Bootcamps vs. College • Hacker News Board

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#371

Post by ssalazar » Fri, May 20, 2016, 1:59 AM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #115

nostrebored wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My CS degree was four years of heavy abstract thinking. If you can get those skills elsewhere great, but I don't think it's that common.

Based on what? The amount of bias in this thread is very strange. I think what's going on is that the people with CS degrees invested a significant chunk of their life and a significant amount of money into getting a CS degree. Therefore they're invested in denying the possibility that the qualities they achieved through their program can be achieved without. The article presents some evidence in support of this poss…

> We’ve found bootcamp grads as a group to be better than college grads at [skills that require a medium level of abstract thinking], and worse at [skills that require a higher level of abstract thinking].

Seems pretty clear to me. Im not sure how this disagrees with

> CS degree was four years of heavy abstract thinking

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#372

Post by Akkuma » Fri, May 20, 2016, 2:01 AM UTC

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…

Your #3 is absurd. Almost 10 years ago I came out of college making nearly that much in a city and state with a lower cost of living than NJ.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#373

Post by xapata » Fri, May 20, 2016, 2:18 AM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #278

xapata wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Frustratingly, the instructors were very unhelpful at the stuff I needed help with the most -- forming a mental model of how and why Rails works. I suspect that's because they didn't know how or why. Rails has a lot of magic -- just follow the convention and it works. Magic can be good, because it encourages a standard. Unfortunately, many Rails programmers seem comfortable leaving the magic as a mystery rather tha…

My first attempt or two learning Rails ended up this way, but I really got it once I had SQL down. In a/A we built our own stripped down, minimal versions of ActiveRecord and Rails. This ended up connecting all of the dots for me.

What is "a/A"?

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#374

Post by cmuuuuuu » Fri, May 20, 2016, 2:32 AM UTC

aczerepinski wrote: post #350

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 have a different perspective on point 5. One of the things that attracted me to Flatiron School was their audited jobs placement report. Very detailed statistics about how many students graduate, how long it takes them to find jobs, and how much they earn. I've never seen traditional colleges hold themselves to that standard of disclosure. I think there are a couple reasons bootcamps are especially successful compa…

https://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and-destinations/

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#375

Post by mdholloway » Fri, May 20, 2016, 2:33 AM UTC

morgante wrote: post #180

SilasX wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Hey, I can code and think abstractly. Give me a chance? That's more or less all most CS graduates can say though. I personally don't think anyone is qualified to be a professional developer until they've been programming for several years (especially coding in an unstructured way). I don't want to be combative, but what made you think you needed a bootcamp? I learned to program long before I went to college and was…

Bear in mind that the tech job market is a lot different than much of the U.S. economy right now. There are fields where experienced candidates with strong resumes can go job hunting and hear crickets. To go from that to not really needing any formal credential is a big mental leap.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#376

Post by douche » Fri, May 20, 2016, 2:40 AM UTC

egonschiele wrote: post #155

Hey, I wrote an algorithms book aimed at bootcampers! The epub is out today, print book to follow: http://amzn.com/1617292230 I'm hoping this will be an easy to read algorithms book for bootcamp grads. Here's a sample chapter for anyone interested: https://manning-content.s3.amazonaws.com/download/f/a75f93d-...

Just bought it today, can't wait for the dead-tree version to get here. Looks pretty interesting.

BTW, Manning was running a promotion on their mailing list for a 50% discount today.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#377

Post by xhedley » Fri, May 20, 2016, 2:59 AM UTC

lsadam0 wrote: post #69

> Bootcamp grads match or beat college grads on practical skills, and lose on deep knowledge. I feel as though you are attempting to lower the bar of what is acceptable in order to sell something :). The word 'practical' is thrown around in this article without much of a definition. Are we talking about making simple web pages? I've just finished conducting a round of interviews for a junior level position, and based…

Software companies aren't the only people who hire developers. I spent today (I'm a non-technical product owner in an enterprise) discussing middleware which will transform 10,000 miscellaneous transactions from multiple line of business system every night into our ERP. There's lots of domain logic and we're paying the supplier a lump sum more than the annual salary of a new CS or BC grad. It isn't a simple web page. Say the transformation from source to target with good sorting would take 100 milliseconds. If it took 10,000 times longer, that's 17 minutes - and that would meet my user requirements. If it didn't I'd expect the supplier to fix their SQL indexes. So none of their technical guys need to be good at sorting.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#378

Post by dang » Fri, May 20, 2016, 3:09 AM UTC

juped wrote: post #305

dang wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

By that I mean "hide from people without showdead", of course. (I have it on.) The question is "why do you move moderated comments from where they were to the top level?".

Usually we do that so we can mark the detached subthread off-topic, which makes it fall in rank. In this case we didn't add that extra penalty, but detaching it from the top subthread had much the same effect.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#379

Post by jkaptur » Fri, May 20, 2016, 3:46 AM UTC

tps5 wrote: post #356

st3v3r wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

It's just an IEEE 754 double.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#380

Post by littleweep » Fri, May 20, 2016, 4:02 AM UTC

mikehollinger wrote: post #365

velodrome wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are bootcamps any different than vocational schools?

They're not. I've said this before [1], but bootcamps are training programming's equivalent to the technician. Techs have a very needed place. A technician can become a master of a trade, and with experience design something that's awesome (see motorcycle craftsman). However, a technician will likely not design a Turbofan engine from scratch. Code camps are (in my opinion) a sign that programming is bifurcating into…

I'm not sure what this means. Do you think there are smart people who would or could be good developers who did not major in computer science and later went on to attend a 'bootcamp'? Do you think it's possible that developers who are not good could graduate from college with CS degrees?