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Tech Prep by Facebook

techprep.fb.com

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Re: Tech Prep by Facebook

#11

Post by throwitallaway1 »

With Facebook's Tech Prep, you too can create shiny monstrosities that chug while trying to scroll on an i7 with the very latest JS engine!

It's tied in with McKinsey because they hate programmers. They hate the fact that the firms they're raiding and "advising" are currently having to pay people a living wage to build and fix their systems. They want to flood the market with a bunch of cheap framework cut-and-paste developers and flood the culture with a bunch of inch-deep strivers [1]. Meanwhile, the McKinsey always-be-closing Powerpoint jockeys will bring the "real ideas". Does somebody have to keep bringing this up every time one of these "get people who never bothered to understand programming on their own to understand programming" articles gets posted?

[1] Disclaimer: I am merely foot-deep.

Re: Tech Prep by Facebook

#13

Post by ngorski »

gtrubetskoy wrote: post #8

I wonder why there exists "computer science" but not "finance science" or "air conditioning science" or "automotive science". It makes me doubt that computer science is really a thing. Algorithms, logic, computation, electronics are covered by other more fundamental "sciences" such as mathematics, statistics, physics, etc. Is computation really justified as a scientific discipline of its own?

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~choset/whatiscs.html

Re: Tech Prep by Facebook

#14

Post by vezzy-fnord »

gtrubetskoy wrote: post #8

I wonder why there exists "computer science" but not "finance science" or "air conditioning science" or "automotive science". It makes me doubt that computer science is really a thing. Algorithms, logic, computation, electronics are covered by other more fundamental "sciences" such as mathematics, statistics, physics, etc. Is computation really justified as a scientific discipline of its own?

"Finance science" would probably be economics. HVAC and automotive engineering are intermediary disciplines that involve facets from various science and engineering fields.

That the software industry is anti-scientific does not mean there is not a computer science.

Re: Tech Prep by Facebook

#16

Post by matthewbauer »

icewater wrote: post #15

For intermediate programmers they are recommending a terrible book full of fake reviews by a scammy author (I purchased the book earlier in the year and returned it). Were any of these recommendations vetted? The book... http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Success-Day-Beginners-Effi...

That's too bad. Is there any way to report stuff like that to Amazon?

Re: Tech Prep by Facebook

#17

Post by anonymouscow0 »

Given recent other posts about trying to get women and minorities in to tech the first thing I saw was the background marketing. Facebook is very good with data and I wonder if they can quantify a positive result. It felt forced, I didn't even notice the text I just kept scrolling around looking at all the photos. I didn't see anyone that looked like me, it all felt too social and nothing at all like programming. Not one felt cubicle, nothing I've seen over years of coding.

How did it make you feel?

Re: Tech Prep by Facebook

#18

Post by envy2 »

icewater wrote: post #15

For intermediate programmers they are recommending a terrible book full of fake reviews by a scammy author (I purchased the book earlier in the year and returned it). Were any of these recommendations vetted? The book... http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Success-Day-Beginners-Effi...

This seems bad, thanks for flagging. I'll try to track down how/why this got recommended.

Re: Tech Prep by Facebook

#19

Post by pinewurst »

throwitallaway1 wrote: post #11

With Facebook's Tech Prep, you too can create shiny monstrosities that chug while trying to scroll on an i7 with the very latest JS engine! It's tied in with McKinsey because they hate programmers. They hate the fact that the firms they're raiding and "advising" are currently having to pay people a living wage to build and fix their systems. They want to flood the market with a bunch of cheap framework cut-and-paste…

I was "blessed" enough to see one of their engagements - the young Bob and Bob McKinseys. So much money, so little results.

Which prompts me to recommend my favorite book on management consulting, the life, the legends, the myths:

http://www.amazon.com/Management-Myth-Debunking-Business-Phi...

Re: Tech Prep by Facebook

#20

Post by truncate »

sotojuan wrote: post #5

This was pretty cool and seems great for young beginners. I wonder, though, what is the modern equivalent of messing with BASIC after school? It certainly isn't Coding for Dummies is it? Would it be messing with the browser console? Messing with Python? On a side note, I still think the beginning of the first SICP lecture is the best introduction to Comp Sci (I watch it to get motivated/inspired sometimes!). What got…

In my opinion a modern equivalent of messing with programming at school would be Racket. There are couple of awesome books `Realm of Racket`[1] and `How to Design Program`. Realm of Racket introduce programming by writing games. Its actually very easy to write interactive programs with this framework called big-bang. Matthias Felleison recently spoke about it on Strange Loop[3]

Unlike BASIC though, Racket no toy language. It's very powerful and expressive. Its a Scheme dialect btw.

I occasionally spend some time contributing to a Racket-JS compiler called Whalsong. Whatever games you write in Racket using big-bang can run on your browser. Checkout some examples here http://bigbang.ccs.neu.edu/search?q=%23stevelikes

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Realm-Racket-Learn-Program-Game/dp/159...

[2] http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayoofXuKqMY

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