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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?
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?
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.
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.
Although it's likely that if you ask both of these developers to develop an efficient algorithm/data structure to do something novel, the one with the traditional four year degree is more likely to come up with a better solution -- and that will likely remain true for the remainder of their careers. The four year degree developer will likely be "caught up" with the self-taught one (given the same base intellectual capabilities of course) within two years and then always be ahead.
There are, of course, exceptions.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
I'd be more interested to see a comparison of a 4 years CS grad with another 4 years of work experience up against someone with 8 years of work experience.