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As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

nytimes.com

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

#21

Post by sarwechshar »

jboggan wrote: post #12
falsestprophet wrote: post #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 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.

I'm just curious, why is there a perception that coders are poor raise-negotiators in general?

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

#22

Post by seibelj »

We made a conscious decision to try and hire someone from these camps as an experiment. I went to their demo day and winnowed the graduating class of 40 down to 6. Of the 6 we interviewed we decided to give 6 month internships to 3 of them, 2 developer and 1 qa. Despite being hourly with minimal benefits, they were making the yearly equivalent of 50k a year which I found more than reasonable given the fact they had no coding experience other than 12 weeks of study.

On the first day, the woman who was QA quit because she wanted to do development, despite being explicitly hired as a QA.

2 months later I had to let one of the developers go because she produced very little and was surfing YouTube for much of the day.

The last developer I did not opt to hire at the end of his internship. He was a smart guy, but he needed years more experience to operate at the level of our other engineers and he was demanding a 75k salary.

I used the 75k he wanted and hired a competent developer with a CS degree and a couple years experience. He is orders of magnitude better than the boot camp guy was.

It is possible that a boot camp graduate could be useful after several years' experience, but fresh out of school they are extremely raw and need years of training. Therefore I won't be hiring any fresh graduates again.

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

#25

Post by JustSomeNobody »

GuiA wrote: post #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.

Shouldn't a math degree already have at least a little programming? Matlab? Python? Something?

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

#26

Post by Johnny555 »

dreaminvm wrote: post #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.

Even "experienced" developers who haven't had formal computer science training can run into performance problems. At my last job, our application was running slower and slower as we added clients. None of the Ruby devs could figure it out, the code was "fine", all of the tests passed and ran quickly (with a stubbed 10 item customer table), and everything ran great until we grew beyond a hundred or so customers so it fell on me to optimize the database which was clearly the problem. I finally took a look at the code and found the problem -- it was a loop within a loop within a loop doing a full scan across the entire customer table disguised by the two inner loops being inside separate Gems. The application had O(n^3) performance. None of the developers knew what that meant so I gave a "lunch-and-learn" presentation on big-O notation and what it means for performance.

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

#27

Post by chadgeidel »

falsestprophet wrote: post #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 Galv…

Denver developer here. I've participated in the hiring process at several orgs, and I think that with a combination of basic-level skills and a good handle on salary negotiation this is entirely doable. I'm continually shocked at the skill level of people that apply - we don't even do Fizz-buzz level of interview questions, and we constantly have people unable to solve the whiteboard questions. Anyone with aptitude can get in.

I can't speak for other areas, but it's amazingly hard to find someone who can code that isn't already gainfully employed.

(I too hate whiteboard questions, and we are working on eliminating that from our onsite interview)

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

#29

Post by codingdave »

falsestprophet wrote: post #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 Galv…

I don't doubt Galvanize's success in producing talent above the 25th percentile. I used to work in Denver, and while there are some great folk there, there also are a lot of mediocre folk just cruising through the large corporations. 25th percentile is a low standard to beat. I also used to work for Jim Deters, who founded Galvanize. It was long, long ago, but based on that experience, I do not doubt his success at building a good organization with good results. Even when we were all young and flawed, he still had put together a pretty great team to work with.

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

#30

Post by JustSomeNobody »

dreaminvm wrote: post #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.

I don't begrudge anyone getting into this field. I just hope that salaries don't drop because management thinks a waiter can do what I do.

Note: I'm not trying to disparage waiters. I'm just saying we all have our skill sets. I could never be a surgeon or a welder or a lawyer or a race car driver, for examples. My skills are problem solving and development.

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