Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bootcamps vs. College

blog.triplebyte.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 449 posts

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#331

Post by morgante »

velodrome wrote: post #277
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?

The lack of regulation.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#332

Post by gohrt »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #326
warlox wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Perhaps we should think of graduating as simply 'finishing' the curriculum. If you paid course fees and did the work, you should be able to walk out and say 'I am a C student at RoR' with a certificate. A company which hires through boot camps can ask for grades and choose to hire or not. A C level student with other skills may still be valuable because of other skills they have and employable for junior or non dev r…

How does the company/school defend its brand against the C students sending out resumes that say "I am a student at RoR' with a certificate" and leaving out the grade part?

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#333

Post by gohrt »

argonaut wrote: post #300
seattledev14 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, most SV companies will pay a recruiting fee for any engineers they hire, even junior engineers. This is okay because it is typically a percentage of first year salary - so the fee is less for junior candidates.

There's no particular guarantee that a bootcamp grad will find their job via a bootcamp referral.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#334

Post by busterarm »

justinv wrote: post #321
huehehue wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like App Academy is still claiming no upfront cost. I successfully applied a few years ago; despite hearing the "X% of your first year's salary" speech over and over, I was told I would not only need to pay a heavy deposit, but the entire program cost. Kush Patel (the founder) claimed people were bailing after the program and my young age made me a risk. I can understand those kinds of problems, but waiting…

http://www.appacademy.io/faq/deposit Their FAQ seems to have a fair amount of information. Though, it was hard to find from the homepage.

This is a recent addition since their site redesign in the last < 12 months.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#335

Post by AlldenKope »

Companies focus too much on attracting talent, not enough on developing it.

If both of these screened avenues of entry to software development are as promising as these metrics indicate (each with their pros and cons) here are some potential larger takeaways for companies:

1) Invest in the continuous development of your employees, regardless of their background and seniority

2) Hire for teams, and diversify teams with both CS and BC grads

3) Hire more people in general (maybe on a probationary period)

Fit to small teams with the goal of cultivating experientially diverse teams, and spend significant time developing employees - junior and senior.

Any intellectual work should involve continuous learning and development. If the company's focus is restricted to current projects, or on the bottom line, or if managers enforce strict division of labor, an organization will warp to optimize for those metrics and become less adaptable to inevitable changes in the market (or within the company) and the company will fail to compete - or at minimum incur major opportunity costs.

What these metrics suggest is that if you take relatively successful candidates and invest in their individual development, both in depth and breadth, that investment will pay off. You'll create engineers who find better solutions to problems and - more importantly - who find better problems to solve.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#336

Post by gohrt »

komali2 wrote: post #322
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…

I work for a popular bootcamp and can offer further insight. Interviews: Criteria include technical ability. Our site points towards a lot of free resources for learning JS, and I can personally attribute that there is enough material to get a liberal arts student from 0 to a basic understanding of core JS functions. If they can't use those free resources to self-teach, or haven't grocked the material after attending…

> They meet with the outcomes staff after and discuss the interview. We now have a general idea of what to expect in a google interview. This data is stored and updated for every single graduate, forever.

This was a major value-add for fraternities and university career-services offices.

The good news is that nowadays, there are no secrets -- Google itself hands out public training material for its interviews, not to mention blogs and careercup / Cracking books, and most companies interview pretty similarly to Google style.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#337

Post by TheCowboy »

forgotAgain wrote: post #144

I wonder how many of the engineers at this weeks Google I/O or the next Apple Dev conference went to bootcamps.

Probably not a lot.

One obvious reason is because they heavily recruit from elite universities. They have the budget, size, and reputation to make that approach work.

Another reason is because the number of people who have gone through bootcamps likely represent a tiny portion of the programmer labor force. So looking at the percentage of Google engineers who attended bootcamps has to be compared to the larger pool of applicants, otherwise it may not be measuring what people think it means.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#338

Post by morgante »

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 hasn't been my experience. I've had plenty of offers where I literally didn't know their primary programming language at all.

Especially as you get to higher level positions, thinking skills are far more important than experience.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#339

Post by gohrt »

morgante wrote: post #323
eonw wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that works both ways; you hire self taught because you are self taught, just like CS grads tend to prefer hiring other CS grads. me, i have no preference when i interview a candidate... can you code? and can you solve complex problems? other then that i dont care about how you got your skills.

> you hire self taught because you are self taught, just like CS grads tend to prefer hiring other CS grads. I like and hire plenty of CS grads as well. I also have a CS degree. It's just bootcamp grads that I steer clear of.

You seem arbitrarily biased against something you think is too "hipster".

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#340

Post by serge2k »

Jormundir wrote: post #207

These results aren't very surprising because this is about interviewing performance. The goal of bootcamps is "teach you enough to get a job"; they're basically gaming the interview process by teaching to the test. University programs on the other hand are "teach you CS theory"; learning to interview well is up to the student and the specific school's offering of interview training. I think there's a strong argument…

> I think there's a strong argument to make that university programs are too focused on theory

What would you see dropped and replaced?

Post reply on HN