4 ms·

No matter how many articles I read on the praise of bootcamps, none have been able to completely sway my opinion: I don't have to have a CS degree to be a good

No matter how many articles I read on the praise of bootcamps, none have been able to completely sway my opinion: I don't have to have a CS degree to be a good developer, but there are certain CS fundamentals lacking from bootcamps that are an investment in your future. The issue, like another commenter mentioned, is that bootcamps are too much like for-profit colleges. Focusing on required skills only, much like a trade school, should be a viable way for people to pick up the needed skills. It seems, however, that bootcamps are over-promising and under delivering. There is a local bootcamp for JS, HTML and CSS. For $6.5k ($12.5K is the advertised priced, but corporate and university sponsors routinely pay part of the cost) and 10 weeks, they should be able to give you a great, solid foundation in those languages and technologies. Either we got the flunky that passed by the skin of his teeth, or our HR has some explaining to do. He's been on board for about 1.5 months, and through some weird agreement beyond my control, he's just made his first commits for very rudimentary tasks. I have a couple friends who routinely sit in on interviews for developers in Houston, Columbus, and Pittsburgh . I made a social media post about skepticism in bootcamps. They agreed for the most part. They said that bootcamps can produce quality developers, but the ratio of good to bad candidates did not smile favorably on bootcamps. The chief complaint seemed to be that they had no knowledge in a specific area. That is, they knew a little of everything but not enough to be of use.

some-guy 11y ago
A CS degree doesn't prepare you for the developer world in certain ways that a boot-camp will, but boot-camps are just too short and crammed to really teach a developer well in my opinion. A boot camp that my housemate is in right now was required to code merge-sort for a test after three days into it, while also advertising that prior programming knowledge was not necessary before starting the program. I would love to see something in between -- a rigorous two-year software-engineering program out there sponsored by community colleges combining CS fundamentals and good up-to-date software engineering practices on large codebases.
- noxToken 11y ago
  That's what I meant by I don't have to have a CS degree to be a good developer, but there are certain CS fundamentals lacking from bootcamps that are an investment in your future. More specifically, things like time complexity, algorithms, data-structures, programming languages, compilers, and by extension discreet maths, formal language theory and software planning/architecture are some of the non-bootcamp concepts that have limited use as a junior dev working on pieces of a larger project. These CS-specific concepts become much more prevalent as one moves from, "Find a way to implement this small feature," to "We need to overhaul this entire part of the project."
AlexB138 11y ago
>there are certain CS fundamentals lacking from bootcamps that are an investment in your future. Unrelated to the topic at hand, but would you mind enumerating a few of these fundamental concepts you feel bootcamp grads lack? Do you mean things like basic algorithms and data structures? I have a background in Ops and I'm working on rounding out my skill set with a more solid understanding of development. I briefly considered a bootcamp, but came to the same conclusion you've shared here. I'm comfortable as an autodidact, but some advanced concepts that I need to be aware of would be useful. edit: I see this was already addressed in a later post, which I'll quote below. I'll leave this here for the sake of discussion. > More specifically, things like time complexity, algorithms, data-structures, programming languages, compilers, and by extension discreet maths, formal language theory and software planning/architecture are some of the non-bootcamp concepts that have limited use as a junior dev working on pieces of a larger project.

some-guy 11y ago

A CS degree doesn't prepare you for the developer world in certain ways that a boot-camp will, but boot-camps are just too short and crammed to really teach a developer well in my opinion. A boot camp that my housemate is in right now was required to code merge-sort for a test after three days into it, while also advertising that prior programming knowledge was not necessary before starting the program. I would love to see something in between -- a rigorous two-year software-engineering program out there sponsored by community colleges combining CS fundamentals and good up-to-date software engineering practices on large codebases.

noxToken 11y ago
That's what I meant by I don't have to have a CS degree to be a good developer, but there are certain CS fundamentals lacking from bootcamps that are an investment in your future. More specifically, things like time complexity, algorithms, data-structures, programming languages, compilers, and by extension discreet maths, formal language theory and software planning/architecture are some of the non-bootcamp concepts that have limited use as a junior dev working on pieces of a larger project. These CS-specific concepts become much more prevalent as one moves from, "Find a way to implement this small feature," to "We need to overhaul this entire part of the project."

AlexB138 11y ago

>there are certain CS fundamentals lacking from bootcamps that are an investment in your future. Unrelated to the topic at hand, but would you mind enumerating a few of these fundamental concepts you feel bootcamp grads lack? Do you mean things like basic algorithms and data structures? I have a background in Ops and I'm working on rounding out my skill set with a more solid understanding of development. I briefly considered a bootcamp, but came to the same conclusion you've shared here. I'm comfortable as an autodidact, but some advanced concepts that I need to be aware of would be useful. edit: I see this was already addressed in a later post, which I'll quote below. I'll leave this here for the sake of discussion. > More specifically, things like time complexity, algorithms, data-structures, programming languages, compilers, and by extension discreet maths, formal language theory and software planning/architecture are some of the non-bootcamp concepts that have limited use as a junior dev working on pieces of a larger project.