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Why do people think a 12 week course will make a non-technical person ready for a junior developer role? Most developers I know have years of deep experience w

• stanleydrew 9y ago
  > Why do people think a 12 week course will make a non-technical person ready for a junior developer role? I'm not sure many people do think that. But it was an experiment. If you assume that the tooling around "programming" or "product building" or whatever you want to call it will eventually be good enough that you can slot a generic human into a well-defined role then these bootcamps might make sense. We may get to a point where building software is more like building a car, and we just need humans to work on the factory assembly line. But we're not there yet. So the experiment failed.
  • scriptkiddy 9y ago
    > We may get to a point where building software is more like building a car, and we just need humans to work on the factory assembly line. But we're not there yet. So the experiment failed. I've seen this sentiment being thrown around a lot lately. I don't think it will ever be the case. There will always need to be someone who can build the tools or the tools that build the tools or the tools that build the tools that build the tools. Let's use your auto assembly line idea to illustrate this. A good portion of auto manufacturing these days is completely automated, the body is assembled by robots for instance. Well, a factory had to build those robots, right? That factory probably bought some robot control software from another company who specializes in that. The company that built the robot probably didn't manufacture all of the components for the robot. For instance, their welding robot may have a wire feed spool that was manufactured by a company that builds welders. However, the company that manufactured the spool probably didn't forge the metal themselves, they bought it from a forging company. That company in turn bought ore from a mining company. The mining company mined that ore using an automated tunnel boring machine. The automated tunnel boring machine was built by another company that manufactures automated mining machinery, and the trail starts anew. Somewhere down the line in every industry is an engineer who designs and possibly even builds components that are necessary for that industry to operate. Now, applied to software engineering: Even if we did have software that could automatically build a web application tailored specifically and exactly to what any given company wanted down to website design and SEO, that software would have still need to have been built in the first place. If that software was built by another piece of software and so on up the line, at some point there is a person who built the progenitor. Regardless of who built the original, wouldn't these pieces of software still have bugs? What if these pieces of software involved more software that could fix their own bugs? Well , who fixes the bugs in the bug fixing software? Beyond this, what if there is a new feature that needs to be built out? Will the software be able to build out that new feature and integrate it with the existing application? If so, how will it handle conflicts? As it currently stands, it takes a team of multiple professionals to simply maintain any non-trivial codebase. I don't personally believe that it is possible to design an AI that is powerful enough to do this kind of work without this AI having human levels of intelligence and creativity. In order for this AI to be able to reach this kind of proficiency it would have to be self aware. And then we are forced to ask the question: is self aware AI still AI, or is it alive? We are not ready to answer these questions. Until we are, there will always be a need for flesh and bone engineers of all sorts. That ended up way longer than I intended.
• kemiller2002 9y ago
  >>They just heard that computer programming was good money, and they enrolled. I think this is the biggest possible problem with them. I've known a few people who've gone through it and done well. The different between them and others is that they want to be programmers. The 12 week course didn't teach them everything, but it taught them enough to go and figure out what questions to ask and search for. Those people who are in it for the money are going to burn out, because it takes a lot more dedication than a 12 week course. When I interview interns for the upcoming summer, I always ask the same question, "Why do you want to do this?" They always get this puzzled look on their face, and then I explain to them that dollar per hour, this is one of the lowest paid fields if they want to be successful. You'll end up working nights and weekends, not because of the company you work for (although maybe), but because a lot of developers want to know more. They go home and think about what they did and how to make it better. People who are strictly in it for the money won't do this, and so many of them won't succeed.
  • brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
    Many students don't understand why they go into their chosen fields at first. They say it is "passion for---" when really, it just seems like a stable, responsible profession that their parents approve of. Along the way, hopefully, with the help of fantastic teachers, a true love of the subject emerges, deeper interests within it are explored and uncovered, and a great doctor or lawyer is made. (My own PCP and another surgeon of mine and my dentist are some of these amazing people) There are other versions of this. Artists and musicians who realize they won't make it go into medicine to make money, at their last available second before their ship goes down. The thing is, they learned something from their previous profession... they learned how to really get into a lifelong pursuit with rigor and intensity and invention and purpose. One never loses the need for that once it is activated. These bootcamps are flooded with folks like this- those who crave actual content to sink their mental teeth into, with Actual Masters in the field to help guide them in a more financially (but no less interesting and intellectually worthy) rewarding/viable direction than the direction they had been going in as a performance artist or Morris dancer (the profession they chose as pre-teens). I kid, but seriously. And what do they find at these bootcamps? Decidedly Not That. —No real masters in the field, no deeply engaging content on par with Morris dancing (or Russian Literature, or Political Science, or The Classics, History, or Art), and no hope for anything but the same disrespect upon leaving these "camps" from future employers than they got as Classics MAs or PHDs. They get spat upon like they presented themselves as puppeteers or mimes. This is why the money just isn't coming into these bootcamps anymore. Smart folks hide the bootcamp from their resume, which means they need to hide the associating GitHub repositories (lots of work here, folks). These graduates talk to one another. A lot. They talk about how they are treated at interviews, or even before interviews. They just don't have the money and time to fart around in their new garrett deleting work they have done that might associate them with a bootcamp, making huge portfolios of visually pleasing apps and deeply meaningful contributions to opensource software projects(not that they would not love to do just that, mind you). They need jobs. And they see other barely competent folks working jobs in tech companies who had nothing resembling their education and even coding ability getting paychecks because they got there sooner. That is why they aren't buying the snake oil anymore. It just isn't the "on ramp" these camps make it out to be anymore, even though it seems to have been for a short time. After this thread ages for a day or so, head over to the Twitter feeds of bootcamp CEOs and directors to hear how they describe this thread as being "all anecdotal evidence of a few who "Don't Really Know What IS Going On"" instead of taking this information in... in a meaningful way and making actual change for the students they already have and the ones they hope to get in the future. That costs too much money and time. Money and time they would prefer the students spend. So these students are squeezed on both sides- by the camps who false promise and the employers who want them to arrive job-ready out of the gate. Jumping up and down and saying it ain't so isn't going to make this un-so. I think we need to stop degrading people for wanting a job and calling that "just in it for the money". Everyone does a job "for the money". Why should a worker not want compensation for hard work? Come on! We call those people "artists" don't we? And we know how much they get paid. This isn't heading in a good direction. Let's show some vision.
• rufford 9y ago
  Because being a junior dev isn't very hard. And certainly doesn't require 4 years of education on computer science minutiae
  • gaius 9y ago
    But being a junior dev with the potential to become a senior dev does.
• woodrowbarlow 9y ago
  > To me, the ideal bootcamp student would be the person who dabbles with programming or programming-tangential technologies on the side, but just needs that little extra boost. my theory is that bootcamps exist for these people and take advantage of everyone else in order to stay afloat. now the "everyone else" is realizing what happened and the market is collapsing.
• Kalium 9y ago
  > Why do people think a 12 week course will make a non-technical person ready for a junior developer role? The cynical answer is because they saw an ad telling them that the bootcamp would get them A SIX FIGURE JOB!!! and they want to believe it. It's an incredibly attractive pitch.