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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.
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.
Well, that replaces outsourcing. Now what do we do for coders?
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.
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. . . .
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.
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.