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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 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.
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.
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.
As you point out, it is all about expectations. However, I think that in general there is a wrong assumption about the skill level of a new graduate. Take surgery as a comparison, for instance. A new medical doctor just graduated from school will not be put into an operating room unsupervised. In fact, every medical specialty requires that new graduates complete a residency. It very similar to what new plumbers and electricians go through, though a doctor will spend a great deal more money to get there.
To me, a new graduate with a computer engineering, computer science, or perhaps even a management information systems (depending on the school) degree has achieved the level of "now I am ready to apprentice under an experienced senior developer." I find it humorous how start ups will load up their staffs with all new graduates for developers and later wonder why their apps and infrastructure have problems. It would be like hiring all apprentice bricklayers, plumbers, and electricians to build you a building. You are likely to encounter problems down the road.
I know that some folks think of coding as an art more than as a trade or skill. However, coding has enough of the skilled trade flavor to it, in particular developing the understanding for how decisions you make in one place will have long lasting effects throughout an application and the things that interact with it (which a new graduate or junior developer is not likely to understand), that the only really sensible way to look at it is as something that requires a pseudo-apprenticeship.
Granted, some people have a natural talent, but even then they benefit from being under the guidance of good experienced developers.
What is the truth here?
Are wages so low that people would rather be unemployed, allowing employers to go the H1B route? I also hear that there is a lot of H1B fraud, in which case higher wages won't help.
People say there are lots of skilled workers, but also that all the young workers are idiots with no clue and low ability levels.
Women are apparently clever for avoiding tech jobs, but for some reason men are desperate for them and unable to do the jobs women are doing instead.
I just want to know the truth. I don't live in the US so it's hard to know based on Slashdot and crappy "news" articles.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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
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.
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.
Since I'm here... How much to call me a malodorous bastard?
We used to have some people here that would do it for $40 an hour, but they got replaced by some H-1B workers willing to do the job for only $22.50 an hour. They also had to lie on their CV about having 25 years experience abusing people on Slashdot, even though the site has only been around for about 20.
It's a mix a both, really. When you have companies in California offering salaries of $60,000 per year it's a lot different than that same salary being offered in somewhere like Nebraska where the cost of living is going to be a lot lower. There are a lot of Americans that aren't willing to work for that pay in California because it won't allow them to afford the type of lifestyle that they expect. Meanwhile, there are many H1-B workers who are more than happy to take those wages, because from their perspective its a great opportunity for them to live in a nice place and having the kind of freedoms that living in a western democracy affords that may not be possible in their native country.
There are a lot of skilled workers, but there aren't a lot of companies that want to pay the rates those workers feel that they're worth when they can get some wet behind the ears college graduate for perhaps half the salary. I don't know if that's always the best economic decision for the company, and some of that may come from companies not having a good way to measure productivity differences which is difficult to do in software engineering without creating some kind of metrics based hell that the smart employees will figure out how to game quite easily.
The truth isn't something that's always easy to completely understand and something like the global economy has so many moving parts that even if you understand some of the fundamental causes (e.g. higher demand for software engineers will increase wages, which ultimately leads to more people majoring in CS and increasing the available labor pool which reduces wages until an equilibrium is reached where the number of people capable and interested in being developers matches the demand) it's really hard to factor everything in. Think of it another way. If you could easily answer that question, centrally planned economies would be easy to pull off and the Soviet Union probably would have won the cold war instead of collapsing like it did.
Are wages so low that people would rather be unemployed, allowing employers to go the H1B route? I also hear that there is a lot of H1B fraud, in which case higher wages won't help.
Some people may be better off unemployed. Married women with children may find that the cost of child care make work not worth it financially. Low skilled middle age people may try to go on disability rather than take a low wage job, etc.
People say there are lots of skilled workers, but also that all the young workers are idiots with no clue and low ability levels.
There are a lot of credentialed people out there. The watering down of education at all levels has lead to a situation where lots of people have paper that say they are educated but don't have the knowledge/skills to back it up.
Women are apparently clever for avoiding tech jobs, but for some reason men are desperate for them and unable to do the jobs women are doing instead.
Women are under-represented in some fields and over-represented in others. Since tech pays better than most fields this has been deemed to be an issue by many with a certain point of view. There may be valid reasons for this but suggesting some will have your career ruined at many places like Google.
Relatively, yes. Consider Silicon Valley. It stretches 40 miles between San Francisco and San Jose, and is about 7 miles wide. San Francisco is the most desirable part of the area, because it has a large walkable downtown area with lots of shops and public transport. Start going down further down and you are into suburbs where you need a car. The central parts of the towns like Menlo Park, Palo Alto (close to Stanford University) are very desirable because they too have walkable down town areas. Then you are into areas like Mountain View and Sunnyvale. If you are on the Eastern side of the peninsula, then you really need a car to get around. Central San Jose is very polluted, and so many people prefer to live up in the mountains where the air is fresher.
Also, they are interested in working for startups, designing and implementing new code, with the chance of going IPO or being bought out, rather than being in support, maintenance or hardware verification.
Because many graduates prefer to live in areas which are walkable downtown and have a social life (to maintain a professional network of friends to help find the good jobs) they prefer to share a room in a house in these areas rather than an apartment somewhere isolated. You are looking at a monthly rent of $4000 to $8000 upwards for a house. Parts of Silicon Valley are majority Mexican, Black or Asian.
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Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Are wages so low that people would rather be unemployed, allowing employers to go the H1B route?
You have the causality backwards.
Companies fraudulently get H1B visas to drive wages down. To keep up the charade, they have to claim it is impossible to find US workers for their jobs.
To keep the fraud going, companies deliberately sabotage their recruiting process. I get 2-3 emails a day from recruiters offering me jobs in cities I do not live in. The jobs require 1/4 the experience I have, with appropriate pay for that level of experience. Since I do not live there and do not want to take a massive pay cut, I do not apply to those positions. The company uses my lack of response, as well as the other people they spam, to pretend there are no US people for that job.
If I did apply for the position, first they would demand I travel at my own expense to multiple in-person interviews, scheduled at the last minute in order to maximize the expense to me. And if I did pay for that travel and show up for the interviews, I would be rejected as unqualified or "not a good fit for their team" or any other reason they could come up with.
Since the job is a massive pay cut, it would be difficult for me to show I was harmed and thus it is harder to sue them for rejecting me. Plus suing an employer, prospective or not, ends your career. Your lawsuit is a public record, so any future employers will see it and refuse to hire you.
Why would the company bother with all this fraud effort? Because they aren't actually looking for someone with 4 years experience. They will "miraculously" find an H1B employee with 10 years experience who will just happen to take the job at the pay rate for 4 years experience. Then proceed to have them to work commiserate with 10 years experience.
Basically, everything you hear that blames this problem on the worker side of this situation is a lie designed to perpetuate H1B visas.
I just want to know the truth. I don't live in the US so it's hard to know based on Slashdot and crappy "news" articles.
All evidence points towards you not being interested in knowing the truth, and far more interested in shitting on workers. But that's OK, we'll drag down your wages too.
If there was a shortage wages would go up. That is the 'invisible hand' of the market.
The "market" is being grossly manipulated. Both supply (a huge over-supply of under-qualified n00bs - including the idiots that fall for boot camps and "take a 6 month course at our institute at huge expense with predatory loans", and of course the lies surrounding H1Bs.
Additionally, there's the whole "bad money drives out good money" thing. Crazy money chasing quick bux has seriously distorted the job market, so that everyone is looking for web code monkeys, and since monkeys are cheap and easily replaced, this has the effect of driving down wages in other parts of the industry since businesses are under the impression that every monkey in every sector is interchangeable, so why should one monkey in one sector be worth several times what another one is in another sector? After all, all they do all day is sit staring at a keyboard and screen - how hard can that be? Bosses do that all the time with no special training.
The field is ruined for at least another generation, and perhaps permanently.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.