Slashdot Mirror
Coding Bootcamps Presented As "College Alternative"
ErichTheRed writes Perhaps this is the sign that the Web 2.0 bubble is finally at its peak. CNN produced a piece on DevBootcamp, a 19-week intensive coding academy designed to turn out Web developers at a rapid pace. I remember Microsoft and Cisco certification bootcamps from the peak of the last tech bubble, and the flood of under-qualified "IT professionals" they produced. Now that developer bootcamps are in the mainsteam media, can the end of the bubble be far away?
Most people waste the time in college, spending more time chasing alcohol and dates.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
College isn't for everyone, but if I just change the title a little bit, does this seem like more of a bad idea?
Employers always love to get the least qualified individual with the least options and marketability to do the job, that is still able to do the job. That doesn't mean you should serve yourself up to them on a platter...
get your bootcamp and be a cheap tool for management...
We'll end up with more brainless "web developers" who will be able to copy and paste code snippets in Javascript and Python without having any clue about how anything else actually works.
long time not seen how are you?
19-week intensive coding academy designed to turn out Web developers at a rapid pace
Like we need still more web monkeys? Hey, maybe DICE can hire you to fix the smart quotes crap on slashdot ... not likely.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Gulags for people who can't code their way out of "hello world" ?
YES.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
When I went back to school, all my programming classes was in Java because the school couldn't afford a site license for Microsoft Visual Studio to teach C/C++. When the site license was renewed, most of the computers couldn't run VS .net when it came out. I graduated as a Java programmer, couldn't find a job and stayed in help desk support. I recently read that Python is the new teaching language and the community colleges are pumping out Python programmers.
Web 2.0 is just a meaningless marketing phrase, that "bubble" never existed
Instructions unclear.
I think after 19 weeks, you'd have at best, someone who can write spaghetti code for an application that may or may not work properly.
Contact Natalie...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I don’t recall seeing boot camps for Electrical Engineers or boot Camps for Medical Doctors. I remember back in the late 70s when I first started coding on an Apple ][ people regarded me with awe for being able to write a print statement in a for loop. In those days everyone probably could learn to code simple text based game and recipe organizers, but they didn’t. Now that we need stable object oriented code that actually takes some discipline to write we’ve decided everyone should do – it is the path too quick riches after all.
I’m not saying our discipline is too hard for a person with an average IQ, but it deserves the same respect as any other technical field. There is enough bad code to fix from people that spent 4-8 years learning to code, I don’t think boot camp graduates will write better code. If anything we should be toughening the academic standards for writing maintainable code and take the time to be sure the lessons have sunk in, not shortening the time we learn to code – I can only imagine that leads to a quick and dirty solutions.
Of course maybe this is not really about true web development, but about just being able to fire up something like Cold-Fusion and churn out volumes of similar looking websites -- you know to keep costs down.
Letter To Iran
You get the same result as four years of college, in only 19 weeks.
Sounds like a damned huge improvement.
And yeah, I'm serious. I've yet to meet anyone fresh out of college who had any clue how things actually work in the real world.
Or better yet, offshore the job.
No wonder US born developers are becoming an endangered species. This is spite of the non-stop shortage shouting.
Look at the job ads. Employers are looking for college degrees, and five years of recent, professional, verifiable experience. And employers will settle for nothing less, even as wages stagnate.
The IT world is full of "bubble boys". It really is a shame.
I remember when there was a big bubble in Oracle DBA boot camps. People would get charged $10,000 - 15,000 for these things. They were told they were 'junior' and only people 'off the street' were entry level. They wouldn't even get interviews. There were alot of these bootcamp IT training places. They collapsed in the early 2000 with the end of teh .com bubble.
Virtually none of these people will get jobs. Virtually every employer wants a Computer Science degree for entry level people. Its a scam to get people's money. I feel bad for the desperate people that will be preyed upon again. Slashdot should change the entry to this. It is very misleading. People who really need jobs are going to spend money they dont have, go into debt for this stuff.
Here is a tell... these companies never keep employment statistics for who got jobs, what was the exact job title and salary. If this really worked, they would have stats to go look at all these people who got jobs and the placement rate. There would be reliable spreadsheets with statistics. Its really easy to market this with here 'look at the data'. if it worked.
most of the "web developers" I've met make the slashdot janitors look like fucking geniuses.
Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
Is writing a web page just simply a "Trade?" You go and mentor with a master and get a job as a junior web page coder. As technology advances it's level of entry should drop.
If you remember during the last bubble that bunches of non-IT folks started calling themselves Web Designers (and still do) - they were simply setting up web pages and helping to "code" content, pretty much graphic designers who learned HTML. They weren't exactly building the infrastructure that we would leave to Software Developers.
We have this discussion a lot. A team just needs a bunch of beginner coders and a senior person to play architect - and you'll have a product. I'd argue you'll have healthcare.gov - but that's a discussion for a different thread... I think. Oh why not have it here...!
When I first saw this article this morning, my immediate reaction was, "Oh no, here we go again." I'm not a developer -- I do systems integration work, and a lot of my job is getting software written by "developers" working on a real system within reasonable parameters.
The parallel I drew from this was the MCSE and CCNA bootcamps that popped up towards the end of the last bubble and continued for quite a while after. Training companies still offer them, but they're no longer touted as the "change your life in 2 weeks!" miracle workers they once were. I entered IT with a science education, but not CS, so I have used certifications throughout my career to check the HR box, and I actually did take an MCSE bootcamp back in the day when I was upgrading my self-taught Windows NT 4.0 certification to Windows 2000. Done right, they are a very good way to review concepts you already know and gain insight from instructors who teach the official classes and know what Microsoft is looking for on the exams. It saves you tons of time not having to review every single thing again looking for changes that are testable. However, in my experience, the greedy training companies also tried to cash in on desperate unemployed people, much the same way for-profit colleges and trade schools are doing now. Remember the old advertisements claiming they could turn a plumber or truck driver into a highly-paid IT administrator in 2 weeks for $10K or whatever? I had a couple of those students in that bootcamp class I took. In 1999, I'm sure they got jobs instantly. But all through the end of the dotcom boom, we were working through this huge glut of underqualified people who went this route.
The DevBootcamp thing actually sounds good on the surface, but the fact of the matter is that unless you have some grasp of machine fundamentals (how TCP works, how HTTP requests work, how to code a database call efficiently, etc.) you will only get someone who knows Ruby on Rails, a couple database tricks, and JavaScript. This is fine if you just want someone who is cranking out maintenance tasks for some small company web application, but it's disingenuous to present it as a true college alternative. There are plenty of college grads who don't have practical experience either, but at least a proper CS curriculum will expose them to the fundamentals that make all this upper-layer stuff work. Plus, maybe, you will have been exposed to something other than web development. I would much rather work with someone who is a little more well rounded than an absolute genius who can't talk about anything outside of their small area of focus. It just seems to me that these companies see a market -- bubbly, frothy VC-funded startups looking for an army of cheap young Ruby coders -- and are taking advantage of it while they can. I just wouldn't want to be one of these people who only know a Web framework or two when the bubble pops and businesses once again demand people with the capability to solve a wider set of problems.
IIRC, DevBootcamp claims a 90% post-bootcamp employment rate with an average 80K salary.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
People can't afford to go to school anymore, so they can all just go to bootcamps. They'll eventually learn to write good code.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
You cannot learn and retain web technology skills in 19 weeks. Especially if you are coming in cold(i.e., no programming experience).
"There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and
In my opinion of course.
Having attended one ( Cisco ) I think the term boot-camp should be renamed to something like " Re-Certification Prep " or something similar.
The sheer amount of material they present ( notice I said present and not teach ) in these things is nigh impossible for anyone to absorb in such a short period of time. I would think they are great ( albeit expensive ) for refresher courses for those who need to get back up to speed to pass a re-certification test, ( Assuming you haven't let it lapse for several years ) but as an introduction to the material, eh . . . not so great.
The folks I took the boot-camp with were less interested in actually learning the concepts than they were with memorizing the material that would be on the test so they could pass it. Need to stress the importance of actually learning the material vs memorizing it if you actually plan to put the information to any use later on down the road.
In NYC, San Francisco or Chicago. (At least they're employed...but I'd hate to have to pay a mortgage and taxes on 80K in any of these locations.)
We'll see what happens. Right now Google and whatever bubble startup need 80K web developers, but that may change when the VC money and stock runup dries up.
I've written about this several times prior, so I'll just summarize those arguments here:
College is not meant to provide job skills : http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
The majority of what developers do does not require advanced skills: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
You don't need much training to get to a point where you're employable: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
There's other points too;
- Once you have learned some language to a given degree of proficiency, you notice that the rest of the languages are little more than different syntactical sugar and different naming for built in functions/libraries.
- Learning how to learn is more important, as our development environments change so often that it's expected we'd pick up new technologies after very little exposure to them, days usually, rather than weeks or months.
I've added up the hours spent in a CS degree program on purely CS classes; it's around 650 hours total. That's it. If it were back to back 8 hour days, it'd only take about 16 weeks of 8 hour days 5 days a week. Obviously that'd be a rough sell, but it's not impossible.
This is 19-25 weeks, I'm guessing 1 or 2 hour 'days', which is around 100 to 250 hours of 'training'. That's just under half - about the equivalent of a 2 year college. More than enough time to fit in the basics of theories as well as actual application, though they may not get some of the higher level specifics like graphics or compiler design.
So it seems reasonable to me, and I've been doing this for 2 decades now with my fancy college learning.
These are pay-day loan / rent-to-own schemes. Take a look under the hood at a few programs, most offer loans at high interest rates (12%+) and some type of laptop (typically a Mac) included with the class. They use the laptop to lure in students, tell them just sign on this dotted line, we'll take the $10,000 tuition from the loan company, you get this shiny new laptop, and don't worry about that interest rate or debt, you'll be making $60,000+ a year as a developer. Sadly, they're typically being placed in blighted areas to boot. Here's a gr8 one that even notes that you don't need algorithms to build website ( http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/ybor-city-startup-gr8code-ready-to-start-bootcamp-for-coders/2206004 ). Amazingly, they got $5.4 million in funding somehow.
These are nothing but predators preying on the dreams of others. Software is one of the few industries that can really change someone's life without a lot of capital expense; however, this is the exact opposite. Cities should shut these "camps" down, and make sure the loans aren't the type that can't be forgiven. If they're promising a $60,000 salary on graduation, these companies should eat the defaults if that doesn't materialize. Otherwise, it'll be the tax payers in the long run.
this ought to keep infosec professionals in demand.
promising 6 digit careers, these scam artists trick muggles into believing they'll become code wizards. NBL - not bloody likely.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
By that, I mean short, specific bootcamps, like the ones given by BNR.
Of course, these are only "kick-start" classes, but work very well for that sort of thing.
Also, they are un-cheap (but I think, worth it).
I've gotten one hell of a return from my BSc. EE. Thankfully it's not being devalued, and as far as ROI goes, wow. Was it easy for me? F--k no. Things that are worthwhile rarely are easy.
Anyone who thinks these bootcamps are a substitute for theory training is a fool. They can make a great way to leverage that core knowledge, though. They're also great for churning out code monkeys. I don't want to be a monkey.
You know what's a substitute, though? -Free- books and training online on those academic topics. Marry that with a good, accredited lab work program and you're going to be onto something; I suspect, however, this will be targeted at a lower common denominator.
Democratizing forces will come to higher education as there's HUGE market inefficiencies there created by an artificial barrier. It's just a matter of time, or like I've said before, one of the Ivy league institutions to offer real credit in an online environment. Right now it's a big game of chicken to see who blinks first.
..don't panic
Didn't people USED to go to college for the educational purpose of building a broad understanding of human knowledge -- history, literature, humanities, science, foreign languages, etc?
Most people now seem to go to college to obtain some kind of vocational certification and get a "career", usually in business, an engineering speciality or if they really apply themselves, in a medical field or law. General learning is a bunch of requirements students don't care about and the instructors mainly view them as an opportunity for ideological posturing.
The best I see these bootcamps is replacing some trade schools or community college technical programs. They might have value for people with an IT background but employed and looking for a new skill to market.
Sounds like Corinthian. They've been in the news lately for being a total scam preying on the weak and taking them for large sums of money. They made some pretty impressive claims too. They all turned out to be completely bogus.
What this outfit claims about itself is just more advertising propaganda. You can't trust it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There is a difference between a programming and a computer science. "College alternative" is misleading and incorrect. The goal of a computer science degree is much more broad than learning ruby and a javascript framework or two. I'm sure a bootcamp can help land a job, but no way 3 months substitutes entirely for a 4 year degree.
When I went back to school to learn computer programming at the community college after the dot com bust to change careers, Uncle Sam picked up the tab with a $3,000 USD tax credit. There are several back-to-school tax credits still available today.
As a Math major I had to take Fortan and C (was quite some time ago obviously) and we never had Windows, let alone "Visual Studio" or Visual C for that matter. It was not until a semester of C was complete that I went and bought Bordland Turbo C/C++. Then Delphi came out, and what a dream that was! Fortran, Pascal and C all available for the back end coding, and GUI builders in C++ for the front end where I did not need to know much about graphics programming.
Then, as with all good competing products Microsoft fucked them over to steal market share and Bordland pretty much vanished. The Microsoft products were inferior in every way and I never wrote another piece of code for a Windows anything (I boycotted Windows, and still do today using their products only where forced.).
Back on point, you can easily write College level classes for C and/or C++. The real problem is that politics keeps people from doing so (threats of revoking educational licenses, etc..). I have tons of books on C, and you could easily learn.
So not only is code.org pushing for more programmers, but now we have people saying "skip college and program"? Do these mega billionaires not realize how obvious their plot is to flood the market with programmers so that they can take even more money from society?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The bookstore at my alma-mater sold bumper stickers of the unofficial school motto: "Sex Kills! Go to Tech and live forever". I went to a small rural high school and there were 36 kids in my graduating class. Unfortunately, there were more attractive women in my high school class than there were in my freshman year in college. This was before the Internet was available, so when people weren't studying, they were watching TV, drinking, or doing things like making explosives in their dorm room to blow stuff up in the mountains.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Being a web programmer is the same as brein able to enter University?
I mean dont get me wrong, i appreciate people who early in their life know what to to and do that well, even if there is is no academic education involved.
But somehow i dount that such people will be the main participants in such "bootcamps".
See, anybody who has a CS degree will be motivated to HATE boot camp guys. Employers who want more (cheaper) labor will be motivated to LOVE any force that lets them hire more people at less cost.
As a self-taught programmer myself managing a 10+ year project that's highly profitable, you'll probably guess which side of that divide you'll tend to see me on.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
There are specific situations in which bringing someone up to speed on a technology or knowledge in a crash course is good.
Most situations are not that specific. In addition, "someone" doesn't mean "anyone". Bootcamps or crash courses work best when you either need to bring someone with no knowledge up to a low level of competence in a field, e.g. so they can start work to gain more experience and thus more knowledge. Or when you need to train already experienced people in a very specific piece of new knowledge, say you're rolling out a new software system to your team.
Software development is IMHO one of the areas least suited to that style of teaching. Slowly learning has big advantages in that the knowledge is less shallow, more strongly connected and more easily accessible in a wider array of situations. Software developers need to be craftsmen - they need to "feel" their material and tools. As long as they just use them, their work will be inferior. And in software, inferior doesn't mean "not so shiny" or "slightly less round", it means zero-days, crashes, data loss and depending on what the software controls, potentially catastrophic damage.
For web developers, it's fine. Nobody gives a fuck anyway and your boss will outsource the next revision of the website to some contractor with the next buzzword wave anyways. Sorry, got a bit sarcastic there, of course web services these days are expensive, important and more often than not of absolutely shoddy software quality. But at least it's not the same as the software running on airplanes or controlling combat drones.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
So for a little over $12,000 you get a 19 week crash course. And people will find this reasonable?
We have a local company that does something similar, for around $10k. And yet, any local resident can go to the local community college and do a programming (or web development) certificate program that covers essentially the same thing for under $900. The Community College consists of four 3 credit hour classes that are designed to be taken in a single 16 week semester. So 12 hours per week of class time, 2-3 times that in outside class work, for a total of 36-48 hours per week. And it covers the same stuff as the private "training camp".
Seriously, does anyone think the "training camp" is a good deal? Why would you pay 10 times more for what is essentially a slick sales pitch?
Imagine if you could learn to speak without knowing how to spell. Without knowing the difference between an adjective and an adverb. Without being able to distinguish between "greatness" and "excellence" and without being able to appreciate the difference between the two. Of course you can do all of these things, and in only 19 weeks. The end result is of course the propagation of ignorance, driven by the desire to obtain wealth without working for it.
The top of the line guys need to care about tightly coupling classes. There's a _tonne_ of rank and file coding that can be done quick and dirty. Right now those jobs pay upwards to $80k/year; sometimes more. The goal here is to cut that in half in 10 years. An admirable goal if you're part of the investor class...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
We stopped telling people to go into trades because most of those tradesmen worked in manufacturing, and what couldn't be shipped overseas was automated. We don't like to pay living wages but we also don't like to look at how people live without them...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I want one. I dropped out when my life went to hell after some bad choices. I've rebounded and I'm making good money like your boot camp graduate. But a real CS degree is hard frickin' work after year 1. Discrete math is kinda tough, and ask any graduate about "Compilers" and "Operating Systems" sometime. 12 hours a day 7 days a week doesn't even get you started with those classes.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If repair was a consideration we'd be driving modern versions of the VW beetle, the 2CV or the many American cars where you could almost stand in the engine bay and get easy access to just about everything. The aim with cars is something designed to sell and not something easy to repair, so sadly economic reasons mean that if it's cheaper to make a design where you need to remove the trunk trim to replace a tail light than provide easy access then that's what happens. I don't like it either.
To twist your car analogy into a computer one consider many Apple products - seen as good designs but ridiculously difficult to repair. This is an old example but it's one I've done myself and it was a stupidly complex procedure just to upgrade a CDROM drive to a DVD drive:
http://wilko.me/emac/
I'm pretty sure someone won an award for that design and an insanely huge number were sold to the educational market. As far as Apple thought it was a good design. As far as people who replaced drives though - not a good design at all, but they were not paying the bills
We develop business software and we're well known in our industry (finance, sell-side trading software).
Yet I keep hearing the term "coding monkey" being bandied about in our office. It irks me greatly to hear this term in a software shop, especially when management bellyaches about not being able to find coders.
So get your degree. If this is the attitude & mindset about coders in a middle-tier software company, you're asking for even more trouble elsewhere.
People can't afford to go to school anymore, so they can all just go to bootcamps. They'll eventually learn to write good code.
By "people", I assume you mean the nerds and geeks, since the average layman can't even fucking spell bootcamp, let alone understand fuck-all that might be going on in it.
College may not be for "everyone", but highly technical bootcamps that tend to move along at a 200MPH pace sure as hell aren't meant for just anyone to pick as the cheaper alternative.