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Bootcamps vs. College

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Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#401

Post by khedoros »

littleweep wrote: post #380
mikehollinger wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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'?

Of course. I know someone that would fit that description, and I don't think he's unusual.

> Do you think it's possible that developers who are not good could graduate from college with CS degrees?

Of course. I graduated with some and work with some. Strictly speaking, learning to write software is just a side-effect of learning how algorithms, data structures, and all that work. Some people never get very good at writing software.

I think you're missing the point, though. College vs boot camp isn't a matter of the skill of the resulting developers. It's more of a focus on different skills. Suppose a technician and an engineer are writing a program together. Maybe the engineer works on the "deep dive" aspects of the design (tough algorithms. the critical path of the program). Maybe the technician works on the overall architecture, wiring things up cleanly and producing an artful design. They're different focuses, and it's a division that doesn't currently really exist in SW dev, but does in some other fields (electrical engineers vs electricians, mech eng's vs various technicians, etc).

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#402

Post by jon-wood »

akubera wrote: post #398
littleweep wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Are you implying that being a programming "technician" is equivalent to being a bad programmer? Nobody has said "good developer" before you did. I think the point is not to base the "goodness" of the developer on the person themselves - of course there will be people who 'get it' and excel at programming whether they go to bootcamp or college (or are self-taught for that matter), just as there will be people who don'…

I interpreted it not as good/bad programmers, but as the level of project you might ask each person to complete.

A technician might be incredibly good at doing things like hooking a mobile app up to a REST API, building database frontends, and building on top of an established system. The engineer on the other hand is able to do all of the above, but is also someone you could trust to give a high level overview of the system as a whole and expect to come back with a considered approach to implementing it, taking into consideration things like fault tolerance, how an operations team would interact with and monitor it, and where to make tradeoffs between an ideal implementation and time/money limitations.

At least in my mind there's nothing to stop a sufficiently motivated technician learning the necessary skills to be considered an engineer - its not about credentialing, but about having experience that could come either from a college course, or just from working in the field for long enough to have picked it up.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#403

Post by enricobruschini »

Thel real big difference that too often Americans forget is that college (and all the education system below colleges) gives you the structural mindset to break down complex problems and find solutions. They create your way of thinking and your rational side. Bootcamps, instead, just teach you how to execute some actions. It's like the difference between colleges and industrial schools.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#404

Post by doeixd »

lloyd-christmas wrote: post #302
marcelluspye wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a reaction to the question, "can bootcamps replace a CS degree?", to which these people would say, "no." On the question, "are bootcamps good or bad?" I think most people would tend towards good, though exactly how good is another matter of debate.

> It's a reaction to the question, "can bootcamps replace a CS degree?" If someone is posing this question, it's not one based in reality. The question is 4 years of a CS degree vs a bootcamp, not 4 years of college vs no college. As I clearly stated, only one classmate didn't have an undergraduate degree. That question is a strawman at best.

I think it depends on the bootcamp. Some bootcamps do market themselves as college alternatives. I spoke with a bootcamp requiter recently and he attempted to convince me that pursuing a CS degree was a waste of time.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#406

Post by madiathomas »

Bootcamps are filling a void which existed for a long time in the CS industry. Most of the time, A CS grad is hired to do a job that can be done by someone with little programming knowledge. I feel it is a waste of resources to hire a CS grad to do CRUD app with maximum 5 users on a very good day.

Now companies can use people from bootcamps for such kind of jobs and use CS grads for deep and high level stuff. Surely some top bootcampers will be able to do high level stuff too.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#407

Post by gaius »

SilasX wrote: post #182
morgante wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That's the point -- I didn't . I just needed it to convince someone to give me a chance. Employers would assume someone still in college for CS can program, and so look there. They don't automatically make that assumption for some rando with a different degree. To be sure, there were also probably some job-searching techniques that would have worked, but they're also hard to learn from reading pointers online if you…

In my experience any numerate degree is as good as CS for securing an interview. Mech Eng grad myself.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#408

Post by santiagobasulto »

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…

Really good summary. What bootcamp is that, can we know? At least, are you guys based in SV or NY? I'm curious about the placement fees. I always thought there were some placement fees.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#409

Post by larzang »

jon-wood wrote: post #402
akubera wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that being a programming "technician" is equivalent to being a bad programmer? Nobody has said "good developer" before you did. I think the point is not to base the "goodness" of the developer on the person themselves - of course there will be people who 'get it' and excel at programming whether they go to bootcamp or college (or are self-taught for that matter), just as there will be people who don'…

I interpreted it not as good/bad programmers, but as the level of project you might ask each person to complete. A technician might be incredibly good at doing things like hooking a mobile app up to a REST API, building database frontends, and building on top of an established system. The engineer on the other hand is able to do all of the above, but is also someone you could trust to give a high level overview of th…

Exactly. I'm a self-taught mostly-backend web developer and so I know a variety of related languages, I know the standard tooling and best practices for both front and back end, I know things like OO patterns and project architecture so that I can create sensible structures when writing a new system, and I know enough about the ops side of things to be able to do a lot of that when needed. All these things are practical and necessary to my day to day work.

On the other hand, I do not know basic things CS BS-havers learned, like how to implement a bubble sort from scratch, because that is not something that has ever been relevant or is likely to ever be relevant to my day to day work (outside of one-off interview questions from companies I likely don't want to work for anyway if that's their interview process). Algorithm design and high level math is the foundation of CS as a science and as a degree, but it just doesn't factor that much into writing code in a high level language for an established platform like the web.

And having a CS degree is no guarantee that you won't put an expensive call inside a loop or write monolithic functions or any of the other terrible practices I've had to train out of junior devs.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#410

Post by ThomPete »

nostrebored wrote: post #328
ThomPete wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many things with you evolved significantly during your time in school.

And decoupling them from the environment I was in, the work that I was doing, and the people that I was around is absurd.

So when I developed the same areas and wasn't in studying how do you explain that?
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