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.

Comments

Define "working"

[HockeyPuck]

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.

Re:Practice, practice, practice

[Jane_Dozey]

Congratulations. Most junior developers take a good couple of years to realise that they're shitty developers. That might sound like a troll, but seriously, there's a point (well, several actually) in every good software devs career that they realise they actually suck at software. That's when they can start to really get better.

Re:Sorry, employers

[BarbaraHudson]

Women leave CS courses for the same reason they leave all hard science courses.

You can't bullshit and blather your way through it.

Sure you can. Men do it all the time. Or have you never worked with men who are incompetent?

Women have incredibly fragile egos (in case you were wondering, that's why feminists bang on about 'male ego' virtually everything they say is projection)... and they are exposed in hard science courses.

Opinion, with no data to back it up. And yes, the fragile male ego thing is real. Go look at how a guy reacts to being turned down by a woman. "She's probably a lesbian." Stalking. Saying it was really him that gave her the brush-off. The simple fact is that women recover better from break-ups than men. And let's face it - it's usually the woman calling the shots as to when it's over, not the men. Just look at which sex files for divorce more often.

Actual maths courses are particularly brutal - you can't hide, you can't hamster away the fact that there are people better than you, you can't skip sections of the work (it all builds on the previous bit) and neat handwriting/platitudes get you nowhere.

Again, opinion with no proof.

We all know it, but we all dance around the subject to... as we always do... protect women's feelings.

They drop out and go do courses that reward waffling and woolly thinking.

That "reward waffling and woolly thinking" is very much a male thing, everywhere from managers bullshitting and shouting their way through meetings, not to mention pissing contests, to the current occupant of the White House.

If they are particularly bitter about it, they'll start blaming men and claim it's male competitiveness or that the system was stacked against them.

Not male competitiveness - male incompetence. The inability of men in a group to act professionally when women are around in small quantities that they see as being safe to harass, ignore, sabotage, and claim that the work the women did is irrelevant, wrong, or worse - appropriating it as their own work instead of giving credit where it's due.

Ignore it, like all women, they will do/say anything to avoid facing reality.

Says the anonymous coward, who hides behind his anonymity to avoid taking any responsibility for his foolish fact-free words.