Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

#181

Post by learc83 » Fri, Oct 23, 2015, 6:17 AM UTC

lloyd-christmas wrote: post #175

jqm wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you had spent years and a lot of money studying 1'st normative forms. You have a lot of pride in in this knowledge... it represents a significant investment in time and money and makes you feel special. Suddenly, a 3 month bootcamp is insinuating it can turn out developers making almost what you are. You may just get a little dicky. But I would guess there are at least a few shop owning mechanics who make as…

Nobody is insinuating that they'll be competing with you. I had a class of 18, I'm one of two who ended up as a back end developer. It wouldn't surprise you much to learn that the two of us were both Math majors. The rest were design-y people who wanted to expand their job prospects and ended up as front end developers. I mean this in the nicest of ways to front end developers, but your algorithms mean jack-shit to t…

>That being said, 4 years down the road of real world experience, I doubt there will be any separation between myself and someone with a CS degree and 4 years of work experience.

That depends entirely on what you do in those 4 years. If you spend that time studying algorithms, data structures, graph theory, discrete math, and the theory of computation, then you may be right.

If you spend those 4 years making CRUD apps, then there will still be a large gap.

I speak from experience by the way. I was a professional programmer for 5 years before I went back to get my CS degree. There were so many things that I didn't know that I didn't know.

It's the difference between spending a week banging your head against a wall or spending 20 minutes realizing your problem is just a variant of a graph theory problem that was solved 50 years ago.

Re: Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

#182

Post by blumkvist » Fri, Oct 23, 2015, 7:44 AM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #152

blumkvist wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody stops you to do your own book keeping or management accounting/budgeting.

Sure, but there are plenty of accounting tasks that you do need to be certified to be allowed do. Is there an analogue to that for software (in the US)?

Certification, no. Practicalities - yes.

Re: Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

#183

Post by indymike » Fri, Oct 23, 2015, 12:02 PM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #101

bko wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Medical Yes. There is plenty of work that can be done by a nurse that doesn't need to be done by a doctor. It seems silly that someone gets sent to school for over a decade to talk to me about whether I can take a drug to bring back the spark in my relationship. > Law Yes. There are plenty of routine legal procedures that should be allowed to be performed by someone that doesn't have to go through the costly proces…

Becoming a nurse or paralegal requires far more certification than software development. It's actually quite amazing how much of an outlier software is in the realm of professional qualification. Accounting is perhaps a more interesting corollary because it doesn't have the built-in awe and long history of respect as the medical and legal professions: perhaps we should have 12-week tax accounting bootcamps! I'm being…

There's a tax bootcamp in a strip mall I drive by on the way to work. It's a nine week program for people that want to be tax preparers. Same story as developers. Fast path to a better paying job.

What is changing right now is that demand for skilled people is outstripping the education system's ability to produce them. So you see the emergence of schools and eventually employer driven training programs. This has been coming for a long time, and it is actually a good thing. It's actually an opportunity.

Re: Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

#184

Post by kotojo » Fri, Oct 23, 2015, 12:08 PM UTC

almostApatriot1 wrote: post #178

kotojo wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually just went through General Assembly's Web Development Immersive course and finished in July. I'm in a similar situation to that. I learned HTML/CSS/JS, then ruby on rails and MEAN stack. After I finished I was at the point to know enough to know I don't really know much of anything, and got hired into an apprenticeship program a local company was running, even though the majority of the stack I learned at G…

Funny, every GA grad says this on Reddit/HN, yet the ones I've talked to claim otherwise, and GA still has yet to release any sort of Employment Statistics. You'd think they'd use some of that 70 million to publish some official stats before starting up all these new expensive courses...

I will say I have helped ta at General Assembly after I finished, and there is a reason you don't see those stats, they don't have them. My individual campus has them now, and the outcomes people kind of had their own list, but there is no one major list in GA for that info.

Also you will hear wildly different GA experiences because every campus tackles the curriculum differently. Mine went JS prework, first 3 weeks of HTML/CSS/JS, next 3 Ruby/Rails, next 3 full MEAN stack, next 3 either random lessons about things like web sockets, comp sci topics, or any other thing the instructors found important. I talked to a LA grad though, and it was completely different. They had Ruby prework, and then day one started learning about Angular.

It's really all about the campus. If you want to go to GA, find out about that campus, not GA in general.

Re: Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

#185

Post by bphogan » Fri, Oct 23, 2015, 7:56 PM UTC

jtmcmc wrote: post #171

bphogan wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with all of this. But I've seen people who came from nothing rise to the occasion and turn things around. And if we'd screened them out, the world would be worse off for it. The perspective they bring demonstrates the true, non-politicized idea of diversity. And so that's what I fear happens if the industry picks this bootcamp thing and runs with it; that we'll end up with a very homogeneous group of develope…

traditional schools absolutely don't have open enrollment. Try telling that to MIT or Stanford. While I agree that there should be programs out there that reach out to underprivileged people and teach them to program I don't think the bootcamp model really suits them. There are a number of organizations that do things like this (there should definitely be more though) but one of the main things is that the should gen…

MIT is launching a micro degree that is open-enrollment-based. The number of students in K-12 is trending downward, thus the number of students in the pipeline is also trending downward.

So more schools are opening their doors to bring in more people. You'll see the trend continue.

Re: Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

#186

Post by bphogan » Fri, Oct 23, 2015, 7:58 PM UTC

learc83 wrote: post #180

tdaltonc wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> open enrollment Do you mean that the program should be made available to anyone who wants to take it? What if there just isn't enough capacity to take that many people?

The usual solution is to raise prices until demand dies down to a level you can handle.

It's not entirely effective if you can get grants and loans to pay for it though.

Re: Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

#187

Post by Ologn » Fri, Oct 23, 2015, 8:53 PM UTC

learc83 wrote: post #181

lloyd-christmas wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is insinuating that they'll be competing with you. I had a class of 18, I'm one of two who ended up as a back end developer. It wouldn't surprise you much to learn that the two of us were both Math majors. The rest were design-y people who wanted to expand their job prospects and ended up as front end developers. I mean this in the nicest of ways to front end developers, but your algorithms mean jack-shit to t…

>That being said, 4 years down the road of real world experience, I doubt there will be any separation between myself and someone with a CS degree and 4 years of work experience. That depends entirely on what you do in those 4 years. If you spend that time studying algorithms, data structures, graph theory, discrete math, and the theory of computation, then you may be right. If you spend those 4 years making CRUD app…

> There were so many things that I didn't know that I didn't know.

I think that puts it very well. It's not just what people know they don't know, it's what they don't know they don't know. That's where it really hits them.