Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies • Hacker News Board

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#21

Post by twblalock » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 9:41 PM UTC

skewart wrote: post #11

> Flatiron, a for-profit school, has seized on a clear need in the economy that some academic experts say reveals a failing among traditional universities. Teaching highly specialized skills currently in demand has not traditionally been the mission of universities. In professions like architecture and medicine there is an expectation that new graduates won't have much in the way of practical knowledge about current…

> Most of the people who go to good bootcamps already have strong university educations and would likely have been able to be hired into junior dev roles anyway without the bootcamp.

That depends on how much programming experience they have. Many boot camp attendees have college degrees in non-technical majors and have no coding experience at all.

A boot camp is a way to get coding experience in a structured environment that has credibility with employers. In the view of many companies, self-taught coders don't have that level of credibility, even when they have decent Github portfolios or other proof that they can program.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#22

Post by badminton1 » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 9:49 PM UTC

dbla wrote: post #20

I used to work for a coding bootcamp (not Flatiron) and made good money with a month off in between each of the three classes I taught each year. I eventually left because it felt like I was complicit in selling a lie. I totally agree with the article. Students graduating from a bootcamp are definitely not "job ready" without additional training / mentorship. Three months is just not a lot of time to acquire all of t…

I used to work for the admissions department of a private university (not in the US). Private universities were mostly focused in enrolling as many people as possible, while not being particularly worried about the market needs at all. Back then, our educational system produced an excessive number of attorneys and kinesiologists, leaving many of them in disadvantage at the moment of looking for jobs. Many of them switched to other occupations for very low wages, something that did not release them from the obligation of paying student loans.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#23

Post by twblalock » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 9:50 PM UTC

badminton1 wrote: post #19

A coding camp graduate can be considered with respect to a computer science graduate what a paralegal is to a lawyer, or what a nurse is to a doctor. They can perform some procedures, but not all of them, and at some point there might be supervision. Now to be fair, paralegal and nursing programs take much longer than 12 weeks, are very strict and are regulated occupations that require a license that you can actually…

Some of the best engineers I have worked with did not learn CS in college, or even in a boot camp. They learned on the job.

Some programmers want to believe that computer science is harder than it really is, because it inflates their egos. CS is not as difficult to learn as law, or medicine, or electrical engineering, or many other disciplines for which self-taught practitioners are exceedingly rare.

Furthermore, I've seen new hires with graduate degrees in CS fail interviews horribly, or get hired and produce horrible crap, while new self-taught hires have outperformed them significantly. A degree is no guarantee of any skill level, which is unfortunate.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#24

Post by tschwimmer » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 9:55 PM UTC

adamnemecek wrote: post #13

gaius wrote: post #12

When Apple Inc., for example, announced in 2014 a new programming language for its products, Swift, Flatiron adjusted its curriculum within days I don't see how this is possible, who is teaching this course? How do you go from 0 to instructor-level expert in "days"?

You know already know the frameworks, a third of swift is ObjC with better and more concise syntax. And it's not like Swift didn't get inspiration from other languages. Even though the combination was novel, the single ingredients were usually from somewhere. (Don't take it as a jab at Swift, it's probably my fav language + environment for app development). You might not be writing idiomatic Swift from the get go but…

> You might not be writing idiomatic Swift from the get go but no one is at that point.

I think that's kind of the point the parent comment is making. How can a school acting in good faith open Swift classes if it's impossible for anyone to actually be an expert on it?

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#25

Post by badminton1 » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 10:01 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #23

badminton1 wrote: post #19

A coding camp graduate can be considered with respect to a computer science graduate what a paralegal is to a lawyer, or what a nurse is to a doctor. They can perform some procedures, but not all of them, and at some point there might be supervision. Now to be fair, paralegal and nursing programs take much longer than 12 weeks, are very strict and are regulated occupations that require a license that you can actually…

Some of the best engineers I have worked with did not learn CS in college, or even in a boot camp. They learned on the job. Some programmers want to believe that computer science is harder than it really is, because it inflates their egos. CS is not as difficult to learn as law, or medicine, or electrical engineering, or many other disciplines for which self-taught practitioners are exceedingly rare. Furthermore, I'v…

An abridged definition of engineering is "applying science to create technology". A software engineer applies computer science to create software based technologies. Under that definition you worked with programmers not engineers.

Then, true. You might have worked with programmers that seemed productive and learned on the job. But much of that learning happened at the expense of exposing the company and the customers to great risk.

For instance, if you are manipulating financial information, and you don't know what a floating point number is, you are eventually going to have a bad time. If you don't understand concurrency and parallelism, you might end up corrupting important data, if you are suffering networking issues and everything you know is HTTP at a high level... you are going to have a bad time. And the list goes on and on and on.

Friendly software development technologies were created to augment productivity, not to release people from the responsibility of knowing what is going on with them.

Now to your point, it is clear that not all computer science programs focus in producing highly-qualified software engineers. But that doesn't mean that you can simply skip the fundamentals.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#26

Post by asdfologist » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 10:04 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #5

pmorici wrote: post #3

"Average starting salary: $74,447." So they are paying them less than they would a recent college grad by something like 25%? no wonder they love hiring people out of these things.

I think you have a somewhat distorted view of the average starting salary of a college graduate: http://www.naceweb.org/s11182015/starting-salary-class-2015....

What do you mean? I learned from HN that $150K/year is the poverty line. Surely the average salary much be much higher.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#27

Post by skewart » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 10:05 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #21

skewart wrote: post #11

> Flatiron, a for-profit school, has seized on a clear need in the economy that some academic experts say reveals a failing among traditional universities. Teaching highly specialized skills currently in demand has not traditionally been the mission of universities. In professions like architecture and medicine there is an expectation that new graduates won't have much in the way of practical knowledge about current…

> Most of the people who go to good bootcamps already have strong university educations and would likely have been able to be hired into junior dev roles anyway without the bootcamp. That depends on how much programming experience they have. Many boot camp attendees have college degrees in non-technical majors and have no coding experience at all. A boot camp is a way to get coding experience in a structured environm…

Interesting. I wonder if that necessity for lending credibility is a somewhat recent thing. Perhaps the popularity of bootcamps makes people who recently got into coding and didn't attend one look worse - companies might assume they couldn't get in to a decent one?

I'm a developer who didn't study CS in undergrad, and I didn't have a problem getting job offers when I was starting out several years ago, self taught and unproven. But bootcamps weren't really a thing back then.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#28

Post by enraged_camel » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 10:15 PM UTC

skewart wrote: post #11

> Flatiron, a for-profit school, has seized on a clear need in the economy that some academic experts say reveals a failing among traditional universities. Teaching highly specialized skills currently in demand has not traditionally been the mission of universities. In professions like architecture and medicine there is an expectation that new graduates won't have much in the way of practical knowledge about current…

>>Is a disinterest in teaching current professional practice really a failing of universities?

I think the issue is that universities are not in a good position to judge what is "fundamental knowledge" and what is simply a current professional practice.

I have a B.S. in Informatics from the University of Washington. It's basically a degree at the intersection of computer science and humanities[1]. During the course of my studies, I also took a lot of non-degree courses from other schools at the university, including a three-semester program focused on Information Security and Assurance.

After I earned my certificate from that program, I went to the dean of the Information School and argued that information security should be made a core part of the Informatics curriculum.

He said: "Just because information security is the hot thing right now doesn't mean it should be a part of the curriculum. Students can take courses on it and count it towards their degree, but it doesn't seem to me like it's fundamental knowledge."

So yeah. To this day, when I see poorly designed, unsecure systems, I think of that moment: some academic declaring that information security does not constitute fundamental knowledge for a degree program about information, technology and computers.

[1]https://ischool.uw.edu/academics/informatics

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#29

Post by bdcravens » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 10:27 PM UTC

skewart wrote: post #27

twblalock wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the people who go to good bootcamps already have strong university educations and would likely have been able to be hired into junior dev roles anyway without the bootcamp. That depends on how much programming experience they have. Many boot camp attendees have college degrees in non-technical majors and have no coding experience at all. A boot camp is a way to get coding experience in a structured environm…

Interesting. I wonder if that necessity for lending credibility is a somewhat recent thing. Perhaps the popularity of bootcamps makes people who recently got into coding and didn't attend one look worse - companies might assume they couldn't get in to a decent one? I'm a developer who didn't study CS in undergrad, and I didn't have a problem getting job offers when I was starting out several years ago, self taught an…

I'm self-educated as well, but back then (starting around 1999) there was no Github (so less visibility into a prospect's activity) and no frameworks (so problem solving was more valuable than structure)

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#30

Post by bdcravens » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 10:31 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #12

When Apple Inc., for example, announced in 2014 a new programming language for its products, Swift, Flatiron adjusted its curriculum within days I don't see how this is possible, who is teaching this course? How do you go from 0 to instructor-level expert in "days"?

"instructor-level" and "expert" have a lower level of cohesion than you'd expect :-)