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"While coding boot camps had many course listings on JavaScript, Ruby, and web development, they had none that covered product management, wireframing, cloud co

"While coding boot camps had many course listings on JavaScript, Ruby, and web development, they had none that covered product management, wireframing, cloud computing, DevOps, or Agile methodologies" I have a 4 year computer science degree and I didn't learn any of the listed topics either, so I'm not sure if the article is implying that other institutions do prepare new grads for these topics. The main advantage I see from bootcamps is that you basically code intensely for 4 months, learn the most important stuff to be productive (at least in small scale) right away, and then you're able to tackle more in depth topics by yourself.

jonny_eh 9y ago
Exactly. They're failing not due to curriculum, but the business model and cash flow.
nonconvergent 9y ago
Ditto on the CS Degree. Closest thing I learned to the above skills that was part of the curriculum was Waterfall, UML, and making ERDs. Had to teach myself git.
- graphitezepp 9y ago
  I taught every single person I was on a group project with git, all the way up through senior year. My familiarity with it came from a damn hackathon of all places. It's actually gross how source control was just not a concept taught at all in the program.
- leo79 9y ago
  You joking right? I got my cs degree 15 years ago and back then i learned Waterfall, UML, and making ERDs...
  - ericmcer 9y ago
    It is still the same people teaching the courses probably.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- koolba 9y ago
  Did git exist at the time you were in school? Or are you using it as a generic term for an SCM?
- QuercusMax 9y ago
  Sounds like my Software Engineering class I took in ~2002. One of the few CS classes I got a B in (totally my fault). Almost 100% BS. About the only useful thing in UML are interaction diagrams. Everything else is a stupid waste of time.
nartz 9y ago
My opinion is extremely biased, but the article seems retarded to call these out as any reason why these people are not getting jobs - an author who doesn't know what they are talking about. "DevOps" is not something you just "teach" to someone who knows 0 about writing software let alone how computers work. Most of these roles today require knowledge of at least a programming language like ruby (Chef), python (ansible), etc. You dont 'teach' cloud computing either imho. Sure, you can point students to the Amazon CLIs or Web UI Console (or others). Maybe technologies like kubernetes or otherwise would be in this blanket 'cloud computing' (orchestration?) umbrella, but I would imagine very much outside the scope of a bootcamp. Agile Methodologies? I mean really? Someone drank the koolaid. =D
amrrs 9y ago
What they do in bootcamps is really good, a lot better than what they do in college. But the problem is what they charge and what they promise! Most people join bootcamps because they either want to pivot or they want a better job and that comes with a huge cost in everyone's life. If people join bootcamps purely for educational purposes then bootcamps are perfect, but people join there to up themselves. Bootcamps charging huge fees fail to well defined free MooCs
- rufford 9y ago
  I think all paid education as we know it fails to well-defined free MooCs. It's just a matter of credibility and the lack of Georgia Tech-level free MooCs at this point
Stranger43 9y ago
IT Operations have always been a apprenticeship system where you progress from servicedesk towards manager as your career progresses, and project management, cloud computing, devops etc is operations not development skillsets. An in a lot of ways the current problem is that outsourcing have killed the pipeline from college drop-out to sys-admin by way of the call center. as the call centre have now been outsourced to people far away in companies with no upward career path. The boot camp industry were never about fixing the operations pipeline problem, but to fix the problem of how to turn domain specialist into programmers something it largely failed at by being way to valley and app centric.
- Bucephalus355 9y ago
  Wow I never realized this. The current CEO of the company I work for actually started out as a help desk operator in Arizona and worked himself up to CIO. Now he has started several companies and is very successful and is the reason I have a job now. Very sad to have lost that pipeline.
jzymbaluk 9y ago
Really? I graduated this year from a state school with a degree in CS and we covered a lot of this stuff. Software Engineering was a required junior/senior level course where we had a semester-long group project where we had to self-organize using Agile methods, and we were grade on our user stories and . I took a senior-level elective course on product management, and we covered cloud and warehouse computing in computer architecture class. We also started using git in our very first programming course, where we had to turn in our code using a central repository. What year did you graduate, out of curiosity?
- panopticon 9y ago
  Not OP, but I graduated from a state university with a degree in CS just over 6 years ago, and we didn't get much in the way of process education. Couple of slides on development processes in a sophomore class and certainly no source control usage for class work (most instructors accepted assignments as zip archives). In the group project classes I took, the instructors were only concerned with the final results. The process, tools, etc were left to the individual groups to decide.
- daotoad 9y ago
  I graduated in 1996, we didn't do any of the work related stuff. We learned algorithms, datastructures, programming in imperative, OO, functional and declarative mode, numerical methods, discrete maths, operating systems, computability theory, and all the CS stuff. SDLC is one of those things that every company seems to do a bit differently. Even if you are the GOD of SCRUM THEORY AND PRACTICE, most likely you'll wind up on a team that is kinda vaguely following scrum. Or more likely they've got a fish-ladder process with lots of little waterfalls that they call agile. Good luck effecting change, especially if you're straight outa school. At best Agile methods provide an epistemology for project planning and estimation. At worst, it's a bunch of behaviors to mimic and terms to incant to justify bad or lacking processes.
- aecorredor 9y ago
  I graduated this year, Summer 2017. For example, my curriculum also required Software Engineering I, which was comprised of a full semester group project. The problem was that it was all waterfall, we spent the whole semester talking about the theory behind waterfall and how to do UML, and talking about architectures that were pretty outdated (we didn't even get to talk about MVC in detail, and don't even think about microservices). We had to do a bunch of documentation with UML about our classes, etc, which all seemed very abstract and like a time waste when comparing it to the actual rails app we had to code. We ended up coding the web app in 4 days with ruby and rails, and didn't even need all the docs to get that MVP. There was a cloud computing elective course which I planned on taking, but it was never offered in any of the semesters that I could have taken it (basically my last year). Wireframing was not even close to being covered in any course. Git I had to learn completely by myself, which isn't a major problem since it's not that bad tbh. Product management, again, not even close to being covered. And, agile, we did cover it in the senior project course, but in reality it was a very vague scrum process, where I'm 100% sure most of the students didn't get the whole purpose of it. Luckily for me I had done an internship in a pretty enterprisy and big company which already had a pretty mature scrum process set up, so I got to learn the benefits from them. I guess what I'm saying is, I feel like most of the stuff I know today about computer science/programming I learned on my own, and not because of my CS degree. I guess that going for a CS degree just helped me in the sense that it actually made me say "hey, this is gonna be you're career, so you better get serious and get into it", which in turn made me start learning a whole lot of more on my own. So, in a sense, I feel that a coding bootcamp can do the same, for a whole lot less money, and in a whole lot less time.
mizchief2 9y ago
With my 4 year software engineering degree I learned c++ and java which I never used professionally. But I also learned about data structures, assembly, OS design, QA, OOP, design patterns, software project management, etc. as well as physics, chemistry, calculus, psychology, literature, etc. Learning the syntax of the current hot language over 4 months is not an equivalent to deep understanding of CS or just good problem solving in general learned over 4 years.

jonny_eh 9y ago

Exactly. They're failing not due to curriculum, but the business model and cash flow.

nonconvergent 9y ago

Ditto on the CS Degree. Closest thing I learned to the above skills that was part of the curriculum was Waterfall, UML, and making ERDs. Had to teach myself git.

graphitezepp 9y ago
I taught every single person I was on a group project with git, all the way up through senior year. My familiarity with it came from a damn hackathon of all places. It's actually gross how source control was just not a concept taught at all in the program.
leo79 9y ago
You joking right? I got my cs degree 15 years ago and back then i learned Waterfall, UML, and making ERDs...
- ericmcer 9y ago
  It is still the same people teaching the courses probably.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
koolba 9y ago
Did git exist at the time you were in school? Or are you using it as a generic term for an SCM?
QuercusMax 9y ago
Sounds like my Software Engineering class I took in ~2002. One of the few CS classes I got a B in (totally my fault). Almost 100% BS. About the only useful thing in UML are interaction diagrams. Everything else is a stupid waste of time.

nartz 9y ago

My opinion is extremely biased, but the article seems retarded to call these out as any reason why these people are not getting jobs - an author who doesn't know what they are talking about. "DevOps" is not something you just "teach" to someone who knows 0 about writing software let alone how computers work. Most of these roles today require knowledge of at least a programming language like ruby (Chef), python (ansible), etc. You dont 'teach' cloud computing either imho. Sure, you can point students to the Amazon CLIs or Web UI Console (or others). Maybe technologies like kubernetes or otherwise would be in this blanket 'cloud computing' (orchestration?) umbrella, but I would imagine very much outside the scope of a bootcamp. Agile Methodologies? I mean really? Someone drank the koolaid. =D

amrrs 9y ago

What they do in bootcamps is really good, a lot better than what they do in college. But the problem is what they charge and what they promise! Most people join bootcamps because they either want to pivot or they want a better job and that comes with a huge cost in everyone's life. If people join bootcamps purely for educational purposes then bootcamps are perfect, but people join there to up themselves. Bootcamps charging huge fees fail to well defined free MooCs

rufford 9y ago
I think all paid education as we know it fails to well-defined free MooCs. It's just a matter of credibility and the lack of Georgia Tech-level free MooCs at this point

Stranger43 9y ago

IT Operations have always been a apprenticeship system where you progress from servicedesk towards manager as your career progresses, and project management, cloud computing, devops etc is operations not development skillsets. An in a lot of ways the current problem is that outsourcing have killed the pipeline from college drop-out to sys-admin by way of the call center. as the call centre have now been outsourced to people far away in companies with no upward career path. The boot camp industry were never about fixing the operations pipeline problem, but to fix the problem of how to turn domain specialist into programmers something it largely failed at by being way to valley and app centric.

Bucephalus355 9y ago
Wow I never realized this. The current CEO of the company I work for actually started out as a help desk operator in Arizona and worked himself up to CIO. Now he has started several companies and is very successful and is the reason I have a job now. Very sad to have lost that pipeline.

jzymbaluk 9y ago

Really? I graduated this year from a state school with a degree in CS and we covered a lot of this stuff. Software Engineering was a required junior/senior level course where we had a semester-long group project where we had to self-organize using Agile methods, and we were grade on our user stories and . I took a senior-level elective course on product management, and we covered cloud and warehouse computing in computer architecture class. We also started using git in our very first programming course, where we had to turn in our code using a central repository. What year did you graduate, out of curiosity?

panopticon 9y ago
Not OP, but I graduated from a state university with a degree in CS just over 6 years ago, and we didn't get much in the way of process education. Couple of slides on development processes in a sophomore class and certainly no source control usage for class work (most instructors accepted assignments as zip archives). In the group project classes I took, the instructors were only concerned with the final results. The process, tools, etc were left to the individual groups to decide.
daotoad 9y ago
I graduated in 1996, we didn't do any of the work related stuff. We learned algorithms, datastructures, programming in imperative, OO, functional and declarative mode, numerical methods, discrete maths, operating systems, computability theory, and all the CS stuff. SDLC is one of those things that every company seems to do a bit differently. Even if you are the GOD of SCRUM THEORY AND PRACTICE, most likely you'll wind up on a team that is kinda vaguely following scrum. Or more likely they've got a fish-ladder process with lots of little waterfalls that they call agile. Good luck effecting change, especially if you're straight outa school. At best Agile methods provide an epistemology for project planning and estimation. At worst, it's a bunch of behaviors to mimic and terms to incant to justify bad or lacking processes.
aecorredor 9y ago
I graduated this year, Summer 2017. For example, my curriculum also required Software Engineering I, which was comprised of a full semester group project. The problem was that it was all waterfall, we spent the whole semester talking about the theory behind waterfall and how to do UML, and talking about architectures that were pretty outdated (we didn't even get to talk about MVC in detail, and don't even think about microservices). We had to do a bunch of documentation with UML about our classes, etc, which all seemed very abstract and like a time waste when comparing it to the actual rails app we had to code. We ended up coding the web app in 4 days with ruby and rails, and didn't even need all the docs to get that MVP. There was a cloud computing elective course which I planned on taking, but it was never offered in any of the semesters that I could have taken it (basically my last year). Wireframing was not even close to being covered in any course. Git I had to learn completely by myself, which isn't a major problem since it's not that bad tbh. Product management, again, not even close to being covered. And, agile, we did cover it in the senior project course, but in reality it was a very vague scrum process, where I'm 100% sure most of the students didn't get the whole purpose of it. Luckily for me I had done an internship in a pretty enterprisy and big company which already had a pretty mature scrum process set up, so I got to learn the benefits from them. I guess what I'm saying is, I feel like most of the stuff I know today about computer science/programming I learned on my own, and not because of my CS degree. I guess that going for a CS degree just helped me in the sense that it actually made me say "hey, this is gonna be you're career, so you better get serious and get into it", which in turn made me start learning a whole lot of more on my own. So, in a sense, I feel that a coding bootcamp can do the same, for a whole lot less money, and in a whole lot less time.

mizchief2 9y ago

With my 4 year software engineering degree I learned c++ and java which I never used professionally. But I also learned about data structures, assembly, OS design, QA, OOP, design patterns, software project management, etc. as well as physics, chemistry, calculus, psychology, literature, etc. Learning the syntax of the current hot language over 4 months is not an equivalent to deep understanding of CS or just good problem solving in general learned over 4 years.