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Bootcamps vs. College

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Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#131

Post by p4wnc6 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #51
lloyd-christmas wrote: post #26

How is this possible? I think one key aspect that is missing is that boot camp graduates aren't straight off the barista lineup. I took one at age 28 after having worked in a technical role in finance since undergrad. The average age of my class was probably 29. Beyond just time in the workforce, I had a double major in math and economics with a minor in applied statistics. Had I dropped "Behavioral Economics" and ta…

Right, all else being equal I would expect bootcamp grads to be significantly more valuable than CS majors, since presumably they're also experts in design, marketing, product management, or some other area. In addition to being able to contribute in a non-development capacity, even in terms of software being good at coding is probably at most 20% of what makes a good developer.

Being good at coding, in the sense of making robust software products that can stably support components of a business, is way more than 20% of the value of a developer.

Additionally, in my experience, it's way easier to teach non-development skills to thoughtful programmers than it is to teach adequate programming skills to thoughtful non-programmers.

Some of the best designers, managers, product analysts, business intelligence analysts, marketing strategists, and client engagement managers I've ever met all came from heavily theoretical CS backgrounds and spent a lot of their early careers mostly coding.

Understanding the interrelationships between business components and business needs often has many similarities with designing quality software. And many of the pitfalls of software (e.g. monolithic classes, no separate interfaces, no solid tests) are directly analogous to non-software organizational problems as well.

Plenty of people who gain technical credential through a bootcamp will go on to do a great job, and their other skills will be of tremendous value.

But it just seems absurd to me to try to make some kind of rank ordering between bootcamp grads and CS degree holders. You're discounting just how highly effective CS degree holders are at translating their very general skill set into other domains of work. Generally speaking, they are very good at this -- so good that it's often threatening to non-technical people who would prefer if there was an easy stereotype suggesting that CS people should be siloed away from non-tech work.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#132

Post by arebop »

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've worked for places with trivia-esque interviews and I agree it works really badly. The only things worse was the "tell me about your greatest weakness..." style favored by the MBAs.

I'm very happy with the people I work with now, who were mostly hired by an audition-style interview: here's a problem that's simple to explain and not simple to solve; solve it with a mix of whiteboard coding (required) and (optionally) proofs, drawings, arguments...

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#133

Post by JustSomeNobody »

Likely, you see more people getting a CS degree because they feel it's a good job than the people going to bootcamps. The people going to bootcamps are more likely to be doing it because they've done some development and really like it.

Now, what bootcamps aren't going to give you is the breadth of a CS degree. But if you're getting a CS degree just for the money, you're not picking things up very well either.

So, I can see where a certain % of CS students and bootcampers are roughly equivalent.

I feel if you're very interested in CS and get a college degree and do really well in college, you're going to come out ahead of someone taking a 3 month bootcamp. I also feel there's more opportunity for CS degrees. ie, one probably isn't going to see too many 3 month bootcampers doing real time development. (I'm talk real real-time, not that buzzword web real time.)

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#134

Post by Jemaclus »

avs733 wrote: post #17

there is a simple confounding variable here that unfortunately triplebyte can't touch with a ten foot pole...age/work experience College is largely about transitioning children to adults (we can argue that separately) the personal and professional development that students go through over 4 years is vast. They are becoming adults in many frames, including understand the world and technology as systems. They aren't ju…

I think you may be making a faulty assumption that Bootcamp means the candidate didn't go to college. Many, many bootcamp grads DID go to college... just not for CS.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#135

Post by Kinnard »

I would love to see a break out for people who are neither bootcamp grads nor college grads but who are completely self-taught, like me :)

Surely they've received some applicants in this category.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#136

Post by bobwaycott »

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…

I, too, have often been amazed at interviewing and working with CS grads who can't seem to correctly think abstractly about a problem, breaking it apart into sensible constituent parts, and then productively attacking the problem. Sometimes, they seem unable to just start working on the matter, and instead get lost in thinking up the most creative and novel ways they could solve it with some new technical thing.

I studied history and philosophy in college/grad school.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#138

Post by kmonsen »

lloyd-christmas wrote: post #90
kmonsen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any date on job performance? It seems to me the complete lack of algorithms is a land mine for any project. I think it is a lot more likely a coder with little fundamentals will be able to grow or see the bigger picture. I agree that not all jobs require this skills, but then suddenly you get a divided workforce with designers and implementers.

> It seems to me the complete lack of algorithms is a land mine for any project. If you hire someone and release them into the wild of your codebase, that's a failure on your part not theirs. New hires are an investment, they shouldn't be treated as an immediate need-based solution. My experience in two fields has shown me that new hires are a drain on resources for a fairly significant time period, regardless of the…

I don't know, when I was a new grad I started on the codebase more or less right away. Didn't even have code reviews back then.

If you have to train them, then it seems the coding part should be cheaper then the algo part.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#139

Post by matthewmacleod »

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…

Chill out!

It's not that four years of study guarantees capability, but four years of study does mean far more exposure to far more technology and methodologies than a 12-week bootcamp can offer.

In my experience, boot-camp and self-taught developers have a different set of skills from a CS graduate. The former could well be very effective at lots of development tasks - but I have found that knowledge is often shallow, in that while they may practically know about, say, implementing a web application in Rails, they would struggle with a different toolset.

This is obviously not always the case, and there are many talented self-learners out there, in part because they aren't as lazy as the somewhat more entitled CS graduate. But contrary to the popular trope, I have rarely if ever encountered a CS graduate who can't code.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#140

Post by arcticfox »

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…

I agree with your assessment, and I have a CS degree.

I consider myself self-taught, I just happened to do a lot of it during a 4-year period. I'm pretty grateful to my school, whose premise is basically: "we're just going to set you up on some smart teams in some difficult situations. Learn your way out of it."

There's nothing inherently wrong with CS degrees, since you can basically learn whatever you want while getting one, but they don't mean anything either.

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