71–80 of 354 posts
The model is broken. Too many people want to learn to code, not everyone can do it well. The only way would be to filter many candidates going in, but the negative press would be huge. So you end up with huge cohorts of people who can't code, and you have to make the money back somehow. Good teachers need to know how to code well, and those are expensive too. And, let's face it, the internet is full of great material…
The model is broken. Too many people want to learn to code, not everyone can do it well. The only way would be to filter many candidates going in, but the negative press would be huge. So you end up with huge cohorts of people who can't code, and you have to make the money back somehow. Good teachers need to know how to code well, and those are expensive too. And, let's face it, the internet is full of great material…
As a former instructor (not at Lambda), I'm kind of inclined to believe it has more to do with the fact that it takes a certain kind of person to put up with the demands of corporate software engineering. Getting both kids and adults (especially kids) to figure out how to program is easy if you understand that most of the concepts are better taught visually through p5js or what have you. Once they leave that sandbox,…
This is why I think those low-level "invert a binary tree" and "find a substring in a string" questions are not really that great if you're trying to find someone to actually build an application. Many more people know how to invert a binary tree than know how to go from an empty text file to a non-trivial mobile app distributed in an App Store.
This is why I like high level design questions like: "Design an application that takes a user's GPS location, draws it on a map, and shows the 10 nearest restaurants." I'm not expecting them to open up their IDE and start coding. I want to see someone who can draw boxes and lines connecting them, and write the right words in those boxes. I want them to show which of those lines are network calls, which of them are IPC, and which of them are API calls within the actual app. Which of them are provided by the operating system and which of them will they need to write themselves? Then show what one of those lines might look like as an API. I don't care if they know the exact code that should be in those boxes. I want to know they are thinking sensibly about how everything fits together.
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I'm glad to hear that it was a positive experience for you! Do you think you know what % of your peers ended up working in tech off the top of your head?
just to level set, i myself went thru a normal (non lambda school, but still highly rated) bootcamp in 2017 (some of which were ISAs, the rest regular tuition), and about 30% of my classmates went back to their past jobs and careers. i'm sure about 20-30% of the rest are in tech but in unhappy situations. but for the remaining 30-50% of us it was a lifechanger. i wish that people would not throw out the baby with the…
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Programming is really not as hard as you're making it out to be. I've taught it to beginners both children and adults and they struggle but they all learn it. Professional software development is quite difficult, but programming is only a portion of why. And even then, software dev is only like the second or third most technically difficult job I've had. Any welder or marine upholsterer or nurse or whatever has about…
Are you doing it one on one or in a classroom setting? In former, I imagine the success rates would be higher.
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The frustration factor is a big deal. I took a bootcamp. One day and another student and I were working on something and a third member of our group (who had other issues) was really frustrated and took it out on us and then went to the teacher. She told the teacher "they just get it and I don't". But in truth the other student and I were not "just getting it", we were failing frequently, we had made no more progress…
I was just talking about this idea with my wife. We're both now senior enough in our jobs that we're team/project leads (not managers, just technical leaders of stuff). One of the projects I'm leading is a small R&D effort to see if a new technique will improve one of our core algorithms. And I have a very bright new junior programmer who has been with the company about 2 years and has a little post-college experienc…
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The frustration factor is a big deal. I took a bootcamp. One day and another student and I were working on something and a third member of our group (who had other issues) was really frustrated and took it out on us and then went to the teacher. She told the teacher "they just get it and I don't". But in truth the other student and I were not "just getting it", we were failing frequently, we had made no more progress…
You underscore the same thing I noticed as well: To have a decent career as a software engineer you need to be a tenacious problem solver. Even the not-so-great devs are tenacious. There are tons of smart, hard-working people who have a mentality of "You should be able to do everything correctly and have it work correctly the first time, or maybe on the second try with some minor adjustments". And I think these peopl…
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> But I had enjoyed working on the hard projects I'd encountered in my programing class back in high school. They were challenges I wanted to overcome. I changed my major and dove into college CS courses, which were full of hard problems -- but hard problems that I wanted to solve. I didn't mind being frustrated for an entire semester one year, working in assembly language and JCL, because I wanted to solve the puzzles.
> Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to "find our passion", but that phrase seems pretty abstract to me. Maybe instead we should encourage people to find the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do you want to keep working on, even when they turn out to be harder than you expected? Which kinds of frustration do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while you figure things out? Answers to these very practical questions might help you find a place where you can build an interesting and rewarding life.
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... And there's also Programming Sucks ( https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks ) which takes a rather hyperbolic style of writing on the subject.
The penultimate part of it is:
> Eventually every programmer wakes up and before they're fully conscious they see their whole world and every relationship in it as chunks of code, and they trade stories about it as if sleepiness triggering acid trips is a normal thing that happens to people. This is a world where people eschew sex to write a programming language for orangutans. All programmers are forcing their brains to do things brains were never meant to do in a situation they can never make better, ten to fifteen hours a day, five to seven days a week, and every one of them is slowly going mad.
I have been through lambda. It was the force of nature that turned my life on the right path. It was the best decision I ever made This wouldn’t have been possible without Austen.
In what way was it a force of nature, vs just a bootcamp where you applied yourself?
Is there something in the instruction Lambda offered vs other bootcamps?
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As a former instructor (not at Lambda), I'm kind of inclined to believe it has more to do with the fact that it takes a certain kind of person to put up with the demands of corporate software engineering. Getting both kids and adults (especially kids) to figure out how to program is easy if you understand that most of the concepts are better taught visually through p5js or what have you. Once they leave that sandbox,…
> Programming is easy. Putting a bunch of black-boxes together in order to build some app or whatever is much, much harder and more complex This is why I think those low-level "invert a binary tree" and "find a substring in a string" questions are not really that great if you're trying to find someone to actually build an application. Many more people know how to invert a binary tree than know how to go from an empty…
Is this just easier to SEE in a bootcamp type scenario? How many people got the traditional education route, rack up even MORE debt, still don't end up doing the thing / end up where they want to be? Is this maybe an easy to see problem that is part of a larger education problem none the less? Full disclosure: I'm the product of a boot camp. Changed careers and learned to code after age 40. It worked out great for me…
You can argue about the value of traditional education. But I think you would be hard pressed to find a university, even a crappy one, where it's up to the students to TA themselves, there are 100 students to one professor, and the curriculum constantly changes in the middle of a semester. So it's not quite accurate to try and compare Lambda to a traditional univeristy. But congrats on your success in career changing…
I have this sense that the world of tech needs the pendulum to swing back a bit towards geeky hacker types who are in it for the love of building cool things, tinkering, exploring and all that. There is a bit too much of the "bro" side of things - hustlebros and techbros and VC bros and that culture. Where are my people at these days?
That sort of environment is an artifact of a new technical domain, not unique to programming or because of any characteristics unique to it. At different times for example it was typical for a doctor, architect, or pilot to be an informally educated enthusiast. As programming has matured into a broadly relevant and economically important domain, the dynamics of who does it and how they learn it change, as it also did…
And there's certainly still space for people who are curious and intrinsically motivated if you think about the whole pie growing rather than just being cut up differently.