Bootcamps vs. College

Definitely agree with you here...as a current faculty member, but someone who has been largely self-taught in recent years, I have to keep reminding myself that I myself needed the structure and artificial deadlines of homework and finals to get into the groove, to get to the point where I could get a job in which I learned more skills at a significantly faster rate (daily professional deadlines tend to do that to you). Not everyone starts out as a self-learner.

Recently, a guy named Haseeb made some news for scoring a job worth $250K at Airbnb even though he was an English major who was not even a year removed from his bootcamp entry date. People were pissed but if you read the guy's story, you'd see that he's not your regular bootcamper...he was a millionaire as a teenager after teaching himself how to play poker...and this is how he describes his bootcamp experience:

http://haseebq.com/farewell-app-academy-hello-airbnb-part-ii...

> Entering into App Academy, barely knowing the basics of Ruby, I came into the office and grinded every day, spending 80+ hour weeks just coding and studying. I’d come in at 9AM in the morning and leave around midnight, 7 days a week, sleeping in a bunk bed in SOMA in a 200 square feet shared room.

How many students at even the best colleges can describe themselves as working that hard on anything (well, other than athletes)?

I'd love to see some more mathematical analysis of these differences. In particular, I suspect that while the averages are similar, the distributions look extremely different.

Specifically, the average engineer out of either a bootcamp or college is pretty mediocre. But the top 10% of engineers are mostly college graduates and are definitely not bootcampers. This is because the best developers are overwhelmingly passionate about development and have been doing it since high school. If you love programming, you might go to college to get a firmer academic standing. You definitely won't go to a bootcamp—if you've been programming for 5 years, a 3 week bootcamp makes no sense.

On the other hand, when it comes to the bottom tier I suspect bootcampers are a lot better. This is mostly because the bottom tier of CS graduates are atrociously bad. Regrettably, it is possible to graduate with a degree in CS without ever having written a single program by yourself. They slink by mostly through cramming for exams and "collaborating" with peers. My impression is that bootcamps are actually less tolerant of this behavior: you won't make it through a bootcamp without ever programming autonomously.

It depends on the school. Some bootcamps have very low acceptance rates to keep their placement numbers high - as that is their main marketing point. They bring in people who can demonstrate they already have the mindset but don't have the knowledge.

Other bootcamps just need you to be able to use your computer and you're in.

Ditto! I went to a bootcamp after having worked in aerospace for 6+ years and, I had a mechanical engineering degree. I had programmed for a long time and had no problem with basic algorithm exercises (of the kind they spend the early part of these camps on). [1]

The problem is, there was no easy way -- for someone like me wanting to go into software -- to (convincingly) say, "Hey, I can code and think abstractly. Give me a chance?"

(If you're going to say, "just contribute to an open source project", there's actually a big gap between being able to code and being able to debug the zillion things that can go wrong in just setting up the builds for a given project. The Open Hatch project c. 2011 was specifically dedicated to helping people contribute, and yet following their instructions would still dump you in a an unnamed text editor with no way to exit.)

[1] Frustratingly, the instructors were very unhelpful at the stuff I needed help with the most -- forming a mental model of how and why Rails works.

Couldn't agree more but I think bootcamps could probably steal some of the magic that CS has.

I spent years programming as an amateur/hobbyist and I thought I knew it all. When I started studying discrete maths and functional programming at the university level it opened my eyes to a lot of things. Suddenly computers weren't hardware they were just implementations of a theoretical idea where many more things were actually possible than I had ever thought of before.

Once you know even elementary discrete math such as sets and logic programming becomes more of an exercise in seeing if you can realize abstract ideas and models.

I do wish CS gave me a better more practical mindset around real world problem solving though. Maybe there are some things you can only learn in the industry but it took me awhile to adjust my attitude and really become a productive programmer.