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?
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.
Well, a slight decrease in starting pay vs not having $100k in student loans sounds a bit better. And 10 years out it will be about ability, not what degree you have.
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.
10 years out it will be about not having a family, being able to relocate on your dime cheaply, and using what free time you have to have learned the latest Web x.0 technologies. If you want out of that rat race, you will have to acquire the $100k in income to get the college degree so you can land a mgmt position to support a more balanced lifestyle.
So perhaps you can save some on interest?
Careful.... OP is trying to auto-darwinate. Don't discourage him...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
It is in the nature of bubbles to not exists. The bubble which has substance is not the true bubble.....
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
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 don’t recall seeing boot camps for Electrical Engineers or boot Camps for Medical Doctors.
Electrical Engineers don't get taken seriously when they say "wiring faults are no big deal."
Programmers do get taken seriously when they say "bugs are no big deal."
That's why coding bootcamps have a chance, because our field is full of crappy programmers, adding a few more could be an improvement.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
From what I've read in the past, it's mostly about being able to scam your way through the HR hiring process at some joint. In most organizations it's a long, hard slog to fire anyone after that point, no matter how clueless.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
African
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
Can you really become a programmer in 19 weeks?
Software engineering is a craft that takes years of deliberate practice and learning to master. Our goal is to graduate world-class beginners, and jumpstart your journey towards becoming an elite coder. Having said that, we are betting that in 18 weeks you can learn enough programming to start contributing value to an engineering team as an entry level developer, where your learning can continue on the job. In fact, we think that our most successful graduates are those that view their first job as covering their food and rent while they continue to learn.
It sounds, very much, like what you can expect after graduating from a 4 year program; it's just more of a trade-school approach.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
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.
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.
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.
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. . . .
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.
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.