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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

#31

Post by eastbayjake »

seibelj wrote: post #22

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 n…

> 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.

Two questions: Are you in San Francisco, and which bootcamp was this?

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

#32

Post by ennuihenry »

seibelj wrote: post #22

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 n…

What area are you in? 75k in NY or SF for an inexperienced developer seems high.

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

#33

Post by bigtunacan »

pyrophane wrote: post #6
omouse wrote: 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)."

Mine was more along the lines of, "I'm going to make so much money cleaning that shit up."

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

#34

Post by chadgeidel »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #19

Once everyone is a programmer, then what?

Once everyone can read and write, then what?

We live in a computer age. Knowing how to program is no longer a "specialized skill", it's mandatory (on some level) to effectively interact with ever more complex systems that run our lives.

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

#36

Post by browles »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #25
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?

Should? Maybe. But plenty of math graduates have little to no programming experience, even from top schools.

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

#37

Post by wh-uws »

eastbayjake wrote: post #31
seibelj wrote: post #22

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 n…

> 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. Two questions: Are you in San Francisco, and which bootcamp was this?

Yeah these are vitally important questions. The curriculums and the level rigor of the different bootcamps varies widely.

Some have a very high bar for entry and are basically just a way for someone who could quickly become competent (i.e. someone with a deep math or some type of engineering background) to ramp up on coding.

Others just let anyone in and teach very basic things so the graduates level would vary widely as well.

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

#38

Post by JustSomeNobody »

Johnny555 wrote: post #26
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…

I've seen this happen with experienced developer with a CS degree. They say, it's "not my job" to test with large data. B.S., it is your job so sit down, shut up and do it. The job of QA isn't to find all your bugs, it's to ensure you don't have any.

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

#39

Post by vorg »

civilframe wrote: post #10
omouse wrote: 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 ;)

> Have the[se rookies] make CRUD apps while we experts work on something interesting

The reality is the opposite: the smooth-talking aptitudeless "rookies" with a years experience 7 times get themselves onto teams designing "interesting" stuff from scratch, then the programming experts are put on the team to clean up the many bugs for years to come.

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

#40

Post by numo16 »

civilframe wrote: post #10
omouse wrote: 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 ;)

> Have them make CRUD apps while we experts work on something interesting

Slightly more complex CRUD apps? ;)

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