validating inputs * Making correct requests and understanding the interac…

> Then they will remain a junior developer and I think that will be many of these bootcampers fate This is a fair assessment - not just of boot camp developers but of all developers. I don't think I agree that it is a problem that some people working as a junior developer today will never become a Technical Fellow, however. I've personally found (especially in the "enterprise") that many senior developers do not actu…

[deleted]

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#319

Post by lowercased » Mon, May 13, 2019, 11:30 AM UTC

jen20 wrote: post #113

mothsonasloth wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree, I would like to blame it on this dichotomy of "frontend and backend development". Most of the bootcampers did three months of "frontend" work and are oblivious to what goes underneath in the murky world of business logic and services. Until they have been able to demonstrate they are confident in: * Presenting data to a user * Validating inputs * Making correct requests and understanding the interac…

> Then they will remain a junior developer and I think that will be many of these bootcampers fate This is a fair assessment - not just of boot camp developers but of all developers. I don't think I agree that it is a problem that some people working as a junior developer today will never become a Technical Fellow, however. I've personally found (especially in the "enterprise") that many senior developers do not actu…

I'm reading job posts for "sr foo engineer" and requirements are typically "4 years of foo", and no other experience level mentioned.

Yes, we all know someone who's done something for 2 years and is amazing, a true genius/savant who redefines what's possible. They're the exceptions.

I've been in professional software around 25 years, and was recently talking with a colleague (roughly same years of experience). He's just started a new job, and is working with people coming out of a bootcamp, and is frustrated because they're both currently being put on the same tasks - some basic FE JS work - and the bootcampers are actually slightly more productive than him. It's because that's literally all they know - they happen to know the same versions of everything the company is using, because it's what the bootcamp used. They can't do anything else, but both parties are being judged by this one ability right now, and he's questioning his own value now. It's giving the junior folks sort of a weird view of what 'old people' are capable of (which, as an old person, bothers me some!)

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#320

Post by throwaway55554 » Mon, May 13, 2019, 11:31 AM UTC

megaremote wrote: post #262

murphy214 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

24 yo CE here with FE here, the question becomes do you think a test can be designed for something as large as software to accurately judge competency. Competency in code comes from getting stuff wrong and having to live with it and fix it, that stuff isn't super easy to test.

You don't even need a test. Just drill down on one particular area and see how much they know. For example, get them to explain a model they would use to represent user login. Then get them to explain how that would link to their use info. Then how they would display that on a login screen. Then how they would save that into the database. Anything to watch out for? Any security concerns?

Everything is so web based on HN. Give them a device protocol and ask them to code up the state machine for it.