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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

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
  > It also required enough math that I could've gotten a dual degree in math by taking (IIRC) two more courses That's my point. I did a double major in Math/Econ with a minor in Applied Statistics. I could have switched 2 courses away from my Econ major and instead received a minor in CS. There are countless boot-campers that just didn't take enough 300 level courses to put it on their resume. Looking back on my degree and my career so far, I can't say I've used the phrase "generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity" in a context other than a joke or in conversations exactly like this. That's from Stats-3xx time series analysis. I worked as an equities trader for the first half of my career before switching to programming. It's harder to get more time-series analytical than that. Who uses that phrase? The PhD econo-quants and risk managers who spent a bit more time studying it than the 2 weeks I went over it in an alcohol filled second semester of my senior year. I'm simply saying, undergraduate degrees aren't much more than a rubber stamp. Sure, you may have learned more about data structures than I did. We both probably took some form or another of graph theory, linear algebra, algorithm design, etc. What you learned in a semester of data structures, I'm sure I learned 95% of it in a year on the job. Similarly, if you decided to go into finance, I'm sure you could pick up all the meaningful parts of macroeconomics in a year. Because that information is USEFUL in the day-to-day. If you decided to apply to a job as an equities trader, you wouldn't be dismissed because you don't know how to implement a model you will never use.* * unless, of course, you decide to work towards being a quant. In which case, you'll probably know more about it than I do in 2 weeks. * poof *, there goes the value of my undergraduate degree.

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
> It also required enough math that I could've gotten a dual degree in math by taking (IIRC) two more courses That's my point. I did a double major in Math/Econ with a minor in Applied Statistics. I could have switched 2 courses away from my Econ major and instead received a minor in CS. There are countless boot-campers that just didn't take enough 300 level courses to put it on their resume. Looking back on my degree and my career so far, I can't say I've used the phrase "generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity" in a context other than a joke or in conversations exactly like this. That's from Stats-3xx time series analysis. I worked as an equities trader for the first half of my career before switching to programming. It's harder to get more time-series analytical than that. Who uses that phrase? The PhD econo-quants and risk managers who spent a bit more time studying it than the 2 weeks I went over it in an alcohol filled second semester of my senior year. I'm simply saying, undergraduate degrees aren't much more than a rubber stamp. Sure, you may have learned more about data structures than I did. We both probably took some form or another of graph theory, linear algebra, algorithm design, etc. What you learned in a semester of data structures, I'm sure I learned 95% of it in a year on the job. Similarly, if you decided to go into finance, I'm sure you could pick up all the meaningful parts of macroeconomics in a year. Because that information is USEFUL in the day-to-day. If you decided to apply to a job as an equities trader, you wouldn't be dismissed because you don't know how to implement a model you will never use.* * unless, of course, you decide to work towards being a quant. In which case, you'll probably know more about it than I do in 2 weeks. * poof *, there goes the value of my undergraduate degree.