Should The Government Pay For Veterans To Attend Code Schools? (backchannel.com)

mirandakatz writes: David Molina was finishing up his 12-year time in the army when he started teaching himself to code, and started to think that he might like to pursue it professionally once his service was done. But with a wife and family, he couldn't dedicate the four years he'd need to get an undergraduate degree in computer science -- and the GI Bill, he learned, won't cover accelerated programs like code schools. So he started an organization dedicated to changing that. Operation Code is lobbying politicians to allow vets to attend code schools through the GI Bill and prepare themselves for the sorts of stable, middle-class jobs that have come to be called "blue-collar coding." Molina sees it as a serious failing that the GI Bill will cover myriad vocational programs, but not those that can prepare veterans for one of the fastest-growing industries in existence.
The issue seems to be quality. The group estimates there are already nine code schools in the U.S. which do accept GI Bill benefits -- but only "longer-standing ones that have made it through State Approving Agencies." Meanwhile, Course Report calculates 18,000 people finished coding bootcamps last year -- and that two thirds of them found a job within three months.

But I just liked how Molina described his introduction into the world of programmers. While stationed at Dover Air Force Base, he attended Baltimore's long-standing Meetup for Ruby on Rails, where "People taught me about open source. There was pizza, there was beer. They made me feel like I was at home."

Comments

Should government pay for diploma mills?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. New schools, even if they're "coding schools" still need to go through the normal procedures to attain recognition that they are a real school.

Re:Should government pay for diploma mills?

[ShanghaiBill]

The school should get fully paid only after the student completes the course, gets a job, and is employed for six months. That will increase their incentive to work with local employers, teach skills that are actually in demand, and help with job placement. It will decrease their incentive to enroll people that clearly can't do the work.

Watch out for scams!

[mspohr]

Unfortunately, there are a lot of schools scamming veterans. They offer fairly useless courses and the government pays.
Of course it would be good for veterans to learn coding but it should be a properly accredited school. It looks like there is a mechanism in place to properly vet (sic) schools and it should be followed.
Pizza and beer do not necessarily make a good school.

I dont get it

[JustNiz]

Why do Americans apparently feel such a massive debt of gratitude is appropriate for ALL military vets?
Apart from anything else, they chose the job.
Where's the recognition for the police or firefighters or others who clearly face far more danger in 1 day than the average so-called vet who spent their entire enlistment (which could be as small as 2 years) in some stateside base nowhere near any actual danger?

Re:I dont get it

[ShanghaiBill]

Where's the recognition for the police or firefighters or others who clearly face far more danger

Neither policing nor firefighting is particularly dangerous. Farmers, truck drivers, and retail clerks are all more likely to die or be injured on the job.

The most common reason that police die on the job is traffic accidents. The second most common reason is suicide.

Over a 30 year career, this is the number of times that most police officers fire their weapon in action: 0.

Being a cop in real life is not like it is on TV.

hell no

[TRRosen]

if you can't learn to code on your own you can't learn to code. This is not an industry where you can learn some skill and be done. Coders are constantly retraining themselves to handle new technologies. Maybe this little snowflake should grow up and realize millions of people actually work there way through college studying late at night after working an 8 hour shift and then taking care of there kids.

Re:ugh

[AK Marc]

Yeah, they want unreasonable things like treatment for medical conditions caused by their service, or the government to live up to the promises made when they signed up. People sign up under the promise of the GI Bill and other benefits, only to see them harder to get than promised.

Coding School

[Tenebrousedge]

First we need a "coding school" that is worth a damn. For the rest of this post I am going to say programming and not coding.

No, these people are certainly turning out coders and not programmers. They will know git and unit testing, but they won't know Knuth or Turing from a hole in the ground.

If such a program is to be instituted, It's going to have to be designed by the likes of Google, Canonical, and even Microsoft.

The industry is not interested in training its own. Otherwise there wouldn't need to be these programs. But I'm taking the words "self paced" and "internship" to mean that you haven't seriously thought about this issue. Internships are not replacements for classroom instruction, and getting someone from being a complete novice to the point where it's even worth it to pair them with a more senior dev takes quite a lot of instruction.