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Do Code Bootcamps Work? (inc.com)
"Computer programming is highly specialized work; it can't be effectively taught in an intensive program," writes Inc. magazine's contributing editor:
Last month, two of the country's largest and most well-regarded coding bootcamps closed. While there are still over 90 such camps in the U.S. and Canada, these for-profit intensive software engineering schools aren't successfully preparing their students for programming jobs. According to a recent Bloomberg article, the Silicon Valley recruiter Mark Dinan characterized the bootcamps as "a freaking joke," while representatives of Google and Autodesk said respectively that "most graduates from these programs are not quite prepared" and "coding schools haven't been much of a focus for [us]."
In one sense, the failure of coding bootcamps reflects the near-universal failure of for-profit universities, colleges, and charter schools to provide a usable education. In another sense, though, coding bootcamps represent a profound misunderstanding of what computer programming is all about... Coding at the professional level is highly specialized and requires years of practice to master... the idea of a bootcamp for coding is just as practical as the idea of a bootcamp for surgery.
In one sense, the failure of coding bootcamps reflects the near-universal failure of for-profit universities, colleges, and charter schools to provide a usable education. In another sense, though, coding bootcamps represent a profound misunderstanding of what computer programming is all about... Coding at the professional level is highly specialized and requires years of practice to master... the idea of a bootcamp for coding is just as practical as the idea of a bootcamp for surgery.
You'll have to use the free market and actually offer HIGHER WAGES instead of complaining about some mythical "shortage".
You can teach the basics of a language in a boot camp, if someone already has math and logic skills. You can't teach coding as a naked skill, and certainly not from the ground up.
VBA jockeys who want to be more formal might benefit, and people who need a structured introduction. But 10% success rate seems about right given the lack of an incoming filter.
Coding at the professional level is highly specialized and requires years of practice to master... the idea of a bootcamp for coding is just as practical as the idea of a bootcamp for surgery.
I guess it all depends. If the output expected is participants being able to manipulate visually [screen] displayed objects or familiarize themselves with a particular language, then they work.
If however, the output expected is of folks who can do heavy serious coding (read coding closer to the metal), then such camps are a pipe dream.
Programming talent comes from intelligence and not from retarded gender-bending PR events by companies known for producing abysmal software quality
You have to be bright and highly motivated to find success at a boot camp. When the camps first opened there were far more people interested in attending the boot camps than there were available seats. This meant that they could be very selective in admissions leading to better results.
When the boot camps decided to scale up to be very large, they could not find the same caliber of students to fill the classrooms. This lead to a lowering of standards to keep the business viable. The result was that many students coming out of the boot camps were ill-prepared to work as developers.
The concept can work but not to the scale that the large for-profit training companies want it to. It would be tragic if the good boot camps were put out of business by the bad ones.
That's what the world is waiting for
In one sense, the failure of coding bootcamps reflects the near-universal failure of for-profit universities, colleges, and charter schools to provide a usable education.
News to me, one I take my kids to seems perfectly fine. Plus they did Hour of Code thing... and it teaches kids to code! What, do you expect to become an expert in anything - foreign language, electrical work, skiing - in 90 days? Doesn't work like that. It gives you an introduction on where to look, they you can try writting tiny apps for your own use / tinker with stuff on github. Maybe works as an apprentice for your friend working on their own thing for some beers. Do this for a year or two and you should be good to use your new skills for fun and profit.
I'm just now completing an intense three month course: Linux, Java, databases (Oracle). Full-time five days/week.
There's very little time to practice and what I've learned is mostly how much I don't know. And that I'm a shitty programmer.
They make money for the people who run them. Do code boot camps successfully teach coding? Maybe. Do they teach software development? No.
Few people can become a professional athlete with a couple of weeks training. Bootcamps (for pretty much any hard skill) can be effective to learn certain things, but they are no substitute for the talent and level of commitment and effort required to work at the top level of a coveted field.
... just as almost anyone can learn to drive. But it passing your driving test doesn't make you Schumacher. Like excelling at most things in life, becoming a good programmer takes innate talent plus years of practice. If you don't have either of those then you'll only ever be the guy driving the Prius to the supermarket, not the one lapping in a Porsche at Le Mans.
Come on /. ..... this was here just a week and a have ago....
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And no they don't.
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.
I cannot say about coding, but health bootcamps -- where people take a few weeks of intensive exercise -- don't work. It just doesn't make sense. People try to get healthy during bootcamps, but instead get injured. Health is not about doing a lot in a short period of time. Health is about making long term and lasting changes. Practicing being healthy on a daily basis for the rest of your life. I suspect coding is the same, just like all skills. You develop skills with life long practice. "kick starting" good habits never seems to work in my anecdotal experience.
If you don't you will fail (like with most things). Besides actually exposing people to coding who don't already know what it is, I don't see any value in code bootcamps.
These Bootcamps doen't teach anything you can't get from some basic crash course tutorials and from searching Stack Overflow
I took a position at this agency that was advertised as "Development Lead" and told I would be given a team of Junior Programers for a project
Project was basic enough, so I figured no sweat. Well, this team of "Junior Developers was 2 people straight out of Bootcamp and while one of them was somewhat proficient, then other was a fucking joke who had NO FUCKING IDEA WTF HE WAS DOING. I mean for FFS, he couldn't even figure out how to pass value from an HTML template to an Angular Controller. We are talking some real first day JS 101 level shit here
I wanted him fired for incompetence -- but was told I had to teach this fucker, and then they added a 3rd recent Bootcamp grad, so I was swamped even more with incompetence. I took a nice little 5 day trip to Puerto Rico, then quit that job
Code bootcamps are like any other intensive-training courses say, for foreign languages, woodworking, etc. They are meant to be a structured approach to learning the basics in a very short time. How "good" someone is at the end totally depends on effort, aptitude and passion. Just as the quality of bootcamps (teaching) varies, so do the quality of students they produce (variation).
Much like foreign language courses, I think bootcamps get you to the starting line. And similar to foreign language learning, it's unlikely you'll be fluent right after the course ends (and if you happen to not have any aptitude for languages, you'll unfortunately still be rubbish at it). Software is a craft, so intellect alone can get you so far. It is a craft that needs to be honed over time. But everyone has to start somewhere.
Are bootcamps better than a CS course? I would argue they are an incomplete piece of the puzzle. CS courses teach foundational ideas, whereas bootcamps teach trade skills. Like in most professions, someone with both will go much farther than someone with just one or the other.
I went to a RAILS boot camp and did an Android boot camp as well. Both of which I did because my boss was willing to pay. I could have grabbed some books and taught myself just fine. It was a nice way to spend a week away from other distractions though and get instantly familiar with all the basic machinery so I could than hit the ground running on projects. I say that as someone with a computer science degree (BS) and years of experience in LOB software development.
What I needed out of those camps was freedom form other things like e-mail and people asking me questions about legacy projects my team supported and a chance to walk thru some structured exercises to learn the basic libraries, name spaces, and paradigms used, and parlance ("dictionary" vs "hash" vs "frame" etc) people working primarily in those technologies use.
There were many people at both camps (HOTT) like myself, however there were also people who had clearly never done any development before, outside a shell script or two in their mothers basement, if that. They were not doing much other than key punching the samples in and not understanding at all what was going on, you could tell by the questions they were and were not asking. Its hard for me to imagine they really got much out of the courses. I don't think they could go home and make even a simple CRUD type app/service pair without a lot of hand holding.
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If you want to define "working" as:
Do the bootcamps attract tiger mom/dad parents who will pay anything to get their kids into Stanford/Berkeley including make their kids learning programming even when they don't have any interest in it so they can brag to their peers that their kid(s) have an app on the Apple/Google store.
Then yes. These things are in every strip mall in the SF bay area.
These bootcamps aren't about turning kids in successful programmers or software engineers any more than petting zoos are making zoologists out of kids. It's a way to make money, pure and simple.
For the bootcamp runners. Raking in the dough from the masses! Keep the fools coming, I say!
Something approaching a CS degree program without the general education requirements to go with it would be ideal. Anyone doing that?
The truth is that businesses have been lying for over 20 years about shortages of workers.
And then policy makers believe it or are paid off to believe it and they then start to push STEM education when the fact is that there is a glut of STEM workers. Our stagnant pay is proof.
Everything else; women in tech, lack of education or what the excuse du jour is, is just PR horseshit to cover their asses in getting more cheap H1-b workers.
During my MGT days, we budgeted 45 cents on the dollar for Indians compared to Americans. And no, we didn't have a lot of rework or anything. We really saved 55% - and I got a really nice bonus.
It's a dog eat dog world out there and you gotta get fed first or not at all.
huh? near-universal failure? i got cs degree in 90s with pell grant and have been working as a developer ever since
I am currently hiring a bunch of interns. I had a couple of applications from a multi-week coding camp. I simply said 'no'. They did not meet the minimum requirements. It isn't that there is a possibility that they could be taught, it is just why would I bother to hire an intern that has almost no experience when I have someone who has 3+ years of formal education? I wouldn't I have zero incentive to take a chance on that person, even for the relatively low risk of an internship. The selling of these boot camps is morally wrong in my opinion. There are very few job opportunities.
But if they do, they probably already taught themselves to code and are making 6 figures.
Frankly, you're more likely to become a good programmer than the people who come out of such things thinking they're all that and a bag of chips.
I've been writing code for well ver 40 years and there's tons of stuff I still don't know about the craft. I did - and continue to do - well because I specialize narrowly enough that inside my boundaries, I know (relatively speaking) a lot. But it took a lot of time, and anyone serious about programming should expect it to take a lot of time. I'm also careful not to go officially / professionally stepping into areas where I know little when the expectations are... other.
There's nothing wrong with your perception in this matter. What will help is patience, perseverance, and a reasonable dose of humility. With those in hand, you can expect to at least approach your potential and do well in the craft.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If you can teach someone to speak, read and write a natural language (such as French, German, Arabic, etc.) in an intensive course lasting a few weeks - which is well known to be possible - why shouldn't you be able to teach someone to write code at a fairly basic level?
The advantages of focus and intensity are great, although to stay with such a schedule the students must of course be highly motivated.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
90 days to become a sex expert.
Have you ever noticed that charter schools mostly teach elementary students? Very few charter high schools exist because teaching older kids is more expensive due to the cost of extra curricular content and sports. In addition, charters tend to mis-identify special education students as they cost more money to educate due to support services.
Some charter schools are for-profit. The for-profit model rewards management and investors by depriving the students of the resources that they need to get a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE). In addition, for-profit schools deprive public schools of the resources that they need to teach all students. while simultaneously concentrating special education students.
Charter schools in our State accept public money without accountability, transparency, or academic achievement. This abysmal failure has been brought to us thanks to Betsy DeVos, and it is coming to your State soon.
Boot camp may refer to basic military training or a cruel method of punishment. Why do you use a military term for something which is more like education and training? I hope you do not punish the wannaby coders when they code wrong.
Also programming requires practice and a good theoretical background. Nothing you can get in a short and intensive training program. However, it might help to learn something new.
Places either want Stanford or H1B. Nobody wants in-betweeners be they state university or grueling bootcamp. Rockstar or slave, there is no tech middle class.
In my experience code camp and competitive coders need to be heavily coached to remove bad habits. Those promote absolutely the wrong habits to be effective members of agile development teams.
Remember during the bubble when a certain country created 300,000 "air quote" "engineers" seemingly overnight? When people here did not understand the difference between a college and University from that country. We have a short fucking memory. Because many of those one trick ponies went to the equivalent of coding boot camps. Now can it work, yes, if you are an engineer. Good engineers are born, not created. You will grow and become a good software engineer, something you would have been no matter what. For most people, no. I have a couple of friends who went to college, did not earn a computer science degree and you would count yourself lucky to have such brilliant people on your engineering team. But they are the exception.
It is sad, but all these people saying that Bill Gate and Zuckerberg did not finish college and are billionaires. First, they did make it into top notch colleges. Second, they proved they were engineers from the get go. The only good thing, is that people from bootcamps are cheaper to hire and they disappear after a while.
University computer science degree means 4 years of writing some level of code for a wide variety of computer science basic topics, a certain level of mathematics. Those general education requirements? How do you think we had enough time to write code for our classes. Taking general ed classes you easily pass going only once or twice a week. Plus, a good engineer thinks out of the box. The more you know about other subjects, the more you can think about solving problems with a different perspective.
Programming is highly specialised. You can learn the basics in a year and master CS in four, making you are a beginner.
If you want to become a professional developer you will need to study fiscal law, that is, if you want to write fiscal software. There are hundreds of disciplines to choose from. If you hold master's or doctor's degrees in both CS and geohydrology, then KWR likes to talk to you....
What if your skills and perseverance are but average? You become a manager or sales person. At least they get paid better.
We have a handful of bootcamp/codeschool graduates at my work alongside our formally trained (CS graduates) and a few folks like me, who are self-taught and have just been working forever. They're all self-motivated and eager to learn, good at asking for help, and good at their work.
I think the feelings about code school holds a lot of ire amongst those who went to school for computer science. They feel like someone took the short cut and is now reaping the rewards that they had to spend 5 years and tens of thousands of dollats. In my experience, coding/programming is not the same as having studied computer science, but there aren't a lot of roles for computer scientists. Lots of companies need code monkeys and they're coming from both ends of the learning curve.
To me, there isn't a lot of difference between the CS kids and the code school kids, because they rarely have enough experience to work in the real world yet. I am fortunate to work with a lot of really good people though, regardless of their educational background.
Any idiot can code -- many do. Writing english (no matter how bad) is coding.
Programming on the other hand is an entirely different beast.
So why are there Coding bootcamps? Did primary school fail to teach these people to write?
Learning a whole profession in a matter of weeks sounds pretty tough, might be why there are no "engineering boot camps" or "accounting boot camps". But I can imagine an "accounting for engineers" boot camp that gave an engineer enough mental tools to talk productively with their accountant, do simple accounting if they run a 1-man consulting firm, that sort of thing.
Accounting is one thing that engineers, doctors, dentists and lawyers and many other professionals could all stand several weeks of. Programming is another, especially for the engineers like myself. I got a whole CompSci degree after my P.Eng. and it changed my whole career, very much for the better. But I effectively *gave* that coding boot camp to several engineers that worked under me over the course of my career. Posters on /. sneer at "VBA coders" but I can't overstate how much more productive a professional engineer can be in certain jobs (in my case, managing over 200,000 underground pipes) with decent "201 level" skills in SQL and VBA.
My suggestion would, alas, *eliminate* programming jobs. Right now, all those professionals have to turn to their I.T. department, which charges them $10,000 for coding and $25,000 for "requirements gathering", "systems analysis" and "enterprise architecture integration", that resulted in a sweet shiny C# application.... that also does what they could have done themselves with Excel and VBA in an afternoon if they'd been through about 50 hours of instruction and 100 of practice.
In the early 2000s, Microsoft certification bootcamps were all the rage. Paper MCSEs were cranked out faster than McDonalds hamburgers. Anyone that could correctly point out a computer 50% of the time got certified. If a person has a pulse and was willing to pony up $10K - $25K could jump into the tech game regardless of aptitude. I'm sure the coding boot camps cranked out just as many high quality "graduates."
The MCSE bootcamps of 1999 have returned. It's just the usual crowd of technical training/education folks trying to squeeze a few bucks out of this bubble before it pops. You're always going to get people trying to take a shortcut to the big money whenever there's a "shortage" of qualified people. Back in the 90s, the MCSE camps were taking people off the streets who'd barely
My opinion is that these bootcamps are only good if they actually teach the fundamentals, but I'm sure they skip most of that and teach codemonkeying in whatever JavaScript framework is hot this week. It makes sense too -- most of he graduates are going to wind up as very junior front-end web developers tweaking layouts and doing simple work. However, there will come a point where these junior developers will need to know more than how to drive Node.js. If you don't understand at least something about how networks, the browser, the naked non-frameworked DOM, and the underlying protocols work, you won't progress beyond a certain phase. if you don't have the internal drive to keep learning, and are just doing it for the money, there's a definite stopping point where you won't move up. At that point, you may end up some random manager or project manager, but the odds are that you'll be out as soon as the economy sours and the web startup you've been coding for tanks. Whether you get another job depends on how good you are, and you will be competing with some very senior people for every position when everyone's going through hard times.
A personal example of this in action is my current challenge at work. I've been doing a combination of systems integration, end user computing and system engineering work for quite some time in an environment that's very sensitive to change -- there's plenty of new things coming in all the time but my focus hasn't been on web-related stuff. All of a sudden, one of the company's core products is being rewritten from scratch for the cloud. We're going from on-premises traditional VMWare and networks to 100 MPH "OMG, dudebro, SoftwareDefined RubyRustNodeAngular ChefPuppetCICDAnsibleJenkins VagrantGithubSlack JIRADockerKubernetes, at web scale!" A lot of the traditional systems people I'm working with aren't taking to it well. However, I've always been one to dig in and figure things out. THIS is where fundamentals are important...instead of all of those tools being magic boxes, learning them with an eye towards what's running underneath them is the key. If you don't have a good grounding, and learn these by going through online tutorials, you're only going to be able to use them as magic boxes and won't be able to effectively diagnose what's happening when your tower of tools breaks down. Bootcamp grads won't get this. CS grads from Stanford won't get this either. The important thing to remember is that no matter what the MBAs say, IT and dev is a profession and a skilled trade combined, and it takes a long time as an apprentice to get good.
No, they don't teach you to program. Nor are they any real use for that.
I did a bootcamp for MCPD in the United Kingdom, about 9 days or so solid work.
It's good at what it does ; if you can program (when I took mine I'd been programming for 40 years....) already you can jam a lot of information in your head very quickly. What it won't do is teach you to program from anything like scratch. In this course, some VB or VC# was a prerequisite. There were maybe 3 or 4 who came from VB6 and they just couldn't cope because they didn't have the conceptual knowledge.
I don't agree about the fundamentals ; I think you're better off learning the fundamentals in a less pressurised environment, and keep bootcamps for learning new stuff fast.
...of for-profit education. They make promises they can't keep, use unethical recruitment practices to get students, and generally spend most of their time and resources on bringing in the money rather than keeping their promises to enrolled students. A general rule of thumb is that you can at least triple the number of guided instruction hours (i.e. being taught by a qualified teacher) necessary to achieve the learning objectives (i.e. knowledge and skills) that students believe they'll have on graduation. I used to teach in for-profit education. Glad I don't anymore.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Ok folks. Here is my background. I have 16 credits of programming in college but changed majors to Business Administration as Slashdot told me all I.T. jobs would be gone by now ... WORST ADVICE EVER! I know the basics of object oriented programming, structures, and doing basic programs. I have around 6 recent years doing I.T. support and gradually worked my way up to Senior Desktop Support Tech. I am at the time of my worth.
My options are either to update my MCSE to get into System Administration as I have worked with Active Directory and Office 365, Exchange, and a little bit of SharePoint but Human Resources remind I do not have experience with servers and VMWare ESX which is frustrating as I need to get in first to get experience.
I also am opened to coding.
My question is has anyone got a successful career changing attending these bootcamps? Employers reading this have you hired anyone and they were a good fit for jr level development work?
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When did you last see a useful developer who was 'educated' through one of these courses? I have never seen ONE. Most of the people with proper degrees who apply for programming jobs are nowhere near good enough to write even trivial programs. It shows when you ask a candidate a few questions, or ask them to complete a trivial program. Many can't even find the compile button to get the compiler to tell them that their code isn't syntactically valid. The wages offered by companies have a huge bearing on who applies. Here (UK), if you offer developer positions paying less than £45000, don't expect many (or any) good candidates. I know from experience of months of recruiting. Most people looking for jobs at this level are non-EU citizens who want work permits. The worst are the products of Indian education, which seems to have a knack for being able to award degrees to people who clearly have not gained knowledge anywhere near being worthy of a degree. Good people cost more, something junior management in my own company understand well, but we are crippled in our ability to recruit by dogmatic policies on salaries set by senior management, who only care about their bonuses. It makes recruiting even basically competent junior staff very difficult. Churning out more incompetent developers from rubbish 'coding academy' courses will do nothing for availability of development talent at all. These people aren't suitable for any kind of development role, and will soon realise it when they fail to pass any kind of technical screening. These people are not developers - their availability won't impact the talent market for software people at all. Effectively, all that is gained is an extra (and somewhat embarrasing) line to add to their CV, along with that useless course on theology, social 'science', politics, economics, management 'science', or history of art.
didn't we all do something like that when we were young? ofcourse they don't make a full coder out of you, but it just gives you a taste which is good enough to know if you want to digg further into it or not.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.