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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?
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.
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.
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.
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
Most people waste the time in college, spending more time chasing alcohol and dates.
You consider partying and chasing dates a waste of time? Okay, but learning and having fun are not mutually exclusive.
I don't think you have known many college CS majors.
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.
Careful.... OP is trying to auto-darwinate. Don't discourage him...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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
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.
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.
Really there ought to be a college alternative to computer science...perhaps a 2 year computer programming vocational degree. No need for a college degree where half the courses have nothing to do with CS for people that just want to code and not be computer scientists.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Yeah, but there isn't a car mechanic analogue to the software engineer. IT has lots of maintenance work to do(and we all love our sysadmins, as long as we get admin rights), but all the coding work in particular is fundamentally going to be engineering of one variety or another.
I'm happy to report that a lot of community colleges do offer this - they typically offer associates of applied sciences in IT focusing either on programming (and heavily on programming at that, a lot of their course programs are very respectable) or on systems management/networking basics/etc. with a focus on getting people enough hands-on experience to get the entry-level certs and start out on the lower rungs of an actual IT department instead of wasting away at Best Buy or the like.
The IT world is full of "bubble boys". It really is a shame.
most of the "web developers" I've met make the slashdot janitors look like fucking geniuses.
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Oh, god, don't make me support those people's code. The thing is: we work as a team. And people who can't manage the engineering theory: design process, design patterns, complex algorithms. These people as team mates make life harder for me, not easier.
Really there ought to be a college alternative to computer science...perhaps a 2 year computer programming vocational degree.
There are at least a thousand community colleges that do exactly this.
Most people waste the time in college, spending more time chasing alcohol and dates.
I wasted my time in college studying. I wish I had spent more time socializing.
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...!
perhaps "booty camp" would be a better idea.
Most people waste the time in college, spending more time chasing alcohol and dates.
Given that college lasts on average at least four years for people, I sure as hell would hope people are spending more time enjoying life in that timeframe rather than enslaving themselves for years to earn a $75,000 piece of paper to hang on the wall.
Oh, a degree is somehow worth more than the paper it's printed on in this economy? Yeah right. There's a reason this entire discussion exists.
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.
And yet, you entrust the OS you run?
Or the latest whizbang smartphone app?
That's rather odd.
I'm with you for two reasons. First, a lot of enterprise IT is adding new fields, changing a web page or link, or changing a db connection. There is usually a legacy application that provides a framework into which changes can be retrofitted.
Second (and maybe a little of topic) was my experience working in Switzerland. Developers, business people, and such typically attended two year technical institutes. Those institutes graduated competent employees who formed the bulk of my co-workers. The system was very successful. A degree from an ETH was not a prerequisite for being a useful Dev.
Since Comp Sci != Coding, I'm going to say that college is a waste of time and money for most coders. These bootcamps may be both as well, but obviously smaller in degree.
My masters degree has bought nothing to the table other than to get me in the door for interviews. I don't feel anymore qualified than some of the people I supervise who never went to school. But they are restricted from moving up because they lack paper.
The whole idea that you need some liberal arts education to code or do most STEM jobs is utterly outdated. Why does my doctor need to know Shakespeare? Shave off a few years from his education so he doesn't need to amass as much college debt to begin with.
What college has become is a crutch for the public school system for being as shit as it is. And it is shit because it has to pass most people. Just basic bell curve, badgered by parents that can't believe their "preshuss" kid failed.
Here is an entrance exam from Harvard in 1869. Ignore the latin and greek, just how many people could do the math on pg 6,7,8?
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/p...
What makes modern college more odious is all the shit HR departments that are staffed by Liberal Arts (most of the shit anyone here could pass with 10 mins studying a night) majors lording it over the rest with their piece of paper, hence everyone needs one.
College hasn't become a system of enlightenment, it's a system of class and social immobility. Even most of the poor who can get in, become lifetime serfs to their own loans and thus always relegated downward. And everyone spread the propaganda, because like "No one got fired for buying IBM", it's the same mentality for "No one got fired for hiring a degree."
And right, a degree proves something. That you can go to a mind-numbing government indoctrination center for 12-13 years, and right after, hold your plate out and say "4-8 more, please! Oh, and I'll pay full price too."
That deserves some kudos, but it shouldn't make one overlook the guy who went right to work and has 8 years under his belt.
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.
I've been learning to code on my own for more than the past 19 weeks pretty heavily.
I could not tell you anything about hashmaps. I can in fact avoid off-by-one errors :p
I still do the best I can but I feel like I have so much to learn I'll never get there.
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.
Designing things isn't practical? Are you an arts graduate?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Not even Web programmer or HTML developer?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Settle down, they're talking about creating "Web Developers" not programmers. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
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.
In college I chased shots of Jack Daniels with beer. What's an appropriate chaser for a fat girl with low-esteem? why that would be a "chubby chaser" lol
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
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.
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.
Code Monkey == Wrench Monkey.
Which is what the US sorely needs. We stopped telling people to go into trades because EVERYONE HAS TO GO TO COLLEGE. I was told in high school I couldn't take welding because I was "going to college." Guess what jobs are in short supply these days? Welding, plumbing, etc.
Sometimes you just need a trade to do a job. Do I need someone that understands coupled classes or a hashtable to build me a website or implement an idea in C? No. If you put 5-10 good coders under a good software engineer I'd trust the output more than trying to hire 3-4 software engineers.
Companies don't hire all engineers, they hire techs as well. We don't need to hire all CS or SE majors but there is a place for them just like there is a place for someone that took a 19-week course on programming.
> Oh, god, don't make me support those people's code.
Why? Do we make engineers 'support' the welds from a welder. Do we make engineers 'support' the plumbing from a plumber?
There is a huge gap between hiring a full engineer and hiring a technician. There should be an analogous range for software. Right now that gap is being filled by cheap Indian and Chinese programmers.
> What college has become is a crutch for the public school system for being as shit as it is. And it is shit because it has to pass most people.
That's only because we have this absurd fixation on college prep. This is something also inherent in common core. Not everyone is suited for college. So not everyone should be pushed into the college prep program.
Most people would be better off with the vocational programs that used to be quite common but don't exist anymore.
So both types of "college" have become a crutch for mismanaged public schools.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
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.
All of the stuff you care about fits easily in a 2-year vocational degree. I have no problem supporting "those people"s code (wow, what language choice) when they didn't take art history, or learn Latin, or do chemistry lab work.
I don't think a 3-month course can cut it, but that's a different topic. (And, honestly, most the people I've worked with straight out of college had learned nothing at all useful in their 4 years of study - a combination of tool-specific stuff for the wrong tools and overly abstract stuff).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I don't think I could honestly trust in the abilities of any programmer who hasn't had a serious discrete math class
On the other hand, I've known programmers who are great at graph theory but can't debug their way out of a paper bag.
And I've worked with a great programmer who had an excellent pure math background (ABD from PhD a program with heavy discrete math component) and someone comparably good with a high school diploma who was entirely self-taught. I wouldn't necessarily set them to solve the same class of problems, but their core skill-sets overlapped quite a lot, as did their attitude toward correctness, good design, etc.
Programming is still an area where a good autodidact can excel, and many academic courses are less than impressive. It's a subject we are still learning how to teach, and so far I've not seen anything to make me believe any particular academic background is either necessary or sufficient to inculcate the desired skills.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
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.
I think that for a certain type of personality, diligent self-study is a reasonable approach. There's always more to learn, but if you learn some every week it piles up in a kind of exponential way. If you're the kind of person who can learn from either written material (books, tutorials, reading other people's code, etc.) or recorded lectures, or some mixture of those, imo self-study is actually probably more likely to result in deeply learning a subject than a code academy. The main advantage of the "bootcamp" approach is that it provides a focused environment, if you're otherwise prone to slacking/procrastinating, or just can't learn at all w/o an in-person instructor. But I worry that it will result in a lot of superficial learning: memorizing some $hot_language syntax and design patterns and that kind of thing.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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
I don't think I could honestly trust in the abilities of any programmer who hasn't had a serious discrete math class
So you do not believe it is possible to get an education outside of a class?
I don't think I could honestly trust in the abilities of any programmer who hasn't had a serious discrete math class
Why math, precisely? Some basics in logic are a must, but most of what you learn in discrete math today is cute and completely useless for most real-world programming tasks. I know some of us old blokes think details of implementation are important and people should use this and not that because it's got better performance, but unless you're writing a 3D engine or a scientific application, it rarely matters very much. Yeah, my loop is 3% more efficient than yours. On the average customers quad core machine it will make 0.1 seconds of difference.
I'd rather have a programmer who understands to not store passwords unencrypted, ask a user interface designer instead of writing crappy dialogs by himself and fail softly. You know, skills that actually make a difference.
But for that, we agree, people need skills and not just a crash course.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
How many programmers write compilers?
There's a lot more "mechanics" than "engineers" in the real world.
Look, I know a lot of people with CS degrees that write garbage code... also lots of people w/o CS degrees that write brilliant code.
I also know people in a leading CS Master's degree program that can barely program.
So I don't think it is easy to judge.
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?
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
I hate the terms code monkey and wrench monkey.
You do not need a college degree to write a lot of apps. Many business run on what I call forms plus database apps. Those often where written in DBase, then VB, and now HTML+SQL. AKA the LAMP stack.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
How many programmers write compilers?
There's a lot more "mechanics" than "engineers" in the real world.
How many engineers redesign the wheel for each and every problem? Competent engineers know when the tools they have are adequate to address the task at hand.
Not even Web programmer or HTML developer?
I told my mechanic you said that. He cried. Stop being so mean to mechanics.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I got an AS from a community college, and the only downside I see is that about half of my required credits were in liberal arts.
It would be the same for the first 2 year in a university. Those freshman and sophomore courses are just refreshing courses. Junior and senior years are focusing on core courses.
I got an AS from a coomunity college as well, and then transfered to a 4-year university. The 2 years in the university, 90% of courses I took were computer/maths related (my major is CS) and I did only 2 courses that were not really related in my major -- Technical writing (ENG301) and Astronomy (a science class with lab, required). The huge advantage to go through this path, to me, is the large cost reduction I must spend in order to get a 4-year degree.
Ther's a risk that this will confuse concept with implementation, though.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I'm not sure about that.
As a rough estimate, a 3 credit hour course is ~45 total hours of class time over a 15 week semester. Or about 3 hours a week. Code Bootcamps (the USMC did their Comp Sci training in this way back in the 90's) are 40+ class hours per week. Or roughly the equivalent of 13+ simultaneous college courses. Over a 19 week boot camp, the student gets as much class time as 17 university classes.
To complete a university BS, you're looking at ~120 total credits. Figure almost half of those are non-major focused classes, you're only looking at 60 total CS credits. Which works out to be roughly 20 classes.
So the total class time difference between a 19 week boot camp and a full 4-year degree, in terms of comp-sci classwork only, is roughly 3 classes.
And I'm pretty sure we could knock off 3 university classes that are great for more theoretical knowledge, but of significantly less importance to entry level contractors. I mean, writing assembly and creating your own compiler are fun and educational projects. But in almost 20 years in LOB software development, I haven't ever encountered a situation where that knowledge has enhanced my ability to do my job or to create quality software.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs