Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hackbright Academy Turns Women Into Developers In 10 Weeks

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 85 posts

Re: Hackbright Academy Turns Women Into Developers In 10 Weeks

#31

Post by zedshaw »

meaty wrote: post #29
zedshaw wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 10 weeks is not enough time to learn any skill. What? So, all of the military training methods don't exist? Military bootcamps are 6-8 weeks and you learn a massive fuck-ton of skills. Hell, college courses are less than this in hours spent and people learn crazy amounts of stuff. So how can you conclude that it's not possible to learn any skill despite a fairly huge amount of available evidence to the exact contra…

In military boot camps, you learn enough not to get killed or court martial, not how to do a job properly. (ex British territorial army) I'm not saying it's not possible, but the marketed result versus the actual result here is disparate.

Uh, no, I was in the Army and I learned way more than not getting killed or court martialed. In fact, you saying that says either your military sucks at training or you're lying.

It also doesn't answer my direct criticism of your comment. You claimed you can't learn any skill in 10 weeks, which is complete bullshit. People learn quite a lot of things in less time, so saying that is stupid.

Maybe you meant to say something less hyperbolic like, "I doubt that someone could master programming in 10 weeks." This is true, but then they don't claim to create master programmers, they claim to create junior programmers, which I (as someone who actually does train people for a living) can say is entirely possible.

Re: Hackbright Academy Turns Women Into Developers In 10 Weeks

#32

Post by tommorris »

eLobato wrote: post #30

Will sound like an asshole to many people, but: Hackbright Academy Turns Men Into Developers In 10 Weeks Hackbright Academy Turns Blacks Into Developers In 10 Weeks Hackbright Academy Turns Whites Into Developers In 10 Weeks Do we really need MORE discrimination? If I go ahead and try to join in, they will say "sorry, no men accepted"? That sounds equally as bad to me as "sorry, no woman accepted" or "sorry, no latin…

> Can anybody explain?

Yes, historically, some groups have been discriminated at and put at a social and economic disadvantage on the basis of intrinsic factors.

Putting right an unequal playing field looks unfair only if you don't see that it is an unequal playing field.

Re: Hackbright Academy Turns Women Into Developers In 10 Weeks

#33

Post by belorn »

Women only courses and equality in education don't normally mix well with me. The whole subject is however rather interesting, being a very political subject but also one where experiments and statistics tend to go against common opinion.

Okey, this is from a Swedish perspective, as that is the only perspective I got. Anyway, the Swedish state educational overseeing body has made several attempts to improve equality in education, normally marked at getting more women and colored people in white men dominated areas. The biggest attempt, which was started in the 1990s, were a rather simple rule. It said "If a student applying for a class would be a minority in a the class thanks to race or sex, that student shall receive a small bonus in the application". No judgment call was used in the applying of the bonus, but in 2007 it ended, and the primary reason it ended was because the target group (women and colored people) was not in the group actually normally receiving the bonus. Rather, 95% of the time, it was a white male, applying to a class where he would be a minority in.

This is actually not that extremely surprising if one consider that 2/3 of the students in Sweden are women. It also not that surprising given that every areas of education except engineering and one form of math (abstract-math past 3rd year university), have women as the dominating group. Classes are rather clustered in women and men density. The state overseeing body for education did suggest after reviewing the program that maybe they should start some men-only courses in areas which are highly dominated by women students. That suggestion however got turn down rather immediately, as it was viewed ludicrously impossible.

Maybe there is some pedagogical value of women-only and men-only classes. There clearly are anecdotal evidence on it, and the numbers do tell that men are more willing to attempt entering a woman dominated class, than a women trying to enter a men dominated class. But as a method to get more equality in education and encouraging a 50/50 setup, based on the Swedish attempts I must say it does not work as intended. To reach that goal, I think further studies of what actually work is needed. Something great this academy could do is to create a research study on the effects, with an control group, and maybe even a men-only class to match.

Re: Hackbright Academy Turns Women Into Developers In 10 Weeks

#34

Post by [deleted] »

davj wrote: post #12
meaty wrote: post #7

10 weeks is not enough time to learn any skill. I wish people would stop these boot camps with ridiculous claims. We've had a couple of victims of these schemes apply to us and we've had to rather sadly tell them 'no way' and explain why. A lot of them have come from business and arts backgrounds and think it's an easy way to make quick cash (hint: it isn't - writing software is hard and laborious and pays crap for t…

Thanks for your feedback. This is not a boot camp. Have you ever committed 100% of your time to learning a new skill over a short period of time?

[deleted]

Re: Hackbright Academy Turns Women Into Developers In 10 Weeks

#35

Post by bradleyjg »

zedshaw wrote: post #25
meaty wrote: post #7

10 weeks is not enough time to learn any skill. I wish people would stop these boot camps with ridiculous claims. We've had a couple of victims of these schemes apply to us and we've had to rather sadly tell them 'no way' and explain why. A lot of them have come from business and arts backgrounds and think it's an easy way to make quick cash (hint: it isn't - writing software is hard and laborious and pays crap for t…

> 10 weeks is not enough time to learn any skill. What? So, all of the military training methods don't exist? Military bootcamps are 6-8 weeks and you learn a massive fuck-ton of skills. Hell, college courses are less than this in hours spent and people learn crazy amounts of stuff. So how can you conclude that it's not possible to learn any skill despite a fairly huge amount of available evidence to the exact contra…

Bootcamp isn't about skills, it's about breaking down the civilian mentality and then building back up a military one.

For those destined to be more than cannon fodder, the skills training comes in advanced courses that last months or occasionally years (e.g. nuclear sub courses).

Re: Hackbright Academy Turns Women Into Developers In 10 Weeks

#36

Post by wladimir »

rdl wrote: post #26
meaty wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case, a simplified view: reading the documentation, building a list of scenarios based on proposed functions and associated risks, testing each one and documenting it in a concise manor. Then building something serious, testing it, breaking it predictably and unpredictably and reworking conclusions from above. Also doing research on best practices, bad practices, performance reducing functions and hints/tips, i…

I think it would be insane for someone with little or no experience in the field to devote years to a specific skill (say, complete mastery of Postgres), before working on problems in the real world. Even in areas where failure has high costs (say, medicine, or war), you don't go off and try to master a specific skill before doing anything -- you master some basic skills, practice using those (in increasingly realist…

Breadth first, then depth

For "deep" areas such as mathematics, medicine, and theoretical computer science one needs an extensive theoretical background before being able to advance the field. A depth-first approach may be the only way of learning a useful subset. This may also apply to something like "database theory in general".

However for "product skills" (such as learning a specific database package or API) there's something to be said for a breadth-first approach. Especially nowadays, where today's hot skill can be neigh useless tomorrow. If you spend years only perfecting some skill you may be too late to profit from it! Also as the field is moving so fast, by the time you learned the PostgresSQL manual from beginning to end, there has been a new major release that invalidates many of the best practices that you spent so much time learning...

Re: Hackbright Academy Turns Women Into Developers In 10 Weeks

#37

Post by ealexhudson »

eLobato wrote: post #30

Will sound like an asshole to many people, but: Hackbright Academy Turns Men Into Developers In 10 Weeks Hackbright Academy Turns Blacks Into Developers In 10 Weeks Hackbright Academy Turns Whites Into Developers In 10 Weeks Do we really need MORE discrimination? If I go ahead and try to join in, they will say "sorry, no men accepted"? That sounds equally as bad to me as "sorry, no woman accepted" or "sorry, no latin…

Perhaps they sense a gap in the market for courses aimed at women who are incredibly interested in tech but would like to study amongst some fellow women as well.

This may not be equal access, but it certainly is equal opportunity. Something has to do be done about the millions of brilliant women who are turning away from tech.

Re: Hackbright Academy Turns Women Into Developers In 10 Weeks

#38

Post by stchangg »

smsm42 wrote: post #11
shurane wrote: post #6

Training programmers in 10 short weeks? Albeit these have experience with programming via codecademy, but 10 weeks? That is a fantastic turnaround and sounds a bit too marvelous. How does it work? This is just the first batch, but does it work consistently? This is fascinating. Do the programmers at Hackbright have any particular traits? Ambition, drive, or a ridiculous work ethic? Surrounding themselves with the hel…

Looking into the article, they don't start from zero: It helps that Hackbright students usually aren’t starting from scratch, but have instead developed their initial skills using Codecademy or by attending development workshops. After all, Phillips said, Hackbright is for people who are serious about programming as a profession, and you can’t decide that you’re serious until you’ve tried it out. So as I see it's for…

FWIW, a friend of mine graduated in this cohort.

She has a physics degree from Duke, and back when we were freshmen together, was considering majoring in CS, among other technical majors. I'm not sure how representative she is of the batch, but for people with existing technical skills/background, 10 weeks of focused coding practice + feedback could be a pretty big help.

Re: Hackbright Academy Turns Women Into Developers In 10 Weeks

#39

Post by knowtheory »

meaty wrote: post #7

10 weeks is not enough time to learn any skill. I wish people would stop these boot camps with ridiculous claims. We've had a couple of victims of these schemes apply to us and we've had to rather sadly tell them 'no way' and explain why. A lot of them have come from business and arts backgrounds and think it's an easy way to make quick cash (hint: it isn't - writing software is hard and laborious and pays crap for t…

You're also forgetting that they've got an application process.

It's not like they're taking random people off the street and claiming that they'll be competent programmers at the end of 10 weeks.

They are almost assuredly selecting people with the aptitude, interest, and determination to become a programmer, because, well, in the end, these programs are setup to turn out programmers who companies can hire. For example, I would be rather surprised if most the folks entering the program had never dabbled in programming.

Re: Hackbright Academy Turns Women Into Developers In 10 Weeks

#40

Post by [deleted] »

belorn wrote: post #33

Women only courses and equality in education don't normally mix well with me. The whole subject is however rather interesting, being a very political subject but also one where experiments and statistics tend to go against common opinion. Okey, this is from a Swedish perspective, as that is the only perspective I got. Anyway, the Swedish state educational overseeing body has made several attempts to improve equality…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN