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

Re:Sorry, employers

[jeff4747]

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.

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.