Slashdot Mirror
As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In the last five years, dozens of schools have popped up offering an unusual promise: Even humanities graduates can learn how to code in a few months and join the high-paying digital economy. Students and their hopeful parents shelled out as much as $26,000 seeking to jump-start a career. But the coding boot-camp field now faces a sobering moment, as two large schools have announced plans to shut down this year -- despite backing by major for-profit education companies, Kaplan and the Apollo Education Group, the parent of the University of Phoenix. The closings are a sign that years of heady growth led to a boot-camp glut, and that the field could be in the early stages of a shakeout. [...] One of the casualties, Dev Bootcamp, was a pioneer. It started in San Francisco in 2012 and grew to six schools with more than 3,000 graduates. Only three years ago, Kaplan, the biggest supplier of test-preparation courses, bought Dev Bootcamp and pledged bold expansion. It is now closing at the end of the year. Also closing is The Iron Yard, a boot camp that was founded in Greenville, S.C., in 2013 and swiftly spread to 15 campuses, from Las Vegas to Washington, D.C. Its main financial backer is the Apollo Education Group. Since 2013, the number of boot camp schools in the United States has tripled to more than 90, and the number of graduates will reach nearly 23,000 in 2017, a tenfold jump from 2013, according to Course Report, which tracks the industry.
But a glut of stupidity, bloat, and bad code.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom...
#DeleteFacebook
Remember when being a doctor or lawyer was the in thing? Look how that turned out.
It's not like the boot camp instructors are CompSci masters who went to MIT or Stanford. It's the same content.
Even if Boot Camps are a little better, they aren't $2900 better
You CAN learn to code in a few months, heck if you are a quick study you could probably learn to code in ONE month.
To write GOOD code however takes a LOT longer.
Something these code camp twats probably knew damn well, but were more that willing to take money from the ignorant.
Also what makes me bang me head against my desk is that people don't realize that coding is not simply learning how an if and a while work, it's about learning how to write a file, read a database (you'll have to learn SQL as well) etc. etc. in your chosen language. That takes a lot of time.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
I hope I am not in the minority with this, but I honestly enjoyed the concept of Dev/Code Bootcamps. I've had an internal philosophy that no matter what 'career' you do (to some extent, so let's not anon-troll that, please) or hobbies/interests, development skills in some programming language would help you. And if you want to make a career out of it, even better!
However, that being said, I'm also a firm believer in experience over quick buzzy skills any day of the week, 100% of the time. All I viewed this as was a way to 1) make a non-profit for gains in big dollars on the business side (WTF WOULDNT want a successful non-profit) and 2) water-down a field that, in my opinion, should NOT be watered down.
Software engineering/development, bridging advanced mathematics (e.g. linear algebra, calculus, etc.) takes an EXTREME amount of well-rounded background in all things computing, skills and investing into yourself, your study, your craft. It's the field I work in, respect and make a living in. I feel like a chimp in shadows of some truly gifted software developers I've met and worked with in my past and I've been doing this for almost 15 years professionally now. Those people didn't get there by taking a quick 4 week crasher on the shiny-new-topic, whizbang a resume with a thesaurus and try to land a $100K gig for 6 months to build a 'previous employment' line-item they could wow the next place into hiring them on.
It's sad from the ideology of it, but if this is the direction it's going, I'm not totally heartbroken either from the glass-half-empty perspective.
The second group are above average, but will never be elite. They lack passion, open mind and desire to continually learn stuff.
The third group are coder that are collecting pay checks and don't have a passion for technology or learning. The would rather be doing something else. I would guess 60% fall into this category from my own experience. Depending on the project, that number can be as high as 75%.
Anyone that has 10+ years of experience with software development would know this. Anyone surprised by this wasn't paying attention.
Has anyone worked with boot camp graduates?
I'm sincerely curious about the caliber of people they turn out. I'm perhaps a bit curmudgeonly on this; I think that to be a competent software developer you need to have a pretty thorough grounding in math and science, as well as some native talent... which seems to be far more common in people drawn to math and science. But I'm willing to be proven wrong.
What I'd really like to see is a proper study of boot camp graduates that uses good sampling methods and some decent objective measurement of skill/ability, at a few points in time (fresh grads, grads after two years in industry, grads after five years in industry, for example) and compares them to graduates from the "traditional" sources, controlling for extraneous variables. In the absence of that, I'd like to hear anecdotes, especially from people who worked with boot camp grads they thought were pretty good.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Don't link to the NYT fucker. Aside from being a leftist piece of trash, they limit the number of articles they allow you to see each month.
The food here is terrible, and the portions are so small!
Certified Novell Engineer (CNE) boot camps produced a generation of sub-par sys admins
Microsoft Certified Engineer / Developer (MSCE/D) produced a generation of sub-par engineers / developers
This is just more of the same :) The wheat will separate from the chaff and the consultants will make a small mint fixing all of the bad code
I'm old enough to remember the MCSE and Java/back end web development bootcamps from the late 90s. I even went to an MCSE bootcamp to renew my certification when a consultancy I was working for paid for it. Any time a field gets hot, and there's money to be made, people who don't have a whole lot of aptitude for it are going to look for a quick way in. In the case of my bootcamp, there was a clear division between those of us who needed to stuff our brains with facts to pass a certification test quickly, and those who were driving a truck last week and got tricked by the school's recruiter to giving them their student loan money, GI Bill benefits, etc.
But just like 1999, 2018 and beyond isn't going to need 20 million JavaScript developers who know a couple of web framework tricks. Right now, anyone who can fog a mirror and write in Node.js or Rust is in hipster startup heaven, making lots of money. When the downturn comes, and activity goes back down to a reasonable level, all the people who are suffering through this for the money aren't going to stick around. We're already seeing the coder schools folding up the tents because they can't get enough marks through the door anymore.
There's nothing wrong with educating yourself and changing gears. I've been on a journey to learn more about modern IT stuff like DevOps, cloud, etc. and filling the gaps in my knowledge has been a long, slow process. I've been doing end user computing and systems integration stuff for a while, so web programming is something I haven't done a lot of. Would it be great to just sit down and "learn DevOps in 14 days?" Sure, but I know that's not realistic. When you're working with people who've done nothing but code and manage web apps for a decade, you have a lot of catching up to do and it's not something you can rush if you want any deep knowledge. It's the difference between, say, putting an SSL certificate on a website that a CA gave you, vs. knowing how that process actually works, what can go wrong, etc.
You cannot for 60 years insist upon blind consumerism and automation without question, upon walled gardens and closed source, and expect people to take an interest in programming in less than a generation.
you cannot hijack the word 'hacker' and expect to be taken seriously when you've spent 35 years incarcerating and denigrating the very people you'd hope to attract to the science of programming and computer systems.
albeit unrelated, this is Much the same with gender and STEM. you cannot usurp 150 years of wife-as-homemaker and husband-as-breadwinner in a week of code camps and diversity seminars. You created these problems, and you'll need to work as hard as you did when you created them in order to fix them.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I have to admit that it's hard to see the value in a lot of these "schools".
I've actually attended a few of the classes attempting to pickup new skills, even though I've got a degree in Computer Science already.
Eg, I took a class in Ruby, which wasn't really popularized when I was in school.
It wasn't a good experience. The class length was nowhere near long enough to get someone completely up to speed from scratch, yet since the class was billed as "beginner friendly", they started out with the standard "Hello world" and "this is what a variable is" stuff. Basically at the end of the class I'd gotten about as much benefit out of it as I'd have gotten in an afternoon of reading, yet any student who came in from scratch probably didn't have a clue on how to do anything useful.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Don't link to the NYT fucker. Aside from being a leftist piece of trash,
I've heard a lot of right-leaning people complain about the New York Times. I haven't, however, seen any evidence that they aren't a good source of information.
they limit the number of articles they allow you to see each month.
It's bad enough that millennial assholes think that it's a crime if everything on the internet is not free, free, free. Reporters shouldn't be paid, they should work for the love of it. (and for the "exposure").
But now, when the New York Times actually is giving away their content for free, the millennial assholes are complaining that they are not getting enough content for free.
"Even humanities graduates can learn how to code in a few months..."
Did anyone else get a good chuckle out of that sly dig? I can imagine a funny commercial: "Are you a high school dropout? Recently paroled? Functionally illiterate? Severe mental deficiency and/or brain damage? Or even a humanities graduate? You too can learn to code in a few months!"
I have had the misfortune of working with such people. Let me be frank about them: they were total disasters.
I don't have high expectations for people with a Comp Sci or similar degree. But even the worst of these people could easily run circles around the self-taught or those with limited education like boot camps or just a continuing education course or two.
The limited education folks are often extraordinarily ignorant. Many of them only know JavaScript. That's it. That's all they know. They don't even know that C, C++, Perl, Java or C# exist.
These people who only know that JavaScript exists end up using JavaScript for absolutely everything. Just like the people, their projects end up being disasters, too. Something is seriously wrong when somebody writes a large, convoluted JavaScript script to do something that could be done with a four or five line shell script.
It really doesn't help that JavaScript is a shitty, inefficient language. At least the college-trained Java code monkeys have a decent language and a large standard library to work with. But the JavaScript fools? By the time they've finished searching for npm packages to use, the Java code monkey has already finished, tested and deployed a working solution.
They are totally clueless about data structures other than arrays and maps. They don't know what a tree is. They don't know what a list is. They don't know what a queue is.
They are totally clueless about algorithms, too. Unless it's one of the few algorithms in JavaScript's extraordinarily shitty standard library, they have no idea it exists.
Since they don't know about algorithms and data structures, they don't know about complexity theory. If their code doesn't run fast enough, it's because "the hardware is too slow"!
Hiring such a low-skill individual (I don't want to refer to them as "programmers", because often they just aren't in any meaningful way) will often only result in distraction and time-wasting for any programmers who have even the slightest ability to program, as these other programmers spend their days fixing up the mistakes and disasters of the self-trained or minimally-trained hacks.
Intensive courses sound good, but once the "graduates" get out, they discover that they will be competing with people who have been obsessed with computers since the age of ten; people who would rather code than eat.
We need more doctor's in this country. Surely we can get some liberal arts majors through a doctor bootcamp, right? Three weeks and you should be ready to perform open heart surgery.
In fact, probably yes. A MD degree gives you a comprehensive education in all of medicine. If, on the other hand, we had decided to train people in narrow specialities, yes, you probably could train a person to be expert on a single type of surgery in a twelve week bootcamp. It would mean training technicians, not scientists: people who know how to do the physical skills, but not necessarily know the etiology of the disease.
Would be a different approach to medicine.
(you said "three weeks," but the average coding bootcamp is 12 weeks).
Why are you targeting millennial with your comment? They don't have a monopoly on cheapness. Hell, if anything, the Boomers are *worse* cause they got it better than any generation before or since, and get pissy when anyone pushes back on their entitled attitude.
It isn't just less prepared workers, but also clients, HR departments, managers, funding/financial entities and even dumbed-down programming environments/tests/solutions/expectations. I have no problem in recognising that, in the past, I let all this nonsense (because provokes everyone to lose) to somehow affect my work. It is also true that, unless you are lucky enough (or similar) to be in a quality-prone and supporting environment, things out there are quite tough: lots of offer at almost any price (+ quality/accountability) and lots of ignorance to make tons of horrible decisions. The high availability of information might also be provoking a wrong impression of control in people not precisely too aware about their actual (lack of) knowledge.
I don't think that coding camps or similarly simplistic/to-the-point/quick trainings are absolutely bad. Every single bit of knowledge can be positive when adequately applied. What is bad is misassessing what you can accomplish with that knowledge and what are the minimum requirements to get a proper product. The real problem are the final decision makers (HR/recruiters/managers for mis-hiring; clueless clients unaware about what they want/need; but also poor-knowledge programmers unaware about what they can/cannot do) who wrongly trust their unreliable knowledge (or other unreliable sources), who buy into the idea that everything is easy ("I read about a kid doing it, so has to be easy!") and contribute towards creating the current low-quality-, unreliability- and shortsighted-prone software development reality.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Millenials are cheap, because there are no fucking jobs out there for them. Anyone born before 1965 could go into -any- profession and earn a living. A college degree helped as well. Come the 1980s, you could still get a good job with any major. Post 2000, especially 2008, you could have a PhD in your field, and you will not be finding work, because the only thing that matters is recent experience. That, or a H-1B.
It's bad enough that millennial assholes think that it's a crime if everything on the internet is not free, free, free. Reporters shouldn't be paid, they should work for the love of it. (and for the "exposure").
But now, when the New York Times actually is giving away their content for free, the millennial assholes are complaining that they are not getting enough content for free.
Wait, what? Someone (anonymous) with no self-identification whatsoever complains about NYT and you somehow lump that person with millennials and proceeds to bash the entire group. You could have replaced millennials with another and it would have made just as little sense. But it's fashionable to bash millennials and blame them for everything so you got upvoted. Mods need to do a better job at moderating.
keeping them happy is the hard part....
love is just extroverted narcissism
Programming is not a task. It is a way of viewing the world. It’s a way of thinking that mingles creativity and logic. Almost like physical poetry. Many of us (yes, I’m a coder and have been a long time) have a burning curiosity and always ask “what if, how did that happen, where did that come from..” and a myriad of other questions indicating a need for constant learning. My wife is very successful in medicine. She’s much more “feeling” driven in her decisions whereas mine are logical. At times call me “cold”, and says “who thinks like that?” We balance, in a good way – most of the time – anyway, I digress
As for programmers, not everyone is built that way, and a “boot camp” won’t change you if you don’t.
This mantra “Everyone can and should learn to code” is one of those tag lines that need to finally die.
because companies don't have to hire the graduates. They can have as many college grads as they want. If they run out of US college grads they can get them from overseas. Why would I hire somebody who's been through an 8 week bootcamp when I can have somebody with 4 years of school? If nothing else that 4 years of school tells me they're stable enough to stick with something.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Even the IDEA that most people can code is STUPID. Coding requires a certain mindset, and critical thinking skills that MANY people just don't have.
The idea that anyone code makes as much sense as saying "Anyone can win the Olympic Long Jump!"
These schools took advantage of people's desire to improve their lives.
the full college system needs change and HR needs something (maybe have something along the lines of boy scout merit badges).
Now in EU they have a lot more apprenticeships.
Even NFL and NBA can use minor leagues and not student athletes who take joke classes when the team needs 35-50 hours a week.
The tech / trade schools are filling the gap from big theory based classroom to more hands on. But over time they more and more roped into the college degree system and accreditation systems.
UOFP was the ONLINE school filling the gap of working pro's who wanted to go school / continuing education but did not fit into the young full time students that other colleges wanted.
community colleges are an other mixed bag with students who may want to tech / trades classes, students who want to do college general education at a much lower cost, People who want an easier class load then full 4 year colleges (now days the full 4 years colleges take way more people as they can get loans)
computer architecture?? like the CS guy working at Google who needed to call the help desk to find the power button on his workstation?
start by cutting pre-med down to 2-3 years.
They spend way to long in schools before they get to an apprentice roll.
Not any different than the "Get your MCSE Certifications" of the early 2000s - they're not interested in placing people in jobs... they're interested in getting paid. They're a business and they'll be happy to take your money.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
I've heard a lot of right-leaning people complain about the New York Times. I haven't, however, seen any evidence that they aren't a good source of information.
Have we already forgotten about the embarrassing Jayson Blair incident?
The number one item on my list of what constitutes a credible news source is, do they publish error corrections?
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/us/correcting-the-record-times-reporter-who-resigned-leaves-long-trail-of-deception.html
Or, to quote the Forbes article on Where You Find Real Facts Rather Than Alternative Facts:
"If a reporter gets facts in a story wrong, will the news outlet investigate a complaint and publish a correction? Does the publication have its own code of ethics? Or does it subscribe to and endorse the Society of Professional Journalist’s code of ethics? And if a reporter or editor seriously violates ethical codes – such as being a blatant or serial plagiarizer, fabulist or exaggerator – will they be fired at a given news outlet? While some may criticize mainstream media outlets for a variety of sins, top outlets such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, NBC News and the New Republic have fired journalists for such ethics violations. That is remarkable in a world where some celebrities, politicians and other realms of media (other than news such as Hollywood films “based on a true story”) can spread falsehood with impunity."
I saw this article go up, but there wasn't a link to the actual article in the summary - so I did a quick search and put in the link as a comment.
Thanks.
Wait, what? Someone (anonymous) with no self-identification whatsoever complains about NYT and you somehow lump that person with millennials and proceeds to bash the entire group.
Yep. Boomers don't whine about getting free content-- they grew up with paying for news subscriptions, and still consider it a win to get it free. And post-Millennials don't post to slashdot-- they're all glued to Facebook and Instagram and Twitter; why would they read a boring text-only site like this?
So, millennial, QED.
There are a ton of jobs out there and huge shortages in a lot of fields.
Any time I push into someone not being able to find a job it boils down to their wants coming before their needs. Grandpa didn't get much choice in the CCC where he worked. But it was a paycheck and the money helped back home.
If you show willingness to pickup a trade there are multiple companies in this area that are hiring. I know people with a GED that showed up a plumber's ad in the paper saying "I don't know anything about plumbing, I'll work hard, show up on time and pass a drug test" and they are now well on their way to a Union journeyman.
But jobs like that mean you have to leave Seattle and SanFrancisco for the 'uncultured' flyover states.
Our local VocTech highschool can't crank out CNC operators fast enough. The principal told me that most HS seniors not on the college track are getting hired at $20/hr before they graduate. We have a 8 week GED/CNC operator course where you can earn your GED, get a CNC cert AND a job in 3 nights a week. You just have to show that you have your life on track with no recent arrests and a character witness.
Hell truck drivers are in massive demand right now. I wouldn't bank on it for a long term career but if you need money can pass a CDL it'll get you to the next phase of your life. With enough money to do everything 'millenials' are complaining they can't get like a house and steady income.
I know multiple people that have taken this and similar paths to their career. The loudest millenials that seem to be pushing the 'there are no jobs' out there have lead a relatively easy life. They had few to no hardships growing up and now expect everything to be handed to them.
My wife and I are both old millenials. Both have advanced degrees, good jobs and have half jokingly talked about what would happen if we had to emigrate. Neither of us are above swinging a hammer or shoveling shit if it means food and a roof and have done both at some point in our lives.
It is changing at the local level. VocTech highschools have realized they fell behind the times and are quickly coming around. The local high school has an EE lab that makes me jealous and better than anything I had in college. They're diagnosing and fixing late model vehicles. One near my mom, on a big lake, fixes and repairs $100k+ boats. From the floaty bits to the electronics.
perhaps it will depress wages to the point that it's not worth it to import indentured servants who are quasi slaves to code.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
They have them.
There are 4-8 week CNA Nursing Assistant courses available across the US. There are no less than 2 advertised on billboards on my way to work.
They also have engineering boot camps called "Welding & CNC training".
And both 4-8 week courses fill the same role in their industries as Bootcamps do for programming: Warm bodies to do tedious work.
If your MDs are doing the work that should be for the CNA or your engineers are doing work that should be for the CNC operator then you're doing it wrong.
Just like if you're using CS majors for bootcamp work, or vice versa, you're in for a world of pain.
We have enough CS majors at my company. Hiring more CS majors won't turn out product faster. However we could use a dozen more *programmers*. Someone that can take the high level architecture and implement it. The reason a lot of our internal tools are progressing so slowly is there's a handful of us working on them. I'd rather a HS dropout with some knowledge of Python to report back weekly how things are going.
Engineers and Architects don't insist on building their own buildings, why do CS majors insist on building their own code? Focus on your training, which is not the flavor of the week programming language.
We need more doctor's in this country
Some places. But a CNA, RN, and PA would go a lot farther in making most medicine less expensive and take the workload off of the MDs so they can concentrate on what they're trained to do.
Three weeks and you should be ready to perform open heart surgery
Nah, we're on our way to automating that. But we still need some CNA, RN and PAs around to assist the robot.
Reality check: you're probably not that great of a coder, and luckily, that's probably all your job requires.
This attitude is common whenever job competition in programming gets mentioned here: some people feather puffing and insisting that they have astonishingly high abilities, and their job regularly requires pushing the very boundaries of computer science and mathematics... And for almost every programmer on the planet, that's just not true.
Most business programming is just pulling results out of databases and posting them over a web server. It's difficult the first few times, but by the 50th or 100th time it's pretty easy. You can pretend you are flying to the moon if you want, but it won't save your job from outsourcing to a guy who slept in university and whose main skills are browsing StackExchange, ctrl-C and ctrl-P.
The main reason that US businesses require degrees at all is often not due to job difficulty, it's due to credentials inflation that was caused by anti-discrimination hiring laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
I do think that the coding boot camps are riding a fake bubble... They're still playing the same song we heard in the run-up to the year2K hiring boom, but there's no year2K17 bug to fix now. Mostly whats available is data entry jobs, as the people who used to have them regularly get their carpal tunnels syndromed (for $12 an hour) and quit.
One of the most useful things I ever learned, I got from a god damn commercial. IIRC it was for TIVO.
PEVR method.
Pause. (Obvious, but important. Don't multitask. Yes it's just bullshitting, but theirs pussy down this road!)
Empathise (Say: 'I'm sorry you feel that way', let her vent)
Validate (Say: 'You are right to feel that way', let her vent)
Resume (obvious)
It's not a problem for you to fix.
Warning: using PEVR method after 'she's on to it' is dangerous. Change phrasing. Don't overuse. Don't use when she's pissed at YOU.
Also: never take girl advice you got on /.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Don't link to the NYT fucker. Aside from being a leftist piece of trash,
I've heard a lot of right-leaning people complain about the New York Times. I haven't, however, seen any evidence that they aren't a good source of information.
they limit the number of articles they allow you to see each month.
It's bad enough that millennial assholes think that it's a crime if everything on the internet is not free, free, free. Reporters shouldn't be paid, they should work for the love of it. (and for the "exposure").
But now, when the New York Times actually is giving away their content for free, the millennial assholes are complaining that they are not getting enough content for free.
Snowflakes have gotta bitch about something.... :/
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
> I haven't, however, seen any evidence that they aren't a good source of information.
Haven't seen any, or *won't* see any? Did you miss their election coverage, and post-election coverage of the President by any chance? Wasn't it the NYT who claimed it was their duty to do anything and everything, even lie, to keep Trump out of office? Yes, yes it was.
Why are you targeting millennial with your comment? They don't have a monopoly on cheapness. Hell, if anything, the Boomers are *worse* cause they got it better than any generation before or since, and get pissy when anyone pushes back on their entitled attitude.
Older Gen-X here......I appreciate free stuff whenever I get it. I am only cheap when I am BROKE. If I have the funds, I will gladly pay extra for nicer things and features...
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Millenials are cheap, because there are no fucking jobs out there for them. Anyone born before 1965 could go into -any- profession and earn a living. A college degree helped as well. Come the 1980s, you could still get a good job with any major. Post 2000, especially 2008, you could have a PhD in your field, and you will not be finding work, because the only thing that matters is recent experience. That, or a H-1B.
Usually the H1B. Don't have to pay them as much.
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
I noticed it, as the most preposterous lie.
Every group will have a few potential code monkeys and a smaller number of analytical minds.
Humanities grads, as a group, already had a choice, no tech for them. (What % made that choice based on party schedule as undergrads, calc really cuts into 'drinking time'?) The analytic ones already view the world through (Jungian, Marxist, Literary Symbolism, Postmodern, * Studies etc etc) lenses. The average ones have just learned derp from the same list. Some of those lenses are more toxic than others...switching to a (data/process/math/tradeoffs/boolean logic) mindset isn't going to be painless in the best of cases. Nothing is free, least of all is time spent training your personal neural net.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Hell truck drivers are in massive demand right now. I wouldn't bank on it for a long term career but if you need money can pass a CDL it'll get you to the next phase of your life.
Hell, I almost had to go to that line of work if I hadn't landed the position I just now got. Was starting to put out emails and requests for information about tuition, etc.
Have over 16 years in IT and the pickings were getting slim in this part of the country (Western Ark) for jobs that paid worth a darn. Most of the manufacturing jobs have left for Mexico and about the only jobs in abundance were either fast food or processing chickens.
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Don't link to the NYT fucker. Aside from being a leftist piece of trash,
I've heard a lot of right-leaning people complain about the New York Times. I haven't, however, seen any evidence that they aren't a good source of information.
Too true. Anyone who thinks outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post aren't good sources of information has been drinking *way* too much right-wing Kool-Aid.
they limit the number of articles they allow you to see each month.
... But now, when the New York Times actually is giving away their content for free, the millennial assholes are complaining that they are not getting enough content for free.
Actually, you can read as many articles as you want if you read it in mode private and don't enable / allow Javascript. For the pages that require Javascript, you can allow it for that page, then revoke the temporary permission -- using NoScript (or similar), of course.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Crap was stupid anyway.
It would be fairly easy to rewrite your post to apply equally to CS grads who have no idea what development workflows are like, or who uses recursion to traverse a string in-order. Programming requires a great deal of theory, practicum, continuing education, and intellectual curiousity. You're not going to pick up a complete programming education anywhere, and the drive to actually be good at this job probably cannot be taught. As a profession, we need to recognize that we are a profession, and get some sort of a guild or other professional organization going, so that we can make sure that people get both theory and modern practices. What we should probably not do is expect arbitrarily well-trained developers to spring up out of the ground like Cadmus sowing dragon's teeth.
(As a side note, people's opinions of what programmers should know seems to be fairly universally biased towards their own skill set. Like the old DBA I met who pooh-poohed a Rails project because it didn't use stored procedures.)
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The differentiation STEM/humanities is kind of diffuse or, at least, not clearly defined across different countries and in different moments; in fact, the normal tendency seems to be moving away from black/white to greyer areas where both aspects might somehow complement each other. I am not sure about what your exact situation is, but mine is pretty hardcore in both: firstly (the order might also matter, BTW), fully focused on humanities and then on STEM (firstly engineering and then programming). When I was in each side I wasn't caring too much about the other one. I do perfectly understand that my position can be seen as a bit too extreme.
As per your post, it seems to me that you are more a humanities-kind of person. You might even work on STEM, but your attitude is humanities-prone. There are quite a few people working in programming from different backgrounds. There are also many positions closely-related to programming/engineering where different kinds of people work. In my original comment, I was referring to hardcore STEM/programming; to people really liking this entire world (not working on a somehow related setup and kind of liking all what it implies). Note that even people with advanced degrees related to all this might not be included there (not really liking/learning/understanding the given field and just passing through; in fact, this was pretty much me when being in humanities, that's why I don't consider myself a part of that, neither now nor back then when I studied it).
In summary, I don't think that you belong to that kind of (hardcore) STEM. I might also be wrong (and only your communication skills look like humanities material) and, in that case, you would be one of the first exceptions I know.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Community Colleges are the niche solution.
Anyone can learn to code on their own, if they have the desire and purpose.
Nobody does - well, very few people do.
The problem is that few, very few, people have that level of commitment on their own. So we need a cheat. Community college for $200 is that cheat. I know it works, because I've done it. I learned C, then C++, then statistics - all at a community college. Best of all, my day-job paid for the classes. Then they sent me to Intermediate and Advanced Cross-Platform C++ classes - followed by X/Motif training.
There's something about "GOING" to class that matters, at least for the first language. Picking up other languages isn't too hard after that. I've learned over 20 - perhaps over 30 other languages - since then.
I've known a few people who did well in these "boot camps" - they usually had deep programming skills in other languages and 10+ yrs of experience already.
I've also known people who attended boot camps with inappropriate backgrounds. They returned very excited, but still nearly clueless. Intensive study over 3 hrs a day is more than our brains can usually handle in completely new subjects. I've attended 4 hr daily training for 2 weeks and my brain physically hurt after. Then I had 2 hrs of homework every evening and 2 hours of practical use outside.
Our brains need time to get, ponder, understand what we're learning.
There is also something about PAYING $$$ for the learning. There are lots and lots of free courses online to learn all the beginning level stuff, yet people seldom sign up, much less finish those courses. In theory, everyone here could learn from beginning through masters-level computer stuff. I bet less than 2% have.
"can learn how to code in a few months and join the high-paying digital economy"
And some still wonder why overall code quality and programming skill level dives like a drunken mallad.
Coding doesn't mean anything. When I started highschool I could code in 4 languages. They kept teaching us algorithms and math for 12 hours a week (4 hrs theory&algorithms, 4 hrs math, 4 hrs coding labs) for 4 years, followed by my university years, followed by many years of practive and still I'd need to learn more than I have time to spend.
No wonder companies test the sh*t out of everyone wanting a sw.eng. job (not me, oh no), it's the easiest approach for trying to filter out the crappiest.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Political thought bubbles maintain their structural integrity by the constant repeating of the mantra, "the other guys are biased".
Still completely relevant: http://norvig.com/21-days.html
Also applies to being taught the first few years.
There is no silver bullet in coding or any other form of engineering, and even less so in learning it. You need talent, dedication, motivation stemming from the subject (not the potential paycheck) and a lot of time.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Back in the late 90's I was already reasonable successful and self-taught. I was burning through certifications left and right because I already new the stuff. I became curious about these "tech schools" I thought I would take one for a spin in case I was perhaps missing something. I was appalled. No one except me had any background in computers, and were having what was for them some seriously heavy duty material thrown at them with no time to actually learn it before moving on. Even the instructors fell short and I found myself correcting them and practically teaching the classes. Then the revelation. When it came time for students to tackle a cert relevant to a particular course, and the class time having been a waste, they were given comprehensive "memorize all the questions and answers and most will be on the cert test" cheat sheets. My last straw? I reached a point were I knew I was going to drop the "school" like a bad habit. There was a bit of personal sociological study that had kept me there. The disaster was fascinating to me. The last straw? I furiously took notes over material I already knew to keep from going bonkers board. In a single hour long class, I could easily crank out five pages of detailed notes. One day the person sitting next to me asked if they could barrow and Xerox them. Okay, sure. The next day I walked in and every "student" in a class of what must have been over fifty had a forty page stack of my notes. That was it for me. I stood up and let the class know that my notes were full of errors and wished them luck figuring out what they were as they used them to study and walked out. In all honesty, there were no errors in my notes, I was just that disgusted.
It will be interesting to see who this goes in seven or eight years when we have this same kind of travesty in the form of "learn to program AI" schools.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
I hope I am not in the minority with this, but I honestly enjoyed the concept of Dev/Code Bootcamps. I've had an internal philosophy that no matter what 'career' you do (to some extent, so let's not anon-troll that, please) or hobbies/interests, development skills in some programming language would help you. And if you want to make a career out of it, even better!
However, that being said, I'm also a firm believer in experience over quick buzzy skills any day of the week, 100% of the time. All I viewed this as was a way to 1) make a non-profit for gains in big dollars on the business side (WTF WOULDNT want a successful non-profit) and 2) water-down a field that, in my opinion, should NOT be watered down.
Software engineering/development, bridging advanced mathematics (e.g. linear algebra, calculus, etc.) takes an EXTREME amount of well-rounded background in all things computing, skills and investing into yourself, your study, your craft. It's the field I work in, respect and make a living in. I feel like a chimp in shadows of some truly gifted software developers I've met and worked with in my past and I've been doing this for almost 15 years professionally now. Those people didn't get there by taking a quick 4 week crasher on the shiny-new-topic, whizbang a resume with a thesaurus and try to land a $100K gig for 6 months to build a 'previous employment' line-item they could wow the next place into hiring them on.
It's sad from the ideology of it, but if this is the direction it's going, I'm not totally heartbroken either from the glass-half-empty perspective.
The problem with these kinds of arguments is the absolute position too many of us take. Is every programming assignment require a CS degree? Is a CS degree necessary for web development, payroll applications, database query, etc? I say no. Some programming tasks require a degree in computer science or engineering as a perquisite and other tasks a formal education in CS is not necessary. That's the way it is and should be.
Those who don't really understand a technology think it's something you can simply learn by being taught. Programming is definitely not one of those things, some people's brains just can't comprehend certain things that you need to be a good programmer.
Back around 2000, I interviewed for a job with a major internet hosting company. Admittedly it wouldn't have been a great match because I'm naturally great at programming, but merely good at admin stuff (I've run my own web site and e-mail server on my DSL since 2000, so I'm not completely clueless there). I was really bothered when their HR bimbo said "We can teach people people to be tech people, but we can't teach tech people to be people people!" It was such a perfectly-formed yet stupid statement that I couldn't forget it. Maybe it's because you (by virtue of being in HR) understand what it takes to be "people people", but you have no clue what it takes to be "tech people"?
I'm glad I didn't get that job, as it ended up with me moving to Austin and a few months later getting my second-best job ever. (so far... the best one happened ten years later)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I've heard a lot of right-leaning people complain about the New York Times. I haven't, however, seen any evidence that they aren't a good source of information.
Wasn't it the NYT who claimed it was their duty to do anything and everything, even lie, to keep Trump out of office? Yes, yes it was.
I notice the lack of any sort of citation on this purported fact, which is of course fake. Neither the NYT nor anyone associated with the NYT ever claimed any such thing.
Along with Forbes' advice on how to determine what is a credible news source, here's my rule on how to determine a fake news site: never believe purported "facts" stated by anonymous cowards. They lie. Not always, but mostly.
Apparently, sharing my honest impressions about my personal experiences by somehow censoring too aggressive positions ("Although that statement certainly looks a bit too aggressive (+ prejudicious)") and by being as over-understanding as possible ("it might cut both ways if you wish") is now also considered trolling by some people (the post above got -1 troll)! Interesting!
One of my life goals is to be able to come up with a comprehensive and accurate enough definition for trolling/being a troll in internet. I might have not enough time (most likely, I will only live around 40-50 years more), but I am a quite optimistic person! LOL.
CLARIFICATIONS FOR THOSE NEEDING LOLs TO GET WHEN I AM SERIOUS/KIDDING: a LOL in one of my posts doesn't mean that all what is written there isn't serious/true. It is just meant to be a mere generic warning helping you to not quickly jump to crazy conclusions after reading a couple of isolated words; you need basic understanding skills to properly get what is going on (with my posts and, in general, with the world around you).
Also bear in mind that I haven't been relying on this policy of undoubtedly tagging for too long (I used to trust in the proper understanding of people or, at least, in innocent jokes not being a problem! What was I thinking, right?) and that posts here cannot be edited. Please, don't convert this good-faith gesture in a new resource for nonsense via if-not-LOL-is-serious. Do you still have doubts? Here you have two suggestions: avoid dealing with me (+ doing anything even slightly affecting me); take a look at the certainly-serious-and-clear parts (e.g., my profile description or any time I talk about my knowledge, expertise, principles, physical features, etc.).
It is really very easy: I (= just one, the same, every time, no exceptions) am a honest, fair and straightforward guy, extremely proud of what I do/think/expect and with nothing to hide, be afraid of or prove to anyone (this is just about minimising the chances of getting involved in ridiculous situations); if any of your conclusions/expectations about me goes even slightly against anything of that, it would mean that you are wrong (and/or didn't get a joke).
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.