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> I worry that if the GI Bill was extended to code schools, we'd see the exact same thing happen again. This is dead on. I am a veteran currently going back to

> I worry that if the GI Bill was extended to code schools, we'd see the exact same thing happen again. This is dead on. I am a veteran currently going back to school for an engineering degree on the GI bill. When I got out of the service I didn't even consider going back to school, and just taught myself how to code and started working as a web developer. Once I made it to the point of working with other software engineers with formal educations in a large firm though, I realized the depths of my ignorance. I hit a wall that no amount of javascript bootcamps or rails tutorials could ever get me past. The fundamental knowledge of math and science that separates engineers from 'coders'. I think the VA is absolutely doing the right thing here by not allowing code schools to take advantage of GI bill money. The industry does not need more coders, it needs more engineers. If these schools were legitimate they would be working in connection with established universities to provide accelerated ABET accredited degrees. You'll notice that the article posted mentioned nothing of the actual long term success rates of these programs, either.

WalterBright 10y ago
> knowledge of math and science Right. You cannot solve engineering problems with programming skills unless you also know engineering, just like you cannot write accounting software unless you know accounting, etc. For another example, if you were coding the Shazam app, a good understanding of undergraduate math is needed to code of the fast fourier transform part. Even more so, one would need that knowledge to even realize that an FFT was the path to a solution.
JamesBarney 10y ago
I agree with you about the VA. But when you say the industry needs more engineers not coders I find this ironic because I have lots of engineering friends who became coders, and no coding friends who became engineers.
z3t4 10y ago
i agree that we need more engineers. but a degree is basically just a proof that you can learn. the real learning begins when you start to work.
CalChris 10y ago
The JC system is awesome. From there you can transfer just about anywhere. We had vets as reentry students at Berkeley. I can't imagine taking a coding boot camp student seriously. And these fly by night schools have a history of fleeing vets.
- throwanem 10y ago
  > I can't imagine taking a coding boot camp student seriously. I felt more or less the same. Then I worked with a few, all second-career starters from a variety of boot camps. Not all were great or even good at what they did - but some, one in particular, were excellent. The latter group seemed to share a degree of native intelligence, drive, and perseverance which didn't seem to occur all together in any of the former. It was almost as though the fact of having graduated a boot camp, by itself, predicted nothing useful at all...
- quaunaut 10y ago
  I didn't go to one, but I'm entirely self-taught. I'd seriously advocate for you to open your mind a bit. I once had a boss that had a very similar attitude to what you're talking about here, and I left the position pretty quickly. And not once have I felt constrained by my lack of degree- if anything, the self-learning put me in a place where I more quickly learn new technologies because I'm more active in starting side projects using them. I understand that one's school is a huge impact on their experience, but don't let it become an implicit endorsement.
gerdesj 10y ago
"it needs more engineers" - absolutely. I'm a small business owner in the UK - IT consultancy. When I'm running through a load of CVs for a technical position I instinctively move the Engineers and Technicians up and the others down the pile. I have other criteria obviously but as a graduate civil engineer myself I appreciate the discipline that an engineering quali brings and the sort of mindset as well (more concrete/steel/timber or bigger plant will fix most problems.) Good on you for being a self-starter and having the perception that there is no short cut to becoming gainfully employable in civvy street (an old UK forces name for the other side) and being prepared to put in the work. I wish you all the best and suspect you will do fine.
ma2rten 10y ago
Many people think that most developers don't actually need CS (and much less math) fundamentals in their every-day work life. That's why coding interviews like big tech companies tend to do are controversial ("Why would an iOS developer need to able to balance a binary tree?"). Can you give some examples where you hid road blocks because of your lack of education?
- gopalv 10y ago
  > Can you give some examples where you hid road blocks because of your lack of education? Not a veteran, but I've noticed something very odd about entry level jobs - they're not challenging. And that is no accident someone hiring you is actually doing that with a clear expectation that the complexity you're about to encounter will fit into their schedules. Higher education is very different - the professors are intentionally trying to push you, hopefully bit-by-bit out of the existing skill range into unknowns. At least mine weren't trying to teach me, they were trying to get me to learn, mostly by making my own stupid mistakes without a huge penalty attached to it. When I moved out of my CS course (and my open-source work building compilers) into my first job, the skill required to do my job satisfactorily was trivial. No more hard problems, just hard timelines. Took a couple of years and changing jobs before again landing up with a problem I didn't know how to solve ("Uh, make PHP5 fast ... Go!"), which helped me grow and learn. That was a lucky break, but I succeeded because my professors had pushed me into the deep end against my wishes (i.e more sleep) before.
- tluyben2 10y ago
  I benefit from my degrees but I would find it annoying if I would get asked questions like that. I design (among other things) crypto algorithms for banking purposes and implement them in a plethora of languages including ARM asm. But balancing a tree? I did that in an exam on paper 22 years or something ago. I would be able to do it given enough time but I probably would just walk out. 20 odd years ago when I was a cocky and already quite experienced coder, I would have done it easily but, although already having done many real life projects, I was a crap coder. And, due to the strangeness of the market and the scarcity back then, my current freelance salary in Europe, is not too different from what it was then. My feeling is still that those questions are pointless unless you want people straight out of uni. And then they already did their exams with those questions, so again pretty pointless...
narribbi 10y ago
> The fundamental knowledge of math and science that separates engineers from 'coders'. Only math. Furthermore, someone with years of coding instinctively develops such mathematical understanding, while the very same understanding will be lost on someone who just graduated, but has never coded.
- quaunaut 10y ago
  This has been my experience. Frankly, coding made it easier to understand the math, and absolutely none of it was complicated when I did finally get to it.
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  > Furthermore, someone with years of coding instinctively develops such mathematical understanding FWIW, this isn't my experience. I have a CS/math background, spent the first few yrs of my career at Google, and then moved to a startup as the first employee. We had a lot of difficulty sourcing good candidates, and our first two hires were 1) a guy with no engineering experience and domain knowledge that had programmed during his Master's (and had some useful domain knowledge) and 2) an engineer with ten years of experience. I supported the first guy's hire and the second guy was hired against my recommendation. The first guy hasn't yet had occasion to put his actual specialty to use, and yet after a month of some pretty hands-on guidance to teach him basic engineering habits, he is pretty much crushing it. He's dependable, he's creative, he's hardworking, he can implement stuff quickly but also think about the big picture: he's certainly exceeded even the fairly high expectations that I had of him despite having no eng experience and relatively limited programming experience. I had the exact same experience with a math PhD who worked under me at Google: he was hopelessly unproductive for the first month or two (Google is really, really, REALLY shitty at ensuring that new hires with potential get the guidance they need). I noticed this and took him under my wing to teach him the basics of engineering (which are truly not very difficult to learn) and in a month or two he was one of the best engineers on our team. Our other hire is.....the opposite of all of that. He's basically been reduced to the only thing he's shown himself able to handle: he spends two days working on okay-to-have changes on the margin that no one really needs but that I could've taken care of in half an hour. 90% of the time he ends up breaking stuff that I have to spend 20 minutes fixing anyway. TL;DR: my experience has been that there are certain skills and ways of thinking (and perhaps innate talent? I dunno) that are incredibly useful for engineering that some people go years and years and years in industry without ever acquiring or strengthening. On the flipside, someone with these capabilities can become a solid engineer in very little time. Good CS and math depts tend to instill or select for pretty much exactly this set of skills, in my experience. The main gap they have is a set of best practices for being a little more meticulous about their code, and this is shockingly easy to teach.
dalacv 10y ago
What about learning something like bubble.is?
- dalacv 10y ago
  I have this course. I'd be willing to provide free coupons to vets https://www.udemy.com/bubble-course/learn/v4/ https://www.udemy.com/bubble-course/learn/v4/

WalterBright 10y ago

> knowledge of math and science Right. You cannot solve engineering problems with programming skills unless you also know engineering, just like you cannot write accounting software unless you know accounting, etc. For another example, if you were coding the Shazam app, a good understanding of undergraduate math is needed to code of the fast fourier transform part. Even more so, one would need that knowledge to even realize that an FFT was the path to a solution.

JamesBarney 10y ago

I agree with you about the VA. But when you say the industry needs more engineers not coders I find this ironic because I have lots of engineering friends who became coders, and no coding friends who became engineers.

z3t4 10y ago

i agree that we need more engineers. but a degree is basically just a proof that you can learn. the real learning begins when you start to work.

CalChris 10y ago

The JC system is awesome. From there you can transfer just about anywhere. We had vets as reentry students at Berkeley. I can't imagine taking a coding boot camp student seriously. And these fly by night schools have a history of fleeing vets.

throwanem 10y ago
> I can't imagine taking a coding boot camp student seriously. I felt more or less the same. Then I worked with a few, all second-career starters from a variety of boot camps. Not all were great or even good at what they did - but some, one in particular, were excellent. The latter group seemed to share a degree of native intelligence, drive, and perseverance which didn't seem to occur all together in any of the former. It was almost as though the fact of having graduated a boot camp, by itself, predicted nothing useful at all...
quaunaut 10y ago
I didn't go to one, but I'm entirely self-taught. I'd seriously advocate for you to open your mind a bit. I once had a boss that had a very similar attitude to what you're talking about here, and I left the position pretty quickly. And not once have I felt constrained by my lack of degree- if anything, the self-learning put me in a place where I more quickly learn new technologies because I'm more active in starting side projects using them. I understand that one's school is a huge impact on their experience, but don't let it become an implicit endorsement.

gerdesj 10y ago

"it needs more engineers" - absolutely. I'm a small business owner in the UK - IT consultancy. When I'm running through a load of CVs for a technical position I instinctively move the Engineers and Technicians up and the others down the pile. I have other criteria obviously but as a graduate civil engineer myself I appreciate the discipline that an engineering quali brings and the sort of mindset as well (more concrete/steel/timber or bigger plant will fix most problems.) Good on you for being a self-starter and having the perception that there is no short cut to becoming gainfully employable in civvy street (an old UK forces name for the other side) and being prepared to put in the work. I wish you all the best and suspect you will do fine.

ma2rten 10y ago

Many people think that most developers don't actually need CS (and much less math) fundamentals in their every-day work life. That's why coding interviews like big tech companies tend to do are controversial ("Why would an iOS developer need to able to balance a binary tree?"). Can you give some examples where you hid road blocks because of your lack of education?

gopalv 10y ago
> Can you give some examples where you hid road blocks because of your lack of education? Not a veteran, but I've noticed something very odd about entry level jobs - they're not challenging. And that is no accident someone hiring you is actually doing that with a clear expectation that the complexity you're about to encounter will fit into their schedules. Higher education is very different - the professors are intentionally trying to push you, hopefully bit-by-bit out of the existing skill range into unknowns. At least mine weren't trying to teach me, they were trying to get me to learn, mostly by making my own stupid mistakes without a huge penalty attached to it. When I moved out of my CS course (and my open-source work building compilers) into my first job, the skill required to do my job satisfactorily was trivial. No more hard problems, just hard timelines. Took a couple of years and changing jobs before again landing up with a problem I didn't know how to solve ("Uh, make PHP5 fast ... Go!"), which helped me grow and learn. That was a lucky break, but I succeeded because my professors had pushed me into the deep end against my wishes (i.e more sleep) before.
tluyben2 10y ago
I benefit from my degrees but I would find it annoying if I would get asked questions like that. I design (among other things) crypto algorithms for banking purposes and implement them in a plethora of languages including ARM asm. But balancing a tree? I did that in an exam on paper 22 years or something ago. I would be able to do it given enough time but I probably would just walk out. 20 odd years ago when I was a cocky and already quite experienced coder, I would have done it easily but, although already having done many real life projects, I was a crap coder. And, due to the strangeness of the market and the scarcity back then, my current freelance salary in Europe, is not too different from what it was then. My feeling is still that those questions are pointless unless you want people straight out of uni. And then they already did their exams with those questions, so again pretty pointless...

narribbi 10y ago

> The fundamental knowledge of math and science that separates engineers from 'coders'. Only math. Furthermore, someone with years of coding instinctively develops such mathematical understanding, while the very same understanding will be lost on someone who just graduated, but has never coded.

quaunaut 10y ago
This has been my experience. Frankly, coding made it easier to understand the math, and absolutely none of it was complicated when I did finally get to it.
wutbrodo 10y ago
> Furthermore, someone with years of coding instinctively develops such mathematical understanding FWIW, this isn't my experience. I have a CS/math background, spent the first few yrs of my career at Google, and then moved to a startup as the first employee. We had a lot of difficulty sourcing good candidates, and our first two hires were 1) a guy with no engineering experience and domain knowledge that had programmed during his Master's (and had some useful domain knowledge) and 2) an engineer with ten years of experience. I supported the first guy's hire and the second guy was hired against my recommendation. The first guy hasn't yet had occasion to put his actual specialty to use, and yet after a month of some pretty hands-on guidance to teach him basic engineering habits, he is pretty much crushing it. He's dependable, he's creative, he's hardworking, he can implement stuff quickly but also think about the big picture: he's certainly exceeded even the fairly high expectations that I had of him despite having no eng experience and relatively limited programming experience. I had the exact same experience with a math PhD who worked under me at Google: he was hopelessly unproductive for the first month or two (Google is really, really, REALLY shitty at ensuring that new hires with potential get the guidance they need). I noticed this and took him under my wing to teach him the basics of engineering (which are truly not very difficult to learn) and in a month or two he was one of the best engineers on our team. Our other hire is.....the opposite of all of that. He's basically been reduced to the only thing he's shown himself able to handle: he spends two days working on okay-to-have changes on the margin that no one really needs but that I could've taken care of in half an hour. 90% of the time he ends up breaking stuff that I have to spend 20 minutes fixing anyway. TL;DR: my experience has been that there are certain skills and ways of thinking (and perhaps innate talent? I dunno) that are incredibly useful for engineering that some people go years and years and years in industry without ever acquiring or strengthening. On the flipside, someone with these capabilities can become a solid engineer in very little time. Good CS and math depts tend to instill or select for pretty much exactly this set of skills, in my experience. The main gap they have is a set of best practices for being a little more meticulous about their code, and this is shockingly easy to teach.

dalacv 10y ago

What about learning something like bubble.is?

dalacv 10y ago
I have this course. I'd be willing to provide free coupons to vets https://www.udemy.com/bubble-course/learn/v4/ https://www.udemy.com/bubble-course/learn/v4/