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The high cost of a free coding bootcamp

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Re: The high cost of a free coding bootcamp

#21
post #2

30k?! You are honestly better off taking two yeas of night courses at a community college, and it will probably cost you half of that for more classroom time. Bootcamp programs are really crap. Even in a traditional classroom setting, you only get out of it what you put in. I know CompSci majors who graduated only knowing Java and who were totally lost if they had to replace a ram chip in a computer. I knew others wh…

> I know CompSci majors who graduated only knowing Java and who were totally lost if they had to replace a ram chip in a computer. The rest of your post notwithstanding, I don't see why a CompSci major should need to know how to replace a stick of ram.

Would you hire such a person for embedded software work? Also having a feel for what can go wrong with RAM can be useful in case a computer acts up. Then there are details like price, speed and parity which may or may not play a role when it comes to hardware selection. And last but not least software security researchers have been seen using cooling sprays and taking out RAM bars to extract information from systems.

Re: The high cost of a free coding bootcamp

#22
post #2

30k?! You are honestly better off taking two yeas of night courses at a community college, and it will probably cost you half of that for more classroom time. Bootcamp programs are really crap. Even in a traditional classroom setting, you only get out of it what you put in. I know CompSci majors who graduated only knowing Java and who were totally lost if they had to replace a ram chip in a computer. I knew others wh…

> I know CompSci majors who graduated only knowing Java and who were totally lost if they had to replace a ram chip in a computer. The rest of your post notwithstanding, I don't see why a CompSci major should need to know how to replace a stick of ram.

They should know it all: where the cpu and ram is, how the motherboard look like and etc. Nobody expects them to go out there and start fixing computers, however if someone spends 4 years studying the subject and can't even be asked to look inside the box,well then there's not much hope... A couple of weeks ago I was on the sales floor and was about to change RAM on a couple of PCs( it's not my job,just wanted to do it). The sales rep pulled the PC from underneath the desk, took the side cover off,removed the old ram and put the new one in.If sales can do it, I'm confident anyone in CompSci should be able to do so as well.

Re: The high cost of a free coding bootcamp

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know CompSci majors who graduated only knowing Java and who were totally lost if they had to replace a ram chip in a computer. The rest of your post notwithstanding, I don't see why a CompSci major should need to know how to replace a stick of ram.

They don't need to. As astronomer doesn't need to know how to repair his or her own personal telescope either. But if you're into the field, it's nice to know how your tools work.

You may not know how to fix it but surely you'd know they have lenses inside,right?

Re: The high cost of a free coding bootcamp

#26

I am not going to hire anybody from a free coding bootcamp or a coding bootcamp for that matter. Seems like they turn out people who know how to hack things together based on shallow knowledge.

Maybe it's an opportunity for people who wouldn't otherwise get the chance. I've met lots of young bright folks stuck in mcjobs, sort of at the mercy of circumstance. Maybe trying a coding camp will turn on a lightbulb.

There will be some filtering required.

Re: The high cost of a free coding bootcamp

#27

> Once, a student asked about the difference between JavaScript array methods, like push versus concat or forEach versus map, the team lead said they were interchangeable. (They are not.) Technically, push and concat can be augmented to achieve the same thing. Same with forEach and map. Might not be the best fitted screwdriver but it’ll still kinda work.

Except that push mutates the array in question and concat returns a deep copy. And forEach returns undefined, while map returns an array. If someone claimed they were the same in an interview I doubt they would get hired.

Re: The high cost of a free coding bootcamp

#28

> Once, a student asked about the difference between JavaScript array methods, like push versus concat or forEach versus map, the team lead said they were interchangeable. (They are not.) Technically, push and concat can be augmented to achieve the same thing. Same with forEach and map. Might not be the best fitted screwdriver but it’ll still kinda work.

Except that push mutates the array in question and concat returns a deep copy. And forEach returns undefined, while map returns an array. If someone claimed they were the same in an interview I doubt they would get hired.

Technically, yes there is a difference in semantics and convenience. pragmatically it depends on the programming style and language features / expressiveness.

Developers were able to map from one list to another list using for loops before functional-style map-like functions. Map is just semantically more concise about what it’s doing, rather than how.

As for mutation versus immutable copy behavior, that’s for convenience. Developers can also clone collections themselves.

A more charitable means of evaluating the class lead’s comment is that the core of an algorithm is not affected by these things.

One could argue multiplication is just repeated addition.

Re: The high cost of a free coding bootcamp

#29
post #26

I am not going to hire anybody from a free coding bootcamp or a coding bootcamp for that matter. Seems like they turn out people who know how to hack things together based on shallow knowledge.

Maybe it's an opportunity for people who wouldn't otherwise get the chance. I've met lots of young bright folks stuck in mcjobs, sort of at the mercy of circumstance. Maybe trying a coding camp will turn on a lightbulb. There will be some filtering required.

maybe can be suitable gig hires to turn out quick cheap startup ideas.

Re: The high cost of a free coding bootcamp

#30

> Once, a student asked about the difference between JavaScript array methods, like push versus concat or forEach versus map, the team lead said they were interchangeable. (They are not.) Technically, push and concat can be augmented to achieve the same thing. Same with forEach and map. Might not be the best fitted screwdriver but it’ll still kinda work.

Except that push mutates the array in question and concat returns a deep copy. And forEach returns undefined, while map returns an array. If someone claimed they were the same in an interview I doubt they would get hired.

Do you mean a shallow copy?
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