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Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

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Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#41

Post by badminton1 »

twblalock wrote: post #32
badminton1 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the information age, given the right questions, you might eventually get the right answers. But you need to be able to formulate the right questions first.

If you do not possess a strong problem solving approach, you might not be able to formulate those questions in the first place.

Then, corporate interest aside, there are definitions of software engineering that are very clear. Refer to the IEEE definition of software engineer for instance, it might be more aligned to mine than to the "I feel like an engineer today" idea you are trying to push.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#42

Post by badminton1 »

superswordfish wrote: post #36
badminton1 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bugs and defects will happen at the time of implementing functional and non-functional requirements no matter how strong your preparation and problem solving skills are. But they differ since assumptions would differ in nature.

Many people would work on a problem until it works (or stops being an obstacle). But it takes some preparation to understand if an implementation is acceptable from a non-functional requirement standpoint.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#43

Post by kem »

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…

To piggyback off of your own analogy...

Learning doesn't stop after an initial degree. So, in medicine, you have situations where nurses are adopting many of the roles that physicians have stereotypically occupied, in terms of NPs and nurse anesthetists, etc. Granted, they do this with additional education, but it's still acquired gradually rather than in a single degree. PAs, which are ostensibly assistants, essentially have the same training after a certain period of time as physicians, especially with med schools shrinking their in-class curricula, and PA programs having stricter pre-degree experience requirements.

I think the argument that's implicitly being made with this sort of model is that you don't need a monolithic degree to learn a given skillset, and there are multiple routes to the same outcome. Furthermore, having a monolithic degree doesn't mean you know everything there is to know in the field (especially as your degree drifts further and further into the past). My guess is a certain proportion of those non-CS graduates provide something else to corporations other than low-level fundamentals of computer science.

My prediction is that medicine will crumble under its own weight as these sort of realities become too expensive to ignore. There's too much of an unmet need for health care to ignore the huge swath of people who can competently provide it. Maybe something similar is happening in IT.

Your analogy is also a little interesting in that in many settings, the tasks done by nurses and physicians are not the same. I routinely have seen physicians ask nurses to complete tasks like put in IV lines and so forth because they didn't know how to do them, and didn't want to botch the job. The nurses weren't simply a substitute, they were functioning in a different role.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#44

Post by aianus »

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"!

$15k is two to three months salary after you graduate and get a job. The ROI is off the charts.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#45

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

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?

Relax. All they need to do is teach, not be experts.

I asked the same of a MechE friend who used to teach AutoCAD at a community college despite not having known it before. His answer? I just need to stay a week ahead of the class.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#46

Post by badminton1 »

kem wrote: post #43
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…

To piggyback off of your own analogy... Learning doesn't stop after an initial degree. So, in medicine, you have situations where nurses are adopting many of the roles that physicians have stereotypically occupied, in terms of NPs and nurse anesthetists, etc. Granted, they do this with additional education, but it's still acquired gradually rather than in a single degree. PAs, which are ostensibly assistants, essenti…

Yes, through years of collaboration they have learned to distribute tasks in specific ways leading to specialization. What I am trying to get at is that it might not be a really good idea to have a nurse be the head of a cardiology department.

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#47

Post by badminton1 »

bdcravens wrote: post #31
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…

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 :-)

Do you perceive that a CS degree could have helped you overcome challenges or mitigate risks through your career?

Have you resorted to trial an error on tasks that could have been solved by applying CS knowledge?

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#48

Post by enraged_camel »

argonaut wrote: post #38
enraged_camel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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 nu…

>>Security is not a required class for pretty much all CS degrees, including at other top CS schools like MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley.

Next time a bunch of credit card data is stolen from a high-profile retailer, or credentials with plaintext passwords leaked from some company's database, you should think long and hard about what factors may have contributed to it.

>>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.

Wait, hold on. You are expecting a bunch of 19-23 year olds to make intelligent and wise decisions about what classes they need to take in order to succeed in their field?

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#49

Post by seangrogg »

gaius wrote: post #12

When Apple Inc., for example, announced in 2014 a new programming language for its products, Swift, Flatiron adjusted its curriculum within days I don't see how this is possible, who is teaching this course? How do you go from 0 to instructor-level expert in "days"?

How do graduate students with no background in teaching become adjunct faculty teaching courses that cost the same amount as ones taught by tenured professors?

Re: Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

#50

Post by gaius »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #45
tschwimmer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Relax. All they need to do is teach, not be experts. I asked the same of a MechE friend who used to teach AutoCAD at a community college despite not having known it before. His answer? I just need to stay a week ahead of the class.

$1000/week seems alot to be taught by such a guy, IMHO. A student could do that for free, from Apple's website, and be only one week behind where they would be. So Flatiron is charging $15k for a one week head start!
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