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Bootcamps vs. College

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Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#411

Post by lsadam0 »

xhedley wrote: post #377
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.…

That's a very good point. I'm only speaking from the view of my experience, and my responsibilities and concerns are different than your example. I suppose my initial skepticism of the article is grounded in that we do all we have different concerns, and I felt the article attempted to paint with too broad of a brush. The author would have helped me tremendously had they defined terms like practical programming.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#412

Post by ArkyBeagle »

Programming isn't all one thing. You have to have what amounts to an epistemology about the system you're working on right now or you're going to break things.

A degree improves the chances of this. About half of what I do is teach these things, on the job. Just being able to classify a systems error can be daunting - is it a show stopper, or an ignore, or something in between?

I see bootcamps as being fine for getting people into seats, but the rest takes a long time.

Finally, employability and what (IMO) CS/programming should be about are diverging rapidly. This was not always so. This is starting to be a real problem.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#413

Post by ArkyBeagle »

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?

A CS degree doesn't make you a coder. Look, CS is born from specific mathematical events in the 19th/20th Century. For some people, a grasp of CS may be a liability - I've been places where it was like that.

The bootcamp thing may work out to equalize load on university CS programs. where us weirdos who were attracted to the discipline for abstract reasons can do what we do, and industry demand for talent can continue to be met through other means.

But!

I rather object strenously to the implied "status" differences between a software technician and a "scientist" but that's probably inevitable. If anything, "shallower" people with good organization skills offer more business value than somebody like me. All I can do is figure out what's really gone wrong, or not make things go wrong to start with. See, even I am using "shallower". I work for people like that all the time, and I admire them greatly.

An analogy is hardware engineers and hardware techs. You need both.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#414

Post by ArkyBeagle »

sotojuan wrote: post #199
p4wnc6 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is that while most employers say the same thing you say -- that they hire for critical thinking ability and intellectual curiosity / talent -- almost all of them don't actually want that. Instead they want employees who don't think independently; employees who are pliable and will not complain if given drudgery, told to use poor practices, told to make things of poor quality. Everyone says they don't just…

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…

People suck at hiring.

Your story is exactly why I haven't put anything personal up on Github. I'd have to polish it beforehand and life is short enough as it is.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#415

Post by mrdrozdov »

joslin01 wrote: post #289
mrdrozdov wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I need someone who can look at a problem and realize that we can cut the amount of work we have to do by understanding programming concepts at an abstract level. I think in many ways this is the exception not the rule. Many students certainly go through their CS degree without thinking this way, and some of these students go on to get phenomenal jobs because they spent a lot of time programming. There are lots of g…

> I think in many ways this is the exception not the rule. Many students certainly go through their CS degree without thinking this way, and some of these students go on to get phenomenal jobs because they spent a lot of time programming. Huh? Even if you didn't want to learn to think abstractly, you would still be enrolled in courses like "Data Structures" that force you to. Did you get a CS degree? You're also maki…

I'm confident you can get through an Algorithms and Data Structures course (which is the most difficult aka "weeder" course at most institutions) by memorizing a handful of sorting and search methods. You probably won't impress the Professor, but I'm sure you can pass.

OOP and other design patterns are also susceptible to memorization. I suspect that you're bringing this up because we have vastly different views of what difficult abstract thought is.

Here are two problems that I suspect are difficult to solve on programming experience alone.

1. How does Google display instant results (and recommendations) when you type into the search bar?

2. How would you build a Siri competitor, and what would be the biggest bottlenecks?

A problem that someone with minimal programming experience could probably solve would be.

1. How would you build me an inventory system which has an app, automated deploy, and unit tests?

2. Imagine you have only ever built Android apps with a NodeJS and Mongodb backend. How would you build an iOS app with a Python and MySQL backend?

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#416

Post by 6stringmerc »

infinite8s wrote: post #264
6stringmerc wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a path I've been considering as well - had a lot of CS background, hated running Unix compilers instead of working with HTML & C++ (already learned some in HS) - so ditched the major. Went with English, which, you know, is another language 'n all. Got into the working world, still have tech savvy... So to me I have to question the ROI of walking away from 5+ years of professional advancement and jump into soft…

Have you heard of CAR (computer assisted reporting)? The field of data journalism requires people who are good at storytelling combined with technical savvy to be able to pull out stories from lots of (usually messy) data - http://www.poynter.org/2005/a-guide-to-computer-assisted-rep...

No I have not and I thank you very, very much for sharing that! I will most certainly look into it. I love the concept as you've described and if I've got an aptitude that sounds like the kind of stuff I'd wake up every day wanting to jump in and work on. Will check it out, thanks again!

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#417

Post by norea-armozel »

My employer has been hiring a few people from some local coding bootcamps here in the Minneapolis area. Most of them are very decent at programming, so I'm not sure if they had any experience prior to their bootcamps or not, but I can't say I have any complaints for those they've hired. Never had a fix any of their code since they've been on the job either. Sometimes they need more help since they didn't get the discrete structures or software architecture knowledge that I did from my traditional CS degree. Honestly I think that should be something you pick up on the job or have been taught in high school (I'm biased of course).

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#418

Post by goldbrick »

monocasa wrote: post #386
goldbrick wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, you're just being a snob. Plenty of "outsider pop stars" (and their songwriters and producers) know music theory just fine and many even went to Berklee/Juilliard/whatever conservatory you're thinking of.

Wait, he's the snob for suggesting that you don't need to have gone to a prestigious music school to be a well accomplished or well known musician?

Are you illiterate? He's sniffing at pop stars who haven't gone to the right conservatories.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#419

Post by lloyd-christmas »

doeixd wrote: post #404
lloyd-christmas wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think of bootcamp in the same terms of the finance bootcamp I took coming out of college. It was a 1 month program mandated by my employer as focused learning. Both have been supplements to my undergrad, not replacements. The ones you mention I see more as a trade school, which I think is a different and potentially viable career path. The reason I say viable is because:

"Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity"

It's my favorite terminology from undergrad. It's from time series analysis. My job coming out of college was as an equities trader. It's hard to get much more time series analytical than that, and yet I never used it even once. Had I gone into quantitative finance, I'm sure I'd use it constantly. 95% of us just use our undergrad as a permission slip to join the real world, CS included. They hand out those permission slips like candy. Most people end up as accountants, not mathematicians. You don't need to know parametric equations to calculate EBIDTA.

It's not a waste of time if it's something you're interested in and you're intelligent enough to use it. It IS a waste of time getting an engineering degree if you think it will give you a leg up on competing for a welding job.

Re: Bootcamps vs. College

#420

Post by busterarm »

goldbrick wrote: post #418
monocasa wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, he's the snob for suggesting that you don't need to have gone to a prestigious music school to be a well accomplished or well known musician?

Are you illiterate? He's sniffing at pop stars who haven't gone to the right conservatories.

You've got it flipped. I'm saying that having a deep knowledge of theory isn't what enables you to make great music. I am also saying that most working musicians' knowledge is extremely limited and that absolutely makes their work outsider art. That's not saying that anyone should go to conservatory (anything but - if you want music ruined for you by all means go), but yes probably every musician _writing music_ should improve the knowledge of their craft.
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