Great article. Bipartisan win!
When people work together (across partisan, economic, social, etc.) divides, everybody benefits.
Kudos to everyone involved in this one.
The Coders of Kentucky
31–40 of 69 posts
Re: The Coders of Kentucky
#32I think the most important line of the article is: "On its first run in 2016, Interapt had 800 applicants, accepted 50 and graduated 35." Any strategy that posits IT and programming "insourcing" as a solution for the troubles of Middle America is going to have to have a strategy for the 750/800 people who don't have the chops to become a software engineer.
765 assuming the graduates all found jobs.
Re: The Coders of Kentucky
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rephrasing the parent's point in a way that I think is not inflammatory: " Anecdotally, the bootcamp graduates that didn't previously know how to code who I have worked with have provided net negative value - that is the productivity cost to the rest of the team has been higher than the value they have provided - and I think companies who hire them must not be aware of this possibility. " This has not been my experie…
It depends on the bootcamp. There's a local one at a decent university that turns out a ton of people with no real ability to program. It's not a very tough course, and so many people are able to get through it without actual aptitude by the end. On the other hand, I recently interviewed someone from an out-of-state bootcamp that was very impressive. They had been self-teaching for a while beforehand, but from the in…
I feel that the market for programmer bootcamps is something like the market for used cars. As in that famous economics paper (the lemons and cherries one), bad bootcamps might get rid of good bootcamps due to costs and the buyer's inability to distinguish. Here, the "buyer" is both immediate (the student) and indirect (the potential employer).
I think lots of people really want something like a BS+MS in computer science, minus the part that would be a generic liberal arts AA degree. Practical people do not wish to waste time and money on the political indoctrination courses. Two years of that stuff is 2.5% of a person's lifetime and the cost of a 3-bedroom house.
Re: The Coders of Kentucky
#34I think the author is making a mistake by assuming the biggest potential benefit would be the coders taking jobs with "tech companies" in Kentucky. Coders working outside of technology companies can still provide significant added value. Smaller, non-tech companies frequently see enormous productivity benefits by building simple building CRUD applications with a small amount of custom business logic.
> Smaller, non-tech companies frequently see enormous productivity benefits by building simple building CRUD applications with a small amount of custom business logic.
The problem is convincing these smaller companies of that fact. Many of these smaller businesses are owned by people who are deeply suspicious of technology, often with good reason. They've been burned by slick salespeople who've promised the moon and have saddled them with software that they don't know how to understand or maintain which now has vital financial or customer data.
As a result, many smaller companies (such as sole proprietorships) don't understand how far along software has come, and the role that software plays in allowing larger companies to squeeze them on margins.
Re: The Coders of Kentucky
#35I'm from KY. This article is great, but in focusing on these coding bootcamp graduates, it misses the much larger picture of just how much brain drain occurs for actual CS graduates (who, to be fair, are much less likely to be from Eastern KY). Right now they're taking millions in gov. money to train a small amount of people... but Kentucky graduates many more people with degrees in CS every year, by about an order o…
[deleted]
Re: The Coders of Kentucky
#36Software development is a semi engineering, semi math/quantitative profession. Very little of current US primary/middle, and high school education is dedicated that. A few boot camps are not going to solve the fundamental skills mismatch issues....
Re: The Coders of Kentucky
#37Software development is a semi engineering, semi math/quantitative profession. Very little of current US primary/middle, and high school education is dedicated that. A few boot camps are not going to solve the fundamental skills mismatch issues....
No, it’s not. Software engineering is about creating and communicating logical structures, which is closer to writing philosophy papers than to cranking quadratic equations or knowing the integrals of trigonometric functions. Some high school math may be incidentally useful in the analysis of algorithmic complexity, but the structural correspondence between math and programming doesn’t show up until math transitions from quantitative (numeric and symbolic computation) to qualitative (proofs) well after the end of the high school curriculum.
Re: The Coders of Kentucky
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rephrasing the parent's point in a way that I think is not inflammatory: " Anecdotally, the bootcamp graduates that didn't previously know how to code who I have worked with have provided net negative value - that is the productivity cost to the rest of the team has been higher than the value they have provided - and I think companies who hire them must not be aware of this possibility. " This has not been my experie…
It depends on the bootcamp. There's a local one at a decent university that turns out a ton of people with no real ability to program. It's not a very tough course, and so many people are able to get through it without actual aptitude by the end. On the other hand, I recently interviewed someone from an out-of-state bootcamp that was very impressive. They had been self-teaching for a while beforehand, but from the in…
Do you mind sharing the name of the out-of-state bootcamp? I've been researching programs to apply to.
Re: The Coders of Kentucky
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on the bootcamp. There's a local one at a decent university that turns out a ton of people with no real ability to program. It's not a very tough course, and so many people are able to get through it without actual aptitude by the end. On the other hand, I recently interviewed someone from an out-of-state bootcamp that was very impressive. They had been self-teaching for a while beforehand, but from the in…
Do you mind sharing the name of the out-of-state bootcamp? I've been researching programs to apply to.
I'm not sure I ever knew the name of it, but it was in Utah, if that helps. Previously they had taught Angular as part of the course, but they apparently recently switched to React.
Re: The Coders of Kentucky
#40I came away from this article feeling cautiously optimistic. As the article noted, they had 800 applicants, accepted 50, and graduated 35. It's great that those 35 got jobs, but what do you do with those 750 people who couldn't get in? Do you train them in something else that requires a little bit of tech skills, such as CNC machining?