Bootcamps vs. College • Hacker News Board

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#281

Post by ball_of_lint » Thu, May 19, 2016, 8:41 PM UTC

warlox wrote: post #240

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…

Isn't not letting C students graduate a good thing?

Depends on how rigorous the curriculum is. The problem here however, is that although colleges typically are overseen and expected to let c students graduate, bootcamps can set as high a standard as they want.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#282

Post by dang » Thu, May 19, 2016, 8:43 PM UTC

juped wrote: post #261

dang wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What a load of crap. > What, they bred the capacity for abstract thought into you in college? > I've had to deal with this kind of idiotic commentary Please edit this sort of name-calling and abrasiveness out of your comments to HN. It breaks the site rules, degrades the discussion, and provokes worse. Your comment would be much better without it. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

Thanks. Now instead of abrasiveness it's abrasiveness without context. Is your software just not capable of hiding things without "detaching" them, or is there reasoning behind this incomprehensible moderation policy?

I'm not sure I understand your question. But I shiver at the wrath of Hacker News were we to "just" hide things.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#283

Post by busterarm » Thu, May 19, 2016, 8:45 PM UTC

goldbrick wrote: post #266

busterarm wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to nitpick but I think music is a particularly bad example here. The vast majority of music as we know it is outsider art. The people I went to music conservatory with are largely not the same people who produce either music that you've heard or great works. Sure, the self-taught pop star isn't going to write Rite of Spring anytime soon, but the music business does just fine while being flooded by people with…

Nope, you're just being a snob. Plenty of "outsider pop stars" (and their songwriters and producers) know music theory just fine and many even went to Berklee/Juilliard/whatever conservatory you're thinking of.

I guess.

I'm actually saying pretty clearly that it doesn't take deep theory knowledge to write great music, which I think counter's the parent poster's point pretty well. And there's a big gap in the amount of theory required to build your career on playing 12 bar blues and on composing for an orchestra. Most conservatory students aren't rigorously studying composition enough to do the latter anyway. In fact, most just want to eke out a living on dull music that hasn't changed in 400 years.

Berklee is not a conservatory. People actually get practical skills there and aren't treated like shit. Nothing wrong with going there. You are much better off doing that vs New England Conservatory, Julliard, Peabody, etc. (Actually the jury may be out after the Boston Conservatory merger, but we'll wait a few years and see)

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#284

Post by eropple » Thu, May 19, 2016, 8:49 PM UTC

sotojuan wrote: post #199

p4wnc6 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is that while most employers say the same thing you say -- that they hire for critical thinking ability and intellectual curiosity / talent -- almost all of them don't actually want that. Instead they want employees who don't think independently; employees who are pliable and will not complain if given drudgery, told to use poor practices, told to make things of poor quality. Everyone says they don't just…

I get what you're saying. Here and on Reddit you see a lot of programmers who say they have been hired or say they hire based on ability to think and not domain knowledge. They say language doesn't matter and that personal projects are a nice bonus but what matter is if you can think and program. That's awesome—I learned how to think in school and love solving problems. The problem is that in real life I've had the o…

That sucks that that's the experience you've had, but I've had the exact opposite experience. I got my first job building mobile software with zero Android experience--I knew Java, but was up-front with my concerns about the differences between Dalvik and Java being significant enough to throw me. I understood enough about Android to talk coherently about it, but had never written a line for it. After I decided to get out of mobile and into devops/platform development, I ended up at a shop where I knew nothing about most of what they were doing: I didn't know Ruby, I didn't know Rails, I had never touched AWS. But I could speak intelligently as to software development and as to how I thought about problems, and they brought me onboard. And these days, as a consultant, I'm often brought in for projects where I don't know anything about them--like, I am emphatically not a network guru, but just yesterday I found myself learning `tc` and figuring out what its kersplosion of acronyms meant in order to solve a problem.

More than this, though: in my experience, it's less about knowing the stack and more about whether people like you or not. I can walk into a place and make a hiring manager (or, these days, somebody willing to pay for consulting) like me, like my work, and feel confident that they're going to get their money's worth. And none of that really has to do with my skills, just my confidence and my ability to talk well about problems.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#285

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 19, 2016, 8:51 PM UTC

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #205

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…

My girlfriend did a bootcamp. It was a very useful experience, and overall we would recommend it. All your points are valid, including the last one unfortunately. That was the one black point about my gf's experience when she was having trouble finding something that suited her: they dangled the threat of dropping her from their network. Also, I should add that bootcamps like hers aren't a "Zero to Hero" offering. Th…

[deleted]

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#286

Post by mulcahey » Thu, May 19, 2016, 8:52 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #242

ThomPete wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of those who took that CS degree never learned abstract thinking. It's not something you first learn on university it's something you develop way before that.

I agree. Though there are those magical universities out there (and who knows, maybe there are magical bootcamps too) that teach abstract thinking. My university unfortunately does not belong to them. In terms of programming, it's all rote-learning of the basics for the exams and shit ton of exercises supporting that rote learning. I can pin-point some places where I did learn various aspects of abstract thinking. I…

+ 1 for GEB. I read that freshman year (now a junior).

As an example of its utility, I really like its description of formal systems which are a somewhat simplified version of context free grammars. There are many other concepts described in that book that give similar but more intuitive explanations of CS concepts that helped me understand them as part of "the bigger picture."

CODE: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, which is mentioned on here a lot, was helpful for similar reasons.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#287

Post by felix_thursday » Thu, May 19, 2016, 8:56 PM UTC

There's something to be said about a person doing a bootcamp. Not only is it a drastic career pivot, but choosing to invest in yourself like that is a huge sign of maturity, growth mindset, and awareness. It's no surprise that a bootcamp grad can quickly get up to speed in their first professional dev environment.

I did the WDI bootcamp through GA, and loved the experience. My motivations weren't to become a full-time web dev, but to become a much better, more well-rounded product manager. It's paid off 5x over so far.

There's a ton of garbage bootcamps out there, and it's unfair to lump them all together -- it's unfair that these exist. period. While, you can't replace the deep technical and theoretical understanding you get with a classic CS degree, if your goal is to build web apps, do you really need the formal experience, or can you learn that on the job?

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#288

Post by dwwoelfel » Thu, May 19, 2016, 8:56 PM UTC

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.

Can you tell us which bootcamps have produced candidates that did well in your interviews?

I get asked about how to break into the industry every now and then--it would be nice to be able to point those people to a quality bootcamp.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#289

Post by joslin01 » Thu, May 19, 2016, 8:58 PM UTC

mrdrozdov wrote: post #126

kemiller2002 wrote: post #78

Boot camps have their place, but they are not a replacement for a traditional CS degree. I have met good and bad programmers from both types of programs (some from well respected colleges who I still wonder how they exactly passed), but here's the thing, I don't care about practical skills. I care about the person being able to think. All those concepts that they teach in CS isn't about knowing the name of an algorit…

> I need someone who can look at a problem and realize that we can cut the amount of work we have to do by understanding programming concepts at an abstract level. I think in many ways this is the exception not the rule. Many students certainly go through their CS degree without thinking this way, and some of these students go on to get phenomenal jobs because they spent a lot of time programming. There are lots of g…

> I think in many ways this is the exception not the rule. Many students certainly go through their CS degree without thinking this way, and some of these students go on to get phenomenal jobs because they spent a lot of time programming.

Huh? Even if you didn't want to learn to think abstractly, you would still be enrolled in courses like "Data Structures" that force you to. Did you get a CS degree?

You're also making the assertion that you can code successfully without learning abstract thought. That's like saying you can paint a picture without knowing how to use a brush. Quite literally, you can't program without keeping an abstract model in your head of one form or another. Things like OOP helps make these abstractions tangible, but it is nevertheless, just your own vision of how 1s & 0s gotta fly around.

I think it's bad form to assert most students who complete a 4 year degree don't ever think at an abstract level. It's rather ridiculous from my vantage point (again, it's 4 years), but maybe your experience is different.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#290

Post by kmonsen » Thu, May 19, 2016, 9:00 PM UTC

lloyd-christmas wrote: post #179

kmonsen wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, when I was a new grad I started on the codebase more or less right away. Didn't even have code reviews back then. If you have to train them, then it seems the coding part should be cheaper then the algo part.

> when I was a new grad I started on the codebase more or less right away I did as well, but... > Didn't even have code reviews back then. Not so much this one. > If you have to train them, then it seems the coding part should be cheaper then the algo part. I do actually agree. But there tends to be other aspects of the job outside of just code and algorithms. Prior work experience is a shining star compared to a 22…

I don't know, we pay people to do a job. Sure some coworkers become friends, but most don't. As long as people are somewhat easy to get along with I don't think we should focus too much on other stuff.