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You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

medium.freecodecamp.com

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Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#41

Post by ebiester »

My understanding of the current coding bootcamps is that they're becoming a finishing school. Most people have some basic programming before they come in, and they are learning the basics of current web development processes on their dime rather than the company. The company then is taking a smaller risk compared to someone with no vetting and no experience.

I have a friend who realized academia wasn't for them after their Ph.D/postdoc. It would be asinine for them to go back for a Computer Science undergrad, but they're in their mid-thirties and essentially are making a career change from academia. They have all the internal skills for becoming a developer or QE, but need some social signaling that they have a chance of doing the job.

I think of that person as someone for whom the bootcamp is valuable. Spend a few months learning to code, then apply to the bootcamp as a finishing school/paid recruiter.

(As an aside, getting off the academia path for those in the humanities is rather difficult at this point. We have really smart people stuck in terrible jobs.)

Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#42

Post by burkaman »

Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #36
menssen wrote: post #19

"'Teaching highly motivated students to code is actually not that hard.' — Dan Sofer" This broadly matches my experience. The hiring and interviewing of bootcamp graduates I've done has made me thing it's really just an intense vetting process for junior developer candidates. Which is valuable, but potentially could be replaced by something that costs less than $15k.

I've had a startup idea for this type of thing. We are forbidden, for nonsense reasons, to use IQ tests when hiring. This makes training your own workforce untenable for any cognitively demanding field, so we must use proxies like college education. However, one of the most important findings in psychometrics is the fact that scores on all cognitive tests are correlated. Thus there seems to be an opening for a compan…

It's not illegal to use an IQ test for hiring, as long as the job actually requires skills that the test screens for. Companies just don't do it because it's not useful.

Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#43

Post by falcolas »

user5994461 wrote: post #29
falcolas wrote: post #12

If you could find a way to create a broadly recognized and meaningful certification, you wouldn't need school at all. You have the JavaScript certification? You know how to code. Doesn't matter if you went to an Ivy League school or (re-)created all of the fundamentals from scratch. Make the certification standards free as in speech, charge a minimal fee to cover administration of the exams, and go to town.

If our jobs could be achieved by going to a 2 weeks certification, there would be plenty of people to do it and no need for the certification in the first place.

You're confusing the concept of a certification with a particular implementation of a certification. Being a certified electrician, for example, has a very different meaning than "went through 2 weeks worth of certification courses."

Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#44

Post by AlwaysRock »

bdcravens wrote: post #38

In 1999 I was a college "drop out" (financial aid probation due to poor discipline and depression, and I was too poor to pay for school for a semester), so I got my first "real" job doing ISP tech support in the little Oklahoma town I lived in. Had already learned basics of web dev (HTML via Notepad on Geocities) and some basic languages (Turbo Pascal, TI-BASIC, QBasic, Javascript, etc). Got into a little Perl, some…

Actually there were coding camps in the 1990's. There were not marketed as heavily and as widely as they are today but there were plenty around. The industry booms anytime there's a big need for developers.

Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#45

Post by linkregister »

Spooky23 wrote: post #34
RKoutnik wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey there. I'm certified to the hilt: IC3, CompTia A+/Net+/Security+ & Microsoft Certified Professional. All before I left high school. These certifications were absolutely useless when it came to getting me a job whenever I interviewed somewhere where they knew what they were doing. All they proved was that I was particularly good at studying and taking tests. This may be a useful skill in another career but in IT (…

No offense, but those certifications are pretty low value. The A+, etc solely exist because the federal government requires them for contractors. Code bootcamps do provide some usefulness, and you could problably look at that syllabus and come up with a more portable ciriculum that you could teach to people with aptitude but without credentials. It would be great to use something like this in civil service and other…

Which companies are disregarding state school graduates?

Don't Amazon, Facebook, et. al. send recruiting teams to most state schools?

Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#46

Post by [deleted] »

Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #36
menssen wrote: post #19

"'Teaching highly motivated students to code is actually not that hard.' — Dan Sofer" This broadly matches my experience. The hiring and interviewing of bootcamp graduates I've done has made me thing it's really just an intense vetting process for junior developer candidates. Which is valuable, but potentially could be replaced by something that costs less than $15k.

I've had a startup idea for this type of thing. We are forbidden, for nonsense reasons, to use IQ tests when hiring. This makes training your own workforce untenable for any cognitively demanding field, so we must use proxies like college education. However, one of the most important findings in psychometrics is the fact that scores on all cognitive tests are correlated. Thus there seems to be an opening for a compan…

[deleted]

Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#47

Post by jondubois »

Learning programming takes a really long time and you almost always think you know more than you really do.

In 2008, I thought I had mastered programming (that was about 5 years after I had started programming and learning intensively) - I was 2 years into my Software Engineering degree, I had built websites, Flash games, did AI stuff (ANNs and decision trees) and I even programmed an ATMEL AVR microcontroller to decode Morse Code from a binary signal on a circuit board.

... And yet, over the past 8 years (about 6 years after finishing my degree), I feel like I have learned more than I have ever before.

If you're curious, you will always find more things to learn.

Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#48

Post by namiller2 »

badminton1 wrote: post #33

I have over a decade of experience, and have worked with: - computer science and engineering graduates - people with a degree, just on another fields - 100% self-taught people - coding camp graduates with varying degrees of computer science education. From all of them, I have to say that working with the coding camp graduates was by far the most stressful. Some coding camp graduates come from computer science program…

What about people with a degree, just on another fields who are also coding camp graduates with varying degrees of computer science education?

Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#49

Post by Moshe_Silnorin »

burkaman wrote: post #42
Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a startup idea for this type of thing. We are forbidden, for nonsense reasons, to use IQ tests when hiring. This makes training your own workforce untenable for any cognitively demanding field, so we must use proxies like college education. However, one of the most important findings in psychometrics is the fact that scores on all cognitive tests are correlated. Thus there seems to be an opening for a compan…

It's not illegal to use an IQ test for hiring, as long as the job actually requires skills that the test screens for. Companies just don't do it because it's not useful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

It is very useful. This is why the military, police and even postal service use them. If you use an IQ test in your company, you will risk a lawsuit. The burden of proof is on you to prove how these skills are relevant, but in most cases they are only relevant because they are predictive of future performance, because they accurately measure cognitive ability. They do not resemble the tasks you will be doing in your job.

My startup idea would be to higher some psychologists and lawyers and develop IQ test templates that are both effective at measuring g and demonstrably related to skills in each job. Because of the nature of g, this seems doable.

Re: You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp

#50

Post by BoorishBears »

jondubois wrote: post #47

Learning programming takes a really long time and you almost always think you know more than you really do. In 2008, I thought I had mastered programming (that was about 5 years after I had started programming and learning intensively) - I was 2 years into my Software Engineering degree, I had built websites, Flash games, did AI stuff (ANNs and decision trees) and I even programmed an ATMEL AVR microcontroller to dec…

Some people have the opposite problem, never feeling like they know much at all.
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