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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.
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.
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.
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....
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
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.
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.
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.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
"and from searching Stack Overflow"
I was with you up until this point. No way is stack overflow a good place to learn to code. Half the answers to questions are either plain wrong or answer a different question. And while a lot of the rest just give an answer , they don't explain the logic behind it. Similarly with the code examples - cutting and pasting code is easy, understanding WHY it works is something else entirely.
Indeed.
A code monkey knows what things work.
A developer knows how things work.
A programmer knows why things work.
Without a drive to find out how and why, you'll never be more than someone who assembles a puzzle. You will be stuck when a piece is missing, not realising that you can create your own piece, or create a better puzzle.
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.
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.
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.
There's definitely one. I believe they call it "Britain".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Starting from not speaking or writing any language at all?
In any case, such a short course is barely going to teach you the rudiments.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
What has gender to do with mental capacity? Women in western countries do not go into tech (but into math). However, in other countries they do have a preference for tech. Looks like this is just a cultural thing.
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.
CS without GenEd would produce grads who *might* be able to get decently-paying jobs right after graduation, but the moment they got laid off after the next recession or merger/acquisition/bankruptcy/outsourcing-fetish, they'd be totally fucked unless they had the resources to spend another year or two taking classes on whatever's hot today.
CS isn't about "learning to code" -- it's about learning HOW to learn, and gaining the background knowledge that might save your ass someday and help you to remain relevant as the industry continues moving forward while you're spending 5 years maintaining some project that's only relevant to your current employer and distracted after work by family life.
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.
Yes, but those skills don't go out of date; running, jungle survival, desert survival, weapon maintainance, hand-to-hand combat, urban combat. basic medicine, vehicle repair, communications.
With computer technology, is programming with Modula-2, Turbo Pascal, Borland C++, 6502/Z80/6809/68xxx/MIPS/Sparc assembly language still relevant? There are still niche jobs in ADA/Cobol/Fortran but those usually require domain knowledge as well.
You can't just learn C++ by itself, you need to learn STL/Boost as well as some GUI like Qt or MFC. If you learn Qt, you also need QML and QSG. If you choose to work with C and device drivers/microcontrollers, then you need to know all the different protocols and bus architectures as well.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
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.
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.
Sure. Why use Stack Overflow when you can get poorly thought out answers at Slashdot? Should Stack Overflow be a programmer's only tool? Of course not. But it's a part of many perfectly competent programmer's toolkits. It's great for quickly finding forgotten syntax, showing alternative solutions, possibly identifying problems with "obvious" solutions and for identifying the vocabulary needed to dig deeper.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
That is because elementary schools are cheap to run plus you get parents to buy $100 worth of supplies per kid per year. This allows the CEO of the Charter Management Company to make a CEO level salary. A charter school in Northern Michigan was recently run into the ground by a Charter School (sic) management company.
This public charter school was paying $900,000 per year for business office services like printing paychecks.
The founder of the charter school is in jail for $600,000 in federal tax fraud.
Charter Schools are the wild west of using public tax dollars to enrich CEOs of management companies. They fail often, and spring back to life. Once the state legislature says you can charge tuition and still get free tax dollars, I plan to open an Elite Charter School and make serious cash.
...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?
http://saveie6.com/
Starting from not speaking or writing any language at all?
Good point! However, I think that knowing a natural language (such as English) is an essential prerequisite for anyone to learn a programming language. They aren't called "languages" for nothing, you know. Certainly programming languages are very different from natural languages, but they have a common core. How could you understand, let alone say, "Add the number in Register One to the number in Register Two and place the result in Register Three" without knowing what a number, a register, or addition are?
In any case, such a short course is barely going to teach you the rudiments.
The thousand-mile journey begins with a single step.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
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.