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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.
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.
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.
keeping them happy is the hard part....
love is just extroverted narcissism
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."
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.
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.....
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.