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Bootcamps vs. College

blog.triplebyte.com

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Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#181

Post by jedc »

llamataboot wrote: post #57
HNcow wrote: post #36

I'm in the process of hiring a junior position and have no bias towards college grads or bootcamp grads. The only negatives towards boot camp grads I've seen so far is: 1) One candidate had no idea what the terms "Class" or "OOP" even meant. I'm FINE with them not understanding stuff like sorts/advanced data structures, but he ACTUALLY had 0 idea what an int was. No lie! 2) I wish there wasn't such a heavy reliance o…

MongoDB (MEAN stack) seems to be a recent shift?? Most bootcamps have historically been Rails/SQL.

It is. When I hired last summer the Galvanize full-stack course was all Ruby/Rails. By this winter/spring it had shifted to full MEAN stack. I get the sense that it's an industry shift. (Which I personally find a bit frustrating...)

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#182

Post by SilasX »

morgante wrote: post #180
SilasX wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Hey, I can code and think abstractly. Give me a chance? 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…

That's the point -- I didn't. I just needed it to convince someone to give me a chance. Employers would assume someone still in college for CS can program, and so look there. They don't automatically make that assumption for some rando with a different degree.

To be sure, there were also probably some job-searching techniques that would have worked, but they're also hard to learn from reading pointers online if you don't automatically have the skill.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#183

Post by RegEx »

morgante wrote: post #164

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 pass…

> if you've been programming for 5 years, a 3 week bootcamp makes no sense

If you want to make a transition to web dev from say, systems programming, cramming that knowledge into a few weeks might not be a bad way to go. At that point, you should already know how to learn, it's just a matter of sitting down and learning it.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#184

Post by brudgers »

There are several factors that don't enter this analysis.

1. Bootcamps can be selective over a range of non-academic criteria such as interview skills, personal hygene, and prior work experience. Or to put it another way, unlike a public university, a boot camp can select for culture fit both in its internal cohorts and in the workplaces it targets.

2. Bootcamps tend to attract people with previous work experience: someone more likely to have several years of working to keep a roof over their head than a recent CS grad. There's a difference between a junior programmer with their first real job and a junior programmer who has spent six years working crappy jobs [or good ones].

3. Bootcamps have much more latitude to train for employment and employability. Listening to Jeff Meyerson's hours of bootcamp love songs, those interviews have left me with the distinct impression that doing so is common.

4. Bootcamp grads may come out with a stronger alumni network that can provide recent feedback about interview processes like Triplebyte's. Going in with some idea of what's coming is likely to produce better results.

5. Bootcamps don't have to report their "failures". There's no independent oversight or accountability of the sort common in university education. A "C student" may simply find it impossible to graduate a bootcamp. The bootcamps are free to shape their "graduate" pool however they wish.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#185

Post by [deleted] »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #115
nostrebored wrote: post #106

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…

[deleted]

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#186

Post by xo5050 »

bobwaycott wrote: post #136
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 st…

That sounds like it would be common under pressure. If you have 45 minutes to do something, it could really mess someone's thinking up. Even being nervous or not sleeping well the night before probably has a big effect on performance.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#187

Post by lolptdr »

morgante wrote: post #180
SilasX wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Hey, I can code and think abstractly. Give me a chance? 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…

I worked in chemical engineering roles for 5 years before deciding to attend a bootcamp. It seems like a refresher/shortcut to get into the webdev or programming industry, so a bit myopic, but it at least gives the added advantage of reducing the amount of time traditional programmers enter and gain traction in software development. Sometimes we only know that we love programming when we hate everything else, at least in my case.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#188

Post by sotojuan »

llamataboot wrote: post #57
HNcow wrote: post #36

I'm in the process of hiring a junior position and have no bias towards college grads or bootcamp grads. The only negatives towards boot camp grads I've seen so far is: 1) One candidate had no idea what the terms "Class" or "OOP" even meant. I'm FINE with them not understanding stuff like sorts/advanced data structures, but he ACTUALLY had 0 idea what an int was. No lie! 2) I wish there wasn't such a heavy reliance o…

MongoDB (MEAN stack) seems to be a recent shift?? Most bootcamps have historically been Rails/SQL.

I think Maker Square does Mongo, not sure. Most I see are still SQL-based as they should be. Mongo isn't used that much... and probably less than a few years ago (seems like it has gotten bad press).

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#189

Post by RegEx »

robohamburger wrote: post #170
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…

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 act…

> 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 agree with this 100%. The proof exercises you have to complete in discrete math make for great programming exercises. They force you to ask yourself

1. What's the problem? 2. What do we know? 3. How do we get to the end? 4. What does it look like to be "done"?

These are great questions to ask yourself when programming.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#190

Post by mywittyname »

lxe wrote: post #48

Do you remember your college web programming courses? The curriculum is always woefully out of date and seems that traditional undergraduate programs don't focus on updating it. This makes sense -- there are very few academic research areas that deal with practical web applications, and this is obviously mirrored in your undergraduate classes. Don't forget -- universities are also research institutions, while bootcam…

My college had state-of-the-art web programming courses along with many other practical classes (mobile, iOS, database design, data mining, 3d graphics). All of which were developed to ensure that students could move onto internships in that field after the course.

All of these courses were optional, but the school was very clear about their purpose: to give their students job skills. Most of the recruiters that came to the campus job fairs knew which of these courses they wanted their interns to take and would ask specifically, "did you take CS___"?

Obviously there was tons of research-oriented classes too, but those targeted jr/seniors.

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