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Early 'Coding School' Dev Bootcamp Is Shutting Down (axios.com)
Dev Bootcamp, the original "coding bootcamp," is shutting down, the company announced on Wednesday. The company's last cohort of students, who begin the program next week, will graduate in December and receive job search help before the school permanently shuts down. From a report: Why it matters: Early coding bootcamps like Dev Bootcamp launched a boom in alternative education for programing skills, with some of the school's own alumni going on to found their own successful programs, like App Academy. Ultimately, the coding bootcamp craze highlighted not only the need to rethink computer science and programming education in traditional colleges, but also the increasing demand for workers with these technical skills.
Follow the multitude of other voc tech training paradigms and industry solutions and apply them to coding.
Yes, this does mean coders should unionize if they want to stop getting walked on.
Half of TFA made it into the summary. Should have included the other half of TFA that explains why the coding camp went out of business. Of course, quoting the entire TFA would have violated fair use.
I think I see the problem...
"with some of the school's own alumni going on to found their own successful programs, like App Academy"
Dev Bootcamp failed primarily because its own students graduated and then decided to cannibalize its business.
Next up, they should open a brain surgery camp, because like software development, any idiot can do it. They just need to start early! Most of them still won't be able to figure out why you are giving them $5.27 when the bill only comes to $5.22, but programming isn't hard like that is!
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Society is about to collapse!
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As a senior developer, I have tried to fill Jr. positions with people who have completed these types of "bootcamps". As far as I can tell, they skim some basic skills, prod students through a single, simplistic project in which they may only do a fraction of the work and may not actually complete and show them the door. At some point $$$$-$$$$$ changes hands.
I think they are a total scam. They don't teach a dedicated person more than they could learn on their own in the same time. What they may do is teach a non-dedicated person more than they would know, but what is the point of that?
Of course, the reason I keep interviewing these people is that management thinks they can get bright young devs with brand new skill for dirt cheap. So there's that.
you can't get hired without a 4 year degree because you're automatically not qualified, meaning the employer gets to bring in a (much cheaper) worker on a Visa. That's why these schools fail. They had them all over the place in the 80s and 90s before the flood of visa workers.
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Remember MCSE bootcamps? If you're in IT and of a certain age, you probably do. These schools sprang up to soak up the demand for system administrators at the peak of the First Dotcom Bubble. I got my MCSE on NT 4.0 (wow, I'm old) through self-study at the time, and these schools were what helped coin the term "paper MCSE." Basically, they'd force-feed total newbies the exam details in a cram session, and teach them a little bit about network and system administration. Microsoft's exams were notoriously easy to game back then, so tons of people who didn't really know anything got certified and were hired in admin positions they weren't qualified for. It took _years_ to clean out some of the paper MCSEs, and some would argue we're not done yet.
I wasn't shocked when I read that web coder bootcamps were starting to pop up as the Second Dotcom Bubble was inflating. I'm not a web developer by any means, but I can't imagine these schools teach anything beyond the absolute basics. Already, if you're starting with one of the JavaScript frameworks, a total n00b is many many levels abstracted from anything that might generate any actual insight. You have to learn the basics if you want to do anything the framework can't do for you, and I bet these coder schools don't teach much beyond how to do front-end coding in one or two frameworks.
It's similar to how the MCSE bootcamps were -- my company paid for me to go to one for a certification upgrade because I was a consultant at the time and they wanted to bill me out at a higher rate. If you were there for a refresher, the model made sense. If you were a former plumber, truck driver, or similar as many of my classmates were, you were in for a world of trouble if you passed and hit the real world. Maybe these coder bootcamps will produce people who can work at some startup banging on front-end code for 16 hours a day, but nothing beats first principles when it comes to really learning.
In the IT world, things move too fast these days to capture everything in a single certification, and I'd argue that it's difficult to learn everything the way you could when products, systems and networks were simpler. I don't know much about web coding though -- is it possible to boil things down enough to make a bootcamp graduate semi-useful?
I have never seen any competent developer who originated from a 'coding academy' scheme. Nearly ALL of the people from these schemes ARE completely unqualified to write software, and lack anything more than superficial knowledge of software engineering. What can you do with such people on a real software engineering project? Nothing in my experience. 'Coding academies' exist to enrich the people who run them, not to help the people paying the money. People with a few weeks to year of training are still untrained, and lack the depth on knowledge that is required in the real world. There might be some benefit for someone with an interest, and partial skills, but the same benefit could just be gained from practical experience, and having code reviewed by a competent developer. The content of a computer science or software engineering course is unfortunately necessary to be able to do real work. While we don't implement things from first principles very often, understanding of the underlying principles is essential to being able to make good engineering decisions. Likewise, understanding of design practices, and not just the mechanics or writing code is utterly essential, unless someone is just going to contribute mess that will later have to be refactored by someone who is competent.
so that they are not cheaper
a total n00b is many many levels abstracted from anything that might generate any actual insight
There's another insidious flip-side to this trend - I've been coding professionally now for 25 years (with four years of college before that and five years of hobby programming before that), and along the way I've picked up on things like pointers, recursion, memory management, algorithmic efficiency, TCP/IP, encryption, SQL, file systems, backwards compatibility, versioning, design, release planning, unit testing, and maybe a few other things. What I haven't quite gotten around to learning, though, is how to hook up Angular 2, Bootstrap, Rails, Node, Express, and MongoDB into a working application (it's on my list of things to get around to). So somebody who comes out of a bootcamp who knows how to do exactly that, and assumes that that is the entire sum of programming knowledge puts together a behemoth that is full of security and scalability problems and ignores any advice I might give him because he knows all this new-fangled Angular stuff and since I don't, I must be obsolete anyway.
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but at the other end the theory loaded 4 year places don't really teach you the needed hands on skills / teach you really out dated stuff.
Why not have 2 year tech / trade schools?
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I get that MCSE mills gave you a bad taste, but these bootcamps are really trying to get people started in coding. I followed the narrow traditional path: coded since I was young, did some web dev, got my CS degree, spent my whole working life so far as a comfortable software engineer. I have also volunteered at bootcamps, think they are doing good work, and I wholeheartedly support the trend.
There are some bad bootcamps and they deserve to be regulated, but the growth should show you there's a real demand, and a real need for coders. These bootcamps are filling a need that the traditional 4-year degree path just isn't filling.
These coding schools allow people who didn't get those breaks I did to get into coding. Many are turning to it later in life. Some are engineers who got their degrees decades ago and can't find work today. Some are grads who have found there were no jobs in their field. Some have always wanted to pursue it but have been turned away by social pressure. For some it's the educational path out of their situation. And they may start as web devs, and some will suck, but some will grow further. We need more engineers in the world, not fewer.
full of security and scalability problems and ignores any advice I might give him because he knows all this new-fangled Angular stuff and since I don't, I must be obsolete anyway.
It seems possible that you aren't taking your responsibility to mentor seriously. While you've been "meaning to get around to" learning modern technology, you could ask for assistance from that kid, impart some wisdom along the way, and actually build a good relationship and your import in the office.
I'm not entirely certain what your skills vs. hypothetical new guy are supposed to mean, either...those are two very separate job descriptions. Your skill set as stated doesn't make you much of a fit for web development. His don't sound all that wonderful for lower-level applications.