Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Coding Bootcamps Presented As "College Alternative"

Posted by samzenpus on from the pop-goes-the-bubble dept.

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?

1 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. 19-25 weeks is completely reasonable by quietwalker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.