221–230 of 449 posts
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…
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…
> This part might get me in trouble here, but we are a small company in NJ and budgeting 50k for the junior 0 experience position. Most of these bootcamps in Brooklyn or Manhattan instill that you minimum should be making 60k and not to even look for anything else. I disagree with that personally I'm graduating from a Manhattan college Saturday and I would never take less than $60k for a programming job. In fact, I s…
I get it, just kind of writing about my experiences.
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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 think saying that a computer science education is a way to learn "abstract thinking" is a useless simplification, given that any undergraduate degree involves some amount of abstract thinking. Surely a bootcamper is more prepared to work as a software engineer than a psychology major in over 50% of cases (all other things being equal). So the comparison between certain specific majors and bootcampers is much more m…
how did you come up with a psychology major for this comparison?
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> The only thing most grads have on bootcamp people is algorithm knowledge. "Just teach algorithms." Do you have two years to spare to do so? Because I'm a platform engineer and I regularly use the extent of my CS mathematics education to write better code--you'd think this'd just be Ruby slinging, "what sort of math do you need to automate systems", but it ends up being remarkably more than that! But you know what e…
I like your post and agree with most of what you said, except about the algorithms. I don't think you need 2 years to teach them. You need a highschool level understanding of Math and about a week. Obviously this varies from person to person - but I learned them extremely quickly. I think where we are not seeing eye to eye here is that I envision a bootcamper that has a high aptitude for abstract thought, can read qu…
We aren't talking about "the algorithms", and to be honest the way you keep referring to "algorithms", rather than a phrase like "algorithmic thinking", is indicative of the real disconnect here. Spewing quicksort at a problem is easy and doesn't require one to really understand it in the first place, and if that's why I said "two years" I'd be totally an idiot. But it wasn't. Two years of instruction is for the mathematics and logic to understand algorithmic thinking at a level where you can reason about problems and approach them from a compositional, mathematical perspective--and that is invaluable when your problem is more than "order a list to splat into HTML". It's not high-school mathematics at all, except for the ten-thousand-foot-view.
I have yet to meet a--what's the phrase that everyone loves, "autodidact"?--who was as comfortable with higher-order computational thinking as many of the people I've worked with. Hell, I wish I had more of a mathematical and CS background than I do. Paxos and the like are still really hard to me!
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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…
Did you actually try to interview before the bootcamp though? (Ideally after building a few portfolio projects.) I ask because I had no trouble getting jobs and freelance work without a degree or bootcamp. In fact, a bootcamp is usually a strong negative signal for me. I'd much rather hire a self-taught developer than a bootcamper.
My problem was basically a lack of network and real understanding of my competition in the field and the bootcamp solved that.
I could have saved a ton of money had I quit my bootcamp as soon as I realized this, but I'm still okay with how things turned out.
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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…
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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.
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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…
Some what tangentially related, hammock driven development: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
The part about pushing on the problem statement is always useful, even if you don't have time to think about problems like he describes.
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> This part might get me in trouble here, but we are a small company in NJ and budgeting 50k for the junior 0 experience position. Most of these bootcamps in Brooklyn or Manhattan instill that you minimum should be making 60k and not to even look for anything else. I disagree with that personally I'm graduating from a Manhattan college Saturday and I would never take less than $60k for a programming job. In fact, I s…
Totally. I'm not looking for sympathy or an explanation, I completely understand. Was just explaining that most of these candidates from NYC bootcamps are conditioned for NYC jobs, and seem to have very little desire to move out of that area / except different pay ranges. I feel college students are different in this regard. Probably because they live on campus and have to change where they live anyway. I get it, jus…
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You're right, you probably can't afford them. Salary range in my cohort was 60k-105k, but it's typically higher. a/A grads are in the unfortunate position of having their camp be "free" ($5k deposit) up front and 18% of your first year salary upon hire. They basically have to earn more to pay off the bootcamp. I had to pass on my dream gig (apprenticeship at 8th Light in LA) in part because the debt to App Academy wo…
It looks like App Academy is still claiming no upfront cost. I successfully applied a few years ago; despite hearing the "X% of your first year's salary" speech over and over, I was told I would not only need to pay a heavy deposit, but the entire program cost. Kush Patel (the founder) claimed people were bailing after the program and my young age made me a risk. I can understand those kinds of problems, but waiting…
If you are under 21 and without degree, they will require the full program cost up front. Also if you are not a US Citizen, they will require the full program cost up front (for more obvious reasons).
The $5k deposit they also only disclose upon acceptance and it was not something I had planned for but found a way to pay it somehow (I had only budgeted 6 months no income and a 900 mile move back to NYC originally).
These little details regarding payment and also the new internal recruiting company they've started (that works no different than any other standard recruiter and treats their alumni mostly like cattle...) have left kind of a bad taste in my mouth towards the company, but the TAs were amazing and the curriculum is solid (and accepts pull requests!).