171–180 of 449 posts
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My CS degree was four years of heavy abstract thinking. If you can get those skills elsewhere great, but I don't think it's that common.
Many of those who took that CS degree never learned abstract thinking. It's not something you first learn on university it's something you develop way before that.
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 shallo…
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've spent my career (no CS degree!) working alongside CS grads. I've gone further, faster, than most of them.
So we should replace selection bias for confirmation bias?
It's hard to read your reply as anything but reactionary and defensive, given that you paint the stance of the original comment as far more pro-college than it comes off as to me, only to knock it down with an anecdote about yourself. The original comment was about boot camps vs colleges, not colleges vs work experience and self-taught people. A twelve week course is not a substitute for four years, even if it is intensive. There's just not enough time to reflect on what you've done or be exposed to enough different concepts in depth to be equivalent.
That's not to say that experience doesn't trump both. You have experience. which accounts for your skill level. College and boot camps both try to impart experience at an accelerated pace, college just attempts to be broader and deeper over a longer period, while boot camps must necessarily by very narrow due to their length, any increase in the breadth of topics will necessarily reduce depth.
> CS grads are always surprised that I never got a degree
Then I imagine you are referring to fresh graduates. From my experience, there's quite a high percentage of non-CS people who do software engineering, you quickly learn to drop your preconceptions lest you be continually shown ignorant. I don't blame college graduates for this, they've yet to experience most of the world.
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My CS degree was four years of heavy abstract thinking. If you can get those skills elsewhere great, but I don't think it's that common.
Based on what? The amount of bias in this thread is very strange. I think what's going on is that the people with CS degrees invested a significant chunk of their life and a significant amount of money into getting a CS degree. Therefore they're invested in denying the possibility that the qualities they achieved through their program can be achieved without. The article presents some evidence in support of this poss…
I'm still deeply skeptical of the average bootcamp graduate though. They're mostly people following a gold rush without any passion for programming. Moreover, bootcamps do their absolute best to distort hiring signals (ie. specifically targeting interview skills and portfolio projects). I've interviewed dozens of bootcamp graduates and haven't found a single one who I'd hire (that being said, I also think the average college graduate is terrible).
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I believe we are misunderstanding each other, as you are making some assumptions. We do spend time training junior developers. We are hands on during work. I'm talking about one problem at the start of the process. In the example, I didn't touch on their choice of sort algorithm. I was pointing out that they believed that re-sorting the same array, for every single GetIndexAt(x) call, was an ok thing to do. The major…
Are they saying that it's an actual okay thing to do? ...like, you challenged them on it and had a discussion and they said it was perfectly okay regardless of size of array? Or it was just allowed to let lie and they said it's an okay thing to do because that's what's in their code? I think it's a huge mistake to conflate whether someone does know and whether they can know something. Some of the best programmers I'v…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My CS degree was four years of heavy abstract thinking. If you can get those skills elsewhere great, but I don't think it's that common.
Based on what? The amount of bias in this thread is very strange. I think what's going on is that the people with CS degrees invested a significant chunk of their life and a significant amount of money into getting a CS degree. Therefore they're invested in denying the possibility that the qualities they achieved through their program can be achieved without. The article presents some evidence in support of this poss…
I could probably muddle along with out them but it changed my entire reference frame for how I thought about computers.
I am certain a motivated person supplement most of the useful parts of a CS B.S. degree but that can be hard when you are too cocky or foolish to even know what you are missing out on (which was my case).
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Many of those who took that CS degree never learned abstract thinking. It's not something you first learn on university it's something you develop way before that.
My concept of abstraction evolved significantly during my time in school.
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> 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.
I did as well, but...
> Didn't even have code reviews back then.
Not so much this one.
> If you have to train them, then it seems the coding part should be cheaper then the algo part.
I do actually agree. But there tends to be other aspects of the job outside of just code and algorithms. Prior work experience is a shining star compared to a 22 year old in any field. I see my coworkers more than my family. Someone that has a full understanding of everything that goes along with that has a head start across the board. Someone changing careers in their late 20's also tends to put a hell of a lot more into improving themselves than just the basic progress-of-life learning. I just think it evens out as long as you're consciously hiring people for the right role.
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…
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. Gi…
That's more or less all most CS graduates can say though. I personally don't think anyone is qualified to be a professional developer until they've been programming for several years (especially coding in an unstructured way).
I don't want to be combative, but what made you think you needed a bootcamp? I learned to program long before I went to college and was hired for programming projects long before I graduated.