Live data from Hacker News

As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

nytimes.com

1–10 of 141 posts

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#4
This article sounds inspiring when taken at face value, but it also strikes fear into my heart. This sounds eerily familiar to the dot-com bubble, and I can't help thinking that churning out zero-to-hero software engineers, web developers, and data scientists at this rate is a recipe for disaster.

Sure, there's a huge need right now, but we can't be too complacent -- thinking that it's impossible to saturate the market again, can we?

Hopefully this doesn't end poorly.

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#6
post #5

Millions more lines of instantly legacy code written by inexperienced programmers? Thank the gods we'll all be employed for decades! Decades I tell you! ;p

My reaction was more along the lines of "I'd hate to be the person who has to clean all that up)."

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#7
Here is some salary data for the two metro areas mentioned in the story for "Software Developers, Applications" from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported for May 2014 [1].

  Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, CO
  10%ile  25%ile  median  75%ile  90%ile
  64470	  80110	  100140  122350  146930

  New York-White Plains-Wayne, NY-NJ Metropolitan Division
  10%ile  25%ile  median  75%ile  90%ile
  66100   83010	  106710  135600  164390
The woman hired by Galvanize achieved a 25th %ile salary for Denver on her first day. Seems hard to believe that someone with so little training could be more productive than 25% of developers of software applications in Denver.

I think it's at least a little suspicious that the single data point that demonstrates the success of Galvanize is paid directly by Galvanize. How about any other student?

The math guy did an undergraduate degree in mathematics!, so he is hardly a characteristic example of waiters in New York who generally shouldn't expect to achieve a median salary for the industry on their first day.

[1] http://data.bls.gov/oes/search.jsp?data_tool=OES

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#10
post #5

Millions more lines of instantly legacy code written by inexperienced programmers? Thank the gods we'll all be employed for decades! Decades I tell you! ;p

As long as these rookies aren't writing nuclear reactor firmware, who cares? Most of programming is mundane. Have them make CRUD apps while we experts work on something interesting ;)
Post reply on HN