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I study CS as UC Berkeley. If you want to be a web developer, a mobile developer, a product engineer, or something like that, go to a bootcamp. That, and then g

I study CS as UC Berkeley. If you want to be a web developer, a mobile developer, a product engineer, or something like that, go to a bootcamp. That, and then getting 2-3 years of work experience is a much better deal than studying CS in college, even Berkeley, and even if you get scholarships. But I would like to point out that many of these criticisms don't apply to top schools like Berkeley. Berkeley's intro-CS classes are all taught by lecturers - and the lecturers are given tenure (e.g. people evaluated solely on teaching). As a result, I have had a nearly-uniformly-positive experience with the quality of teaching in CS - extending to and especially professors who are also leading researchers. There are also more areas than buildings apps. If you're interested in distributed systems, robotics, machine learning, finance, etc., then going to a great CS school like Berkeley is a fantastic choice. There is truly cutting-edge, industry-leading work being done in distributed systems, computer architecture, machine learning, deep learning, and databases at Berkeley, and that undergrads are able to contribute to.

jfaucett 11y ago
I think your assertion that you need to study at a higher education institution to do something besides building apps sadly true. That statement however has nothing to do with whether or not the form of education at colleges is better than bootcamps at training individuals to become good at some task set X. It does say something about the barriers to entry in those other fields. For instance in robotics, money for hardware, access to cutting-edge research and journals are the minimum requirements for anyone interested in jumping into that field, and this jump is made easier for students who have access to all of this via their university. I would hypothesize that the form of intense applied study that bootcamps offer is better suited than the traditional 4 year CS degree for training individuals in any field, whether that be research in theoretical computer science or building a distributed database system, mainly because of the higher degree of specialization, applied project based approach, and dedicated mentor based guidance in the bootcamp model. This topic is fascinating. I think we have so much more space for vastly improving the output of the education process at every level of the system. But I think a lot of improvement domains will depend on the degree to which we can alter and manipulate the current status quo in industry and the system itself.
- brianchu 11y ago
  Okay, I agree in the abstract that "intense immersive study" is a better form of education than any other. This is really obvious. But the breadth and depth of knowledge required in the areas is huge. (e.g. for distributed systems, you'd ideally understand things at all levels of the computing stack - OS, networking, databases, C/C++, data structures, algorithms, some basic discrete math). This could easily require a "bootcamp" to be a year long. Would it really be a bootcamp then? Also, the world experts in all those areas are at research universities. Now, it's true you could probably offer them a lot of money to teach bootcamp courses, but one of the best routes to developing skills in these areas is to do actual research in these fields. Research takes a long time (> 1 year), so this goes back to my original point.

jfaucett 11y ago

I think your assertion that you need to study at a higher education institution to do something besides building apps sadly true. That statement however has nothing to do with whether or not the form of education at colleges is better than bootcamps at training individuals to become good at some task set X. It does say something about the barriers to entry in those other fields. For instance in robotics, money for hardware, access to cutting-edge research and journals are the minimum requirements for anyone interested in jumping into that field, and this jump is made easier for students who have access to all of this via their university. I would hypothesize that the form of intense applied study that bootcamps offer is better suited than the traditional 4 year CS degree for training individuals in any field, whether that be research in theoretical computer science or building a distributed database system, mainly because of the higher degree of specialization, applied project based approach, and dedicated mentor based guidance in the bootcamp model. This topic is fascinating. I think we have so much more space for vastly improving the output of the education process at every level of the system. But I think a lot of improvement domains will depend on the degree to which we can alter and manipulate the current status quo in industry and the system itself.

brianchu 11y ago
Okay, I agree in the abstract that "intense immersive study" is a better form of education than any other. This is really obvious. But the breadth and depth of knowledge required in the areas is huge. (e.g. for distributed systems, you'd ideally understand things at all levels of the computing stack - OS, networking, databases, C/C++, data structures, algorithms, some basic discrete math). This could easily require a "bootcamp" to be a year long. Would it really be a bootcamp then? Also, the world experts in all those areas are at research universities. Now, it's true you could probably offer them a lot of money to teach bootcamp courses, but one of the best routes to developing skills in these areas is to do actual research in these fields. Research takes a long time (> 1 year), so this goes back to my original point.