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As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

nytimes.com

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Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#121

Post by curun1r »

phatbyte wrote: post #117

As someone who interviewed dozens of bootcampers I can give some insight. 1) Most of the bootcamps teach the basic of front-end, and a lot of them, teach by doing without explaining a lot of basic concepts. They are basically money grabbers and throw these people out of the door as fast as possible to get their money back. 2) A lot of the students are in for the money, not for the love of the job. Sorry, but it's tru…

> The best developers I worked with are the self-taught guys/girls who learn on their own before they even hit the college

I think this is the crux of the issues I had with bootcamp candidates. They were reasonably strong in the areas that they'd been taught, but there were gaping holes in their knowledge wherever they hadn't been taught. They could explain how to build a site with a Node backend and an Angular front end, but they couldn't explain why any of the decisions they'd been taught were good ones. And there were fairly basic concepts that were completely alien to them...of the 20 or so I interviewed, not one had even heard the term 'load balancer', let alone could tell me why I might need to use one. They had no notion of 'threading' or what it meant for a piece of code to be 'thread-safe' because they were only taught Node and its concurrency model. Even then, not one of them had heard of 'nextTick' or understood the event loop beyond the fact that it would call their callback function with the results. Their experience felt like a facade that was designed to seem impressive than it actually was. And all the areas where a developer with a traditional background would have thought, 'huh...I wonder how that works?' and then spent 2 hours figuring it out were completely unexplored.

This is why I think developers coming out of college are significantly more likely to be better at software development...not necessarily because the education they got in school was better, though I do believe an education starting with first principles and teaching you to figure out the solution from there is a better approach, but because the people that choose to study that in school are self-selecting for curiosity in the subject. They're the ones that hit something they don't know and go learn it rather being told what to learn. And they're the ones that spent at least 2 years following those tangents to get a more well-rounded education. Because any developer who only knows what they've been taught in courses, be they bootcamp or a traditional CS degree, is not going to have what it takes to learn on the job.

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#122

Post by tudelo »

phatbyte wrote: post #117

As someone who interviewed dozens of bootcampers I can give some insight. 1) Most of the bootcamps teach the basic of front-end, and a lot of them, teach by doing without explaining a lot of basic concepts. They are basically money grabbers and throw these people out of the door as fast as possible to get their money back. 2) A lot of the students are in for the money, not for the love of the job. Sorry, but it's tru…

The most boring category is interesting... I might fall in to that category. Any advice to be "less boring"?

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#123

Post by zbtaylor1 »

Method-X wrote: post #23

Most coding bootcamps are a complete waste of money. Ever since I launched https://edabit.com , I've noticed a ton of traffic coming from these bootcamps and I'm not sure what to think of it. On the one hand, I like the free promotion but on the other, I can't help but feel as though these people are getting ripped off (considering they can access the site for free).

Is there some affiliation between this and the Zurb foundation? That yeti looks familiar...

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#124

Post by vonmoltke »

phatbyte wrote: post #117

As someone who interviewed dozens of bootcampers I can give some insight. 1) Most of the bootcamps teach the basic of front-end, and a lot of them, teach by doing without explaining a lot of basic concepts. They are basically money grabbers and throw these people out of the door as fast as possible to get their money back. 2) A lot of the students are in for the money, not for the love of the job. Sorry, but it's tru…

> A lot of the students are in for the money, not for the love of the job.

Who cares? Can they do the job or not? Do they have the work ethic and professionalism to continue to do so?

The vast majority of people, including those who excel at their respective fields, don't love their jobs. This industry needs to stop using "passion" as a lazy signal for work ethic.

> The most boring developers I work with, the the ones who only learn to code while in college and never developed any interested to learn before that.

Again, who gives a shit if they are "boring"?

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#125

Post by HumbleGamer »

babaganoosh89 wrote: post #91
sheepmullet wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hack Reactor is ~11 hours a day 11 hours a day for 12 weeks can't compare with two hours a day for a year.

Apples to oranges.

11 hours a day is a bit extreme. After a certain point I would be concerned about my retention. Personally, I've never had good results from studying more than a few hours a day, but I understand this may not be the case for others. I usually study a bit, take a break for a couple hours, and study some more.

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#126

Post by aczerepinski »

phatbyte wrote: post #117

As someone who interviewed dozens of bootcampers I can give some insight. 1) Most of the bootcamps teach the basic of front-end, and a lot of them, teach by doing without explaining a lot of basic concepts. They are basically money grabbers and throw these people out of the door as fast as possible to get their money back. 2) A lot of the students are in for the money, not for the love of the job. Sorry, but it's tru…

A 93% failure rate is absurdly high, and probably more indicative of an inadequate hiring process than "bootcamp grads are all dumb lolz". Are there any examples you could share of relevant interview questions that this group faked their way through, but later were revealed to not understand? Have the hiring managers since been mentored on how to do a better job vetting candidates?

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#127

Post by model_m_warrior »

vonmoltke wrote: post #124
phatbyte wrote: post #117

As someone who interviewed dozens of bootcampers I can give some insight. 1) Most of the bootcamps teach the basic of front-end, and a lot of them, teach by doing without explaining a lot of basic concepts. They are basically money grabbers and throw these people out of the door as fast as possible to get their money back. 2) A lot of the students are in for the money, not for the love of the job. Sorry, but it's tru…

> A lot of the students are in for the money, not for the love of the job. Who cares? Can they do the job or not? Do they have the work ethic and professionalism to continue to do so? The vast majority of people, including those who excel at their respective fields, don't love their jobs. This industry needs to stop using "passion" as a lazy signal for work ethic. > The most boring developers I work with, the the one…

> Again, who gives a shit if they are "boring"?

Me.

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#128

Post by ghaff »

vonmoltke wrote: post #124
phatbyte wrote: post #117

As someone who interviewed dozens of bootcampers I can give some insight. 1) Most of the bootcamps teach the basic of front-end, and a lot of them, teach by doing without explaining a lot of basic concepts. They are basically money grabbers and throw these people out of the door as fast as possible to get their money back. 2) A lot of the students are in for the money, not for the love of the job. Sorry, but it's tru…

> A lot of the students are in for the money, not for the love of the job. Who cares? Can they do the job or not? Do they have the work ethic and professionalism to continue to do so? The vast majority of people, including those who excel at their respective fields, don't love their jobs. This industry needs to stop using "passion" as a lazy signal for work ethic. > The most boring developers I work with, the the one…

This also comes back to broader discussions about programmers needing to have worked on this stuff since they were kids. Perhaps uniquely among STEM subjects. No one expects a chemical engineer to have done anything other than to have enjoyed and done well in high school chemistry prior to college or to have chemical engineering "side projects."

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#129

Post by apatters »

vonmoltke wrote: post #124
phatbyte wrote: post #117

As someone who interviewed dozens of bootcampers I can give some insight. 1) Most of the bootcamps teach the basic of front-end, and a lot of them, teach by doing without explaining a lot of basic concepts. They are basically money grabbers and throw these people out of the door as fast as possible to get their money back. 2) A lot of the students are in for the money, not for the love of the job. Sorry, but it's tru…

> A lot of the students are in for the money, not for the love of the job. Who cares? Can they do the job or not? Do they have the work ethic and professionalism to continue to do so? The vast majority of people, including those who excel at their respective fields, don't love their jobs. This industry needs to stop using "passion" as a lazy signal for work ethic. > The most boring developers I work with, the the one…

Not sure how the industry may define passion, but for me it's a constant drive to develop one's skills, improve one's output, and an interest in all these things outside of the hours you get paid to be interested in them.

I've hired good developers who had this type of passion, and good developers who lacked it. But I've yet to hire a truly great developer from the latter camp.

It seems to me this is true in just about every industry, those who have devoted the most time and energy to a skillset tend to be the best at it.

Re: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

#130

Post by vonmoltke »

Alacart wrote: post #93
colllectorof wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad reality of software engineering is that the wast majority of code everyone writes is not something they would want to show in an interview. Even if they legally could, which is rarely the case for commercially developed software. Heck, even reasonably good software can produce a very negative impression. Utilitarian code can be seen as ugly or overly simplistic. Elegant conceptual stuff often runs the risk of…

Your first argument is true, but I would argue that if you already know what you're doing, you can write some demo portfolio code specifically to show off your skills in very little time. Make that code pleasant to read, free of legal constraints, and be ready and able to talk about it. You probably will spend at least 40 hours a week at your job and it will dramatically affect your life. That's worth spending a few…

> Make that code pleasant to read, free of legal constraints, and be ready and able to talk about it.

That would be difficult for people who work for companies that claim presumptive ownership over everything they produce.

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