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As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

nytimes.com

11–20 of 141 posts

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

#11

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 Galv…

I find it extremely believable that someone with ambition and drive could do better than many developers who are coasting off a CS degree.

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

#12

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 Galv…

Salary is not a monotonic mapping of developer productivity. Besides, given the general increase of salaries across the board and the poor raise-negotiating skills of coders in general, it isn't hard to imagine the 25% of salaries under hers were mostly of an older un-altered vintage for underperforming programmers.

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

#13
As someone that's done a fair bit of hiring for engineer and data scientist positions, my outlook on these 'coding academies' is pretty grim.

If you want someone that can hack together a web app in rails/node.js/django/framework of your choice then that's fine. But the reality is most people going through these code academies tend to get a really poor foundation in both writing "good" and "fast" code. There's very little focus on algorithmic fundamentals.

But really, it's the academies that claim to spew out data scientists that I have a problem with. Every candidate I've interviewed that came from one of these knew how to run a regression, use R, and fit a variety of classifiers (eg; random forest, feed-forward ANN). But not one of them could answer really basic questions about sampling and experimental design (one of them asked: "multiple comparisons..? What's that?").

I've found that people that come in completely self-taught oddly enough don't have these issues. Many of them really do focus on the fundamentals first. It's easier to teach someone that understands experimental design and probability theory how to fit a few models in R than to teach probability theory to a kid that knows how to copy and paste from stackoverflow.

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

#14
While the demand is real, I am just not sure it will last with the level of skills being pumped out of these bootcamps. I recently interviewed a few candidates from a coding bootcamp mentioned in the article and while they can write basic rails code, they all lacked problem solving skills. Most candidates were hung up on basic performance related questions.

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

#15

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 Galv…

That math degree is incredibly important in terms of his actual knowledge and perceived value.

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

#16

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 Galv…

My gut tells me it's not exactly a challenge to outcompete the bottom 25% of anything. In my experience, breaking into a new career at all is the hardest part. Once you're in, it's not like you are automatically stuck at the bottom of the food chain.

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

#17

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 Galv…

[deleted]

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

#18
Somehow I have a hard time believing that if you have a math major, the only difference between you waiting tables and living on the brink of poverty or making bank as a software engineer is a 3 months Ruby course (I have a double math/CS major); I feel like there may be something more going on here. I'm happy for the gentleman's success, but it seems like a poor example to use in any case.
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