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Can a New Type of School Churn Out Developers Faster? (dice.com)
Nerval's Lobster writes: Demand for software engineering talent has become so acute, some denizens of Silicon Valley have contributed to a venture fund that promises to turn out qualified software engineers in two years rather than the typical four-year university program. Based in San Francisco, Holberton School was founded by tech-industry veterans from Apple, Docker and LinkedIn, making use of $2 million in seed funding provided by Trinity Ventures to create a hands-on alternative to training software engineers that relies on a project-oriented and peer-learning model originally developed in Europe. But for every person who argues that developers don't need a formal degree from an established institution in order to embark on a successful career, just as many people seem to insist that a lack of a degree is an impediment not only to learning the fundamentals, but locking down enough decent jobs over time to form a career. (People in the latter category like to point out that many companies insist on a four-year degree.) Still others argue that lack of a degree is less of an issue when the economy is good, but that those without one find themselves at a disadvantage when the aforementioned economy is in a downturn. Is any one group right, or, like so many things in life, is the answer somewhere in-between?
Or is that community college?
Pregnant women can tap out morse code on their bellies. And then only speak in binary. A two character alphabet is very flexible
Well, anything you can learn in two years about software engineering can be learned without going to school in the first place.
Four years is just enough of a theoretical basis that some of it MIGHT stick and be useful years down the line.
How is this different from any other community college?
Yeah, schools can't churn out qualified software engineers in 4 (and in many cases 5) years already. What makes you think you can do a good job in 2 years?
Offshore vocational schools?
New H1B targeted training centers?
It will not churn out developers faster (i.e. people who develop things from ground up, Starting with basic application and adding features). And it will not churn out Software Engineers (i.e. people who engineer the solution from top-down using abstraction). It may churn out copy-pasterino-code-monkeys who copy paste from stackoverflow, and complain if it doesn't work.
Sure. But they can only get hired if they have green cards. So best site that thing in India or Pakistan and see to stuffing that congressional envelope.
There's no shortage of qualified developers.
What there's a shortage of, are qualified developers who are barely old enough to shave, have no family (wife/husband/kids), will work for next to nothing, will put in 80+ hours a week for months on end, and who you can basically treat like shit because they don't know any better and are just desperate for any job in the industry.
Looking at my undergrad experience as a whole, i learned waaaay more in 3-4 semesters of co-op / hands on training than I did in 4 years of classes.
You want more developers to show up, raise the pay. It's always about supply and demand people. I guarantee you that if 90%+ of CS graduates could find a job out of college making $100k, there would be zero shortage of developers. What there is is a shortage of people who are willing to go $50k into debt for a $30k job.
Prison labor is very cheap, and it's an abundant resource in the US. They produce a pretty good debate team, why not programmers? You know, something actually useful!
There's probably money to be made if it can.
In fact, there's probably even more money to be made if it can't, because, you know, that was a pilot scheme ...
Sadly, not by me in either case. No doubt those Pearson cuntbags will be in on it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
But it is possible to take someone with no experience and turn him/her into a code monkey in only 2 years.
And I think that that is the point with this. They aren't looking to educate new "engineers". They want cheap, fast labour. Code monkeys.
If one of those people goes on to learn more, on their own, so much the better.
If not, well the CxO's of those companies will claim that it is the fault of the workers.
Most people are incredibly stupid, and most programmers are—and always will be—terrible at programming.
Do you think you're good at programming? Then, no, you definitely are not.
No
Well, duh!
I went to college but didn't come anywhere near to graduating. I went to work in a computer operator training program at Ross Perot's EDS. After being continually denied being allowed to enter their programmer training program, I quit and went to the Southland Corporation. SC was a real opportunity company. If you had the aptitude and desire to move ahead, SC would give you the opportunity to get where you wanted. After 9 months as a computer operator there, I was moved up into programming. I had self taught myself cobol and assembler already by continuously looking at code listings and asking other programmer questions, as well as slipping practice programs onto the computer myself. I enjoyed a career as a software engineer (what used to be only a computer programmer) for many years. Today I am retired, mainly playing with writing programs in Pascal and some C++. I am also running two remailers which has given me some nice Linux and bash experience.
This college thing is good if you have the ability to get a degree, but to insist on a degree for a specialty such as programming computers is nonsense. What this amounts to is an unnecessary jealous suppressing by people who have degrees. Many technical areas do not require this. Certain jobs, such as scientific or engineering programming would certainly require a degree, but writing programs to handle inventory, as well as financial programs can be handled easily (as I had to do) by a programmer with no college training. The specifications are handed to you and you simply put the specification into code.
...developers who can't write a single line of LUDDITE software and can only write "Hello World" using APPS!
Apps!
You can't churn out developers like automobiles.
I began programming casually in elementary school on Commodore Pets. I started programming on my own computer in fifth grade on a Commodore 64. Afterwards, I had plenty of short work stints during junior high school, high school, and my 7 years at the university, but I didn't begin programming full time for more than an 8 month period until I was 24. Even then, I was still very green.
The best developers have been at it for 10-20 years at a minimum, and I'd even go as far as to say I prefer programmers who've been at it for 30 years.
What I don't care about is your physical age. If you started programming at five years old, and you kept at it continuously until age 25 then you'd meet my criteria.
Developers are created over many years, they've worked on many generations of technology, and they've proved flexible with time. Many of the good ones have been at it since childhood, but I don't think that should disqualify anyone.
That's why developers need to get paid so much. Training over a decade to achieve basic competence at something is expensive. Many have a very expensive university education they have to repay. For me, I had to forgo my social life pretty significantly from age 15-25, and I'll never get that time back. The only way I can be repaid for that is with money.
If you're trying to shortcut the process somehow by picking up someone who knows nothing about creating software, hope to train him or her in a few years, and expect to pay him or her poorly then you're going to produce some pretty awful software.
Of course from a job hunter's perspective it is better to have a four year degree than not. How much better depends on experience. In a small number of cases it could hurt you.
There is no quality of school factor in a guy w/degree vs guy without degree comparison. In general I'd say four years of Ivy league employment experience trumps Ivy league school experience. A great deal of it depends on the employer and for higher level positions companies can and will make exceptions on degree requirements.
Does a degree help if you are concerned with actually being good at what you do once hired? No. Not in the slightest. You'd learn more in a one year guided self study apprenticeship 100% of the time if you have the raw talent to be any good.
In a world where every position now lists requirements dramatically in excess of what is needed to fill the role (mostly so they don't fill it and can justify hiring an H1-B worker) it's just one more useless thing that rules out perfectly qualified and possibly better candidates. But there is no shortage of qualified talent or increased demand. There is only a desire to increase the labor pool and drive down wages.
9 women + 1 month != A baby..
School doesn't exist solely to build wage slaves to work overtime for your shitty advertising company.
I know never attended a four-year university program. They have either a two-year degree or a high school education and lots of common sense and chutzpah. I'll take the guys who can learn and are very curious as to how things work over the supercilious, in-love-with-themselves Carnegie Mellon or Stanford types.
God I hope my tax dollars paid you to write that somehow.
Well cut out the fluff and filler classes and you can do it in 2-3 years.
Some of the 5 year thing is due to the way classes fall / fill up / the high number of required classes.
We don't need PE / GYM classes as required classes where just 1 class costs as much or more then a 2 YEAR gym membership.
Why the hell would anyone want to hire a developer from a school that markets itself with a phrase like "We churn them out faster!"
When you can already get crappy developers cheaper in India.
Don't make it an over hyped high cost school. Like others who seem to have the same idea.
vocational school / tech schools have there place but lot's of them have become just get people in on to the loans that have no cap and take anyone.
Also no risk for schools and the banks don't even offer low rates as they don't have the risk of people using chapter 7 or 11 to get out of them.
Of course they can!! Everyone who has been teaching computer science and software engineering so far just hasn't been smart enough to realize it. It's WHO is behind the school that counts!!
Go Holberton!!!! Yah!!
Just because you can use a calculator to hammer a nail into a piece of wood, doesn't mean I'm about to spend my time/money on taking a class about hammering nails with calculators in-case 20+ years from now technology has failed and its back to basics.
sounds like http://neumont.edu/ my alma mater. it just doesn't have as much support as this.
Someone should tell these kids how long they'll probably be in software development before they switch careers to something that will most likely require a four year degree.
The 4-5 year thing is due to stacked prerequisites.
At real schools, if you don't pass calculus I first semester freshman year you have already blown your chances of finishing in 4 years.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Some of the 5 year thing is due getting a Master's degree and all that. Unless, indeed, the software engineering MSc you are thinking of does feature Physical Education filler classes -- poor Dijkstra..
I am not talking about a 2 year degree, how about running the place like a trade school, where you have to pass your tests to get certified.
People that want engineering or computer science degrees would attend university.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Neumont University in Utah has been doing this sort of thing since 2004, and most students graduate in 2-3 years.
Personally I'm sick of developers who didn't go to Universities and don't study the field who get promoted to well beyond their understanding and abilities. That's not to say that there aren't some very good programmers who didn't go to university however in most cases their sphere of knowledge is constrained by the tool-sets that they've worked on and their interest in ICT theory in general. Recently I was working with a developer turned manager and there was a requirement to develop a software component with far greater assurance than he had come across. He was completely unaware that there have been decades of research in this field which has lead to a variety of techniques for developing high assurance software components. After a less than friendly series of meetings I finally had to approach him in private with a set of texts for him to read which provided him with an introduction to the various fields. Prior to that he firmly believed that Object Oriented programming was the be all and end all of programming techniques.
In countries with free educations systems all aspiring programmers should go to Universities (even if they don't finish they tend to pick up some gems), in the US with the education systems is geared towards ensure that the wealthy get the top jobs it's not as cut and dried as the education system is a bit broken.
However the key factor in this field is aptitude and interest, the concept that you can train a bunch of people with low IQs and no interest to code effectively is completely broken. If you look at standardized aptitude tests the profile required for good programmers sticks out like dogs balls, any country that wants a strong ICT industry would be better off developing this pool of talent via scholarships and special training.
I have wondered more and more over the years whether the traditional CS curriculum is still relevant.
So many software libraries exist that take care of the low-level details these days.
really?
Yeah, but your language sounds like people are gargling ancient Sanskrit three days into Oktoberfest, and some of the words have more syllables than I have socks (and I have a lot of socks!) Too hard.
Why can't some other country come up with free education, a responsible social safety net, and legal prostitution? I'm totally ready to emigrate. I just can't find anywhere to go. :(
There's a lot of reasons why some kids take 5 years rather than 4. Some double or even triple major. I know I gave some thought to doing a CompSci/CompE/EE major since the overlap between CompSci and EE cover just about all of your CompE requirements. Some choose to take a lighter load each semester so they can spend more time on each class and not burn out. Some are just slow and need to take extra time. Getting your prerequisites lined up for some classes can sometimes be tricky, especially at smaller schools with fewer sessions of the foundation classes.
There's all kinds of reasons why people take 5 or more years to get a 4 year degree. It doesn't change the fact that they're still not prepared to do the work when they leave school and the company that hires them has to finish the last 2/3 of their education.
Probably not, but it doesn't mean companies and aspiring programmers won't spend 10 years and millions on such snake oil.
This demonstrates the corporate need to treat education as an on-demand resource that can be purchased immediately and abandoned when longer valued. Alas, that education comes with a person who needs to eat, sleep and pay bills after his corporate usefulness has ended. Worse, that person may be a terrible student, or a brilliant student with no understanding of the skill-set he just memorized, or a person without the intellect to apply the skills just learned. So corporations also want someone else to pay for the very wasteful process of employee training.
Originally, higher education was proof that one had one had skills to perform more complex jobs and receive on-the-job training. Now it's means of exploitation by removing education fee caps and forcing everyone into education debt. A more educated workforce should mean a more liquid workforce, a requirement of a perfect economy but employees aren't allowed to move from bookkeeping to macro programming, for example. That reveals that education has stopped being infrastructure and become another asset available for corporate exploitation.
Look, you can get any four year degree and then go for an IT masters program, or post-graduate certificate.
Provided you have experience in software engineering.
I don't know how many times I've walked down University Ave and overheard about to graduate Computer Science majors talk about (in May) that maybe they should get some work experience.
That's too late.
So do some GitHub or other programming, crank out some fun apps or software, but do it before you graduate CS.
Many people go for a Masters or PhD in a field that is not the same as their undergrad, so exactly which form of degree (even Arts) is not that important. But you need to be able to handle complex task-oriented projects with computing deliverables, and you'll need some experience, even if it was a volunteer job.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
give three year degrees. It doesn't seem to be a problem. All the school has to do is say its two years degreee is a BS.
"Well cut out the fluff and filler classes"
Really? What is "fluff and filler"? English? Calculus? Programming languages? PE? Should we only have courses like "Freshman Java", "Second Semester Freshman Java", "SQL", "No SQL", "Spring" (offered in the Fall only), "How-to Scrum" (qualifies as a PE credit), "Git Hub", "Advanced Git Hub", "C#", Etc. ?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
it's what you learned in them. I've met devs who have been doing the same stupid shit in the same stupid ways for 20 years.
"Demand for software engineering talent at rock-bottom prices has become so acute,"
There. Fixed it for you.
For being a code monkey, CS itself is and always has been completely unnecessary.
For being a Computer Scientist, well, yeah, the curriculum is still a pretty damned good requisite.
It really matters not. But reality and real life are different. If you give any asshole any reason what so ever to fuc you over they will use it.
So even if you are the best programmer the world has ever known, without it someone will fuck you sooner or later.
Goes for all walks of life.
I failed my high school exit exam, then stayed six month at home doing nothing until my parent put pressure on me to find a job. I was like huh I sleep all day
and live the night so logically I became a night guardian.
Then a friend of mine, who was also a drop out, found a job as photocopier repair man in interim and told me they were looking for more people. I ended up repairing printers. From that I went to repair PCs so I became a technicien, then I did a little bit of sysadmin and helpdesk. It was in the mid 90s, I knew modems and became a hotliner for an internet provider. Went back to sysadmin and a little bit of coding in a startup to more and more coding to the point I stopped sysadmin.
For a long time a was insecure to present myself as a developer, today I can.
I don't know anything about math nor algorithm. I can't tell the difference between O(n) and O(log(n)).
All my colleague are engineers or have a college degree, most of them are brilliant and they can do stuff that I can't nor learn by myself.
They create business algorithm but often the code they make can't fit directly in production, or they miss some simple things.
As an example we had a daemon written in python which loaded tons of stuff from files at startup and stored it in a dictionary of numpy arrays.
My boss was proud of this code saying that this way the data was cached and it let us do things faster than calling the files everytime.
It could take one minute or more to start. That was super annoying if you had to change the code. I just stored the data into Redis at
first launch so I could relaunch the code at will without losing time, no big deal. Now they trust me for technological choice and practical
solutions.
"How-to Scrum" (qualifies as a PE credit)
I thought that class was underwater synchronized scrumming? I remember taking it just after wine tasting.
Come to think of it, I don’t remember registering for that class... or the wine tasting for that matter.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
In my experience, everything learned in school is CS is outdated by time you graduate. So churning out CS majors in 2 years is a waste, People need a broad amount of knowledge to do CS properly. Those who only have a 4 year CS degree or worse yet a 2 year one, are useless. A history major with desire might be better as they can apply what they learned there to make brand new algos, CS majors could never conceive of. You need desire, and different perspective and then we can use you to make better code.
2 years is silly.. yes we can get call center people... but you don't need a degree for that either.
Every project is brand new and different... one day its a web server with a DB so big not even Oracle can handle it... so shards need inventing, another day big data, another day replication between M/F and Wintel and then HA on Unix.... its always changing.
I've gone the down the no-degree career path, but don't recommend it. I started in the low-voltage electrical industry doing things like access control, security systems, fire alarms, and the like. I spent nearly ten years doing that work, and even now still own a business doing alarm systems. Since I was 11, I've been learning computers, hardware, software, and the integration of the two on my own.
In 2006, at the age of 27, I applied for a position as a junior sysadmin with a starting wage that matched my current "senior" electrical wage. I had to prove myself during the interview with some script examples, but had little hard evidence of actual skill. Since then, I've worked my way to a "principal" level in a software engineering department as a highly respected team member. It would have all been easier with a degree, but I never did miss the student loan payments. If I had to do it over, I'd go get a degree.
A bit of introspection provides some personal humility. I have been tasked lately of interviewing internship and co-op candidates. Most of the interview questions are those you would expect, but are generally specific about the candidates education. I find this exercise interesting and have been enthusiastic to hear about their experiences and interests. Usually, the candidate will turn questions around on us, the interviewers.
I always avoid the education questions, because I have no formal education. In one particular instance, after deftly avoiding the, "where did you go to school," question, I was asked, as we were departing, again, the same question. Embarrassed and with no escape, I had to reply I had none. To my surprise, the individual replied they were impressed and that I must really know what I'm doing to get so far. They genuinely seemed impressed. Further, on the ride back to the office with my colleague, he replied that he wasn't aware, and was also very impressed.
TL;DR: Go to school, you'll learn a bunch of shit that's harder to learn on your own.
Nike Free pas cher gave us some great insight into how he created the AdiZero Rose 2.5 and what Adidas Basketball is looking to accomplish moving forward. Enjoy the interview and keep your eyes peeled for D-Rose in those Bulls games, because hel be showing off new colorways as the season continues. Get your pair on February We did this to represent Rose flying high above the competition The ankle bands on the AdiZero Rose 2.0 were an innovative feature. How does the change to the ankleillow?on the 2.5 affect the shoe performance and style ell to start, the AdiZero Rose 2.5 is a higher cut sneaker, which is more supportive and provides some different benefits. While the styles are different we didn make the Rose 2.5 to pit against the 2.0. The 2.5 is a different sneaker that we created as a way of giving customers more options. I wouldn say that one has advantages over the other it simply a different style that we offer to give customers more options to meet their personal preferences. Tell us a little about the Sprint System. This has been a consistent feature among the AdiZero Rose sneakers and was enlarged for the 2.0.
But not for that reason. Profits for some, fuck everyone else. That is the current mindset with too many people holding power. Nepotism, cronyism, and quid pro quot is the overwhelming number of rich people today. Oh I know, there has always been some of that but we used to teach morality. Morality is one of those things omitted in current schools, and you'll have to give less than that to try and expedite programmers. Here is the test: Ask a person today "If you are rich, how much money is too much money?" 30 years ago most would put the number in the couple million mark. Today, most people will laugh and tell you know such thing. So we have gone very far backwards in morality as a society, in a very short amount of time.
Could a school turn out "programmers" in 2 years? Sure, they will know enough to do some "programming" but not how to solve problems, and won't be able to communicate with people. Further, they will be ignorant to history so not know what to look out for in actions by the powerful which makes a large group of people fodder.
I heard something similar the other day, where 100 years ago people from Universities were well versed in every subject. They studied Math, Music, Chemistry, Languages, Art, Philosophy, and History. A person with a degree was very high valued. That was supposed to be the goal of Public Education and Government funding and control in Universities. And look where we have gone. Specialized degrees like "Sports Marketing" with little to no other knowledge to fall back on.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It takes two years just to provide the fundamental Physics, Math, English, general Engineering and electives of a properly constructed Engineering degree. You might be able to squeeze one or two software engineering courses in the first two years, but most of the Software Engineering happens in the last two years.
Now, if you are looking for use them up and throw them away code monkeys who can take direction from a real Software Engineer and will never climb up the ladder past Code Monkey, then absolutely, yes, you can do that.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I have been interviewing programmers for over thirty years, almost all with degrees in CS, many with years of professional experience, and the majority are rejected because they can't come close to independently solving even tiny programming problems -- problems that capable programmers solve nearly instantly on inspection. Given today's salaries, I don't think there is a vast pool of potential programmers who are kept out because a four-year degree is required. We have a glut of people entering law school to graduate into a crowded field in hope of a professional income. There's a reason they aren't all becoming computer programmers.
You know, like hiring people over the age of 35, paying more, or not require exact matches. Stuff like if you've done C++ for 10 years there's a good chance you know something about OOP and can pick up another language pretty quickly. But like I say, that crazy, way out of there shit.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
We've heard this BS before. Go and hire all of the engineers HP just laid off... Problem solved!
But stop with all the focus on only OOP. the programmers that come out suffer from Dunning Kruger and usually aren't as skilled as a good C or JavaScript programmer at the same point in their career. If you didn't spend a good chunk of time on block structured and functional coding there is no point in me hiring you.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
Well duh. Programming is an apprenticeship, and a university isn't vocational training. Everyone knows that.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Do you want an auto mechanic or automotive engineer? Degree is not geared for any particular job including programming. It gives to you tool set and if you are intelligent select right tools for the right work using your innovative thinking. When the technology changes, the tool bag is still there to help you. A board understanding of technology, sociology, liberal education, critical thinking, people skills... are all essential. Community college miserably fail because of the lack of qualtity. I recently took many courses for fun and it was a horrible experience. Paar timers without any motivation to teach (and lacked research experience) just gave As and Bs not to hurt the emotional pain of students. A well rounded education is key for success, but where to get is the basic question. One has to have aptitude, attitude and determination to excel. Coding is only a small part of translating an algorithm, but developing an algorithm depends on a deep knowledge. So, internship during study, like the Germans do, is the key, but the administrative structure of educational institution is notorious for sponging the money for their own self. Most schools have mediocre faculty who will never allow the best one to come on board as it will stop their own growth. These street smart as opposed to academic and creative smarts, are ruining the education and control our education which becomes useless. The solution to this problem is complex and no short cut is there to meet the challenge. Singapore is the only place where the best eduction is the goal and you can see their growth.
I am drowning
There is no sign of land
You are coming down with me
Hand in unlovable hand
And I hope you die
I hope we both die
Just need more not just to educated programmers, but to education all kids in any fields. Getting rid of public schools where the teacher is most important group and making charter schools where the students are the most important group would help a lot. As it is, teacher unions are killing the education system. Teachers unions don't care squat about the kids.
Some people will be able to be a great developer in 2 years. Not all people. And of course, what's a "developer"? We aren't talking about licensure or anything are we?
This whole thing is part of a conspiracy by US companies to chip away at high salaried developers. On one front is the give everyone a green card crowd. Bring in a bunch of people from 3rd world countries and drive down wages. On another front are the groups like this that want to turn out programmers with a minimum amount of formal education. This too will drive down wages by increasing the labor pool.
What is so evil about this is that on the surface it seems like a noble thing to do. Create opportunities for people from poor countries. Fill a shortage of talent thereby allowing American companies to grow, benefiting everyone. Provide professional level jobs for people that would otherwise not be eligible for them without attending college.
The problem is that its all a load of shit. They don't give a damn about poor countries. They don't give a damn about creating jobs or other such nonsense. What companies DO care about, first and foremost, is making money. And the easiest way to do that is to cut labor costs.
The problem is that a lot of companies now want speed as the priority. "How long is it going to take to fix this bug?" "How long is it going to take to patch this new feature in?" "How long is it going to take to add another option in this application?" Expected answer is in hours not days or weeks. Then the source base ends up looking like a snake-pit of cable runs where many modules are half-completed. The idea being they only implement the code they actually need.
They also want people to specialize; one person will do code optimization, another will do parallelization. Someone else will do low-level, while another person only does the high-level GUI, while a few others write all the new code.
no School needed! ..
But.. You need 5 years of serious instrest in coding. Maybe more. I guess I had about 10 years of coding, before I was of age for those schools.
So sure, learn them code in 2 years.. and I will NOT hire them.
Two thoughts:
1) When someone has only one skillset they have less job mobility and so less negotiating power for salaries (argument in favor of a well rounded education)
2) When someone with that one skillset gets laid off because their job got outsourced overseas for fuckall/hour they will have more trouble finding alternative work.
America is shooting itself in the proverbial foot by making good education so expensive.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Surely you mean code monkeys?
It could be like a 2 year community college degree, without the electives and GEC classes, the extra classes could be theory or practical.
I don't really see a problem with either, I think colleges should give the option to opt out of GEC's, just call it a technical degree, if you want to take several years of filler, then you earn a bachelor's or associates.
I take it think might not be either, as it says hands on, maybe typical schools need to incorporate hands on more into their curriculum. Or perhaps partner more with employers so ever student has a part time programming job.
But it is possible to take someone with no experience and turn him/her into a code monkey in only 2 years.
And I think that that is the point with this. They aren't looking to educate new "engineers". They want cheap, fast labour. Code monkeys.
If one of those people goes on to learn more, on their own, so much the better.
If not, well the CxO's of those companies will claim that it is the fault of the workers.
Depends on what you mean by "no experience". Do you mean "no professional experience" of any kind whatsoever, or simply "no programming experience".
I ask because I know first hand of several schools (a new trend I'm witnessing) where they take professionals (teaches, business people, nurses, fine arts, and what have you), put them on a 10-week bootcamp, 8AM to 8PM, monday through saturday, going through the grind of software development topics (sans theoretical CS such as diving into the purely mathematical analysis of algorithms or automata theory).
And I've seen them making a good transition into competent software developers (junior level, but still very much competent), certainly not code monkeys.
And what I see is that people with a 4-year degree (but could also be a 2-year degree) and some professional experience of any kind already have grit to dive into things and get proficient. They already know how to study, internalize and categorize things. They already know how to divide and conquer problems, and they already know how to see patterns of work.
That is the stuff a degree, be it 2 or 4 gets you. Those people already went through that, regardless of the degree. So for them, taking a 10-week, 6-days-a-week workshop from dusk to dawn is just another do-or-die project, which they complete.
So yes, you can take anyone without prior experience and turn them into software developers in short order, provided they have educational maturity.
A lot of people complain that half of the classes in a BS, AS or AA degree is not related to the main topic of graduation. And they are missing the point. Unless you are exceptionally gifted, you need to go through the grind of things, to learn how to study, how to apply yourself. The actual subjects of graduation come on top of it.
This is no different from a craftsman apprenticeship program. A master plumber just doesn't learn from books. He gets hands-on practice on a medium that is fundamental to the type of work he is expected to perform.
Same with a person hoping to work on the subject of a 2 or 4 year degree. What people call "irrelevant" curricula is that medium.
On another note, I agree that we do not need a 4-year degree to do software development. I got my first job with just a 2-year AA degree, and it served me well. I did get my 4-year degree in CS while working as a developer (and then went to grad school). But for 90% of my work, what I learned in the 2-year AA degree was more than fine.
It was only on the areas of large scale software engineering and algorithm complexity (which I did end up having to confront) that I relied on my seniors. And that area of lacking got resolved once I got my 4-year degree.
We insist too much not just on having a 4-year degree, but a 4-year CS degree, when most programming jobs can be done with just a 2-year AS program, or an apprenticeship program for people coming from other professions. There are a lot of jobs that do require a 4-year CS degree, but they are not the majority. And I think we are doing a disservice to the industry in insisting to fill every programming job with 4-year CS graduates.
That is what you get when you hire contractors in India.
Just thought I would be honest about what one can get without a degree. My weekly take home pay after taxes (Illinois, single, no kids): $742.52, or $2,970.08 a month. That's after spending 4 years doing temp work and 5 years full-time. At the end of the 4 years of temp work I was making $18/hr. How much do most people earn while going to college?
I'm sure I could make a hell of a lot more if I were motivated and full of energy, but I'm not. Being paid $24/hr to read Slashdot is quite nice.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
Any CS curriculum at a US university is essentially a 2 year degree. The other 2 years are wasted on mandatory courses that have absolutely nothing to do with the major. In European universities the curricula focus on the subject studied, they do not include stuff you already did or should have done in high school. US universities should remove all the gunk and clutter from their curricula, which will make graduating faster without lacking knowledge and skill while also keeping the expenses for students down...but since each and every university soaks those who are not athletic to pay for money wasters like college sports and overly landscaped campi they have to make the CS majors study biology, philosophy, and write a book report about "The Great Gatsby" for nth time in their lives.