Bootcamps vs. College

I'm happy to answer any questions about this (I expect it to be controversial). When we started Triplebyte one year ago, I was pretty skeptical of bootcamps. Doing credential-blind interviews and seeing what some bootcamp grads can do, however, has won me over. Clearly there are a lot of bad bootcamp grads (and probably a lot of bad bootcamps). But the model is working really well at the top.

I think that both college and boot-camp styles of training have their place. I'd think my default inclination would be to want to hire the CompSci majors to do the deep-scope planning/figuring and use boot-camp hires to do the grunt-work of supporting that vision.

It's important to note that this is just my initial inclination. I have no expectation that there won't be instances of boot-camp hires being better than CompSci hires in cases. It really comes down to the particular person, and hopefully any hiring process would do a decent job of evaluating each person.

at what? assessment here would likely be highly task specific.

lines of code?

first pass code quality?

understanding of architecture?

ability to link user's handwaving to functional product?

To be clear, I agree with you, I just think there are tasks where the CS grads would generally win and those where the bootcampers would win as well rather than looking at this as an overall population comparison. No one size fits all, as others mentioned, its all about identifying your need and filling it with the right person not just the right education.

This just isn't how software is built in practice. Engineers make dozens of architectural decisions every day. They may feel like small ones, but over time they add up to a whole lot of surface area. The skills you learn in Computer Science provide a whole lot more context for your decision making when actually building things. Bootcamps, at least from the folks I've interviewed so far, simply don't prepare their graduates to do real work. This is particularly true when it comes to data structures and basic algorithms. Two really key fundamental knowledge areas if you're goal is to build actually reliable and relatively efficient software.

This isn't to say that all CompSci graduates are good programmers (clearly they are not). It also isn't to say that everyone coming out of a bootcamp is bad (they are not, I recently hired my first). But when painting with a broad brush bootcamp's right now seem to mostly churn out students who are sort of comfortable with syntax and very basic logic, but not much else.

I'd be interested to see this article go farther. What do these cohorts look like in two years? Does that fundamental knowledge gap hold those bootcamp graduates back? I suspect it does, but I have very little proof but my own intuition. I'd love to be wrong.