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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

#51

Post by always_good »

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…

I had to take an IQ test when I was interviewing for ThoughtWorks.

Then again, they also asked me about my cultural and religious views, like my thoughts on immigration and refugees.

"I don't have strong feelings about this issue either way" was not the right answer to whatever it was they were asking.

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

#52

Post by tannhauser23 »

ebiester wrote: post #41

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…

I went through coding bootcamp and this is correct. We had former lawyers, bankers, accountants, IT personnel, database administrators, architects, and on more recent graduate front, physics majors, math majors, econ majors... We also had people from totally out of the left fields like designers and bartenders (both were better coders than practically anyone else). They were all looking to break into programming. They had spent a long time learning on their own and decided to do the bootcamp as a finishing school. It was a good experience for me.

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

#53

Post by titzer »

I think the existence of $15k coding bootcamps is not a good sign for our industry. It means that without a doubt there is a huge bubble forming. Why? Because in 2002 I graduated with an undergraduate degree in CS with "only" $16k in debt. I know college is a lot more expensive these days, but $15k for a mere month of education, from which is supposed to follow a $100k+/y job? Get real, market. That seems like both a ripoff and a steal at the same time. Either way I think our industry is not in a good shape with so many highly inexperienced people commanding high salaries. A crash is soon to follow.

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

#54

Post by falcolas »

RKoutnik wrote: post #22
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.

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 (…

How would you feel if one of the certification point consisted of:

Able to read, manipulate, and emit the contents of a file.

And the test point given by one proctor consisted of:

Write a program which accepts this file and translates all 'c' characters to 'C' characters, and puts the modified contents of the file to stdout.

Nothing too fancy, but a useful starting point (feel free to come up with a better test question than the one I devised in under 15 seconds).

Could it be gamed? Of course. But then so can a University course. As can an interview. As can a coding school.

> memorizing rote knowledge is nigh-useless

I used to think this, but accessing data in your brain is faster than accessing it on Stack Overflow. And sometimes it's impossible to find the right answer without at least having the right terminology.

"remove an item from a list where each item in the list has a reference to the next item in that list" doesn't return a meaningful Stack Overflow result, and the notes from a CS course show up below the fold in a google search; yet the use of the rote-learned phrase "linked list" yields not only a page full of meaningful google results, but the suggestions include every language which uses linked lists.

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

#55

Post by [deleted] »

Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #49
burkaman wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by badminton1 »

namiller2 wrote: post #48
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?

The thing is that the job market is very competitive, and I can understand if people don't want to be self-deprecating and admit to not be very good at topic X since some employers might be picky and choose not to hire if someone doesn't know about topic X.

Some other employers would just consider that when deciding what role is best given an applicant strengths and weaknesses and address that deficiency as a team.

I think that if there's someone who meets the requirements for a position there should be no problem to hire, the thing is to establish what those requirements are...

To be more specific now: I think coding camps can help you getting started on web and mobile development, mostly covering scenarios when things do work as expected. But to go past the prototyping phase you will need to also understand how to deal with scenarios where things do not work as expected...

Having that said, that's where some more experience and knowledge starts adding value. You can accrue that experience and knowledge in different ways. But when you build a team you need to account for that by having at least one person who can make sure some advanced requirements are represented.

For instance, low level issues like race conditions, number precision problems, resource leaks, error handling... and non-functional requirements (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-functional_requirement)... can be a bit counterintuitive if you don't come from a computer science/software engineering background, but it's not rocket science. Through mentoring, collaboration, etc... experience gets accrued and deficiencies eventually get mitigated. It just takes a bit of time, and some risk mitigation skills.

Personally my approach to mentoring is to avoid trial and error, and have people be vocal when they are unsure or they're blocked. I try to do this by asking newer people to write unit tests, to develop an intuition about how requirements get implemented and verified. Also, to create a culture in which asking good questions is perceived as a good trait, and guessing as a bad trait.

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

#57

Post by flukus »

rublev wrote: post #16
huangc10 wrote: post #9

and guess what? You don't need a website either. Step 1: Get a copy of "The C Programming Language" by Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan. Step 2: Learn the fundamentals Step 3: Master other languages Edit...I know there's been a lot of negativity towards my comment and I can understand why. I like to keep my comments simple and leave it to the reader's interpretation. However, it seems my comment was too simple... Let'…

Standard HN comment, and also absolutely insane. Have you met people with limited computer experience just getting 'into' it? Computers and code are literal magic to them. I mean people who's lives don't really entail a computer at all beyond social media. I taught at a local bootcamp. It had less to do with code and more to do with getting people to think in abstractions within a specific domain. If you can sit in a…

> Have you met people with limited computer experience just getting 'into' it? Computers and code are literal magic to them. I mean people who's lives don't really entail a computer at all beyond social media.

Then they need to learn to use computers, not to code. If they don't have basic computer skills then they are useless as programmers.

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

#58

Post by wishinghand »

titzer wrote: post #53

I think the existence of $15k coding bootcamps is not a good sign for our industry. It means that without a doubt there is a huge bubble forming. Why? Because in 2002 I graduated with an undergraduate degree in CS with "only" $16k in debt. I know college is a lot more expensive these days, but $15k for a mere month of education, from which is supposed to follow a $100k+/y job? Get real, market. That seems like both a…

I think most of the $100k/year jobs are outliers and indicators of hiring in Silicon Valley/San Francisco. I went to Origin Code Academy in San Diego and it was $12k for 3 months. They let you know that you'll be considered a jr developer even if you have some prior experience. Jr decs get around $60-65k in San Diego. Some of the graduates from my cohort who have been hired are in the high 50s, though that's a probationary salary for 90 days. I have an offer of $80k and am waiting for a comparable one but I only have these higher numbers because of a year and a half prior experience as a LAMP stack developer.

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

#59

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #55
Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

[deleted]

[deleted]

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

#60

Post by RKoutnik »

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…

None taken, the IC3 in particular exists so that people can say they're "certified". The qualifications are things like "Make some text bold in MS Word". Ridiculous.
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