7 ms·

Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies

• meeper16 10y ago
  The title to this is excruciatingly obvious...
• pmorici 10y ago
  "Average starting salary: $74,447." So they are paying them less than they would a recent college grad by something like 25%? no wonder they love hiring people out of these things.
  • ghaff 10y ago
    I think you have a somewhat distorted view of the average starting salary of a college graduate: http://www.naceweb.org/s11182015/starting-salary-class-2015.aspx http://www.naceweb.org/s11182015/starting-salary-class-2015....
    • asdfologist 10y ago
      What do you mean? I learned from HN that $150K/year is the poverty line. Surely the average salary much be much higher.
    • pmorici 10y ago
      Sure, but in the sentence right before that it talks about the companies hiring the graduates that are based in SF and NYC and these camps are put on in those cities so I'm assuming you don't go to these boot camps and then take a job in Kansas.
      • chamakits 10y ago
        For what it's worth, when I started working in NYC in 2011 in a prominent company, I started at 65K, having graduated from a traditional college with a Computer Engineering degree. Not saying it was a good salary, but not all college graduates start at the ludicrously high salary people keep seeing posted online.
        • JustUhThought 10y ago
          2nd this. Grad degrees provide a substantial boost, but not everyone can afford the debt and opportunity costs associated with a masters. Sadly, most of those that can, are in a better financial situation (family) to begin with.
  • mdolon 10y ago
    I think this average takes into account salaries in other states as well, not just CA and NYC (where junior devs do make higher starting salaries). We've hired people fresh out of bootcamps at companies I've worked at in the past and in most cases, we offered them salaries pretty close to that of a recent grad.
  • argonaut 10y ago
    After 3.75 years of work experience, most of them will almost certainly be making more than a recent college grad.
  • danso 10y ago
    My first job in NYC was at a non-profit as a web dev with far more skills than what anyone could learn from a boot camp (I have a comp engr degree) and made substantially less than the posted average. I still a managed to live comfortably in Manhattan. For people coming in who may be stuck in sub-$60K jobs, $10K to $15K in 10 weeks to be elevated to an a new income bracket doesn't seem unreasonable, when comparing it to the cost of going back to college.
• Animats 10y ago
  "The Flatiron School’s 12-week course costs $15,000, but earns students no degree and no certificate." Over $1000 a week per student, and their classes look big. Somebody is making lots of money off this. What do they pay their instructors?
  • argonaut 10y ago
    A semester of tuition at a top-50 private university is $20-25k. Seems reasonable.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • gaius 10y ago
      NEITHER of them "seem reasonable"!
      • pyre 10y ago
        Maybe comparable was the word the parent post was searching for.
      • argonaut 10y ago
        It's reasonable from several different angles. Economics: The goods are priced lower than the competition. You don't negotiate prices against yourself. ROI: as aianus mentions. Affordability: it's about the same cost as a car, and lots of people own cars.
      • aianus 10y ago
        $15k is two to three months salary after you graduate and get a job. The ROI is off the charts.
• skewart 10y ago
  > Flatiron, a for-profit school, has seized on a clear need in the economy that some academic experts say reveals a failing among traditional universities. Teaching highly specialized skills currently in demand has not traditionally been the mission of universities. In professions like architecture and medicine there is an expectation that new graduates won't have much in the way of practical knowledge about current practices, and so apprenticeships are more or less built in to the transition from student to practitioner. Is a disinterest in teaching current professional practice really a failing of universities? It seems more likely that bootcamps are simply a way for software firms to outsource part of the apprenticeship process. Most of the people who go to good bootcamps already have strong university educations and would likely have been able to be hired into junior dev roles anyway without the bootcamp.
  • twblalock 10y ago
    > Most of the people who go to good bootcamps already have strong university educations and would likely have been able to be hired into junior dev roles anyway without the bootcamp. That depends on how much programming experience they have. Many boot camp attendees have college degrees in non-technical majors and have no coding experience at all. A boot camp is a way to get coding experience in a structured environment that has credibility with employers. In the view of many companies, self-taught coders don't have that level of credibility, even when they have decent Github portfolios or other proof that they can program.
    • skewart 10y ago
      Interesting. I wonder if that necessity for lending credibility is a somewhat recent thing. Perhaps the popularity of bootcamps makes people who recently got into coding and didn't attend one look worse - companies might assume they couldn't get in to a decent one? I'm a developer who didn't study CS in undergrad, and I didn't have a problem getting job offers when I was starting out several years ago, self taught and unproven. But bootcamps weren't really a thing back then.
      • bdcravens 10y ago
• gaius 10y ago
  When Apple Inc., for example, announced in 2014 a new programming language for its products, Swift, Flatiron adjusted its curriculum within days I don't see how this is possible, who is teaching this course? How do you go from 0 to instructor-level expert in "days"?
  • adamnemecek 10y ago
    You know already know the frameworks, a third of swift is ObjC with better and more concise syntax. And it's not like Swift didn't get inspiration from other languages. Even though the combination was novel, the single ingredients were usually from somewhere. (Don't take it as a jab at Swift, it's probably my fav language + environment for app development). You might not be writing idiomatic Swift from the get go but no one is at that point.
    • tschwimmer 10y ago
      > You might not be writing idiomatic Swift from the get go but no one is at that point. I think that's kind of the point the parent comment is making. How can a school acting in good faith open Swift classes if it's impossible for anyone to actually be an expert on it?
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
        Relax. All they need to do is teach, not be experts. I asked the same of a MechE friend who used to teach AutoCAD at a community college despite not having known it before. His answer? I just need to stay a week ahead of the class.
        • gaius 10y ago
          $1000/week seems alot to be taught by such a guy, IMHO. A student could do that for free, from Apple's website, and be only one week behind where they would be. So Flatiron is charging $15k for a one week head start!
• JustUhThought 10y ago
  Another instance of tech thinking it did it first. In the rest of the economy, we call these "trade schools".
• partycoder 10y ago
  A coding camp graduate can be considered with respect to a computer science graduate what a paralegal is to a lawyer, or what a nurse is to a doctor. They can perform some procedures, but not all of them, and at some point there might be supervision. Now to be fair, paralegal and nursing programs take much longer than 12 weeks, are very strict and are regulated occupations that require a license that you can actually lose under certain circumstances. Their purpose is to provide extra productivity and cost efficiency, but at some point they might require supervision and some procedures might exceed the skills learned during their training.
  • twblalock 10y ago
    Some of the best engineers I have worked with did not learn CS in college, or even in a boot camp. They learned on the job. Some programmers want to believe that computer science is harder than it really is, because it inflates their egos. CS is not as difficult to learn as law, or medicine, or electrical engineering, or many other disciplines for which self-taught practitioners are exceedingly rare. Furthermore, I've seen new hires with graduate degrees in CS fail interviews horribly, or get hired and produce horrible crap, while new self-taught hires have outperformed them significantly. A degree is no guarantee of any skill level, which is unfortunate.
    • partycoder 10y ago
      An abridged definition of engineering is "applying science to create technology". A software engineer applies computer science to create software based technologies. Under that definition you worked with programmers not engineers. Then, true. You might have worked with programmers that seemed productive and learned on the job. But much of that learning happened at the expense of exposing the company and the customers to great risk. For instance, if you are manipulating financial information, and you don't know what a floating point number is, you are eventually going to have a bad time. If you don't understand concurrency and parallelism, you might end up corrupting important data, if you are suffering networking issues and everything you know is HTTP at a high level... you are going to have a bad time. And the list goes on and on and on. Friendly software development technologies were created to augment productivity, not to release people from the responsibility of knowing what is going on with them. Now to your point, it is clear that not all computer science programs focus in producing highly-qualified software engineers. But that doesn't mean that you can simply skip the fundamentals.
• dbla 10y ago
  I used to work for a coding bootcamp (not Flatiron) and made good money with a month off in between each of the three classes I taught each year. I eventually left because it felt like I was complicit in selling a lie. I totally agree with the article. Students graduating from a bootcamp are definitely not "job ready" without additional training / mentorship. Three months is just not a lot of time to acquire all of the good instincts that you naturally learn over years of doing development. Also the number of junior developers coming out of these bootcamps, combined with graduates from traditional CS programs is way more than the Bureau of Labor statistics suggests that the job market can bear and I saw these effects in action. Each class I taught had a harder time finding jobs than the one before, despite being more qualified on average. That's not to say bootcamps are not worth it for anyone. There are some really good ones out there that honestly want to help improve peoples lives. The catch is that the students that have the most success are not the ones who come in knowing nothing. The most successful students have spent months (if not years) of dedicated self study. The bootcamp acts as a way to fill in some gaps and provide confidence in the job hunt.
  • partycoder 10y ago
    I used to work for the admissions department of a private university (not in the US). Private universities were mostly focused in enrolling as many people as possible, while not being particularly worried about the market needs at all. Back then, our educational system produced an excessive number of attorneys and kinesiologists, leaving many of them in disadvantage at the moment of looking for jobs. Many of them switched to other occupations for very low wages, something that did not release them from the obligation of paying student loans.