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Bootcamps vs. College

blog.triplebyte.com

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Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#271

Post by seattledev14 »

mrdrozdov wrote: post #209
brudgers wrote: post #184

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: s…

How does Triplebyte make money? A lot of bootcamps place graduates as part of their process (and is how some of them make money), which is another factor to consider.

Mostly tuition. Some take a placement fee, but most companies don't pay a fee on Junior talent.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#272

Post by kmonsen »

crazypyro wrote: post #163
lloyd-christmas wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems to me the complete lack of algorithms is a land mine for any project. If you hire someone and release them into the wild of your codebase, that's a failure on your part not theirs. New hires are an investment, they shouldn't be treated as an immediate need-based solution. My experience in two fields has shown me that new hires are a drain on resources for a fairly significant time period, regardless of the…

Eh, I disagree with the generalization that all new hires are a drain for a significant time period. In my experience, the rate at which they come up to speed is extremely varied.

Yeah, in my experience we have had interns come in and be amazing right away. New grads can sometimes contribute pretty soon as well.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#273

Post by [deleted] »

ammon wrote: post #2

I'm happy to answer any questions about this (I expect it to be controversial). When we started Triplebyte one year ago, I was pretty skeptical of bootcamps. Doing credential-blind interviews and seeing what some bootcamp grads can do, however, has won me over. Clearly there are a lot of bad bootcamp grads (and probably a lot of bad bootcamps). But the model is working really well at the top.

[deleted]

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#274

Post by nappybrainiac »

I'm not sure that a comparison between bootcamps and college is viable.

College is not just about learning to code. You also learn to deal with professors and how to get the best grades out of them. You figure out how much you can drink without the glaring hangout that interferes with your morning philosophy class. You sign those forms to get credit cards that haunt you till you have a job. If you're smart, chose a good college and get really lucky, you might actually learn something and get a job after graduation.

Boot camps are about learning to code, creating networks and passing interviews for tech jobs. You can't pledge, or hang out with the furries, paint your face with your college colors for the football game at the weekend, or struggle figure out if your summer course fulfills the requirement for your social science elective.

These two places of learning can peacefully co-exist and each one has its purpose.

I even think that it would be good for some CS Degrees to walk into a bootcamp to explore something new and expand their knowledge.

Bootcamp replacing college? I don't think so. Not till bootcamps have long lines of students trying to change their course selections at the registrar's office.

There are some options that lie somewhere in the middle...

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#275

Post by superuser2 »

If I were stranded on an island with the laptop I used in college and a power source, I'd have a pretty good idea of how to stumble through:

- A multithreaded UNIX-like operating system with user programs, system calls, and a filesystem, with reasonable (if not entirely optimal) caching strategies.

- A TCP/IP stack for that operating system.

- An authenticated encrypted channel over my TCP/IP stack with forward secrecy by building a pseudrandom function up to a stream cipher, RSA with OAEP, Diffie-Helman, etc.

- Network services from the RFCs in C (we did a router and IRC).

- A high-level programming language with support for both functional and OO idioms based on the typed lambda calculus with recursion, lists, records, tuples, ref cells, subtyping, etc.

- A lexer, typechecker, and interpreter for that language using parser generator tools, a recursive descent parser, or a shift-reduce parser in a pushdown automata model.

- A formal specification of the evaluation and typing rules and a type soundness proof for that lanugage.

- A distributed KV store with Paxos, Raft, or Byzantine Generals running on my encrypted channel and written in my language (we used 0MQ and were given a 0MQ broker that could be told to drop messages for testing purposes).

- Greedy, dynamic programming, network flow, and ILP algorithms with proofs of correctness and efficiency.

My class work repositories put me about three quarters of the way there.

I'm sure bootcamps can teach people enough to tread water in a dynamic language web framework, and that meets real business needs and adds real value. But college is a chance to go deeper.

I know nobody is paying us to build our own lightsabers. But - and call me old fashioned if you'd like - I think a professional ought to be able to build his own lightsaber anyway.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#276

Post by [deleted] »

spdionis wrote: post #191
humbleMouse wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What algorithms did you learn in a week? "I learned Algorithms in a week" sounds weird.

[deleted]

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#277

Post by velodrome »

brudgers wrote: post #184

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: s…

How are bootcamps any different than vocational schools?

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#278

Post by busterarm »

xapata wrote: post #231
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…

> Frustratingly, the instructors were very unhelpful at the stuff I needed help with the most -- forming a mental model of how and why Rails works. I suspect that's because they didn't know how or why. Rails has a lot of magic -- just follow the convention and it works. Magic can be good, because it encourages a standard. Unfortunately, many Rails programmers seem comfortable leaving the magic as a mystery rather tha…

My first attempt or two learning Rails ended up this way, but I really got it once I had SQL down. In a/A we built our own stripped down, minimal versions of ActiveRecord and Rails. This ended up connecting all of the dots for me.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#279

Post by eropple »

morgante wrote: post #174
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have a CS degree. I don't think it helped me to be a better developer in any meaningful capacity. I'm still deeply skeptical of the average bootcamp graduate though. They're mostly people following a gold rush without any passion for programming. Moreover, bootcamps do their absolute best to distort hiring signals (ie. specifically targeting interview skills and portfolio projects). I've interviewed dozens of bootc…

I disagree with regards to a CS degree not making me a better developer, but if I was reading your post three years ago I might have agreed with you. It's interesting--much of what I learned in college was of at best marginal utility when I was starting out, but a ton of it's come back around to be useful today. Which is kind of to be expected, in that a junior developer's not likely to be dealing with much that's particularly challenging (in an absolute sense--of course, it's often going to be challenging in a relative sense). In particular, I spent this morning studying Raft and the Paxos family of distributed consensus algorithms to better understand the tools I'm using so that I can more effectively reason about them for the problem I'm working on; in my adventures I ended up digging Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigm by Tanenbaum out of my closet. (Guess why I had that? ;) )

To this end, I'm generally leery of bootcamp classes, and have not had good success working with bootcamp graduates for more than "line programmer" roles where attention and hours are sufficient to achieve a goal. Of those I can think of, none of the ones I've worked with have been dumb, far from it, but they haven't had the underlying theoretical education (even, generally speaking, something as foundational as a first-year discrete mathematics course) through which to filter whatever length of practical experience they've had. I find both to be extremely valuable, and to make me much better at my job.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#280

Post by MaxfordAndSons »

changkx wrote: post #256
MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a remarkably cynical opinion. Why do you assume bootcamp grads learn and become more valuable at a lesser rate than CS degree grads? You're also making the assumption that bootcamp grads decided to forgo a CS degree in favor of an easier route, which in my experience is rarely the case - by and large bootcampers are there because they want to change careers, not as a way to cheat the system without learning "t…

Obviously this isnt every case but quiet frankly it's bullshit if somebody who studied some "worthless" major like psychology or history then thinks they can do a 10 week coding bootcamp and be on par with a CS grad. If anything the TIME alone that a CS grad has to put in to graduate puts them above coding bootcamps.

I don't think most people come out of bootcamps claiming they're "on par" with CS grads, but rather that they're good enough to be given a chance for some subset of programming jobs.

Also the time based argument strikes me as misleading - bootcamps are much more intensive than university curriculums. University students aren't studying 10-12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week every week; most Bootcamp students are. That said, I recognize that the University student undoubtedly takes in a greater volume of material, but the ratio is severely distorted by referring to it as 4 years.

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