Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies • Hacker News Board

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#31

Post by bdcravens » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 10:34 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #23

badminton1 wrote: post #19

A coding camp graduate can be considered with respect to a computer science graduate what a paralegal is to a lawyer, or what a nurse is to a doctor. They can perform some procedures, but not all of them, and at some point there might be supervision. Now to be fair, paralegal and nursing programs take much longer than 12 weeks, are very strict and are regulated occupations that require a license that you can actually…

Some of the best engineers I have worked with did not learn CS in college, or even in a boot camp. They learned on the job. Some programmers want to believe that computer science is harder than it really is, because it inflates their egos. CS is not as difficult to learn as law, or medicine, or electrical engineering, or many other disciplines for which self-taught practitioners are exceedingly rare. Furthermore, I'v…

I've been in the industry since 1999 with no CS degree, and there were no boot camps back then. I'll bypass the horn-tooting, but I've managed to do pretty well in my career :-)

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#32

Post by twblalock » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 10:36 PM UTC

badminton1 wrote: post #25

twblalock wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the best engineers I have worked with did not learn CS in college, or even in a boot camp. They learned on the job. Some programmers want to believe that computer science is harder than it really is, because it inflates their egos. CS is not as difficult to learn as law, or medicine, or electrical engineering, or many other disciplines for which self-taught practitioners are exceedingly rare. Furthermore, I'v…

An abridged definition of engineering is "applying science to create technology". A software engineer applies computer science to create software based technologies. Under that definition you worked with programmers not engineers. Then, true. You might have worked with programmers that seemed productive and learned on the job. But much of that learning happened at the expense of exposing the company and the customers…

I never said anyone should skip the fundamentals. But you don't need to go to college to learn them.

Your nitpick on the difference between engineering and programming is ridiculous, and your definition of engineering is wrong.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#33

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 10:42 PM UTC

badminton1 wrote: post #19

A coding camp graduate can be considered with respect to a computer science graduate what a paralegal is to a lawyer, or what a nurse is to a doctor. They can perform some procedures, but not all of them, and at some point there might be supervision. Now to be fair, paralegal and nursing programs take much longer than 12 weeks, are very strict and are regulated occupations that require a license that you can actually…

[deleted]

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#34

Post by danso » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 10:43 PM UTC

pmorici wrote: post #3

"Average starting salary: $74,447." So they are paying them less than they would a recent college grad by something like 25%? no wonder they love hiring people out of these things.

My first job in NYC was at a non-profit as a web dev with far more skills than what anyone could learn from a boot camp (I have a comp engr degree) and made substantially less than the posted average. I still a managed to live comfortably in Manhattan.

For people coming in who may be stuck in sub-$60K jobs, $10K to $15K in 10 weeks to be elevated to an a new income bracket doesn't seem unreasonable, when comparing it to the cost of going back to college.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#35

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 10:48 PM UTC

tschwimmer wrote: post #24

adamnemecek wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know already know the frameworks, a third of swift is ObjC with better and more concise syntax. And it's not like Swift didn't get inspiration from other languages. Even though the combination was novel, the single ingredients were usually from somewhere. (Don't take it as a jab at Swift, it's probably my fav language + environment for app development). You might not be writing idiomatic Swift from the get go but…

> You might not be writing idiomatic Swift from the get go but no one is at that point. I think that's kind of the point the parent comment is making. How can a school acting in good faith open Swift classes if it's impossible for anyone to actually be an expert on it?

[deleted]

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#36

Post by superswordfish » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 11:02 PM UTC

badminton1 wrote: post #25

twblalock wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the best engineers I have worked with did not learn CS in college, or even in a boot camp. They learned on the job. Some programmers want to believe that computer science is harder than it really is, because it inflates their egos. CS is not as difficult to learn as law, or medicine, or electrical engineering, or many other disciplines for which self-taught practitioners are exceedingly rare. Furthermore, I'v…

An abridged definition of engineering is "applying science to create technology". A software engineer applies computer science to create software based technologies. Under that definition you worked with programmers not engineers. Then, true. You might have worked with programmers that seemed productive and learned on the job. But much of that learning happened at the expense of exposing the company and the customers…

Not all software requires the same degree of rigor in design and implementation. Software has bugs, but it sounds like you'd prefer if such software were never written in the first place. Regarding risk, it's as likely that the super-educated "engineer" drops unfiltered input directly into a SQL query as it is that Joe Programmer has the chance to corrupt data with a concurrency bug.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#37

Post by argonaut » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 11:11 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #10

argonaut wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A semester of tuition at a top-50 private university is $20-25k. Seems reasonable.

NEITHER of them "seem reasonable"!

It's reasonable from several different angles. Economics: The goods are priced lower than the competition. You don't negotiate prices against yourself. ROI: as aianus mentions. Affordability: it's about the same cost as a car, and lots of people own cars.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#38

Post by argonaut » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 11:14 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #28

skewart wrote: post #11

> Flatiron, a for-profit school, has seized on a clear need in the economy that some academic experts say reveals a failing among traditional universities. Teaching highly specialized skills currently in demand has not traditionally been the mission of universities. In professions like architecture and medicine there is an expectation that new graduates won't have much in the way of practical knowledge about current…

>>Is a disinterest in teaching current professional practice really a failing of universities? I think the issue is that universities are not in a good position to judge what is "fundamental knowledge" and what is simply a current professional practice. I have a B.S. in Informatics from the University of Washington. It's basically a degree at the intersection of computer science and humanities[1]. During the course o…

Security is not a required class for pretty much all CS degrees, including at other top CS schools like MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. And from my experience, academics at these schools know exactly what professional practice is, given how many professors start startups out of these universities.

Students are not dumb. I personally think no specific classes should be required of a CS degree (other than a specific number of classes), and while the department should make recommendations, they should trust the intelligence of their students and give them freedom to pick the right classes.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#39

Post by argonaut » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 11:18 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #23

badminton1 wrote: post #19

A coding camp graduate can be considered with respect to a computer science graduate what a paralegal is to a lawyer, or what a nurse is to a doctor. They can perform some procedures, but not all of them, and at some point there might be supervision. Now to be fair, paralegal and nursing programs take much longer than 12 weeks, are very strict and are regulated occupations that require a license that you can actually…

Some of the best engineers I have worked with did not learn CS in college, or even in a boot camp. They learned on the job. Some programmers want to believe that computer science is harder than it really is, because it inflates their egos. CS is not as difficult to learn as law, or medicine, or electrical engineering, or many other disciplines for which self-taught practitioners are exceedingly rare. Furthermore, I'v…

On a meta level, "I've known great engineers who were self-taught and terrible engineers with CS degrees" is a recurring meme in these discussions that really adds no information to the thread - it's obvious, and it's almost a tautology.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#40

Post by twblalock » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 11:21 PM UTC

skewart wrote: post #27

twblalock wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the people who go to good bootcamps already have strong university educations and would likely have been able to be hired into junior dev roles anyway without the bootcamp. That depends on how much programming experience they have. Many boot camp attendees have college degrees in non-technical majors and have no coding experience at all. A boot camp is a way to get coding experience in a structured environm…

Interesting. I wonder if that necessity for lending credibility is a somewhat recent thing. Perhaps the popularity of bootcamps makes people who recently got into coding and didn't attend one look worse - companies might assume they couldn't get in to a decent one? I'm a developer who didn't study CS in undergrad, and I didn't have a problem getting job offers when I was starting out several years ago, self taught an…

I think it's partially a new form of credentialism. But there is also the question of a candidate's suitability for the job. If you want to hire a Rails developer, for example, someone who just got out of one of the Rails boot camps is probably a more attractive candidate than a self-taught programmer who did not focus on Rails -- even though that self-taught programmer might know more about programming in general.