221–230 of 341 posts
The people living in these places are still semi-barbaric, they need a long civilizing process before they can cut it in the modern world, 2 months long boot-camps is definitely not going to do this. It's a process that should start from childbirth.
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This has been my experience, and I'll add I have noticed there is a massive disconnect from the reality of just how complicated modern software is. I remember beginning my career what I think used to be a quite common experience of being quite a bit overwhelmed by how much I had to learn, very aware that I didn't even know what I didn't know and this definitely motivated me. This awareness is completely absent from 1…
> I have noticed there is a massive disconnect from the reality of just how complicated modern software is. There's also a massive disconnect from the reality of just how complicated modern software needs (not) to be. That said I agree that some 3-month bootcamp probably isn't enough time to really internalize the basics of programming (unless you're really smart or have prior exposure), let alone learn to design and…
Consider a typical front-end developer setup - with IDE/smart editor, linters, transpilers, packers, package managers, project generators. These are all useful tools, but to be even a marginally competent developers, you have to know what they do and why. Otherwise, you'll be completely lost when some default changes. You'll be flabbergasted when you discover that the project structure you're used to isn't "how the web is made", but just an opinionated pattern that was sort-of fashionable at the time you were learning.
I've seen this problem happen with code camps teaching people RoR some years ago; I believe it now happens with Node/React.
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>Most of them have engineering background: electrical engineering, civil engineering, petroleum engineering. That's great, but what about the people who come from a non-engineering background? I feel like people with a technical background will be able to pick up coding a lot quicker than people who don't have a lot of engineering aptitude. >We work with the Bootcamp to improve their program: giving reference to 'har…
> That's great, but what about the people who come from a non-engineering background? I feel like people with a technical background will be able to pick up coding a lot quicker than people who don't have a lot of engineering aptitude. You're almost certainly correct. It's perhaps possible that the bootcamp model, which can work well for people with solid technical backgrounds, might not work equally well for others.…
(Best, they should take as long as they need to until the student demonstrates competence, but that would break the "pay up-front, train a fixed amount of time, get a nice job" business model / marketing strategy.)
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> commit to 6 months of training for anyone I hire. Google broadly believes it takes 6-12 months for a new hire to become completely productive, so I doubt that particular aspect of your experience is due to shallowness of the embedded (straight) C (not C++) talent pool in your area.
Google did a lot of pioneering work and created a proprietary stack. This used to be a big competitive advantage, but the industry largely caught up and now the incompatibility is mostly just tech debt that everyone has to ramp up on.
For anyone here, that went through one of these CodeSchools/Bootcamps/training.jargon[2] courses, I have a question: At any point in these camps was there a section on interviewing and job seeking? I'm asking as both a hiring manager who has seen a very fair share of...sorry, BAD resumes coming from people who finished a local code school, who struggled through the interview (only one made it to a technical assessmen…
A "Hi I'm Bob" page seems like it would not be the product of an actual full-time bootcamp, but maybe a short part-time bootcamp? Even the relatively lower achievers were capable of hooking up some sort of front end for a public API by the mid-point of the course, putting it on github and getting it up on Heroku.
That said, many of the people I attended with had higher education or experience. My group was a former QA engineer, a bioengineering bachelor, an MBA, another biologist, and myself (Masters in Information Systems). By the end, we were relying more on the members of our group for disbursing useful information than on the instructional infrastructure of the bootcamp. I think subsequent jobs came mostly through networking between the groups of whoever was left by the end rather than the bootcamp itself.
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Why did your company fall for this? The only logical reasons I’ve seen are an inability to hire otherwise, and staff moonlighting at the boot camps. Both are bad reasons.
Its a UK company so they have the British Disease = "don't want to pay for training"
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> It may sound weird but actually many people here didn't picked their university by themselves but by the guidance of their parent, so they might study something else than their favourite. Hello! This was me. Studied music because it’s what my parents wanted me to do, and kept finding ways to shoehorn “computer stuff” into any music I was doing: making digital synths, making music analysis programs, and coding up ge…
Interesting its normally parents wanting kids to do one of the big 3 law, medicine and engineering.
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> Needless to say, I will be leaving my company very soon to go to a place where there is a coding test and filtering to prevent most of these bootcampers from getting in. I went to a bootcamp, and the first hour of every day was spent learning to solve the types of coding tests that companies use in interviews. So, when companies look at the graduates of these bootcamps, it's really hard to differentiate between peo…
After attending that bootcamp do you thing you could design tests to stump people who only knew how to do tests.
I'd instead try to pair with people on solving a problem that translates well to the problem domain that you're trying to hire for. Anybody who's new to the industry is going to need a decent amount of support & mentorship starting out before they're able to contribute meaningfully to a team and working with someone for a day is a good way to figure out how much support they're going to need and what it's going to be like to mentor them. Bootcamp graduates would likely be open to a day of paid pairing to figure out if a job would be a good fit.
If you did want to go with the more traditional coding test route, I'd try and do something relatively concrete:
- download a set of log files & group them based on a search
- hit an API route & use that to render and update a list of items
- connect to a database, figure out what schema migrations are necessary to support a new feature, and then talk through how to do the migration
- figure out why a test is occasionally failing on a CI server
- add metrics, logs, tests, and alerts to a service with two routes (/healthcheck and /doSomethingImportant)
Like all interviews, the closer the interview maps to the day-to-day of what your needs actually are, the better it will be. There's something beguiling about questions about dynamic programming or red-black trees, but being good at answering those questions has almost no relationship to day-to-day work. (Unless you're at a place where deeper knowledge of data-structures and computer science really matters... and in that case, you're not going to have much with recent bootcamp graduates anyways)
1) Developers tend to sneer at this model, because they learnt themselves online (and dont think sitting in an intensive bootcamp would help) or went to a university for multiple years. This means these bootcamps are often run by people on the fringes of tech, recruiters or in this case "consultants"
2) There is no reason for a developer to teach these bootcamps, they pay less than an equivalent job and most firms would look at experience teaching at one of these bootcamps as a red flag (because most of the teachers are students who couldn't get jobs). University is different here, as your research can be viewed valuably by tech companies, even if while at the university you earn less money, and there are other quality of life benefits
3) Once they get in most students get the impression (even subconsciously) that they've been scammed. Thats mostly for above reasons (founders and teachers who don't have tech experience), combined with a hard sell getting them into it. This gives graduates intense imposter syndrome. Even worse they follow the lead of people who run the boot camp and "fake it till they make it", mainly because these bootcamps offer them TA jobs to juice their stats and incentivizing them to say nice things about the bootcamp.
The combination of these factors means you get graduates who have been taught by people without experience, with a bunch of baggage that makes them worse developers, afraid to ask questions for fear of being seen as an imposter, exaggerating any real projects/experience they've worked on, resistant to learning anything new because they've only been taught specific frameworks with no theory.
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To adapt a quote from one of my favorite movies: "Not everyone can become a great coder; but a great coder can come from anywhere ." That's what (in my opinion) you should take away from "everybody can code." I think it's obvious that not every single person in the world has the external characteristics to be a great software developer. But those with passion and curiosity will be able to make a great career for them…
Why does everybody need to be “great”?
But these initiatives that try to promise high paying jobs to everyone who applies, it's just not going to work out for everyone who goes through the mill. And yeah, I think to have a long career as a software developer, you need a little more than "meets expectations." You need the drive to improve and grow after you leave the program and even once you land your job. So, I think when you get a newbie who has passion, is personable, and who submits themselves to iterative improvement, I really do think that makes a great developer.