6 ms·

A lot of bootcamp / self-trained devs went into front-end JS for the money. Now that it's saturated, time to move onto the next buzz word. A foundation of CS fu

by seibelj 10y ago

A lot of bootcamp / self-trained devs went into front-end JS for the money. Now that it's saturated, time to move onto the next buzz word. A foundation of CS fundamentals will still be lacking.

thatwebdude 10y ago
u mad, bro?
- seibelj 10y ago
  The same thing happened in the 90's, my coworker's sister got a "Certificate in HTML" and promptly found a job for $80k in 1998. These people wash out, I've been burned enough times by bootcamp grads that I won't hire them anymore
  - thatwebdude 10y ago
    I've never found myself not knowing what I should do, or threatened by a hiring/skills bubble. When I stopped feeling like I was getting anywhere with front-end I started to take on more back-end projects and sell myself as a full-stack developer. I've never been in a situation where I've felt "man, I really should have gotten a CS degree": but what do I know; I'm just a web developer. Maybe we're not talking about web developers? No advanced engineering skills have been required to make the frontends/backends/architect a system for Fortune 500s and local businesses that I've been involved with. (I'm speaking of things I would have learned in school with CS and math principles had I been able to get past CS 101). -- college dropout with successful programming career.
  - thatwebdude 10y ago
    About how long did it take for the washout to occur? Wanted to know for my own financial planning.
    - seibelj 10y ago
      It is 100% possible to be an ace developer without a CS degree. However years of hiring experience has made my bullshit detector ring alarms with self-taught / bootcamp guys. If they have a hard-science degree it's less risky. Honestly I don't bother interviewing these people anymore without a warm introduction, it's hard enough to find good devs and the ratio of good to bad is so much worse with the self-taught crowd.
      - tonyedgecombe 10y ago
        My bullshit detector is ringing bells as well.
  - i-machine-learn 10y ago
    You are over generalizing. I am a bootcamp grad who specialized in undergrad in electrical engineering. I worked for a few years as a research for the one of the top tech universities in the country; I have found that I have a stronger math and physics background than many CS grads. However, many times when doing something I have been stopped by saying "wait aren't you a bootcamp grad? can you even understand this?" I'm not alone; my bootcamp had plenty of STEM majors. One of colleagues was a biomedical engineer and worked in a research lab and now works in the front end at a top firm in SF. Another was a math major at an Ivy before working full stack. The top guy at my bootcamp went to Berkeley in Biochem and was way way smarter than me. So stop generalizing. I understand that they are unaccredited institution so you get a wide variance of talent but you can't shit on everyone. To be honest, your issues probably in how you screen talent. My current company has found success in hiring bootcamp and top schools in the area (Berkeley, Stanford).
    - seibelj 10y ago
      Yeah people with hard science degrees and/or from top schools, I'm less skeptical about. The guy who was a waiter 3 months ago and now saying he's a software engineer, very concerning.
    - biocomputation 10y ago
      How is he over generalizing? It's just a very simple fact that 90% of the bootcamp grads can't program their way out of a paper bag. In fact, most self-trained programmers are vastly better than even the best bootcamp graduates. The problem with bootcamp grads is that they don't know what they don't know. And they don't know a lot. Undoubtedly some of them will turn out to be great programmers, but not after 3 months. Or even 6. Or even a year.
      - thatwebdude 10y ago
        I wasn't under the impression we were separating bootcamp from self-taught. I took them both to mean "no formal schooling" and "self-taught". In my brief experience with I.T. training; some knowledge already had to be assumed.
allyelsey 10y ago
You say "for the money" like it's a bad thing. A job is where you trade labor for money, no need to foist anything else onto it.
- seibelj 10y ago
  It's great to do jobs for money, I just think programming isn't something you can pick up in an afternoon and be good at, like mowing lawns or making sandwiches. I can't trust the journeymen for high tech jobs, maybe for editing wordpress or something.
throw_fraud_dev 10y ago
I'm a self trained dev (aka horrible person?) who's spent the last 8 years doing back end dev work - mostly C#, Java, Python and now Scala in everything from SV startups to a government research lab. Either I'm an outlier, or you're overestimating the importance of those cherished fundamentals (which can be picked up independently of a degree anyhow).
- seibelj 10y ago
  I think 8 years of experience plus solid references and projects speaks for itself. It's a resume that lists a 3 month boot camp, a github full of forked projects with no original commits (plus the obligatory ToDo app in rails), Senior Software Engineer title, $100k salary demand, leaving their first professional programming job after 6 months, can't speak knowledgeably about basic shit like IPC. I don't... have time... for this anymore.
  - i-machine-learn 10y ago
    Can't you just filter this out with an hour coding challenge? I don't even know why you are screening these candidates, the profile you are talking about doesn't even hit our hiring team usually or gets binned within 5 minutes. I really think you have a recruiting process problem.
  - brookside 10y ago
    Posts like this definitely give me a nice flare-up of imposter syndrome. Had not heard the acronym IPC. So I guess I don't even know basic shit. As a bootcamp graduate, what do you want me to ... do? I can't go back in time and major in CS. My employer is satisfied with my work and I build things I'm asked to build independently. Should I give up a startup salary, inflated as it may be, and ship myself off to a CS monastery?
    - seibelj 10y ago
      Hit the books? That's what I do, I'm reading this one for fun now: https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Kernel-Development-Robert-Love/dp/0672329468 https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Kernel-Development-Robert-Love/... It's awesome. I have a library stacked full of software and CS books. Maybe try to get your bachelors at night? I got my master's at night while working. This is a craft. If you want to be an expert, train like an expert. Realize 3 months of a bootcamp isn't going to cut it, not at least until you've been working for 4, 6, 8 years. If you can't tell me what inter process communication is, what it's used for, pipes, signals, etc. then I think you have some pretty big gaps in knowledge that preclude you from being an expert at this point.

by seibelj 10y ago

A lot of bootcamp / self-trained devs went into front-end JS for the money. Now that it's saturated, time to move onto the next buzz word. A foundation of CS fundamentals will still be lacking.

thatwebdude 10y ago

u mad, bro?

seibelj 10y ago
The same thing happened in the 90's, my coworker's sister got a "Certificate in HTML" and promptly found a job for $80k in 1998. These people wash out, I've been burned enough times by bootcamp grads that I won't hire them anymore
- thatwebdude 10y ago
  I've never found myself not knowing what I should do, or threatened by a hiring/skills bubble. When I stopped feeling like I was getting anywhere with front-end I started to take on more back-end projects and sell myself as a full-stack developer. I've never been in a situation where I've felt "man, I really should have gotten a CS degree": but what do I know; I'm just a web developer. Maybe we're not talking about web developers? No advanced engineering skills have been required to make the frontends/backends/architect a system for Fortune 500s and local businesses that I've been involved with. (I'm speaking of things I would have learned in school with CS and math principles had I been able to get past CS 101). -- college dropout with successful programming career.
- thatwebdude 10y ago
  About how long did it take for the washout to occur? Wanted to know for my own financial planning.
  - seibelj 10y ago
    It is 100% possible to be an ace developer without a CS degree. However years of hiring experience has made my bullshit detector ring alarms with self-taught / bootcamp guys. If they have a hard-science degree it's less risky. Honestly I don't bother interviewing these people anymore without a warm introduction, it's hard enough to find good devs and the ratio of good to bad is so much worse with the self-taught crowd.
    - tonyedgecombe 10y ago
      My bullshit detector is ringing bells as well.
- i-machine-learn 10y ago
  You are over generalizing. I am a bootcamp grad who specialized in undergrad in electrical engineering. I worked for a few years as a research for the one of the top tech universities in the country; I have found that I have a stronger math and physics background than many CS grads. However, many times when doing something I have been stopped by saying "wait aren't you a bootcamp grad? can you even understand this?" I'm not alone; my bootcamp had plenty of STEM majors. One of colleagues was a biomedical engineer and worked in a research lab and now works in the front end at a top firm in SF. Another was a math major at an Ivy before working full stack. The top guy at my bootcamp went to Berkeley in Biochem and was way way smarter than me. So stop generalizing. I understand that they are unaccredited institution so you get a wide variance of talent but you can't shit on everyone. To be honest, your issues probably in how you screen talent. My current company has found success in hiring bootcamp and top schools in the area (Berkeley, Stanford).
  - seibelj 10y ago
    Yeah people with hard science degrees and/or from top schools, I'm less skeptical about. The guy who was a waiter 3 months ago and now saying he's a software engineer, very concerning.
  - biocomputation 10y ago
    How is he over generalizing? It's just a very simple fact that 90% of the bootcamp grads can't program their way out of a paper bag. In fact, most self-trained programmers are vastly better than even the best bootcamp graduates. The problem with bootcamp grads is that they don't know what they don't know. And they don't know a lot. Undoubtedly some of them will turn out to be great programmers, but not after 3 months. Or even 6. Or even a year.
    - thatwebdude 10y ago
      I wasn't under the impression we were separating bootcamp from self-taught. I took them both to mean "no formal schooling" and "self-taught". In my brief experience with I.T. training; some knowledge already had to be assumed.

allyelsey 10y ago

You say "for the money" like it's a bad thing. A job is where you trade labor for money, no need to foist anything else onto it.

seibelj 10y ago
It's great to do jobs for money, I just think programming isn't something you can pick up in an afternoon and be good at, like mowing lawns or making sandwiches. I can't trust the journeymen for high tech jobs, maybe for editing wordpress or something.

throw_fraud_dev 10y ago

I'm a self trained dev (aka horrible person?) who's spent the last 8 years doing back end dev work - mostly C#, Java, Python and now Scala in everything from SV startups to a government research lab. Either I'm an outlier, or you're overestimating the importance of those cherished fundamentals (which can be picked up independently of a degree anyhow).

seibelj 10y ago
I think 8 years of experience plus solid references and projects speaks for itself. It's a resume that lists a 3 month boot camp, a github full of forked projects with no original commits (plus the obligatory ToDo app in rails), Senior Software Engineer title, $100k salary demand, leaving their first professional programming job after 6 months, can't speak knowledgeably about basic shit like IPC. I don't... have time... for this anymore.
- i-machine-learn 10y ago
  Can't you just filter this out with an hour coding challenge? I don't even know why you are screening these candidates, the profile you are talking about doesn't even hit our hiring team usually or gets binned within 5 minutes. I really think you have a recruiting process problem.
- brookside 10y ago
  Posts like this definitely give me a nice flare-up of imposter syndrome. Had not heard the acronym IPC. So I guess I don't even know basic shit. As a bootcamp graduate, what do you want me to ... do? I can't go back in time and major in CS. My employer is satisfied with my work and I build things I'm asked to build independently. Should I give up a startup salary, inflated as it may be, and ship myself off to a CS monastery?
  - seibelj 10y ago
    Hit the books? That's what I do, I'm reading this one for fun now: https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Kernel-Development-Robert-Love/dp/0672329468 https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Kernel-Development-Robert-Love/... It's awesome. I have a library stacked full of software and CS books. Maybe try to get your bachelors at night? I got my master's at night while working. This is a craft. If you want to be an expert, train like an expert. Realize 3 months of a bootcamp isn't going to cut it, not at least until you've been working for 4, 6, 8 years. If you can't tell me what inter process communication is, what it's used for, pipes, signals, etc. then I think you have some pretty big gaps in knowledge that preclude you from being an expert at this point.