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Bootcamps vs. College

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Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#111

Post by hornd »

kemiller2002 wrote: post #78

Boot camps have their place, but they are not a replacement for a traditional CS degree. I have met good and bad programmers from both types of programs (some from well respected colleges who I still wonder how they exactly passed), but here's the thing, I don't care about practical skills. I care about the person being able to think. All those concepts that they teach in CS isn't about knowing the name of an algorit…

How do you suggest structuring an interview to find candidates who are able to think abstractly? I don't think the current trivia-esque style interview works.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#112

Post by jegutman »

p4wnc6 wrote: post #101
kemiller2002 wrote: post #78

Boot camps have their place, but they are not a replacement for a traditional CS degree. I have met good and bad programmers from both types of programs (some from well respected colleges who I still wonder how they exactly passed), but here's the thing, I don't care about practical skills. I care about the person being able to think. All those concepts that they teach in CS isn't about knowing the name of an algorit…

The trouble is that while most employers say the same thing you say -- that they hire for critical thinking ability and intellectual curiosity / talent -- almost all of them don't actually want that. Instead they want employees who don't think independently; employees who are pliable and will not complain if given drudgery, told to use poor practices, told to make things of poor quality. Everyone says they don't just…

I don't think companies really don't want employees that think independently. These employees come with a ton of upside. However, not everybody turns out to be a star and in some companies (plenty still foster it) they don't want their average employees to be completely rogue.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#113

Post by lloyd-christmas »

busterarm wrote: post #62
HNcow wrote: post #36

I'm in the process of hiring a junior position and have no bias towards college grads or bootcamp grads. The only negatives towards boot camp grads I've seen so far is: 1) One candidate had no idea what the terms "Class" or "OOP" even meant. I'm FINE with them not understanding stuff like sorts/advanced data structures, but he ACTUALLY had 0 idea what an int was. No lie! 2) I wish there wasn't such a heavy reliance o…

It really depends on which bootcamp. I finally picked up SQL while at App Academy and while we did use JSON, we spent no time working with NoSQL databases. Backend ended up being my strength and my primary role at my (full stack) jobs. The monetary worth as a junior developer is also very dependent on the bootcamp. A decent App Academy or Dev Bootcamp grad in NYC? 60k is a reasonable minimum IMO and a wage below that…

I think there is nothing of distinguishing value between all three of those boot camps. Trying to place them in tiers, I assume, is just a form of self-flattery.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#114

Post by busterarm »

lsadam0 wrote: post #99
busterarm wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I never expect people to pick the right algorithm the first time. In the real world it's hard to do. I'm much more interested in if they think about alternatives to their solution, know where the problems with theirs are and if they might find an alternate solution to the problem online. If you're hiring junior developers without expecting to be hands-on in their work and with plan to train them, then you…

I believe we are misunderstanding each other, as you are making some assumptions. We do spend time training junior developers. We are hands on during work. I'm talking about one problem at the start of the process. In the example, I didn't touch on their choice of sort algorithm. I was pointing out that they believed that re-sorting the same array, for every single GetIndexAt(x) call, was an ok thing to do. The major…

Are they saying that it's an actual okay thing to do? ...like, you challenged them on it and had a discussion and they said it was perfectly okay regardless of size of array?

Or it was just allowed to let lie and they said it's an okay thing to do because that's what's in their code?

I think it's a huge mistake to conflate whether someone does know and whether they can know something. Some of the best programmers I've ever seen started off pretty clueless - most of that group learns things absurdly quickly too.

I don't think that exercise gives you good information other than to confirm your expectations. I don't know whether that can tell you if they'll bring value to your organization or not.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#115

Post by sillysaurus3 »

nostrebored wrote: post #106
mattnedrich wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the most important quality is being able to think abstractly and solve problems, why does it matter if they have a CS degree or come from a bootcamp? I do agree with you that CS degrees are very valuable, though it seems like you are saying that they are important because they teach problem solving and abstract thinking - but aren't there many ways to obtain those types of skills?

My CS degree was four years of heavy abstract thinking. If you can get those skills elsewhere great, but I don't think it's that common.

Based on what?

The amount of bias in this thread is very strange.

I think what's going on is that the people with CS degrees invested a significant chunk of their life and a significant amount of money into getting a CS degree. Therefore they're invested in denying the possibility that the qualities they achieved through their program can be achieved without.

The article presents some evidence in support of this possibility:

Over the last year, we’ve worked with about 100 bootcamp grads, and many have gone on to get jobs at great companies. We do our interviews blind, without knowing a candidate's background, and we regularly get through an interview and give a candidate very positive scores, only to be surprised at the end when we learn that the candidate has only been programming for 6 months.

We’ve found bootcamp grads as a group to be better than college grads at web programming and writing clean, modular code, and worse at algorithms and understanding how computers work. All in all, we’ve had roughly equivalent success working with the two groups.

That's pretty persuasive. So why respond to data with anecdata?

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#116

Post by balls187 »

andrewvc wrote: post #107

What a load of crap. What, they bred the capacity for abstract thought into you in college? College attracts a generally higher quality applicant pool. You're mistaking selection bias for an effect. Let me tell you, I've interviewed programmers from all over. There are boatloads of people with CS degrees with close to zero capacity for creative thinking. There are also boatloads of CS grads who can barely code their…

Are you the standard, or an outlier?

// The ELK stack is pretty sweet.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#117

Post by excitom »

hornd wrote: post #111
kemiller2002 wrote: post #78

Boot camps have their place, but they are not a replacement for a traditional CS degree. I have met good and bad programmers from both types of programs (some from well respected colleges who I still wonder how they exactly passed), but here's the thing, I don't care about practical skills. I care about the person being able to think. All those concepts that they teach in CS isn't about knowing the name of an algorit…

How do you suggest structuring an interview to find candidates who are able to think abstractly? I don't think the current trivia-esque style interview works.

I like to give candidates a word problem. It doesn't need to be complicated, but I want to see the candidate turn it into code. Doesn't matter what language. Just show me you can read and understand a problem and write down the solution. I never cease to be amazed at the number of people who freeze like a deer in the headlights.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#118

Post by softawre »

hornd wrote: post #111
kemiller2002 wrote: post #78

Boot camps have their place, but they are not a replacement for a traditional CS degree. I have met good and bad programmers from both types of programs (some from well respected colleges who I still wonder how they exactly passed), but here's the thing, I don't care about practical skills. I care about the person being able to think. All those concepts that they teach in CS isn't about knowing the name of an algorit…

How do you suggest structuring an interview to find candidates who are able to think abstractly? I don't think the current trivia-esque style interview works.

Funny enough, solving this requires thinking abstractly.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#119

Post by busterarm »

Zombieball wrote: post #108
busterarm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large percentage of the people in my bootcamp already had STEM or law degrees or many years of experience in another technical field (like myself)...and in a few cases both. I do way more than just CRUD apps - I basically own all of the business logic/processes here at my company. My bosses on a regular basis make it clear that I'm invaluable to the organization. I think this view is fairly myopic and basically cre…

This is really interesting! I have to admit that I am probably guilty of stereotyping at times (in my own internal thought processes) graduates of bootcamps as individuals from non-STEM backgrounds (e.g. arts degrees, or no formal post-secondary education). I wonder if there are any studies showing the degrees held by bootcamp graduates? A bootcamp probably makes a ton of sense for say a mechanical engineer looking t…

I think certain bootcamps attract certain types, so the circumstances I experienced likely aren't universal across bootcamps.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#120

Post by danso »

I wouldn't be surprised that a bootcamp grad could beat a college CS student in practical web knowledge. Stanford has a web applications elective, CS142 [0]...in the previous years, it focused on Rails [1]; this year, it moved to the MEAN stack. In both syllabi, a week is spent on learning HTML/CSS alone...this year, I believe they spend a couple weeks learning JavaScript.

This class is an elective, which means that students aren't expected to know HTML/CSS/JS before taking it, though the core CS classes (Java, C) are prereqs. This also means that students who don't take 142 could quite graduate without having any practical knowledge about web development.

That said, it's not because the CS students couldn't actually learn practical web dev, and as others have said here, the best bootcampers are often folks who have a STEM background already.

[0] http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs142/

[1] http://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/cs142-winter14/index...

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