Bootcamps vs. College

It was not long ago that Computer Science degrees itself faced a similar challenge, against more well-rounded liberal arts programs, championed and prided by the Ivy Leagues. Today MIT and Stanford are ahead by the strength of their more “practical” engineering degrees. The data from Triplebyte supports the same narrative, just in greater granularity: businesses value practical skills.

There is value in being balanced and diversity, but this applies to teams, not necessarily individuals. Not everyone on your engineering team needs to be an architect. After your globally distributed, fault tolerant, realtime, highly available system is designed, somebody’s got to build it. And most startups or software teams have no business even trying to design such a system in the first place.

In the US, my generation was told we all needed four year degrees. We don’t. Some jobs and some roles certainly but the entire population of future adults?

There is an engineering shortage in the US because everyone was too busy getting four year degrees in more well rounded fields. Meanwhile Apple needs tens of thousands of engineers that could have been trained by two year vocational programs that the US was apparently above for our children, and thus cannot meet their business needs.

And yet this data from Triplebyte is incredibly encouraging because while we screwed up the educational policy, it may not be so difficult to fix.

> 1) That's not really a "bootcamp" issue as it is with a candidate who can't be bothered to learn basic programming concepts or open a book on their own. Almost every book I've read on programming covers OOP in most languages.

I wholeheartedly disagree here, and think it very much is an issue with bootcamps. If a bootcamp doesn't even introduce its students to such concepts as classes, instances, OOP, and basic data types, then it has failed to adequately serve its students with fundamental knowledge and offered a shitty introduction to programming. I've worked to mentor a few people who have come out of bootcamps, and I see this lack of knowledge consistently. When I do, it has never been because the student couldn't be bothered to read or study. It has always been because the concepts were never mentioned and introduced, and thus the student didn't even know it existed, thus that it was something they should understand. Whenever I have introduced the concepts, the students eat that shit up, because they really are interested in learning.

Personally, I think a great many bootcamps are poor places to learn programming because they overwhelmingly focus on web-stack. When you're learning to place shit into the DOM, you don't need to care if it's an int, string, dictionary, array, etc. When you aren't being taught to store your data in an SQL table, you don't become aware of data types, parsing ints, casting strings, coercing one type to another, validating types, etc. You're just being introduced to storing blobs of JSON into Mongo or whatever. Hell, when I started with JS so many years ago, I was rather dumbfounded there was a difference between == and ===. This leads to fresh, potentially valuable developers who don't even know what they don't know. And when that's your starting point, it's a bit unfair to think it's the students' fault. We wouldn't say that of CS graduates.

Bootcamps provide an often too-rudimentary introduction to programming with poor technologies chosen for education. They'd be much better if they sought to teach real CS concepts, not just web-stack basics.

That's a path I've been considering as well - had a lot of CS background, hated running Unix compilers instead of working with HTML & C++ (already learned some in HS) - so ditched the major. Went with English, which, you know, is another language 'n all. Got into the working world, still have tech savvy...

So to me I have to question the ROI of walking away from 5+ years of professional advancement and jump into software development again - by way of an in-person bootcamp. I'm not going back to a Uni or interested in online learning settings. However, I do recall the concepts and am certainly excited by the developments in languages and technology since watching some of the roots take hold.

Being a "creative" person who can speak "engineering" is one of my strongest, and often the most unusual of my professional strengths.

While you're largely right, there are pay in full and up front boot camps out there that tend to churn through people and either not care about or grossly inflate their placement rates.

And there's a big difference between "12 weeks of structured curriculum" that you get from the ones mentioned vs the "12 weeks of follow the Hartl Tutorial and meet with a mentor for 3 hours a week" variety like Bloc.

One thing I realised my final year of University is how much marketing Universities do towards the job market.

They shop their students and curriculum around to employers all over the county (some on an international level).

There is going to be a lot of inertia involved when it comes to hiring from Universities that most Bootcamps don't even consider or spend time doing. I don't think they give universities any cause for concern, and wont, for some time.