In many cases it's literally the same instructors at the community college that teach the first two years of a CS program at the universities. Don't waste your money sitting in a room with 100 other students while the instructor is forced to move through a rigidly scheduled curriculum that is totally at odds with what students are actually struggling with. They all seem to prefer teaching at community colleges as well.
Teach at a Community College
131–140 of 155 posts
Re: Teach at a Community College
#132I looked into this, as I'm starting to burn out of working in the industry. The community colleges in my area require a surprising amount of prerequisites and pay _dismally_. Even with 15 years of industry experience, I'd need at least a year or two of additional schooling (while not being paid) to earn a paltry few hundred dollars per credit hour per semester while teaching. Hard sell to not get paid for a few years…
I'm not in tech but I'm qualified to adjunct/teach some other subjects and this is it. I'm even a good teacher. But why would I do it when I'm making more and I'm treated better working retail ? My local CC just posted a part-time librarian job I would jump on if it paid more than 21/hr. Fuck that - I could do better as a waitress or bartender. If they want to use my experience and education they can pay for it; God…
Most of the time it's professors from universities that are financially well off already and who like teaching, often nearing retirement.
If you need another fancy job on your resume or a big paycheck then it isn't for you. It certainly does a good job filtering out instructors that only care about their own advancement and don't give a shit about teaching the courses, which is unfortunately a significant percentage of the people that teach university courses.
I'd go as far as to say academia in general isn't for you if you want to get paid the big bucks. If you aren't professor emeritus or department chair for a large CS department, then it is never going to be competitive with industry. That should be obvious, but I guess for some people it isn't.
Re: Teach at a Community College
#133I taught Celullar Networks and Android Internals at my alma mater just this past semester and can relate with TFA. It took 4 to 6 hours of prep to deliver a one hour class. Preparing from existing course materials available online or from YouTube and Wikipedia was the fastest as opposed to going through the text books. I found it very hard to know when to go fast and when to go slow, what to skip and what to include.…
I've taught HS kids for ~4 years so not quite the same demographic as yours. That said - and I know folks object to doing this - you have to play disciplinarian _and_ teacher. Set a firm culture around no phone usage and kick anyone out who uses one. Kudos to you for going back to your alma mater and teaching. That's something I want to do, too.
That's another advantage of community college courses, is it may actually be practical to implement that sort of discipline. It certainly isn't when it's you and a TA and 100 students in a big lecture hall.
Re: Teach at a Community College
#134Paraphrase: teaching a few classes at a community college can be great for you , in the begining , but probably not long term, and it is probably not great for your students. You are doing something new, learning to communicate, potentially even learning some new material or a new perspective on something you know. At the very least, you get inspiration to create new materials (for teaching). This experience is not g…
The people teaching at the community colleges don't tend to be new at teaching, since you need to already be financially well off to be able to do it. And the credential requirements are still high enough that you can't just walk in without at least a Master's and some level of industry experience that would allow you to easily make more in industry.
It isn't a "bootcamp" for aspiring professors. Think of it more as a public service for professors nearing retirement who actually like to teach and interact with the students.
Re: Teach at a Community College
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also for people looking to get the best value for their tuition dollars. Many colleges (often by law) have to accept local community college transfer credits. A freshman can save thousands by taking prerequisite/introductory math, science, and other courses at a community college and then transferring to a traditional college or university to complete an undergraduate degree.
> Also for people looking to get the best value for their tuition dollars. I'd like to add that one of the ways community colleges provide educational value is by putting you in a classroom made up of more than just teenagers and 20-somethings who came to college directly from high school. For a lot of subjects, the quality of discussion is improved a lot by having parents, veterans, people who have had varied or mul…
There are networking benefits to this as well. You are significantly more likely to meet people already working in industry at the CC than at a university.
Re: Teach at a Community College
#136There's sometimes a stigma, which we should get rid of. First, I had great instructors at Portland Community College. Also, in addition to what I learned there, an area company (Tektronix spinoff) happened to put a job post there for a co-op student, and it turned out to be a great company, doing big things, which launched my career. After later working and then going to fancy-pants schools, one day a professor disse…
> When I'm hiring, I see a lot of MIT/Stanford/Ivy on resumes, but I also pay as much attention to resumes from people who went to other schools, or who took some other path through their circumstances. I agree wholeheartedly. As another datapoint, over the years I've worked with many people from "top" schools like MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Ivies, etc. Generally they have not been strong engineers. I don't real…
When you've got a prestigious school on your resume you don't need to worry as much about improving your skills to get hired. They don't have to put in as much effort to be marketable to employers, so they don't in some cases.
Anecdotally, my interview/application rate went from something like 5% to more like 25% when I finished my B.S. I previously only had a C.S. associates degree and a year or so of credit at university in an unrelated program from just after high school. By the time I enrolled in the B.S. program I had ~3 years of industry experience and a promotion on my belt. None of that (including my contributions to major open source projects, and other code samples that to this day I still think are high quality) made as big of a difference for hiring managers as the scrap of paper from a university. I didn't learn a damn thing and had to pay ~$20,000 for the privilege, lost out on time with my young son, etc. It's worth it for the security of knowing you will always be able to find a job on short notice, but it's also massively frustrating. I wish there was a B.S. equivalency exam of some kind that was taken seriously.
Anyways, here are some of the advantages I see in hiring community college grads instead of or in addition to bootcamp grads, the other major way companies hire non-traditionally:
1. The students did have to put in at least a solid ~2 ish years and had to work on the fundamentals. A big one here is being able to step through code mentally, which is something we often forget has to be learned.
2. They are much more likely to actually like programming, given that they stuck with it for 2 years. I worry the shorter bootcamps sometimes aren't able to weed out highly intelligent people that nevertheless are going to end up hating the job, and that they are focused too much on front end web development that is flashier than a lot of the work many companies need done. So sometimes the candidate from a bootcamp may just like front end but hate more general programming.
3. You can't just copy code into a GitHub profile and have bootcamp instructors hold your hand through everything. If somebody with just an associates shows you code that isn't obviously some kind of brain teaser from a course exercise, you can bet they wrote it themselves without a lot of handholding. The code may suck compared to what you get from bootcamp grads, but it is significantly more representative of what the candidate will actually produce on the job.
4. I don't just hire web developers. There is no bootcamp I am aware of that teaches C programming or that goes through computer architecture and basic operating system stuff. All of that is covered by the local community colleges in their associates degree programs.
Re: Teach at a Community College
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Community College is for people who are busy getting things done. FiveThirtyEight has a great article from 2016 that agrees with you. [0] It also debunks a lot of the myths of higher education, like the myth that students are mostly majoring in humanities: >What few journalists seem to understand, Goldrick-Rab said, is how tenuous a grasp many students have on college. They are working while in school, often jugglin…
I'd love to see an update. 2016 doesn't seem like long ago but in the labor markets and advent of TikTok I'm curious to see what the industry (higher ed) looks like compared to trade schools w/ TikTok channel on the side or something. I've met a ton of folks who, like me, decided to sail off into the sunset and started a youtube channel and now that's all they do and are thriving. I decided against the channel and in…
>I've met a ton of folks who, like me, decided to sail off into the sunset and started a youtube channel and now that's all they do and are thriving.
That is very surprising to me, and I am a reasonably-successful YouTuber.
For nearly everyone, YouTube is not a viable career path. It’s not even a viable path to making money. Any money.
YouTube is the most saturated market that I know of. There are almost no barriers to entry, and your competition is everyone else on the planet who has a YouTube channel, plus, to some degree, the entire entertainment industry. Success on YouTube requires hard work, but hard work doesn’t guarantee even a bit of success. To succeed on YouTube, you don’t just have to create great content; you have to create content that people want to watch more than everything else that is available to them. That, obviously, is very hard. And even if you do it, a significant luck component remains.
Why did you “decide against the channel?”
Re: Teach at a Community College
#138> Learning to teach To learn, teach.
For contrast, there's also: Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Not that I 100% agree with that.
If none teach, few can do or teach.
"This is where teachers are paid the most" (2021) https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/teachers-pay-countrie... :
> Globally, teachers’ salaries vary hugely, according to the OECD’s Education At A Glance 2021 report
Re: Teach at a Community College
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, I just looked it up and the largest community college in my city now charges about the same as I paid to go to the nearby state university 10 years ago. It's clearly not going to the instructors. It must be a combination of new construction and administrative bloat.
Or less state funding: https://www.highereddive.com/news/state-funding-for-communit... > States are giving four-year colleges $63 million less in fiscal 2021 than they did last year, a 0.1% decline. Meanwhile, they’re cutting funding to two-year institutions by $457 million, a 2% decline. > Enrollment losses and pandemic-related expenses are buffeting community colleges’ budgets as these schools face cuts in state su…
State funding doesn’t matter as much for many CCs because they have local taxing authority, just like K-12 education.
This is another reason why they are often significantly cheaper than a 4-yr school in the same state.