9 ms·

As someone who interviewed dozens of bootcampers I can give some insight. 1) Most of the bootcamps teach the basic of front-end, and a lot of them, teach by do

• curun1r 9y ago
  > The best developers I worked with are the self-taught guys/girls who learn on their own before they even hit the college I think this is the crux of the issues I had with bootcamp candidates. They were reasonably strong in the areas that they'd been taught, but there were gaping holes in their knowledge wherever they hadn't been taught. They could explain how to build a site with a Node backend and an Angular front end, but they couldn't explain why any of the decisions they'd been taught were good ones. And there were fairly basic concepts that were completely alien to them...of the 20 or so I interviewed, not one had even heard the term 'load balancer', let alone could tell me why I might need to use one. They had no notion of 'threading' or what it meant for a piece of code to be 'thread-safe' because they were only taught Node and its concurrency model. Even then, not one of them had heard of 'nextTick' or understood the event loop beyond the fact that it would call their callback function with the results. Their experience felt like a facade that was designed to seem impressive than it actually was. And all the areas where a developer with a traditional background would have thought, 'huh...I wonder how that works?' and then spent 2 hours figuring it out were completely unexplored. This is why I think developers coming out of college are significantly more likely to be better at software development...not necessarily because the education they got in school was better, though I do believe an education starting with first principles and teaching you to figure out the solution from there is a better approach, but because the people that choose to study that in school are self-selecting for curiosity in the subject. They're the ones that hit something they don't know and go learn it rather being told what to learn. And they're the ones that spent at least 2 years following those tangents to get a more well-rounded education. Because any developer who only knows what they've been taught in courses, be they bootcamp or a traditional CS degree, is not going to have what it takes to learn on the job.
  • arenaninja 9y ago
    I recently wrapped up teaching a bootcamp course. In the timeframe for teaching bootcamp students, there's no realistic way to cover load balancers or teach the event loop holistically You underestimate the time a self-taught developer would spent figuring these things out. I'm self taught, and though I think nothing of it I easily spend 4 hours on trivial things -- it had never mattered until family obligations made it obvious that I needed to cut down since I was also teaching on top of my full time job. I started teaching the bootcamp precisely because I disagree with the mentality that junior web developers need to understand load balancers or the event loop or any number of other things. These things WILL come to experience, and all you need to get started is grasp the basic syntax and be able to follow the execution path of anything you write. It's a job, as much as people like to believe that it's a craft, and many other people are fully capable of doing this job even if their decisions look different from our own. Most of my students are at the same place I was when I landed my first Jr role, a handful (about 20% of the class) are far ahead of that point.
    • curun1r 9y ago
      See my reply (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15104346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15104346) to another comment for a fuller answer, but briefly... I'm not impugning bootcamps or claiming you should be teaching those concepts. I'm claiming that it takes years of independently exploring and learning concepts to be qualified for this kind of work. Most of the developers I hire and work with have been doing this kind of exploration since they were teenagers, if not before that. By the time Node, Angular or most of the technologies taught in these bootcamps came out, they would be comfortable reading docs and just figuring it out and wouldn't need a bootcamp to teach it to them. It's an unrealistic expectation to think that people can go from zero to professional in such a short time. I honestly don't care if a junior developer knows those concepts. What I care about is that they know something other than what they were taught in the bootcamp. Show me some independent exploration that you did that wasn't required for the bootcamp which leads me to believe you can do more of it. I can pair a junior up with a more senior developer some of the time, but most of the time they're going to have to flail around and try to figure it out by themselves and I want to know that they can do it based on nothing other than documentation, trial and error rather than needing their hand held.
• tudelo 9y ago
  The most boring category is interesting... I might fall in to that category. Any advice to be "less boring"?
  • mikegerwitz 9y ago
    Do you want to be less "boring"? Do you work well on your team (if you're on one)? Are you valued by your team/company? Are you worried about future job prospects? If you're happy with your current situation, forcing a change isn't going to suddenly make you interested in those changes. If you have legitimate interests, explore them. If you don't, see what catches your eye here on HN and other places and read up on them, seeing if anything naturally does.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • phatbyte 9y ago
    I didn't mean to say ALL of them obviously, I just meant to say that a lot of devs who only learned to code in college, usually don't code for fun, just code to get the job done. By no means are they bad programmers, in fact they are good coders, they just lack curiosity and some creativity. Is like IBM vs Apple in the 70s if you know what I mean :P
• vonmoltke 9y ago
  > A lot of the students are in for the money, not for the love of the job. Who cares? Can they do the job or not? Do they have the work ethic and professionalism to continue to do so? The vast majority of people, including those who excel at their respective fields, don't love their jobs. This industry needs to stop using "passion" as a lazy signal for work ethic. > The most boring developers I work with, the the ones who only learn to code while in college and never developed any interested to learn before that. Again, who gives a shit if they are "boring"?
  • model_m_warrior 9y ago
    > Again, who gives a shit if they are "boring"? Me.
  • ghaff 9y ago
    This also comes back to broader discussions about programmers needing to have worked on this stuff since they were kids. Perhaps uniquely among STEM subjects. No one expects a chemical engineer to have done anything other than to have enjoyed and done well in high school chemistry prior to college or to have chemical engineering "side projects."
    • jasode 9y ago
      >Perhaps uniquely among STEM subjects. No one expects a chemical engineer to have done anything Computer programming as a self-motivated hobby is not unique in this. Many electrical engineers started playing with electronics as kids (e.g. disassembling radios, wiring up homemade amps, etc). Many mathematicians "play" with math as kids before they go to college and get a teaching/research position. (E.g. Andrew Wiles was 10 when he was captivated by Fermat's Last Theorem.) Many biologists and zoologists when they were kids had a keen interest in nature and animals (beyond the typical children's "dinosaurs are cool" stage). Same for astronomy.
      • ghaff 9y ago
        Yes, there's often a level of interest beyond "Hey, I liked this class in high school." But I'd still argue that the computer science space is unique in that there's a fairly widespread expectation (as seen in these threads) that it's expected to be some sort of passion indulged in since childhood. To the degree that a lot of today's university CS programs don't effectively accommodate those without previous experience. As a mechanical engineering major undergrad, I can assure you that I had no particular experience in the area prior to college.
• aczerepinski 9y ago
  A 93% failure rate is absurdly high, and probably more indicative of an inadequate hiring process than "bootcamp grads are all dumb lolz". Are there any examples you could share of relevant interview questions that this group faked their way through, but later were revealed to not understand? Have the hiring managers since been mentored on how to do a better job vetting candidates?
  • phatbyte 9y ago
    This was more than 2 years ago, I don't work there anymore. But to my best recall, the interview process was pretty straightforward, mostly revolved around basic programming knowledge (we knew we were aiming at junior devs). Basic programming questions (what is an object, an array, etc..), a few question on to approach a particular problem and lastly they were presented with vanilla JS file, with bugs and things that could be improved. No algorithms, or data structures or complex problems to solve. Something that I would include if these were fresh college grads or senior developers with extensive background. Again, I didn't mean to call anyone dumb, I don't think these people are dumb at all, they were just bad/fast trained.
    • dcole2929 9y ago
      >> presented with vanilla JS file, with bugs and things that could be improved. Uhhh that's really difficult in js even for experienced devs. Way too much non deterministic behavior. I hope this exercise came with tests and a working debugger.
• calvinbhai 9y ago
  I agree with all the points you made, except for a part of the third one. This "started coding in middle/high school or college" is a misleading metric since it assumes everyone has equal access and support to learn that way. As some one from India who never had own computer until finishing college (the early 00's), along with no internet or cell phone, I find it hard to accept/respect those people who gloat about how early they started coding. I always assume there are thousands of kids in the US who were/are not as lucky as the kids who started coding while they were in their diapers. People/companies in US love to talk about their efforts to fix diversity, but without fixing this attitude of "earlier you learn, better you are" attitude, no amount of throwing money will fix it for the true diversity candidates.
  • aczerepinski 9y ago
    It's also unfortunate that everyone defaults to measuring the years that have elapsed since someone's first line of code, instead of hours invested. "N years experience" loses value as a measuring stick when there are probably 2 orders of magnitude separating how much code the most passionate and least passionate developers wrote in that time frame.
  • atom-morgan 9y ago
    > but without fixing this attitude of "earlier you learn, better you are" attitude This mindset seems to work rather well for more objective areas like athletics. I don't see any reason why an intellectual pursuit like programming would be any different.
    • cossatot 9y ago
      Athletes need to start early because they peak early (20s for most sports). Architects do their best work very late in life. I personally wouldn't want a surgeon that started cutting into people at age 9.
    • sn9 9y ago
      Many of the greatest programmers in history started programming in adults. See anyone you can think of from the 60s and 70s like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.
• 0xfeba 9y ago
  I agree with 3, the disclaimer being that I myself am self-taught. However, in college and now 7 years later in my career the best problem solvers I met were self-taught. My senior project lead, who's younger than me, doesn't have a CS degree like me but constantly impresses me by his breadth and width of knowledge--more than my own in many cases. For almost everyone else I've worked with it's just a job. No Github account, no personal projects, no dev environment setup on any home computer.
• acjohnson55 9y ago
  For #3, I know a lot of people who started this way and then used a bootcamp to build modern skills. To me, that's a really solid combo. Having a bootcamp be your first intro to the field is a much tougher road.
  • ryandrake 9y ago
    This is a cool idea. Even though I've got close to 20 years under my belt, I could almost see myself going to one of these bootcamps simply to quickly update my skills to today's New Hotness (web development or ML). Wonder if it would actually be useful.
• otakucode 9y ago
  I went to a smallish private university and in the first year, there were about 50 people who intended to go for a CS degree. By year 2, there were about a dozen left. Every single one that said 'I heard there were good jobs in it' was gone. CS and writing code is not like many different arenas in that if the homework takes you 8 hours to understand, then it takes you 8 hours to understand. If you don't understand it, it is an order of magnitude more difficult to 'wing it' or get 'partial credit' when there is absolute proof of your lack of understanding with non-compiling or non-functional code. I studied CS and Philosophy. I could phone in a philosophy paper if I wanted. I could not phone in a linked list implementation. I know companies loathe the idea like no other, but software engineering is a skill that is difficult for most people to acquire and is likely to remain that way. Mostly it boils down to peoples understanding and value they place on logic. Anyone with a good grasp on, or even just a high value for logic, can learn to code. No one who sees logic as 'nitpicking' can learn to build systems that function predictably, reliably, and accomplish a defined goal.
  • _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
    Funny, I also studied CS and philosophy and always though it an execellent combination, most people I talk to find it odd.
    • ma2rten 9y ago
      PG also did that. Maybe that's why he's so good at writing essays.
    • harwoodjp 9y ago
      Nothing to add but I did CS/Phil also. I think they complement each other nicely.
      • JBlue42 9y ago
        I think it's also why I have friends that did Philosophy before going to Law School. Despite what was said above, good philosophy papers do take some rigor of thought.
• hashkb 9y ago
  I taught at a boot camp; can confirm you are right.
• whipoodle 9y ago
  Hell, I've been doing this for 13 years (professionally, more like 20 total) and at this point I only care about the money too. Everything else about this industry is not great, honestly.
• orclev 9y ago
  As someone who both interviewed bootcampers, and also partnered with a local bootcamp (IronYard) this is pretty much exactly my experience. The bootcamps can take someone who had an interest in programming before hand, and give them a fast leg up to get into programming professionally, and that's great. But the vast majority of people in these programs are just there because they heard you can make a lot of money as a programmer and have no real interest, or talent with programming, and it shows in their work.
  • GrinningFool 9y ago
    India had similar code academy type institutions in the 90s (don't know if they still do) and they gave pretty much the same results. A very small percentage who "get it" and could think their way through a logical problem in a logical way; and a majority - those there strictly to find the path to a well-paying job - who could write code to the exact specification you provided, but with no independent thought. Only difference is that then, the token technologies used for study were out of MS's desktop stack. Source: worked with lots of outsourcing/offshore partners out of India during that time... edit: I should also add that in the US the same could be observed: uptick in CS grads who only started out in it for the money, had no real interest in the actual building blocks they were given -- and were predictably uninspired in the workplace. The percentage of 'good' programmers was higher, but that was only because there was a 4-year barrier to entry vs ~16weeks-1yr for the tech schools in India.
• YCode 9y ago
  A bit off topic, but what skills should front-end web developers be working on right now?
  • vanadium 9y ago
    That's too broad a question; you'd need to specify "front-end developers" in the context of their primary focus, first. Are they game developers? Are they working on enterprise apps? Are they working on lead-gen landing pages for marketing companies? Data visualization? Accessibility-focused? etc... Front-end is becoming increasingly specialized to a degree.
    • YCode 9y ago
      Enterprise apps and data visualization if you prefer, but I was actually curious about the broader answer for web.
• fdafellow 9y ago
  I believe you are the creator of codebugapp and 3dheap. Both of these links go to nowhere. Just curious what happened.
• nemo3141 9y ago
  Do you still interview front end developers? It is absurd that, as a bootcamp grad, I am trying to get a potential opportunity from you in a thread that vilifies bootcamps but I wanted to give it a try anyway. I do have some experience and a decent portfolio. I would love to provide links and resume if you could shoot me an email at timon.park@yahoo.com