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Bootcamps vs. College

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Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#351

Post by losteric »

gohrt wrote: post #332
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Same as universities... they don't. Companies generally ask recent grads to send their college transcript.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#352

Post by st3v3r »

autotune wrote: post #72
HNcow wrote: post #36

I'm in the process of hiring a junior position and have no bias towards college grads or bootcamp grads. The only negatives towards boot camp grads I've seen so far is: 1) One candidate had no idea what the terms "Class" or "OOP" even meant. I'm FINE with them not understanding stuff like sorts/advanced data structures, but he ACTUALLY had 0 idea what an int was. No lie! 2) I wish there wasn't such a heavy reliance o…

1) That's not really a "bootcamp" issue as it is with a candidate who can't be bothered to learn basic programming concepts or open a book on their own. Almost every book I've read on programming covers OOP in most languages. You can even hack it together in BASH ( http://lab.madscience.nl/oo.sh.txt ), not that you should. 2) LAMP stack is still probably the safest bet (substitute PHP for Python maybe), but yeah, jus…

I have to disagree with #1. If they don't even know what an int is, that's a complete failure of the bootcamp.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#353

Post by tps5 »

SilasX wrote: post #168
lloyd-christmas wrote: post #26

How is this possible? I think one key aspect that is missing is that boot camp graduates aren't straight off the barista lineup. I took one at age 28 after having worked in a technical role in finance since undergrad. The average age of my class was probably 29. Beyond just time in the workforce, I had a double major in math and economics with a minor in applied statistics. Had I dropped "Behavioral Economics" and ta…

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…

Interesting. I went through a bootcamp recently. We started with sinatra (a slimmed down ruby application framework), then went into rails, and lastly used node+express.

If we had only done rails, I'd probably have little idea how it worked, but doing all three definitely shored up some weak points.

It also helped that the teachers were genuinely knowledgeable and we had short lectures on deeper-level stuff (we had one hour lecture on how to build a tcp server from scratch in ruby, one on how the internet actually works - from the link layer up, and so on).

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#354

Post by st3v3r »

Zeno84 wrote: post #201
bobwaycott wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) That's not really a "bootcamp" issue as it is with a candidate who can't be bothered to learn basic programming concepts or open a book on their own. Almost every book I've read on programming covers OOP in most languages. I wholeheartedly disagree here, and think it very much is an issue with bootcamps. If a bootcamp doesn't even introduce its students to such concepts as classes, instances, OOP, and basic data…

>If a bootcamp doesn't even introduce its students to such concepts as classes, instances, OOP, and basic data types, then it has failed to adequately serve its students with fundamental knowledge and offered a shitty introduction to programming. Honestly, if someone doesn't understand these very basic concepts, what's his/her curiosity level regarding computer programming? I would not want to hire him/her based sole…

It's still the bootcamp's fault for not at least introducing them to those concepts. I mean, you can't really google what an int is if you don't even know that an int is a thing.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#355

Post by DougWebb »

humbleMouse wrote: post #105
DougWebb wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In another comment I wrote that bootcamp-trained developers are learning to do jobs that will be automated soon. It's interesting that you mention teaching them to write coherently designed CRUD apps, because my company's product is a tool that writes a coherently designed CRUD app based on querying your database schema. Using my company's product, I can spend 15 minutes to do the job that you spent six months traini…

That's cool you made that app - but you are still going to have to have people think about the architecture, manage servers, maintain the app, implement custom business logic, talk to business people, etc. I feel like a common theme on this comment page is that bootcamp people are trained to do XY - therefore they cannot do Z or learn Z quickly. People who are actually into computers will learn all the other computer…

I learned software development the same way you did; 34 years of programming experience, with just 19 as a career professional. I got a BE in Mechanical Engineering, not CS, and didn't plan to become primarily a programmer until most of the way through grad school.

My problem with "bootcamp people" is really restricted to people who are choosing a bootcamp over college or on-the-job experience, with the expectation that they'll be able to do the same job for the same money as someone who has a CS degree, or a similar level of self-training like you and I. I have an even bigger problem with managers who would choose someone with bootcamp training over someone with deeper knowledge simply because the bootcamp person is cheaper and seems 'just as good'.

Regarding the app: you're absolutely right. Generating the code is just the first step. The value we provide is in giving you a multi-man-year head start and a solid foundation, so that you can spend your time on higher-level business-oriented requirements instead of all of the basic functionality. (My profile has a link to our website, in case you're interested. Lots of info, some video demos, and a free trial you can download.)

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#356

Post by tps5 »

st3v3r wrote: post #352
autotune wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) That's not really a "bootcamp" issue as it is with a candidate who can't be bothered to learn basic programming concepts or open a book on their own. Almost every book I've read on programming covers OOP in most languages. You can even hack it together in BASH ( http://lab.madscience.nl/oo.sh.txt ), not that you should. 2) LAMP stack is still probably the safest bet (substitute PHP for Python maybe), but yeah, jus…

I have to disagree with #1. If they don't even know what an int is, that's a complete failure of the bootcamp.

Every number in JavaScript is a floating point number of type, you guessed it, "number."

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#357

Post by aczerepinski »

madmax96 wrote: post #206
madmax96 wrote: post #32

I have a slightly more pessimistic view of the situation: Sure, bootcamp grads can write a web application just fine; after all, it's usually only CRUD. But what value are they bringing to an organization? Why would I pay them the same amount as a college graduate who undoubtedly has more total knowledge not only in CS, but in other areas as well? Ideally, a college should expose students to a diverse range of knowle…

I hesitate to add this lest I be accused of moving the goalposts, but I'd like to add that the algorithmic and other low-level knowledge is vital to bringing technological value. Here's why: I've taken English courses and Music theory courses, but I am not a writer or a composer by any sense of the word. Sure, I can write a blog post or a comment, and I know how to compose a harmony, but I still lack the sort of know…

I have a doctorate in music from one of the top conservatories, but excellence in music (or anything else) is only about putting the hours in. There's nothing I learned in school that isn't widely available in books, or attainable by transcribing records and studying scores. A good teacher is pretty important but doesn't require the formality of school enrollment.

I'm quite sure the same is true in programming. So what if a bootcamp grad can only make CRUD apps a few months into their dev career? What can they do five years after that? At a certain point individual dedication and passion is what matters. There are a million books about algorithms and many bootcamp grads have library cards.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#358

Post by eropple »

p4wnc6 wrote: post #306
eropple wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

I would say your experience is a significant outlier, especially becoming a consultant. I don't know how much of your previous job movements were based on having a contact at the hiring company: if few then yes your experience is indeed an extreme outlier, if many then it makes some sense because someone vouched for you. I agree that in many cases it boils down to subjective ideas about whether someone likes you -- a…

Of my four full-time jobs in my career, one had a prior contact and one was a you-know-nothing,-you're-a-college-hire job. (Much of my consulting comes from my personal network, of course.) Two were startups, two were big companies. Interestingly, the startups were more amenable to "you don't know this but you are obviously capable of picking this up".

Your point about personal appeal is well made, and I'm pretty good at projecting even though I pretty consciously avoid a lot of what the startup world thinks makes it great (and I won't work at one again because I respect myself). It helps that, to toot my own horn a little, I'm pretty good; I have a broad base of stuff to apply to a problem (even when I didn't know Ruby I knew Perl, Python, JavaScript, Smalltalk, Lisp...) and I can talk my way into an understanding via analogy and fundamental knowledge.

But what I think really matters on this front is that I'm able to express that I'm competent to somebody, and I don't need a whiteboard to do it, and I really do think that's key. My view of it is that all I need is to get somebody who's willing to listen and I'll pry that door wide open. I'm one of those people who interviews (well, interviewed, I like consulting) aggressively and habitually, and I have an Excel file with the results or non-results of every resume I've ever sent out in my life (155). When I look at he number of times I have gotten to at least a phone interview (112), not gotten an offer (53, but that includes me declining them), and gotten a reason why (21) that was related to a lack of direct subject matter expertise...I get a real small number. Two, as it happens. And this is totally a small sample size, I am not claiming statistical relevance. But I think the recognition that this industry, despite protestations of logic and high-mindedness, is still fundamentally and inescapably about making connections with people and making them like you, is something that even small-sample data like this can indicate. Most tech folks won't take this to heart, because of all the weird factors and weird people involved, but I do think that some pretty straightforward Dale Carnegie stuff is as beneficial to a reasonably good developer as anything they can learn with their hands on a keyboard.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#359

Post by eropple »

morgante wrote: post #338
sotojuan wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup yup. Thinking, communication, functioning as a human being who will have to talk to people who are not nerds. Simple asks, but they're uncommon enough that they can bend the odds a whole bunch.
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