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They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

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Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#331

Post by mrguyorama »

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #225
dvtrn wrote: post #128

For anyone here, that went through one of these CodeSchools/Bootcamps/training.jargon[2] courses, I have a question: At any point in these camps was there a section on interviewing and job seeking? I'm asking as both a hiring manager who has seen a very fair share of...sorry, BAD resumes coming from people who finished a local code school, who struggled through the interview (only one made it to a technical assessmen…

I went to a bootcamp. I won't say which one. It was in a major city, and it was a residential program (anybody who was in the bootcamp but not local lived together in apartments included in the cost of the program). The program was structured beginning with a quick review of language basics (you were expected to know JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to a reasonable degree before the course began) and layouts, then moved on…

>you were expected to know JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to a reasonable degree before the course began

As a clarification, it seems you did not go to a "Coding" bootcamp, but some sort of engineering one. They seem to be the exception, rather than the rule

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#332

Post by draw_down »

john_moscow wrote: post #129
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…

The key to handling such environments is to not care about the result more than the others. So socialize with the newbies, maybe go have some beers, be a pleasant person and absolutely don't give a damn that they are utterly completely useless. It wasn't your decision to hire them and you shouldn't be wasting your passion and energy on rectifying it. If you care about what you're doing, it consider starting a side pr…

It’s unfortunate that people will describe such a view as “cynical”, it’s entirely pragmatic. The cynicism is in whoever clearly doesn’t care that the people they hire are not effective in their jobs.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#333

Post by jfarmer »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #313
jfarmer wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can't vouch for other bootcamps! DBC was sold in 2015 to Kaplan and they shut it down in 2017. :(

Here's a thread I posted the other day, though, that might be interesting to you: https://twitter.com/jfarmer/status/1127324440469970944

BTW, the evolution of your feelings is pretty normal and it brings back memories. Haha. People would always be like, "Uh, yeah, ok, so you're churning out code monkeys, right?"

Then we'd bring them in, show them what we were teaching and how we were teaching it, and they'd go "Oh man, I wish I had been taught like this!"

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#334

Post by 333c »

Nasrudith wrote: post #278
Kalium wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You're almost certainly correct. It's perhaps possible that the bootcamp model, which can work well for people with solid technical backgrounds, might not work equally well for others.…

Reminds me of one Computer Science professor I had whose degree was in Philosophy - of course he predated computer science degrees. He is part of the older branch of "self-taught" as opposed to degree trained in programming - it is now rarer for someone new to get into the field at a higher level without formal training.

A CS professor at my school graduated after 2000 with a bachelor's in creative writing. She did do her graduate studies in CS, however. So it's still possible to be a professor without studying the field at an undergraduate level.

However, she certainly had formal training in CS, just not at the undergrad level.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#335

Post by distant_hat »

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…

Haha. There is a lot of this happening in data science as well for software engineers and with exactly similar kind of results. I hate mentoring tons of new people who just learned to throw tensorflow at pandas dataframes.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#336

Post by daveslash »

hirundo wrote: post #44
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…

> Coding requires a certain drive and curiosity > By all means subsidize a laptop If you have a certain drive and curiosity for coding the price of a used low-end laptop is unlikely to be a significant barrier, when adequate new ones are available from Walmart for $159. I just found a 3 year old Chromebook on ebay for $57, or around 10 hours work at the federal minimum wage after taxes. And there's a salutary pride o…

To introduce people to the very most basic concepts of programming (if-then, loops, etc, and making hello-world, fizz-buzz, etc...), I've been using the javascript console in the Chrome (or Firefox) developer tools. In casual conversations with non developer friends (30-40 y/o), I'll say "here, pass me your laptop... " and I'll do fizz-buzz real quick. I haven't tried with any one, but I would think that teaching someone how to wrap their head around those concepts could be done with a cheap net-book and built-in browser development tools. In the beginning, get all of the dependencies out of the way - no need for a compiler, source control, package manager, etc....

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#337

Post by fma »

scj wrote: post #78
fma wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a lesser extent, the same can be said for those who get an "IT" degree from a no name school from the college of business. I've spent a lot of my time training people who graduate from local small colleges instead of say, Georgia Tech or UGA (I'm in Atlanta) because management at my big corp is throwing cheap bodies at the solution. Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed mentoring but done kids graduate with no clue and…

If you don't mind me asking, what is the ratio of mentors : grads where you work? What do you think is an acceptable ratio?

I don't really have a good answer but I'll give it a shot.

I can only speak for my team. In big corp, your work experience is based on your team. We have 4 senior dev, 7 college hires who have been with us between 0-4 years. The experience/aptitude varies. i.e. there are some who have been with us for 2 years that is not as good as the one hired. We've had some come on our team and move onto other teams. I have one who's been with us for 4 years, and at 3 years I felt is like a competent senior dev. He's moved to another team and runs laps around his new teammates.

Because I have the most patience in the group...I end up being the person most of them come to for help. I'm technically the architect on the team (manager gave me the title recently, too modest to accept it...) and the senior devs even come to me with questions...but of course I don't truely mentor them. But to give continuing education to the team, I've implemented a "Tech talk Friday" where I book a 1.5 hour of our time on Friday and watch and discuss various conference talks on YouTube that I feel are applicable for us. It's a nice way to end a Friday, too :)

There's no defined ratio. A grad who has a good foundation, is a go-getter and can learn on their own only needs to be guided. While others need to be handheld. Mentors' should not be bogged down to the point they are not able to do their real work - otherwise they'd get burned out and would just dismiss mentees.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#338

Post by freewilly1040 »

lozenge wrote: post #245
freewilly1040 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree. That's not what the parent post was talking about. The post disparaged people based on who they are not what they do.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#339

Post by barbecue_sauce »

mrguyorama wrote: post #331
barbecue_sauce wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to a bootcamp. I won't say which one. It was in a major city, and it was a residential program (anybody who was in the bootcamp but not local lived together in apartments included in the cost of the program). The program was structured beginning with a quick review of language basics (you were expected to know JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to a reasonable degree before the course began) and layouts, then moved on…

>you were expected to know JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to a reasonable degree before the course began As a clarification, it seems you did not go to a "Coding" bootcamp, but some sort of engineering one. They seem to be the exception, rather than the rule

It was actually billed as a "Web Development" bootcamp.

Re: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

#340

Post by 4h53n »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #246
lozenge wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's CFS? Cloud Filestore?
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