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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?
A lot of adults who have jobs do that too.
On topic:
I don't think I could honestly trust in the abilities of any programmer who hasn't had a serious discrete math class, without that being matched by years of actively failing at good design and learning the more fundamental pitfalls and ways around them the hard way.
19 weeks of training is enough to not make off-by-one errors. It's not enough to know to avoid tightly coupling classes. Or even really enough to know the guts of how a hashtable is implemented and how that affects performance.
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.
It is as simple as programing as a vocation vs a profession.
Think car mechanic vs engineer. One can fix an engine or even put it together the other designs it. Of course the best is when you have an engineer that is also a mechanic.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I think that, in this case, it is more like someone trained to change your oil at one of those 5 minute places.
Someone working there CAN move on to bigger things, but it won't be because that training taught them how.
You're assuming such boot camps only produce "monkeys", which is false. These people work twelve hour days, seven days a week, for three months: compare that to your typical CS graduate who's maybe had a month total of relevant programming experience.
In fact, we hired a boot camp graduate about half a year ago, and she's been awesome. WAY more knowledgeable about programming than other candidates we considered, including CS graduates.
Even that requires more than a weekend seminar.
A lot of jobs could be handled as apprenticeships but that's not the way that corporations want to treat labor anymore. They want custom tailored laborers for cheap with no effort expended on their part.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.