10 ms·

Why students are throwing tons of money at a program that won't give degrees

74 points by wallflower 11y ago

Futurebot 11y ago
"He’s skeptical of bootcamper applicants and is more inclined to hire four-year CS degree graduates, especially for the most in-demand positions: “full stack” developers who possess a range of coding skills. He compares the skillsets of bootcampers to performing auto repair on a car, versus the kind of large-scale, architectural skills of your standard CS degree holder, who can do everything from small repairs to making deep structural changes. “You emerge from a bootcamp fit to do an oil change, but not design a car,” he said." If employers prefer actual CS degrees, they should be pushing to make obtaining said degrees not require people to go into massive amounts of debt. The "gold rush" might be part of the issue here, but the cost of bootcamp certs vs degrees is not insignificant, as the article states.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Which mirrors, as far as I understand, the current state of affairs at US universities. In many countries degrees are state sponsored and you don't need to debt yourself for life just to get a CS degree.
bcg1 11y ago
Bootcamps could be useful if students just use them to get their foot in the door at a truly entry level job that is basically a learning experience. If you pay cash for a bootcamp and then work for $30,000 a year for 4 years on real projects, you would be a much more attractive job candidate than many people with an undergraduate CS degree, and you might even have some savings instead of massive debt. The problem with "bootcamps" seems to be that some people think that they can short circuit the learning/experience process, which is just not possible. If willing to keep learning after the initial program, seems like it could be a good option.
pink_dinner 11y ago
It's like anything in life. You have enthusiastic people that have this vision in their head about becoming a software developer and joining a startup. When the realities hit and they realize that some of it is mentally taxing and boring work, they give up and quit. I've been writing software for 20 years. I haven't gotten bored yet. In any boring task, I can always learn something new that's interesting.
88e282102ae2e5b 11y ago
What's with the assumption that you can only learn fundamental computer science in a classroom? If you go through a bootcamp and get a real job but never grow, that's not because you never got a CS degree, it's because you never took advantage of the Internet and a workplace full of practical problems and people who know more than you.
cm2187 11y ago
To be honest 95% of large corporate software development doesn't require a computer science degree. They are usually one form of another of CRUD application. The novelty is only that they need to support more than one platform or be web based. It's not exactly rocket science. And even scaling problems are basically common sense, not advanced maths. To me this lack of training is more concerning from a quality point of view, and in software who says quality says security. But I am not convinced a formal computer science education teaches coding best practices either (but not having done one myself it is hard to judge).
- ethanbond 11y ago
  You're kind of off-base. A formal computer science education doesn't really teach coding at all. You'll learn how to write code (hopefully) as a corollary to learning how computation works. At least in my program, there isn't any single course that's oriented around the act of writing code.
  - cm2187 11y ago
    Yeah but someone doesn't understand a database unless they understand what a hashtable or a binary tree is. But none of that is very complex.
    - ken47 11y ago
      But hash tables and binary trees are CS concepts. Even though you don't have a CS degree, it sounds like you've taken the time to learn some basic CS.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    That may be true but it's not responsive to his real point, which is that you don't need to understand computation to build a typical line-of-business application. Companies used to build LOB apps in Microsoft Access, and nobody believed you needed a degree to use Access (plenty of business people figured it out for themselves, just like Excel). Now nobody uses Access anymore, but the web frameworks that replaced it aren't that much harder to use, and don't really involve a lot of complexity theory or parser generators.
loeg 11y ago
It seems like something in the middle would be a good idea. Low cost, 2 year program, sufficient to cover some theory — but CS only, unlike community college associate degrees today. Do we really need to pay $10,000-30,000/year for gen. ed.?
- samcodes 11y ago
  I agree. I don't understand why community colleges can't provide something like this. It seems like an opportunity for them to be something other than a pre-4-year college.
  - copperx 11y ago
    Community colleges are mandated by law to have gen. ed. on the curriculum, so there's that.
  - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
    I did this. I have a non CS undergrad degree, and used the Post 9-11 Gi Bill to take every CS class at a CC.
- ntkachov 11y ago
  I see little difference between this and a community college degree. Community college CS associates can teach you everything you need to keep yourself up to date on basic algorithms and enough theory to get you ready for industry. It has the added benefit of also transitioning into a 4yr degree if you need it. All for about $20k. Some of the best engineers I know took 2 years at CC and then moved to a 4 year degree.
  - Robelius 11y ago
    I'm a community college transfer, and seeing that 20k always reminds me how nice the California Community College system is. Completing an AS is 5K max, assuming you don't get 100% tuition covered which a large percentage do via BOG. A free degree is always nice.
  - 11y ago
danso 11y ago
The best bootcamp curriculums, on paper, offer skill sets that college computer science/engineering schools would envy. I'm teaching some coding to university students now, some of who've gone through a couple quarters of the CS track, and am sometimes surprised when they have trouble with file I/O (opening text files, deserializing their contents) or lack experience with doing things like interacting with web service APIs or creating and running code outside of an IDE (if the CS track does the Java/C/C++ track). I'd be more shocked if that weren't my experience as a computer engineering graduate (though web APIs and products like Github and Sublime Text were not around in my day)...I don't ever remember running code outside of Eclipse or Microsoft Studio...when I worked professionally, an intern had to show me how to use version control. That said, 10-12 weeks of "intensive" coding is only as effective as what students bring to it. If you have a science background, and have less instinctive shock at dealing with "symbols", rigor in language, and scientific hypothesis (or rather, knowing how to recognize the difference between a system error and and error in your expectations)...you'll undoubtedly benefit from being thrown into an intense course of learning devops and software engineering best practices. If not? You may be able to know and memorize the steps of complicated processes...e.g. how to deploy a Rails app from scratch onto a production server...but you might be likely to only adopt the skillset described in the article as "the same skillset that can be easily outsourced or offshored." 10-12 weeks is a short time to learn the ropes and get all the moving pieces together...but it is almost certainly too short of time to build the right mindset -- the kind that can properly debug. I've noticed that top-tier bootcamps that promise 90% to 100% rates of employment at $80K+ also have stringent acceptance rates, such that the vast majority of students they're working with are STEM graduates looking to get into dev. The outcome is probably significantly different for non-STEM students looking to do the same.
- ThrustVectoring 11y ago
  That's my experience with a bootcamp as well. I had the right mindset from attending an engineering school, but no degree / not living in the SF Bay Area / not having the structure and organization to put myself out there. The faculty was also concerned about succeeding through the acceptance filters - if they couldn't make less prepared students successful, then expanding in order to accept more students is a really poor choice.
jypepin 11y ago
So... I'm biased because I did a bootcamp. I think the comparison of bootcamp vs 4years CS degree is not very apple to apple, because well, you compare on 1 side people who almost "discovered" programming 3 months earlier to people who have been studying it for 4 years + most of the time have had internships etc. What I can say tho, is that, for junior positions (I guess one of the points of the article) those bootcampers can be 1. very good and productive, and because of the nature of the bootcamps, 2. usually very motivated and eager to learn, get feedback etc. So if you are willing (and have resources) for some extra mentoring, bootcamps can be a very good additional pool for hiring (since hiring engineers is very hard is most places) and can be very good long term for your company. I joined a YC startup after my bootcamp and continued to work my ass off there for a year (during work, and after work to continue to learn CS concepts etc.) and I think I can say I was successful there. I had good mentoring despite our size (3-4 engineers at most) but I eventually became a good asset to the company. After 1 years, the company was sold and I needed to find a new job. I did well on multiple interviews, both startups and big cos (facebook and co) and am now very successful at a top startup in the bay. You just need to expect what is expectable - I remember when I did my bootcamp, I was never promised to get a CS degree in 3 months - I was promised to learn the basics I would need to 1. be hirable at a junior level and 2. learn how to learn, to be able to figure things myself and continue growing. That's what I got from it. I think everything's the same - if you are motivated and driven to be successful, you'll be successful, if not, cruising through both a CS degree or a bootcamp won't do it. I've interviewed hundreds of people, from bootcamps, new grads, masters, phds, experienced people, and people from each background have done from bad to great.
- laredo 11y ago
  Couldn't you have done it using Internet, books, video tutorials, etc.?
  - leesalminen 11y ago
    I did, as I'm sure many here have as well. However, not everybody has that kind of self motivitation. Some people need that $30k expenditure to keep their wandering minds in check when the going gets tough at the beginning. I remember my first paid experience coding...was reading/learning 6+ hours every day on top of the project itself.
tracker1 11y ago
Software development is not the same as Computer Science... Even then, it's a small part of STEM, and beyond that, how much shortage is there, really? In the end, I've seen far better results from self-starters that try than graduates with C.S. degrees that don't. I think that there is a lot of arrogance in the software industry, and it tends to do far more harm than good. It bubbles certain mindsets and pushes out others. In the end, it does little for what's being worked on, and when good enough solutions that work are displaced by "best" solutions that come out months/years late and/or outright fail. In the end, you can get a LONG way with pragmatic choices... you can go even further, with consistently simpler ones. The more complex something is, the more likely it is to fail when you need it to grow the most. Time and time again, people just don't see this. I've been guilty of it myself. You don't need a C.S. degree, or a bootcamp, and honestly, if you do, you're probably not enough of a self starter to actually be productive, help and work with a team checking your ego at the door anyway. I'm guilty of this myself at times. But the debate is pretty silly. Nobody should go six figures into debt for a job that starts out at less than six figures. And nobody should expect to master anything in much less than a couple years. What often bugs me more than anything is institutional resistance to anything new. Okay, going to sign off this messy rant... I just find the whole debate the article makes irritating, as it's the people more than the process that determine success.
- npx 11y ago
  I like to think that software can actually be perfect, and that "good enough" is the mortal enemy of excellent. I agree regarding arrogance, though... I think it's insane to imagine that the insertion sort (for example) is somehow more innovative than the plane, train, automobile, or combine. I think that you can actually get very far in terms of educating yourself with the materials and tools that are now publicly available. I'm currently spending a lot of time doing this, so I suppose it's an axiom that I've accepted. https://github.com/hypoalex/machine_learning/blob/61d6729489cfa9d68bcd585bae692627304e0f1d/classes/MIT/18.01/lectures/lecture_1.ipynb https://github.com/hypoalex/machine_learning/blob/61d6729489... For instance, I personally find Jupyter Notebooks many times more useful than traditional course notes. They're executable, they can be revisited and expanded upon, and they're actually used commercially... so you're killing many birds with one stone. It would be a very different world if the first thing you learned in high school was version control and Python, but it might actually be one worth living in.
gearoidoc 11y ago
The content of programming boot camps will eventually be moved to high school curriculums (I'm not sure if they currently do this in North America or not). This will be a good thing. Students who were somewhat interested in programming (but not so much after delving into it) will have picked up some basic skills. Those who were very much interested in it will have to take less of a 'leap of faith' when it comes to a third level course.
mrdrozdov 11y ago
Why wouldn't we want to train people to do the jobs that are being outsourced? Especially when the jobs that are being outsourced can be critical to a business and provide valuable experience to the workers that take them on? Gigs that I've heard are being commonly outsourced: machine learning (usually NLP), android development, QA (typically related to frontend)
analognoise 11y ago
I'd hire an enthusiastic person with an associate's degree in computer science before I hired someone from a coding bootcamp. Why not just get the AS?
LoSboccacc 11y ago
This problem is more than a decade old http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool... and doesn't seems the quality of those bootcamp improved meanwhile.
deleted 11y ago
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lloyd-christmas 11y ago
Maybe I'm reading too much into these articles, but it seems like people think that the individuals taking these bootcamps are all ex-baristas. I took one, and most people had several years of high-professional work experience, many of whom had undergraduate degrees in STEM. My current boss is our lead architect with more than 20 years of programming experience. He has an undergraduate degree in neuroscience. My father is a physician/oncology researcher. He has an undergraduate degree in physics. Skills are transferable, especially within the entire STEM bubble. > “You emerge from a bootcamp fit to do an oil change, but not design a car,” You emerge from an undergraduate degree with a permission slip to join the professional world. Undergraduate CS degrees aren't 5 year engineering programs. They are just your average bachelors like the rest of them. Your major is a demonstration of what you were interested in during college, not whether or not you're capable of being a a contributing member of an industry. The vast majority of the fundamental career knowledge is learned within your first two years. A couple years into my career in finance, my coworkers with English Literature degrees were impossible to differentiate from those with Finance degrees (those that made it that far). The reason isn't because the Finance major was entitled or less capable. It's because the two were equally capable, and the general industry knowledge plateau comes quickly before you start working towards some specialization.
- Turing_Machine 11y ago
  "Undergraduate CS degrees aren't 5 year engineering programs." It depends on where you go, really. Undergraduate "CS" programs are all over the place, ranging from programs that might be better called "IT", to ones that are basically just specialized math degree. A good marker, IMO, is whether the program requires a compilers course that actually requires that the student implement a compiler. Of course, I would say that, of course, since mine did. :-) It also required enough math that I could've gotten a dual degree in math by taking (IIRC) two more courses. I was in calculus-based physics and ODE right there with the engineers, too. Where the programs diverged was when they started taking statics and dynamics (after physics), and I started taking compilers, theory of computation, and stuff of that nature.
  - lloyd-christmas 11y ago
carlosnunez 11y ago
I think a bootcamp is pretty useful for someone who has no experience in development and wants to obtain it in a relatively short time frame. Teachers come to mind here. Many of them encounter a LOT of difficulty when they try to find jobs outside of education. Many, many companies completely discount their experience regardless of the length of time they've spent in the profession. This essentially means that teachers who've been in the system for a while and are becoming disillusioned with it are almost forced to restart their career; this is very painful for those that have many, many years in the game. A bootcamp is a great way of getting the experience needed to restart their career into a well-paying industry (for now). Yeah, they don't learn Big O or discrete math, but they do learn how to write an app that will make their founders a LOT of money if it sells, and that's worth a lot. BTW: A lot of high-falutin places (like Jane Street, which I worked at a few years ago) care much more about your experience and what you've done than where you came from (at least on the development side of the house, which pays handsomely compared to market; the trading side still heavily recruits from the Ivies). I remember them hiring a few Hacker School type devs, and if they survived our interview process, that means they HAD to be good.
acomjean 11y ago
This isn't entirely new. When I graduated in the mid nineties a lot of friends that took non technical degrees (history, english, psychology) did temp work and got "certificate" at a university which helped them secure work. They ended up doing pretty well. Of course the tech economy was just starting to take off back then....
aczerepinski 11y ago
I went to a bootcamp, and I think people are way too fixated on the three month thing. You have to write code to get accepted to a decent school, so the students on day 1 are definitely not "straight out of Starbucks." For me it was 2-3 months of full-time study while I applied and got the school lined up (including pre-curriculum while I waited for my cohort to start). The program itself was three months of intense 50-60 hour weeks. Then I continued studying full time for a month until I got a job. So by the time I showed up to work, I had put in ~7 months of full time coding. Since then, I've still been going hard, as have most of my classmates. I've been working in two languages that I didn't learn at school, and using a third one in my side projects. Nine months removed from school, I still spend a lot of my free time studying whatever looks interesting to me at frontendmasters/egghead/pluralsight. I read a lot about programming, and listen to 5-10 podcasts each week on my commute. At some point the three months I spent at a bootcamp or the four years somebody else spent in a CS program are irrelevant. How passionate are you, and how hard are you willing to work?
- nedwin 11y ago
  As with all things, YMMV. Keen to hear if you think you're an average example of your cohort or in the top x%.
  - aczerepinski 11y ago
    I was definitely in the top x% for some values of x. :) Kidding aside, I definitely wasn't the best or the worst in my class. The variance from best to worst was pretty large, but that's obviously going to be true for traditional CS degrees or anything else in life as well.
  - d2xdy2 11y ago
    I recently finished out a stint at General Assembly's Web Development course in Atlanta. I'm definitely not an average example of my cohort, though I would like to say that prior experience I brought in really drove up the "average" for many of my peers. Of a class size of 17 people, many of us had jobs lined up before we finished while several were / are still taking time to "get ready"; There was only one who sort of remained clueless during the cohort, but in spite of that they have worked very hard to keep up in class. The coding required to get into GA was minimal, and the interview beforehand was not very difficult-- the person I mentioned who was generally clueless actually blew through the admissions process (better than I did, in fact). I'm not sure where it's appropriate to set that barrier to entry, especially given that most of the early material caters to someone with very limited knowledge-- it would have been interesting to see a course targeted at someone who already has a foundation in basic web technologies. Living in Atlanta, I've had the opportunity to speak with grads of many other bootcamps both in Atlanta and on the West coast. The biggest difference I really notice is between people who were able/willing to work those 60/70 hour weeks to gain as much as possible and those who couldn't/wouldn't.
methehack 11y ago
A tiny bit off topic, but I keep thinking there should be a "Software Development" degree separate from a "Computer Science" degree. Less (but some) math, more process and communication. Lots of code. Bootstrap programs seem great as an accelerator for folks who are inclined to otherwise be self-taught (of which there are lots). Others would make great developers, want a little more time or standard academic environment, but don't want all the math.
- _delirium 11y ago
  A lot of schools have a Software Engineering degree, which is more development and process oriented. Not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, but it's one alternative to a CS degree.
hugh4life 11y ago
I went to a top 5 CS university and liked what I received(and it wasn't too expensive with instate tuition), but I honestly think my time would have been better spent with something like Pluralsight(& similar) + newsgroup of fellow learners moderated by mentors + Github. I don't like the idea of boot camps unless there's some follow through but I think it's very important for there to be good alternatives to the 4-year CS degree path.
rbkarbka 11y ago
I attended a bootcamp and was fairly unimpressed by the curriculum and general quality of teaching. The absolute biggest advantage of a bootcamp was that it held my feet to the fire. For the most successful students, it was pretty clear that the bootcamp was (pedagogically at least) not responsible for their success, rather mostly providing a space and opportunity to the kind of group work that is difficult to do alone. At the same time, people are very arrogant about their CS degrees. I was very successful as a student in a non-technical field and it's honestly amusing that a student in a giant CS department at a random public university would think that they have a competitive advantage against someone like me in the workplace simply because they have a technical degree. CS majors don't have a monopoly on smarts and 95% of enterprise software development is honestly not rocket science.
yomly 11y ago
This will always be a divisive subject and my opinion will likely be equally divisive. For the record, I took a bootcamp over doing a master's in CS: the clincher for such a decision came when an engineer friend at a tech unicorn said he'd take a smart bootcamper over a regular CS grad on the basis that from hiring experiences: - you don't use most of the stuff you learn from CS at work (when was the last time you proved root two was irrational, or used red-black trees on the job?) - a bootcamper will write cleaner code and is less likely to have some of the stereotypical traits engineers are prone to having (e.g. takes feedback badly/doesn't communicate well/takes feedback badly) he attributes this to the more diverse pool of people boot camps attract To be frank, I think the aversion to bootcampers primarily stems from individuals' need to validate their own life choices thinking things like "I studied CS for four years to become a Software Engineer so how could someone come close to playing catch up in 3 months!?" But really this style of thought is flawed - people underestimate the fundamental value of doing a degree, which teaches you way more than just knowledge. Think how much less developed you were intellectually coming out of high school than post college. With that said, it's also probably true that there are plenty of bootcamp graduates out there with an inflated sense of worth and companies that have hired/rejected poor bootcampers and now have a set opinion about bootcamps. To these people it's worth noting that bootcamps have only been around for a couple of years, and as is the case in any good startups, the product improves as the companies grow and mature and have time to iteratively improve it. Graduates from a bootcamp today are probably of appreciably higher quality than they were back then.
- mitchty 11y ago
  > - you don't use most of the stuff you learn from CS at work (when was the last time you proved root two was irrational, or used red-black trees on the job?) Used them yesterday in fact. Then again, using red black trees and knowing when you need to isn't uncommon in kernel programming. I'd couch this more: you generally don't need to care about using red-black trees. Until you do need them that is. The key is knowing and realizing when that time has come. Just thought I'd put my $0.02 in on that one as it is both my opinion and experience.
  - dagamer34 11y ago
49531 11y ago
As a former instructor at a bootcamp, there are some massive pros to the bootcamp model, but low quality programs will typically produce low quality producers. Our program spent a considerable amount of time setting career expectations and preparing for interviews. High performing students would regularly find themselves landing mid-level software engineering jobs based on their interview performance, but we would try to maintain the expectation that an internship or a Jr dev position was really great. We saw some of our competitors get torn apart by past students who's expectations were higher than the reality of being a bootcamp grad. You can't tell someone they're going to make 100k/yr after 12 weeks of learning to code. People believe you, buy into your bullshit, and get burned. With so many bootcamps popping up, consumers have a lot of resources and choices to find a good program. Low quality programs are slowly being edged out by the market. It's becoming more competitive, which I think is good. Bootcamps aren't a silver bullet, but they help a lot of people get on a trajectory of a successful engineering career. They also help with diversity, a lot of folks can't afford to get a CS degree, whether it's because they have an aversion to crippling debt, or they're a single mother who has to work full-time, or they just don't thrive in a university-style environment. I know a lot of really unique engineers that wouldn't have been able to have the careers they do without a bootcamp.
BWStearns 11y ago
> They don’t have the fundamentals to pick up a new set of tools and technologies. Will they be bootcamping every 3 years? Programming professionally requires constant learning even when your stack remains roughly the same. No one survives professionally on the strength of memorized rails g commands, and even if one did you'd have to be insane to want to. I'm sure some people muddle through bootcamps who really don't have the desire or ability to always be learning, but, at least at quality schools, they're in the minority. (Disclosure, I'm a bootcamp product who had previously been learning on my own)
Apocryphon 11y ago
Honestly, it's only a matter of time before bootcamps are made specifically for teaching the basics of algorithms and data structures, with an emphasis on acing interviews. Seems like the sort of cram school/career "consulting" that would naturally develop from the semi-dysfunctional interview process that tech has. And such a program would be beneficial not only for people without CS degrees, but also CS majors as well.

74 points by wallflower 11y ago

"He’s skeptical of bootcamper applicants and is more inclined to hire four-year CS degree graduates, especially for the most in-demand positions: “full stack” developers who possess a range of coding skills. He compares the skillsets of bootcampers to performing auto repair on a car, versus the kind of large-scale, architectural skills of your standard CS degree holder, who can do everything from small repairs to making deep structural changes. “You emerge from a bootcamp fit to do an oil change, but not design a car,” he said." If employers prefer actual CS degrees, they should be pushing to make obtaining said degrees not require people to go into massive amounts of debt. The "gold rush" might be part of the issue here, but the cost of bootcamp certs vs degrees is not insignificant, as the article states.

pjmlp 11y ago
Which mirrors, as far as I understand, the current state of affairs at US universities. In many countries degrees are state sponsored and you don't need to debt yourself for life just to get a CS degree.

bcg1 11y ago

Bootcamps could be useful if students just use them to get their foot in the door at a truly entry level job that is basically a learning experience. If you pay cash for a bootcamp and then work for $30,000 a year for 4 years on real projects, you would be a much more attractive job candidate than many people with an undergraduate CS degree, and you might even have some savings instead of massive debt. The problem with "bootcamps" seems to be that some people think that they can short circuit the learning/experience process, which is just not possible. If willing to keep learning after the initial program, seems like it could be a good option.

pink_dinner 11y ago

It's like anything in life. You have enthusiastic people that have this vision in their head about becoming a software developer and joining a startup. When the realities hit and they realize that some of it is mentally taxing and boring work, they give up and quit. I've been writing software for 20 years. I haven't gotten bored yet. In any boring task, I can always learn something new that's interesting.

88e282102ae2e5b 11y ago

What's with the assumption that you can only learn fundamental computer science in a classroom? If you go through a bootcamp and get a real job but never grow, that's not because you never got a CS degree, it's because you never took advantage of the Internet and a workplace full of practical problems and people who know more than you.

cm2187 11y ago

To be honest 95% of large corporate software development doesn't require a computer science degree. They are usually one form of another of CRUD application. The novelty is only that they need to support more than one platform or be web based. It's not exactly rocket science. And even scaling problems are basically common sense, not advanced maths. To me this lack of training is more concerning from a quality point of view, and in software who says quality says security. But I am not convinced a formal computer science education teaches coding best practices either (but not having done one myself it is hard to judge).

ethanbond 11y ago
You're kind of off-base. A formal computer science education doesn't really teach coding at all. You'll learn how to write code (hopefully) as a corollary to learning how computation works. At least in my program, there isn't any single course that's oriented around the act of writing code.
- cm2187 11y ago
  Yeah but someone doesn't understand a database unless they understand what a hashtable or a binary tree is. But none of that is very complex.
  - ken47 11y ago
    But hash tables and binary trees are CS concepts. Even though you don't have a CS degree, it sounds like you've taken the time to learn some basic CS.
- tptacek 11y ago
  That may be true but it's not responsive to his real point, which is that you don't need to understand computation to build a typical line-of-business application. Companies used to build LOB apps in Microsoft Access, and nobody believed you needed a degree to use Access (plenty of business people figured it out for themselves, just like Excel). Now nobody uses Access anymore, but the web frameworks that replaced it aren't that much harder to use, and don't really involve a lot of complexity theory or parser generators.

loeg 11y ago

It seems like something in the middle would be a good idea. Low cost, 2 year program, sufficient to cover some theory — but CS only, unlike community college associate degrees today. Do we really need to pay $10,000-30,000/year for gen. ed.?

samcodes 11y ago
I agree. I don't understand why community colleges can't provide something like this. It seems like an opportunity for them to be something other than a pre-4-year college.
- copperx 11y ago
  Community colleges are mandated by law to have gen. ed. on the curriculum, so there's that.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
  I did this. I have a non CS undergrad degree, and used the Post 9-11 Gi Bill to take every CS class at a CC.
ntkachov 11y ago
I see little difference between this and a community college degree. Community college CS associates can teach you everything you need to keep yourself up to date on basic algorithms and enough theory to get you ready for industry. It has the added benefit of also transitioning into a 4yr degree if you need it. All for about $20k. Some of the best engineers I know took 2 years at CC and then moved to a 4 year degree.
- Robelius 11y ago
  I'm a community college transfer, and seeing that 20k always reminds me how nice the California Community College system is. Completing an AS is 5K max, assuming you don't get 100% tuition covered which a large percentage do via BOG. A free degree is always nice.
- 11y ago

danso 11y ago

The best bootcamp curriculums, on paper, offer skill sets that college computer science/engineering schools would envy. I'm teaching some coding to university students now, some of who've gone through a couple quarters of the CS track, and am sometimes surprised when they have trouble with file I/O (opening text files, deserializing their contents) or lack experience with doing things like interacting with web service APIs or creating and running code outside of an IDE (if the CS track does the Java/C/C++ track). I'd be more shocked if that weren't my experience as a computer engineering graduate (though web APIs and products like Github and Sublime Text were not around in my day)...I don't ever remember running code outside of Eclipse or Microsoft Studio...when I worked professionally, an intern had to show me how to use version control. That said, 10-12 weeks of "intensive" coding is only as effective as what students bring to it. If you have a science background, and have less instinctive shock at dealing with "symbols", rigor in language, and scientific hypothesis (or rather, knowing how to recognize the difference between a system error and and error in your expectations)...you'll undoubtedly benefit from being thrown into an intense course of learning devops and software engineering best practices. If not? You may be able to know and memorize the steps of complicated processes...e.g. how to deploy a Rails app from scratch onto a production server...but you might be likely to only adopt the skillset described in the article as "the same skillset that can be easily outsourced or offshored." 10-12 weeks is a short time to learn the ropes and get all the moving pieces together...but it is almost certainly too short of time to build the right mindset -- the kind that can properly debug. I've noticed that top-tier bootcamps that promise 90% to 100% rates of employment at $80K+ also have stringent acceptance rates, such that the vast majority of students they're working with are STEM graduates looking to get into dev. The outcome is probably significantly different for non-STEM students looking to do the same.

ThrustVectoring 11y ago
That's my experience with a bootcamp as well. I had the right mindset from attending an engineering school, but no degree / not living in the SF Bay Area / not having the structure and organization to put myself out there. The faculty was also concerned about succeeding through the acceptance filters - if they couldn't make less prepared students successful, then expanding in order to accept more students is a really poor choice.

jypepin 11y ago

So... I'm biased because I did a bootcamp. I think the comparison of bootcamp vs 4years CS degree is not very apple to apple, because well, you compare on 1 side people who almost "discovered" programming 3 months earlier to people who have been studying it for 4 years + most of the time have had internships etc. What I can say tho, is that, for junior positions (I guess one of the points of the article) those bootcampers can be 1. very good and productive, and because of the nature of the bootcamps, 2. usually very motivated and eager to learn, get feedback etc. So if you are willing (and have resources) for some extra mentoring, bootcamps can be a very good additional pool for hiring (since hiring engineers is very hard is most places) and can be very good long term for your company. I joined a YC startup after my bootcamp and continued to work my ass off there for a year (during work, and after work to continue to learn CS concepts etc.) and I think I can say I was successful there. I had good mentoring despite our size (3-4 engineers at most) but I eventually became a good asset to the company. After 1 years, the company was sold and I needed to find a new job. I did well on multiple interviews, both startups and big cos (facebook and co) and am now very successful at a top startup in the bay. You just need to expect what is expectable - I remember when I did my bootcamp, I was never promised to get a CS degree in 3 months - I was promised to learn the basics I would need to 1. be hirable at a junior level and 2. learn how to learn, to be able to figure things myself and continue growing. That's what I got from it. I think everything's the same - if you are motivated and driven to be successful, you'll be successful, if not, cruising through both a CS degree or a bootcamp won't do it. I've interviewed hundreds of people, from bootcamps, new grads, masters, phds, experienced people, and people from each background have done from bad to great.

laredo 11y ago
Couldn't you have done it using Internet, books, video tutorials, etc.?
- leesalminen 11y ago
  I did, as I'm sure many here have as well. However, not everybody has that kind of self motivitation. Some people need that $30k expenditure to keep their wandering minds in check when the going gets tough at the beginning. I remember my first paid experience coding...was reading/learning 6+ hours every day on top of the project itself.

tracker1 11y ago

Software development is not the same as Computer Science... Even then, it's a small part of STEM, and beyond that, how much shortage is there, really? In the end, I've seen far better results from self-starters that try than graduates with C.S. degrees that don't. I think that there is a lot of arrogance in the software industry, and it tends to do far more harm than good. It bubbles certain mindsets and pushes out others. In the end, it does little for what's being worked on, and when good enough solutions that work are displaced by "best" solutions that come out months/years late and/or outright fail. In the end, you can get a LONG way with pragmatic choices... you can go even further, with consistently simpler ones. The more complex something is, the more likely it is to fail when you need it to grow the most. Time and time again, people just don't see this. I've been guilty of it myself. You don't need a C.S. degree, or a bootcamp, and honestly, if you do, you're probably not enough of a self starter to actually be productive, help and work with a team checking your ego at the door anyway. I'm guilty of this myself at times. But the debate is pretty silly. Nobody should go six figures into debt for a job that starts out at less than six figures. And nobody should expect to master anything in much less than a couple years. What often bugs me more than anything is institutional resistance to anything new. Okay, going to sign off this messy rant... I just find the whole debate the article makes irritating, as it's the people more than the process that determine success.

npx 11y ago
I like to think that software can actually be perfect, and that "good enough" is the mortal enemy of excellent. I agree regarding arrogance, though... I think it's insane to imagine that the insertion sort (for example) is somehow more innovative than the plane, train, automobile, or combine. I think that you can actually get very far in terms of educating yourself with the materials and tools that are now publicly available. I'm currently spending a lot of time doing this, so I suppose it's an axiom that I've accepted. https://github.com/hypoalex/machine_learning/blob/61d6729489cfa9d68bcd585bae692627304e0f1d/classes/MIT/18.01/lectures/lecture_1.ipynb https://github.com/hypoalex/machine_learning/blob/61d6729489... For instance, I personally find Jupyter Notebooks many times more useful than traditional course notes. They're executable, they can be revisited and expanded upon, and they're actually used commercially... so you're killing many birds with one stone. It would be a very different world if the first thing you learned in high school was version control and Python, but it might actually be one worth living in.

gearoidoc 11y ago

The content of programming boot camps will eventually be moved to high school curriculums (I'm not sure if they currently do this in North America or not). This will be a good thing. Students who were somewhat interested in programming (but not so much after delving into it) will have picked up some basic skills. Those who were very much interested in it will have to take less of a 'leap of faith' when it comes to a third level course.

mrdrozdov 11y ago

Why wouldn't we want to train people to do the jobs that are being outsourced? Especially when the jobs that are being outsourced can be critical to a business and provide valuable experience to the workers that take them on? Gigs that I've heard are being commonly outsourced: machine learning (usually NLP), android development, QA (typically related to frontend)

analognoise 11y ago

I'd hire an enthusiastic person with an associate's degree in computer science before I hired someone from a coding bootcamp. Why not just get the AS?

LoSboccacc 11y ago

This problem is more than a decade old http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool... and doesn't seems the quality of those bootcamp improved meanwhile.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

lloyd-christmas 11y ago

Maybe I'm reading too much into these articles, but it seems like people think that the individuals taking these bootcamps are all ex-baristas. I took one, and most people had several years of high-professional work experience, many of whom had undergraduate degrees in STEM. My current boss is our lead architect with more than 20 years of programming experience. He has an undergraduate degree in neuroscience. My father is a physician/oncology researcher. He has an undergraduate degree in physics. Skills are transferable, especially within the entire STEM bubble. > “You emerge from a bootcamp fit to do an oil change, but not design a car,” You emerge from an undergraduate degree with a permission slip to join the professional world. Undergraduate CS degrees aren't 5 year engineering programs. They are just your average bachelors like the rest of them. Your major is a demonstration of what you were interested in during college, not whether or not you're capable of being a a contributing member of an industry. The vast majority of the fundamental career knowledge is learned within your first two years. A couple years into my career in finance, my coworkers with English Literature degrees were impossible to differentiate from those with Finance degrees (those that made it that far). The reason isn't because the Finance major was entitled or less capable. It's because the two were equally capable, and the general industry knowledge plateau comes quickly before you start working towards some specialization.

Turing_Machine 11y ago
"Undergraduate CS degrees aren't 5 year engineering programs." It depends on where you go, really. Undergraduate "CS" programs are all over the place, ranging from programs that might be better called "IT", to ones that are basically just specialized math degree. A good marker, IMO, is whether the program requires a compilers course that actually requires that the student implement a compiler. Of course, I would say that, of course, since mine did. :-) It also required enough math that I could've gotten a dual degree in math by taking (IIRC) two more courses. I was in calculus-based physics and ODE right there with the engineers, too. Where the programs diverged was when they started taking statics and dynamics (after physics), and I started taking compilers, theory of computation, and stuff of that nature.
- lloyd-christmas 11y ago

carlosnunez 11y ago

I think a bootcamp is pretty useful for someone who has no experience in development and wants to obtain it in a relatively short time frame. Teachers come to mind here. Many of them encounter a LOT of difficulty when they try to find jobs outside of education. Many, many companies completely discount their experience regardless of the length of time they've spent in the profession. This essentially means that teachers who've been in the system for a while and are becoming disillusioned with it are almost forced to restart their career; this is very painful for those that have many, many years in the game. A bootcamp is a great way of getting the experience needed to restart their career into a well-paying industry (for now). Yeah, they don't learn Big O or discrete math, but they do learn how to write an app that will make their founders a LOT of money if it sells, and that's worth a lot. BTW: A lot of high-falutin places (like Jane Street, which I worked at a few years ago) care much more about your experience and what you've done than where you came from (at least on the development side of the house, which pays handsomely compared to market; the trading side still heavily recruits from the Ivies). I remember them hiring a few Hacker School type devs, and if they survived our interview process, that means they HAD to be good.

acomjean 11y ago

This isn't entirely new. When I graduated in the mid nineties a lot of friends that took non technical degrees (history, english, psychology) did temp work and got "certificate" at a university which helped them secure work. They ended up doing pretty well. Of course the tech economy was just starting to take off back then....

aczerepinski 11y ago

I went to a bootcamp, and I think people are way too fixated on the three month thing. You have to write code to get accepted to a decent school, so the students on day 1 are definitely not "straight out of Starbucks." For me it was 2-3 months of full-time study while I applied and got the school lined up (including pre-curriculum while I waited for my cohort to start). The program itself was three months of intense 50-60 hour weeks. Then I continued studying full time for a month until I got a job. So by the time I showed up to work, I had put in ~7 months of full time coding. Since then, I've still been going hard, as have most of my classmates. I've been working in two languages that I didn't learn at school, and using a third one in my side projects. Nine months removed from school, I still spend a lot of my free time studying whatever looks interesting to me at frontendmasters/egghead/pluralsight. I read a lot about programming, and listen to 5-10 podcasts each week on my commute. At some point the three months I spent at a bootcamp or the four years somebody else spent in a CS program are irrelevant. How passionate are you, and how hard are you willing to work?

nedwin 11y ago
As with all things, YMMV. Keen to hear if you think you're an average example of your cohort or in the top x%.
- aczerepinski 11y ago
  I was definitely in the top x% for some values of x. :) Kidding aside, I definitely wasn't the best or the worst in my class. The variance from best to worst was pretty large, but that's obviously going to be true for traditional CS degrees or anything else in life as well.
- d2xdy2 11y ago
  I recently finished out a stint at General Assembly's Web Development course in Atlanta. I'm definitely not an average example of my cohort, though I would like to say that prior experience I brought in really drove up the "average" for many of my peers. Of a class size of 17 people, many of us had jobs lined up before we finished while several were / are still taking time to "get ready"; There was only one who sort of remained clueless during the cohort, but in spite of that they have worked very hard to keep up in class. The coding required to get into GA was minimal, and the interview beforehand was not very difficult-- the person I mentioned who was generally clueless actually blew through the admissions process (better than I did, in fact). I'm not sure where it's appropriate to set that barrier to entry, especially given that most of the early material caters to someone with very limited knowledge-- it would have been interesting to see a course targeted at someone who already has a foundation in basic web technologies. Living in Atlanta, I've had the opportunity to speak with grads of many other bootcamps both in Atlanta and on the West coast. The biggest difference I really notice is between people who were able/willing to work those 60/70 hour weeks to gain as much as possible and those who couldn't/wouldn't.

methehack 11y ago

A tiny bit off topic, but I keep thinking there should be a "Software Development" degree separate from a "Computer Science" degree. Less (but some) math, more process and communication. Lots of code. Bootstrap programs seem great as an accelerator for folks who are inclined to otherwise be self-taught (of which there are lots). Others would make great developers, want a little more time or standard academic environment, but don't want all the math.

_delirium 11y ago
A lot of schools have a Software Engineering degree, which is more development and process oriented. Not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, but it's one alternative to a CS degree.

hugh4life 11y ago

I went to a top 5 CS university and liked what I received(and it wasn't too expensive with instate tuition), but I honestly think my time would have been better spent with something like Pluralsight(& similar) + newsgroup of fellow learners moderated by mentors + Github. I don't like the idea of boot camps unless there's some follow through but I think it's very important for there to be good alternatives to the 4-year CS degree path.

rbkarbka 11y ago

I attended a bootcamp and was fairly unimpressed by the curriculum and general quality of teaching. The absolute biggest advantage of a bootcamp was that it held my feet to the fire. For the most successful students, it was pretty clear that the bootcamp was (pedagogically at least) not responsible for their success, rather mostly providing a space and opportunity to the kind of group work that is difficult to do alone. At the same time, people are very arrogant about their CS degrees. I was very successful as a student in a non-technical field and it's honestly amusing that a student in a giant CS department at a random public university would think that they have a competitive advantage against someone like me in the workplace simply because they have a technical degree. CS majors don't have a monopoly on smarts and 95% of enterprise software development is honestly not rocket science.

yomly 11y ago

This will always be a divisive subject and my opinion will likely be equally divisive. For the record, I took a bootcamp over doing a master's in CS: the clincher for such a decision came when an engineer friend at a tech unicorn said he'd take a smart bootcamper over a regular CS grad on the basis that from hiring experiences: - you don't use most of the stuff you learn from CS at work (when was the last time you proved root two was irrational, or used red-black trees on the job?) - a bootcamper will write cleaner code and is less likely to have some of the stereotypical traits engineers are prone to having (e.g. takes feedback badly/doesn't communicate well/takes feedback badly) he attributes this to the more diverse pool of people boot camps attract To be frank, I think the aversion to bootcampers primarily stems from individuals' need to validate their own life choices thinking things like "I studied CS for four years to become a Software Engineer so how could someone come close to playing catch up in 3 months!?" But really this style of thought is flawed - people underestimate the fundamental value of doing a degree, which teaches you way more than just knowledge. Think how much less developed you were intellectually coming out of high school than post college. With that said, it's also probably true that there are plenty of bootcamp graduates out there with an inflated sense of worth and companies that have hired/rejected poor bootcampers and now have a set opinion about bootcamps. To these people it's worth noting that bootcamps have only been around for a couple of years, and as is the case in any good startups, the product improves as the companies grow and mature and have time to iteratively improve it. Graduates from a bootcamp today are probably of appreciably higher quality than they were back then.

mitchty 11y ago
> - you don't use most of the stuff you learn from CS at work (when was the last time you proved root two was irrational, or used red-black trees on the job?) Used them yesterday in fact. Then again, using red black trees and knowing when you need to isn't uncommon in kernel programming. I'd couch this more: you generally don't need to care about using red-black trees. Until you do need them that is. The key is knowing and realizing when that time has come. Just thought I'd put my $0.02 in on that one as it is both my opinion and experience.
- dagamer34 11y ago

49531 11y ago

As a former instructor at a bootcamp, there are some massive pros to the bootcamp model, but low quality programs will typically produce low quality producers. Our program spent a considerable amount of time setting career expectations and preparing for interviews. High performing students would regularly find themselves landing mid-level software engineering jobs based on their interview performance, but we would try to maintain the expectation that an internship or a Jr dev position was really great. We saw some of our competitors get torn apart by past students who's expectations were higher than the reality of being a bootcamp grad. You can't tell someone they're going to make 100k/yr after 12 weeks of learning to code. People believe you, buy into your bullshit, and get burned. With so many bootcamps popping up, consumers have a lot of resources and choices to find a good program. Low quality programs are slowly being edged out by the market. It's becoming more competitive, which I think is good. Bootcamps aren't a silver bullet, but they help a lot of people get on a trajectory of a successful engineering career. They also help with diversity, a lot of folks can't afford to get a CS degree, whether it's because they have an aversion to crippling debt, or they're a single mother who has to work full-time, or they just don't thrive in a university-style environment. I know a lot of really unique engineers that wouldn't have been able to have the careers they do without a bootcamp.

BWStearns 11y ago

> They don’t have the fundamentals to pick up a new set of tools and technologies. Will they be bootcamping every 3 years? Programming professionally requires constant learning even when your stack remains roughly the same. No one survives professionally on the strength of memorized rails g commands, and even if one did you'd have to be insane to want to. I'm sure some people muddle through bootcamps who really don't have the desire or ability to always be learning, but, at least at quality schools, they're in the minority. (Disclosure, I'm a bootcamp product who had previously been learning on my own)

Apocryphon 11y ago

Honestly, it's only a matter of time before bootcamps are made specifically for teaching the basics of algorithms and data structures, with an emphasis on acing interviews. Seems like the sort of cram school/career "consulting" that would naturally develop from the semi-dysfunctional interview process that tech has. And such a program would be beneficial not only for people without CS degrees, but also CS majors as well.