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They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

301 points by pfortuny 7y ago

shiburizu 7y ago
I find it very important to analyze cases like these when CEOs sound off about how you shouldn't need a degree to work in the industry. These code camps have no credibility.
- y4mi 7y ago
  But... You really don't need a degree for most programming work I've seen at my day job? It's basically just creating various APIs in order to wrap them into some service you can sell. You can do most of that with maybe 1 year of coding at home. Though code review should be done at least in the beginning to make sure the produced code is maintainable
  - learc83 7y ago
    There's some truth to that. There definitely is plenty drudge work that can be done by supervised noivices. But I think we tend to overestimate how much of our jobs that work entails, and what exactly can be done independently. A master carpenter can have an apprentice do most of the physical work, but the apprentice is still very much working under the master and relying on them to guide their work. Good bootcamps can prepare someone to be an apprentice, but we shouldn't pretend 12 weeks is enough to produce a useful employee. And it's not a wholesale replacement for a degree. Good graduates are going to have at least as much practical experience as good bootcamp graduates from internships, hackathons, personal projects, group projects etc... Plus they are going to have significantly more theoretical knowledge. Even more "professional" jobs like lawyer and capital E Engineer can be learned throughout apprenticeship, so there is value there. But we should stop acting like our profession is just hooking up wires. Other professions aren't nearly as self effacing as we are, it's like we've all internalized the disdain that upper management feels for us because of the power that we hold.
    - y4mi 7y ago
      well, our chief architect at my day job (with a degree) "designed" a system with several points of failure, each of which would kill the whole platform if even one of them failed. honestly, a degree really doesn't show competence -- nor does experience from what i've seen. Its clearly hard to create a fault tolerant system, but its just as hard to quantify what makes people able to do just that
      - mcguire 7y ago
        Would it have made a difference if your architect had to take personal, professional, and financial liability for the system?
      - learc83 7y ago
        Yes, incompetent credentialed, experienced Engineers, surgeons, plumbers, programmers etc... exist. >honestly, a degree really doesn't show competence -- nor does experience from what i've seen. Its clearly hard to create a fault tolerant system, but its just as hard to quantify what makes people able to do just that Of course, but in experience hiring programmers, computer science grads from reputable programs (either programs I'm aware of, or programs where I thought their curriculum looked decent) are much more likely to be able to create fault tolerant systems than non graduates--assuming approximately equal work experience and age. This levels out at some point, e.g., I don't think the degree is the primary differentiator between 2 talented programmers with 10 years experience. And there is definitely a very strong correlation between years of experience and the ability to create fault tolerant systems.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    Sometimes x = x + 1; is meaningless drudge work and sometimes it's going to cost tens of millions of dollars, a company's reputation, the private data of thousands of innocent bystanders, and sometimes lives. Unfortunately, it's also not immediately obvious which case is which.
- snazz 7y ago
  I’ve seen many super-talented self-taught programmers who never received any formal education, and I’ve seen college graduates who can’t get FizzBuzz working. Of course the code camps are scams, but a degree isn’t much better for many people who have very little internal motivation to learn.
  - commandlinefan 7y ago
    Ok. Yes, you’re right. There are proficient programmers who never went to college and complete idiots who did go. However. Most decent programmers do have a four-year degree, mostly in computer science (or something similar like math or physics) and most people who couldn’t hack it in college also can’t hack it solving coding problems 8-10 hours a day, all day, for decades. Stop acting like college degree _means_ moron.
    - deleted 7y ago
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  - learc83 7y ago
    People regularly say this. But there is no way you made it through my program without literally paying someone else to do your entire degree without being able to code FizzBuzz. And I went to a no-name state school. I don't doubt that you've seen it, but my guess as that it either was someone from a very poor program, their degree was long time ago and they haven't been doing actual programming since then, or they just get nervous in interviews. Degrees aren't equal and you should definitely at least look through the curriculum if you aren't familiar with the program when evaluating a candidate. I've noticed several times that a candidate will have a degree from a department of Computer Science and Computer Information Systems. And everyone will assume their degree is CS, but if you look through their transcript it's clear they concentrated in IT/sysadmin stuff. Also, in general, their is a huge difference between someone who took the easiest classes and barely passed and someone who has a 3.0+ with challenging coursework. Look at transcripts.
    - johnsimer 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago
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chillacy 7y ago
That’s disappointing. I remember I was very supportive of coding as trade education when I first heard of it but it hasn’t really panned out. I can’t quite decide if it’s because we’re bad at teaching (the example in the article seems like an execution failure) or if it’s fundamentally infeasible (programming is hard and unintuitive for most people).
- brianwawok 7y ago
  It’s weird. No one says anyone can be a basketball pro, here’s a play basketball boot camp to get you into the NBA. But clearly there is demand for a lot more programmers than NBA players. The kind of people who make good programmers are competing with people going into law and finance. More programmers means less lawyers and less business people. Which I guess is fine, but it is weird to just assume anyone can do it.
  - matwood 7y ago
    The NBA is a bad analogy. That would be closer to saying that anyone can get a job at Google. Most programming jobs are not Google, and more akin to rec league basketball. With desire and practice many people can be effective rec league players.
    - purple_ducks 7y ago
      Google is not analogous to the NBA. It's the IBM of the 2010's.
- detaro 7y ago
  Bootcamps aren't really a full "trade education", are they? You'd be looking more at an apprenticeship model, which is quite rare for coding (I know some examples here in Germany), or something else practical to follow up on the basics from the bootcamp.
- tyingq 7y ago
  16 weeks is just unrealistic though. Credible auto mechanic trade schools are a year or so. And once you graduate, there's plenty of low end work for you to earn your keep while you continue to skill up.
tyingq 7y ago
Not terribly surprising that 16 weeks of training doesn't make you ready for a coding job. The only way I see that working is a pretty aggressive pre-test that washes out most of the candidates. You'd need some related experience and programming aptitude for 16 weeks to make you employable.
- DoctorOetker 7y ago
  I totally agree about the 16 weeks = 4 months being insufficient: I think we can all agree that most of the coal miners went to school in a different era, and so probably never had much of a high school education, and even if they did we can all agree that half a career in the coal mines (combined with the prospect of working there until retirement) would pretty much obliterate the motivation to keep up your high school knowledge. So essentially (without pointing fingers) if the goal is to end up with a programming job, we can say that at entering this course they are pretty much at the level of midway highschool. The problem is not re-educating these people to become programmers (which I believe could work). The problem is the claim it can be done in 4 months without proof or trials. It's unethical to trial and thus social experiment this on people who may be giving up their current status and jobs believing it is already proven. If the technology was available today to achieve such a feat in 4 months, why are people going to colleges and universities? Why isn't this already being done in high schools, so that they can always become a programmer as a backup job? Because the feat has not been achieved yet. 4 months seems very short, but I do believe such a feat is certainly possible in a few years. Perhaps even within a year if it's really intensive and education technology would become so advanced that software recognizes your mistakes in thinking, can answer why questions, etc... But that is not today. This was just a fig leaf proposal to abdicate social responsibility...
  - JoelMcCracken 7y ago
    I think people need to realize that these boot camps are a start, not an end. They give you the minimal viable education to do the job. After that, you need to keep educating yourself.
    - 7y ago
RhodesianHunter 7y ago
I know I'll catch flak for this, but where did this idea that "anyone can learn to code" come from? Coding requires a certain drive and curiosity, without delving into the capability side. What makes anyone think that they can take a bunch of people who never or barely passed highschool and have been working in a mine for a decade+ and teach them this? By all means subsidize a laptop and point them at some great online (free) resources, but beyond that if they won't/can't help themselves...
- hirundo 7y ago
  > Coding requires a certain drive and curiosity > By all means subsidize a laptop If you have a certain drive and curiosity for coding the price of a used low-end laptop is unlikely to be a significant barrier, when adequate new ones are available from Walmart for $159. I just found a 3 year old Chromebook on ebay for $57, or around 10 hours work at the federal minimum wage after taxes. And there's a salutary pride of ownership in earning it. I earned my first computer by working the grill at Burger King. Dreaming of what I'd buy with my wages made finally getting it particularly sweet.
  - PorterDuff 7y ago
    Exactly. After years of getting highest-end company-supplied desktops, one of my holy missions is to reduce the cost of home computing. Typing on my eBay Chromebook, desktop box is a $35 i5 Optiplex running Qubes. There's better things to spend your money on.
  - ip26 7y ago
    A wonderful world we live in. The best I could come up with as a kid was a used Xbox running Linux and a homemade VGA cable for something like $150. A then-modern machine for $50, I sure couldn't find one. (Of course adult-me is better at bargain-hunting)
  - daveslash 7y ago
    To introduce people to the very most basic concepts of programming (if-then, loops, etc, and making hello-world, fizz-buzz, etc...), I've been using the javascript console in the Chrome (or Firefox) developer tools. In casual conversations with non developer friends (30-40 y/o), I'll say "here, pass me your laptop... " and I'll do fizz-buzz real quick. I haven't tried with any one, but I would think that teaching someone how to wrap their head around those concepts could be done with a cheap net-book and built-in browser development tools. In the beginning, get all of the dependencies out of the way - no need for a compiler, source control, package manager, etc....
BlackJack 7y ago
We can discuss code camp pro/cons all day, but the article spells out that there was little coding being taught here. Instructors with little tech experience, high rate of firing and stuff turnover, students being told to "google it", operating without licenses, all while the founder has fancy offices in Chicago with rapacious and alcoholic parties. Amanda Laucher, the founder, essentially stole funds from governments and made false promises and is now going to Law School in Chicago. Meanwhile, these people quit their jobs on false hope and now are unemployed or have to rejoin at the bottom of the rung. Assuming the article is fair, this is a sad situation and Laucher should be prosecuted.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  Won't happen. Unless some WV politician makes a crusade out of it nobody is going to get prosecuted for ripping off poor people.
  - dingbat 7y ago
    yup, and since Sen. Manchin took credit for bringing them in and giving them tons of public money, doubtful he'll be up for that crusade
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  > “Instructors with little tech experience, high rate of firing and stuff turnover, students being told to "google it", operating without licenses, all while the founder has fancy offices in Chicago with rapacious and alcoholic parties.” Hmmm sounds like pretty much every start-up I’ve ever heard of.
- iguy 7y ago
  It sounds uncomfortably close to a cynic's view of aid projects in poor countries. The customers aren't the students, but rather the Commission, and they were apparently sufficiently impressed with the TED talks to part with $1.5 million to start this thing. Maybe someone trying to get re-elected got to cut a ribbon on TV too. And I bet this also made a great story for the founders to tell in their law school applications.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
The untrustworthy city slicker stereotype doesn't come from nowhere. Nobody ever engages with these people except to take their money or tell them they're backwards hicks and their way of life is somehow wrong/bad (this being an example of the former).
- redisman 7y ago
  Some do care about people left behind but they usually don't care about a big social media boost to their ego so you don't really hear about their work
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Just because it "comes from somewhere" doesn't mean it is valid. The rural they would already be disinclined to trust those from without - their mechanisms of trust are based upon personal knowledge and history which outsiders lack. Also the latter is clearly bidirectional. I haven't heard of the urban calling the rural "not real Americans" for one.
commandlinefan 7y ago
I guess people believe what they want to believe, but it should be obvious that if programming is really something you can learn in a few months in your spare time, it’s not going to be a very valuable skill. Either programming requires extensive education and experience to be really proficient (read: employable) in, or it’s going to be a minimum wage “we can throw a rock and replace you this afternoon” call-center job.
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  You can learn it in a few months in your spare time if you're cut out for it, which the vast majority are not. CS education for programming jobs is mostly a very expensive formality to convince hiring managers you know what you already knew before enrolling, or at least it was in my case.
  - mratzloff 7y ago
    "You can learn how to be a lawyer in a few months in your spare time if you're cut out for it" would be considered a ridiculous statement. Perhaps you could learn enough to be an assistant to a legal secretary. The same applies to programming.
    - jimmaswell 7y ago
      They're not the same thing at all. Being a lawyer involves cramming in an enormous volume of rote information over many years and passing an exhaustive exam; programming is just a combination of problem solving, being able to deal with abstract concepts and how computers work, and learning a relatively small amount of syntax and general concepts. You can easily get a grip on all that in a few months if it's your thing.
      - johnsimer 7y ago
        I disagree that it takes just a few months. I'd say there are tons of hidden dependencies you have to learn in writing programs. Stuff that the tutorials and books often leave out. And that most developers take a few years to learn these dependencies, because there currently is no widely-known easy way to learn all this "tribal knowledge". And when universities try to systematize ways to learn this tribal knowledge, they come up with a curriculum that takes most people 4 years to get through. (Yes there are many smart developers who could learn the curriculum faster.)
erentz 7y ago
The “anyone can code” and “just learn to code” phenomena needs to die in a fire. This reminds me of many other scams in our education system, it’s disgusting how much money is being leeched out of people on private “schools”. This “anyone can code” idea is actually an easy thing to test if we were serious and honest about it. But we are not. And I believe boot camps give a false sense that more people are successful at it than aren’t. It really seems boot camps are in reality is a very expensive filtering system to separate those with some ability to teach themselves coding from those who can’t.
- vsskanth 7y ago
  As a counter-point, I would like to point out India's IT industry. When the IT outsourcing industry was booming and there was a serious programmer shortage, outsourcing firms such as Infosys, Cognizant, Tata would hire college graduates en-masse regardless of major (like, entire batch of 20XX would get a job offer). They would then spend 6 months actually training them and weeding out poor performers. The ones who get through would be placed on actual projects for their clients. I do not know if this still happens today due to the sheer number IT majors on offer in India. Now you can rightly argue with regards to the overall quality of products they created and the culture they proliferated but for their clients it appeared to suffice to achieve their business objectives. Sure most of them won't be FAANG grade but might be totally adequate for making some CRUD app or maintaining some system. IMO, I don't think one needs a four year degree to code, two years at the max would suffice (obviously not for cutting edge work) . In fact, I would go as far to say beginners can be trained on a good declarative low-code (not low code) guardrails-type DSL incorporating best practices to create simple CRUD or reporting web apps. There have been many attempts but I don't know if this is solved yet.
  - erentz 7y ago
    It doesn’t sound strictly like a counter-point? More like we agree. As you say they weeded out those who had the capability from those who didn’t. Which in my experience is what bootcamps do, very expensively. Watching someone go through one of the more “legit” bootcamps: they first filter for candidates that can largely grok it and self teach by putting through a few hours of basic tutorial and quizzes. But a fair amount of ground is covered quickly in this which when you look at the people going through it (in chat rooms etc) means it’s very much a lot of googling and self teaching to understand what they’re saying in the videos. So after this point you selected people who can get basic programming and teach themselves. And the rest don’t go into the course and so don’t pollute their success rate statistics.
sheeshkebab 7y ago
Do these bootcamps ever give programming aptitude tests to people before accepting them into programs? Or is it all about money grab from grants for “learn to code” (which it sounds like it is based on this article)
- erentz 7y ago
  A lot of them do. This one seems like an outright scam, but for example well known boot camps like Lamba School put you through some tutorials and tests before hand. When you look at these tutorials it really seems to be a filter for “can you teach yourself coding”. IMO making the bootcamps fairly useless given the huge amount of online courseware and free tutorials available now.
  - sheeshkebab 7y ago
    I guess if lamda school has a consistent track record in the industry & companies are hiring from them, i could see that being of value to someone switching careers. (Employers seem to be inept in interviewing for programming positions - and otherwise - On their own)
    - erentz 7y ago
      Yes, I tell people thinking about a boot camp to first try really damn hard to teach themselves first, then if they still want to, to just use something like Lambda School as interview preparation and to “credential” yourself.
  - xenadu02 7y ago
    It’s no different than hiring a personal trainer. Sure everyone can go to the gym but having a set schedule, paying money, and being accountable to someone is a life hack that uses human social nature to one’s advantage.
    - bittercynic 7y ago
      It's a little different because you know from the start that hiring a personal trainer is not going to magically make you prosperous. There is a widespread idea that working in tech is easy and will make you rich, and all you have to do is get your toe in the door, and many "entrepreneurs" use that misunderstanding to set up programs that waste students time and extract money from donors and government programs that are unable to meaningfully evaluate what they're donating to.
in_cahoots 7y ago
The real shame here is that apparently nobody throwing money at this company did any due diligence. In an interview, the co-founder claims that all of its graduates get jobs, and that the skills taught are worth $200-$250 an hour (i.e. 400-500k a year) in San Francisco. The website’s success testimonials include quotes from a co-founder and one from a co-founder’s brother. If the people donating a million dollars had done ten minutes of background research they could have prevented this debacle in the first place.
asveikau 7y ago
> When word spread of a trip by the Mined Minds leadership to a tech conference in Lithuania in November, she saw an opportunity. I am partly of Lithuanian descent. With respect, I don't understand why someone in the US would think to attend a tech conference in Lithuania, when there is a much larger tech industry closer to home.
- jen20 7y ago
  Have you looked at the line ups of Build Stuff in Vilnius? It has many of the same speakers as QCon, historically at a fraction of the price, and attendees from across Western Europe and the US. I have priced it out several years running, and with flights from major US cities or (especially) Europe, a hotel and expenses it is substantially cheaper than attending a US conference in the same tier. Disclaimer: I have worked on the CFP for that conference several times over there last few years, but have no financial interest in the conference.
  - jen20 7y ago
    Also since this came up out-of-band (ugh) and apparently is not the norm for US conferences: Build Stuff pays full travel expenses for all speakers, whether they come from Kaunas or San Francisco.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    Interesting, thanks. I could certainly see it as less of a stretch for people elsewhere in Europe especially.
- in_cahoots 7y ago
  Apparently the co-founders met while in Lithuania: https://money.cnn.com/2016/04/22/news/economy/coal-workers-computer-coders/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2016/04/22/news/economy/coal-workers-c.... Given the overall tone of this article I’m guessing it was a vacation dressed up as a business trip.
jen20 7y ago
This article seems (at best) poorly researched and one-sided - and it does not chime even slightly with my experience of this group. I have personally met several people who have been through Mined Minds training with no prior coding experience - and those people were the first who convinced me that development “boot camps” were not a completely lost cause.
mothsonasloth 7y ago
[Warning Exremely Controversial Post Ahead] I am currently working for a big corporate in the UK, who have been showing off their "pioneering" and "visionary" strategy to focus recruitment from code boot-camps. All I can say is that as a senior developer, it has made my life misery. I've gone from writing code and producing features, to a full-time mentor and babysitter. Half of the boot-camp graduates I believe have become coders for the wrong reasons like: * developers have an easy life, getting into work whenever they choose * they get to wear t-shirts and baggy jeans * they get all the latest toys to play around with and shiny MacBooks * I hated my last job, looking at developers on TV in these Silicon valley places looks like the dream life * I am a single mother who was given the course for free The others, have aptitude but are so inexperienced from their 3 month session that it will take them atleast two years before they can be fully independant engineers. These codecamps are licenses to print money it seems, they charge the students a hefty fee for the course and companies then pay a recruitment fee at the end. Needless to say, I will be leaving my company very soon to go to a place where there is a coding test and filtering to prevent most of these bootcampers from getting in. Yes its snobby, but I didn't study and spend my student loan on my passion just so I can train up a bunch of people looking for the "easy life".
- mathattack 7y ago
  Why did your company fall for this? The only logical reasons I’ve seen are an inability to hire otherwise, and staff moonlighting at the boot camps. Both are bad reasons.
  - mothsonasloth 7y ago
    I believe the main reasons were: * The local management are non-technical and have a rudimentary equation that 1 developer = 1 productivity unit * The bootcamp has some really great salespeople * Hiring is generally difficult for great dev talent, so their logic is just to hire anyone for the numbers, otherwise their budget gets constrained by kafkaesque finance practice from the companies HQ. * Local political and PR reasons, the company is "hiring local talent", "equal opportunities" etc.
mathattack 7y ago
Looks like the allegations of fraud were in the air in 2017 before WV started. https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2017/12/21/miners-sue-mined-minds-program/ https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2017/12/21/miners-sue-mined-...
auston 7y ago
Any ideas on how we (HN) could help these people that dealt with Mined Minds? Perhaps some free remote tutoring? Some interview coaching? Resume review? A whole lot of bagging on coding boot camps, the founders of Mined Minds & people looking for an easier life. I’m game to help myself! If anyone knows those folks & they want some help - I’m happy to connect & spend time doing any of the above!
- Kalium 7y ago
  It might be worth considering that the underlying question - does this model even work at the scale it was sold as? - goes unanswered. With that in mind, it sounds like what might be needed is the education they were looking for in the first place. Resume review, remote tutoring, and coaching are great ideas, born of a genuine blossoming of kindness and compassion. It may be possible that these well-meant ideas could be of perhaps slightly limited value for people who, based on the contents of the article, seem to have roughly as much marketable knowledge of Ruby as they did before they started the program.
  - pbourke 7y ago
    The students in the article were taken advantage of. It sounds like nobody even got the chance to find out whether they would like or succeed at coding. So many responses in this thread are written from a middle/upper-middle class context. Folks who had reasonably good schools, access to computers at a young age, a stable home environment in which to work with them, a culture (parents and/or peers) that supported them, an expectation and pathway to higher education at a young age. Maybe not all of those boxes are ticked for every successful software engineer but I bet a good number of them are. The people in this article didn’t have as many of these factors. Maybe they had none of them. That doesn’t mean that they’re dumb, untrainable or not cut out to be coders. I think what it means is that an appropriate approach to training needs to be taken. That approach is probably something akin to a gateway aptitude test to demonstrate ability and commitment followed by a significant period of apprenticeship combined with some formal classes at the community college level. This is the way that people enter the skilled trades, and also seems similar to military occupational training. I don’t see why it couldn’t produce competent entry-level folks who are capable of working on 95% of business systems/websites/etc at the end of their training.
peter303 7y ago
In the mid 20th century coding was seen as a trade school skill. Perhaps boot camps are another version of this. When I attended MIT in the 1970s there was no pure computer science major even though competitor schools had such. The faculty said it was a skill most of the students picked up in high school. In 1980 MIT made computer science a co-major with electrical engineering. And finally last year an independent school.
- redisman 7y ago
  My highest level of education is trade school (electronics). Trade school doesn't take 4 months, it's usually 2-3 years with multiple internships and apprenticeships.
rayiner 7y ago
This is a byproduct of the (in my view, very positive) tradition in programming of not requiring a college degree. It offers the political class an easy message for dealing with the ramifications of the jobs exodus in places like Appalachia. Nobody would suggest, for example, training people up as doctors or lawyers or accountants to be a solution to that problem. The degree requirements are a signal: “this is not for everyone.” With programming, politicians have gotten this idea that because there are no formal educational requirements, programming and “tech” jobs are an avenue for employing the large numbers of economically displaced. But of course, programming is hard. Most people don’t have the analytical/mathematical mindset necessary to be even competent programmers. All of these coding boot camps and public programs just capitalize on this misconception and wishful thinking.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  > But of course, programming is hard. Most people don’t have the analytical/mathematical mindset necessary to be even competent programmers. All of these coding boot camps and public programs just capitalize on this misconception and wishful thinking. It works both ways too; When bootcamps first popped up, I was dismissive of them until I realized that there was (to be fair, relatively new) high demand for people who could even do the bare minimum of stringing together CRUD apps, forming a labor market that had nothing to do with me, despite nominally being an "engineer". I think a lot of the pathologies of eng hiring stem from the broadness of the role "engineer", which just ends up causing credentialism and the metaphorical ghetto-ization wrt talent of parts of the stack, like frontend.
coconut_crab 7y ago
My experience with code bootcamp trained developers is positive, due to the follow reasons: - Most of them have engineering background: electrical engineering, civil engineering, petroleum engineering. - Since they lack formal education in IT, they have to train twice as hard, which our company encourages (2 months of probation = 2 months of training, it's almost impossible to find developer with Scala experience around here anyway). - We work with the Bootcamp to improve their program: giving reference to 'hard', 'theoretical' books such as Algorithms & Datastructure or Database Design and cutting down some unnecessary parts. - Most importantly, we strongly prefer people who switched to IT because they actually love programming, not just looking for higher wage.* * It may sound weird but actually many people here didn't picked their university by themselves but by the guidance of their parent, so they might study something else than their favourite.
- jdhn 7y ago
  >Most of them have engineering background: electrical engineering, civil engineering, petroleum engineering. That's great, but what about the people who come from a non-engineering background? I feel like people with a technical background will be able to pick up coding a lot quicker than people who don't have a lot of engineering aptitude. >We work with the Bootcamp to improve their program: giving reference to 'hard', 'theoretical' books such as Algorithms & Datastructure or Database Design and cutting down some unnecessary parts. That's great that you guys do this. I'm a real big proponent of this private/public model since it benefits both businesses (they get people who are trained in key business areas) and colleges/bootcamps (they can brag about knowledgeable grads whose job placement boosts their numbers).
  - Kalium 7y ago
    > That's great, but what about the people who come from a non-engineering background? I feel like people with a technical background will be able to pick up coding a lot quicker than people who don't have a lot of engineering aptitude. You're almost certainly correct. It's perhaps possible that the bootcamp model, which can work well for people with solid technical backgrounds, might not work equally well for others. That's fine. Not every tool is a fit for every job. A hammer is very useful, but it makes a poor saw.
cr4ig_ 7y ago
Hey, it served it's purpose -- as a shiny prop for whatever political candidate championed it to come and spout some pretty words and get a nice photo op.
i_am_proteus 7y ago
> She doesn’t know the motives of the people at Mined Minds, she said, whether they had bad intentions or were just “incredibly sloppy” with good ones. Is there a term for this kind of hustle? Raising money from unsavvy investors for a technically-complicated effort, then "failing" in a way that isn't obviously fraudulent.
- mcguire 7y ago
  A "start-up". :-)
thwg 7y ago
Programming is not for everyone. Teaching programming is no easy task either. In the end, one of them, even if only one, got a real software job. This is enough to say this program is not a failure.
dvtrn 7y ago
For anyone here, that went through one of these CodeSchools/Bootcamps/training.jargon[2] courses, I have a question: At any point in these camps was there a section on interviewing and job seeking? I'm asking as both a hiring manager who has seen a very fair share of...sorry, BAD resumes coming from people who finished a local code school, who struggled through the interview (only one made it to a technical assessment, he struggled on the syntax but seemed to grok the concepts. He ultimately did not get hired)and as a friend of someone who went through a code school and has absolutely zero interview skills,. Their resume-upon reading-would have you wondering if they've applied for a "Junior React Developer" by mistake (restaurants, service industry jobs, stints at hotels, and at the very bottom: "React Bootcamp, Chicago - 2017-2018"). The generic cover letter this friend had me read jumped from topic to topic and was at least 5 paragraphs and two pages long, their only portfolio item was a single page "Hi I'm Bob" they made in the class. It just makes me wonder what else these schools are doing to help their students actually succeed.
- barbecue_sauce 7y ago
  I went to a bootcamp. I won't say which one. It was in a major city, and it was a residential program (anybody who was in the bootcamp but not local lived together in apartments included in the cost of the program). The program was structured beginning with a quick review of language basics (you were expected to know JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to a reasonable degree before the course began) and layouts, then moved on to Angular (this was a few years ago during MEAN stack hyper) and its associated patterns and best practices, then Node.js APIs and Mongo (the program has since shifted to PostgreSQL instead). Along the way, students were given assignments to augment these areas, such as reimplementing popular javascript libraries (like Underscore) against a test suite. The mid-point of the course culminated with presenting a solo project to the class, which was a good indicator of who was and who wasn't excelling. By this point, several students had dropped out and returned home or just stopped attending. After this, students were funneled into groups, with the higher performing students clustering together. The groups were given suggestions for projects to work on, typical web applications built on a combination of your own backend and third-party APIs. My group's project, for example, was a hybrid mobile budgeting application using Plaid and APN/GCM for push notifications. We had an exploratory phase where we tested the limits of the Plaid API (response times, features, webhooks, etc.) and determined user stories and requirements, then had stand-up meetings every morning and worked off of wireframes and ERD diagrams that we had designed. We were required to use git versioning so that we would inevitably experience merge conflicts and integration issues. There was about a week towards the end of the program that was focused on practice interviews (though these were admittedly somewhat half-assed) and resumes, in addition to the daily toy problems. At the end of the program, recruiters and local businesses were invited to see group and individual projects at a showcase day and this led to interviews for most of the students. A "Hi I'm Bob" page seems like it would not be the product of an actual full-time bootcamp, but maybe a short part-time bootcamp? Even the relatively lower achievers were capable of hooking up some sort of front end for a public API by the mid-point of the course, putting it on github and getting it up on Heroku. That said, many of the people I attended with had higher education or experience. My group was a former QA engineer, a bioengineering bachelor, an MBA, another biologist, and myself (Masters in Information Systems). By the end, we were relying more on the members of our group for disbursing useful information than on the instructional infrastructure of the bootcamp. I think subsequent jobs came mostly through networking between the groups of whoever was left by the end rather than the bootcamp itself.
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lgleason 7y ago
quelle surprise! Most of these programs are a joke. I remember when Tech Square Labs in Atlanta did a program to "help" inner city black kids. I went down to talk to them and get more information. For one year of this program they were charging the sponsors $57K. That is more than the tuition at many private schools. But it gets better. They had The Iron Yard (which is now closed) doing the course material so I had a chat with the people teaching the courses etc.. It was very apparent they had no idea what they were doing. The supposedly "disadvantaged" founders of this did not even understand the kinds of things they kids in the program actually were going through, such as having a lack of financial literacy or even a bank account at times. I'm white but live in a disadvantaged neighborhood and knew this because I don't live in the rich bubble that these "disadvantaged" founders did. When the political climate was right they were bilking the tax payers for this program with funding from the city of Atlanta, the feds etc., but after 2016 the funding went away, as did the founders profits. There have been many programs like this one in Atlanta and the one for the people in Appalachia. I'm all for bringing people who do have the aptitude to the industry. That said, not everybody has the aptitude to be a developer, in the same way that not everybody has the aptitude to be a prize winning author, language guru, doctor, top athlete etc.. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. The coding bootcamp industrial complex appears to be a movement of grifters from a non tech background trying to make a quick buck and flood the market with cheap labor. In the end most of the students were poorer than they would have been in an accredited program, without training that would actually get them a job and as an industry we've had to deal with the fallout from it. I'm saying all of this as someone who actively supports one of these, but the one I support is run by computer science majors, who grew up poor, have made enormous personal sacrifices to run the program and targets people who truly have no option to go to the university and do it for far less than what the grifter orgs were doing it for. Truth be told, "learn to code" is not the way to economic prosperity. Paying livable wages for things is, irregardless of the country etc..
WoodenChair 7y ago
Ms. Laucher on Twitter responding to a critique from the article: "Retraining won't fix it. Give them UBI. Free training programs should only have viable candidates when it isnt for quick $" Is the last sentence a little ironic given the article? Source (perhaps will be deleted): https://twitter.com/pandamonial/status/1127627288676270081 https://twitter.com/pandamonial/status/1127627288676270081 Edit: To be fair, in other comments she claims many of the statements in the article are false and refused to comment for the article based on legal advice. I assume there are two sides to this story and the NY Times article does seem pretty one sided.
mynameishere 7y ago
They just hint at it, but the solution to the problem is already there for such people. Keep your job, go to a community college, and if you have the aptitude and build up the credits, transfer to WVU (or whatever) for the completion. Even failing that last part, an associates degree is still better than a phony cert.
whack 7y ago
I understand that building a startup is hard. I've often heard founders being advised to "overpromise" and operate in a "reality distortion field" in order to get the ball rolling. That all works out great when things eventually go well. But sometimes, there's a lot more at stake than simply investor money. This article does a great job of showing the human carnage that happens when founders overpromise jobs and riches that fail to materialize. Please keep that in mind the next time you are pitching your startup's mission to change the world.
duxup 7y ago
I went from a different technical career through a coding camp. I loved the experience. Having said that I'd say at least half my class was unemployable by the end. The camp did not filter candidates nearly enough and really hurt the class and I fear their own financal well being. I think coding camps could be done right, I just don't know if anyone is really doing it right...
- ng12 7y ago
  The problem is there's no incentive to fail out a paying customer. And this isn't isolated to bootcamps -- I've noticed many universities babying CS majors by dumbing down CS101 and offering enough soft-skill electives that you can basically get a degree without knowing how to code.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Agreed, the incentives are all wrong for camps. A classmate said "it's a boot camp... people should be kicked out / quit". But presumably that might mean a partial refund and the camps do not want to do that.... so they sit in class weeks behind not doing well and dragging the whole class down with them. At least in universities you MIGHT fail a class. Not so much in coding camps. But yeah I've ran into and worked with some CS folks I wondered about... like dude you should know a lot more than me... you're having trouble logically doing anything here...
TheLuddite 7y ago
Coding jobs in Appalachia...wow I've heard it all. The people living in these places are still semi-barbaric, they need a long civilizing process before they can cut it in the modern world, 2 months long boot-camps is definitely not going to do this. It's a process that should start from childbirth.
- murphy214 7y ago
  https://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/People-are-pooping-more-than-ever-on-the-streets-13778680.php https://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Pe...
cavisne 7y ago
The issues with these bootcamps are 1) Developers tend to sneer at this model, because they learnt themselves online (and dont think sitting in an intensive bootcamp would help) or went to a university for multiple years. This means these bootcamps are often run by people on the fringes of tech, recruiters or in this case "consultants" 2) There is no reason for a developer to teach these bootcamps, they pay less than an equivalent job and most firms would look at experience teaching at one of these bootcamps as a red flag (because most of the teachers are students who couldn't get jobs). University is different here, as your research can be viewed valuably by tech companies, even if while at the university you earn less money, and there are other quality of life benefits 3) Once they get in most students get the impression (even subconsciously) that they've been scammed. Thats mostly for above reasons (founders and teachers who don't have tech experience), combined with a hard sell getting them into it. This gives graduates intense imposter syndrome. Even worse they follow the lead of people who run the boot camp and "fake it till they make it", mainly because these bootcamps offer them TA jobs to juice their stats and incentivizing them to say nice things about the bootcamp. The combination of these factors means you get graduates who have been taught by people without experience, with a bunch of baggage that makes them worse developers, afraid to ask questions for fear of being seen as an imposter, exaggerating any real projects/experience they've worked on, resistant to learning anything new because they've only been taught specific frameworks with no theory.
gyc 7y ago
Don't they have community colleges with programming courses in Appalachia? I remember years ago I took a single 3-month long summer class at a local community college that taught C, basic data structures, and basic algorithms. Based on what I learned in that class I was able to actually pass tech white boarding interviews and get a summer internship at a local tech company.
torgian 7y ago
I still see myself as a junior dev since I am still self-teaching a lot of stuff. While running my own business, working on projects with my customer. I’m not a good dev. But I am good at working with others and getting stuff done. So, there’s that going for me I guess. I probably wouldn’t be employable if I had to go through coding tests. But I can fix problems since I study and research a lot.
hluska 7y ago
I’m not shocked by HN’s attitude towards bootcamp grads, but I am very surprised that so many here are blaming the grads and not the bootcamps themselves. Bootcamps use absolutely disgusting marketing techniques to appeal to people with little ability outside of being able to pay tuition. Their grads are closer to victims.
- slow_donkey 7y ago
  They absolutely are the victims but it's also a students responsibility to do due diligence on the bootcamps just like you would (should?) research an employer before signing the job offer.
  - em-bee 7y ago
    how would they do that? if they are the kind of people described in the article, then they have no means with which to evaluate the school. as a programmer, i can judge if a potential employer is doing proper software development, and if i am already in the field, i can judge whether the next class/school will teach me something that relates to what i am doing, but as a student completely new to the field i don't even know yet what and how i can best learn. so i can't necessarily judge the quality of the school. i can look at statistics for past students, but those can be faked, so short of actually talking to a number of past students, evaluation of a school is hard.
  - hluska 7y ago
    Let me pull out a quote from the article. “But Tori and her mother, Stephanie, 45, stayed. Every weekday morning, Tori would wake up early, her mother would feed the chickens and together they would head down the serpentine mountain road to Beckley. Nights and weekends they spent in the glow of their laptops — bought from a website on credit — learning the rudiments of Ruby, the programming language.” To steal a shitty term from mainstream media, let’s unpack this. Tori [Frame] used to be an assistant manager in a Family Dollar location. She decided to take a bootcamp with her mom so she quit her job. And, the family bought laptops on credit from a website. I’m pretty sure we can all guess what kind of website that is. With all due respect to the Frames, I don’t buy that either of them were qualified to assess whether the bootcamp was any good. Instead, they sound a lot like desperate people caught up by predatory marketing.
burfog 7y ago
What we need is a relatively standardized degree that is like a Bachelor's minus the Associates. That is, we don't need the two years of useless filler classes. Taking two years (4% of career time, more of lifetime earnings) for that gunk is a huge opportunity cost. I'm still waiting for my employer to ask me to do a Marxist literary criticism of a poem. When that day comes, I'm prepared! These coding boot camps could have been what we need, but they are far too short and not at all standardized. I doubt the students ever write a boot loader, compiler, or kernel. I doubt the students do much analysis of algorithms or even know what a Turing machine is. The same applies to non-coding careers that involve college degrees. We don't want surgeons with only a 14-week surgery boot camp, but cutting two years off of the lengthy education would increase the supply of doctors and reduce the cost (including opportunity cost) of their education. It's better than adding two years to every career.
zeade 7y ago
The HTML on minedminds.org is pretty sad for being a coding bootcamp site. Ignoring the basic badness of it looking like the output of Google+Stack Exchange copy-paste, it's not even valid (multiple head tags, div sitting outside of body/html tags, etc).

301 points by pfortuny 7y ago

I find it very important to analyze cases like these when CEOs sound off about how you shouldn't need a degree to work in the industry. These code camps have no credibility.

y4mi 7y ago
But... You really don't need a degree for most programming work I've seen at my day job? It's basically just creating various APIs in order to wrap them into some service you can sell. You can do most of that with maybe 1 year of coding at home. Though code review should be done at least in the beginning to make sure the produced code is maintainable
- learc83 7y ago
  There's some truth to that. There definitely is plenty drudge work that can be done by supervised noivices. But I think we tend to overestimate how much of our jobs that work entails, and what exactly can be done independently. A master carpenter can have an apprentice do most of the physical work, but the apprentice is still very much working under the master and relying on them to guide their work. Good bootcamps can prepare someone to be an apprentice, but we shouldn't pretend 12 weeks is enough to produce a useful employee. And it's not a wholesale replacement for a degree. Good graduates are going to have at least as much practical experience as good bootcamp graduates from internships, hackathons, personal projects, group projects etc... Plus they are going to have significantly more theoretical knowledge. Even more "professional" jobs like lawyer and capital E Engineer can be learned throughout apprenticeship, so there is value there. But we should stop acting like our profession is just hooking up wires. Other professions aren't nearly as self effacing as we are, it's like we've all internalized the disdain that upper management feels for us because of the power that we hold.
  - y4mi 7y ago
    well, our chief architect at my day job (with a degree) "designed" a system with several points of failure, each of which would kill the whole platform if even one of them failed. honestly, a degree really doesn't show competence -- nor does experience from what i've seen. Its clearly hard to create a fault tolerant system, but its just as hard to quantify what makes people able to do just that
    - mcguire 7y ago
      Would it have made a difference if your architect had to take personal, professional, and financial liability for the system?
    - learc83 7y ago
      Yes, incompetent credentialed, experienced Engineers, surgeons, plumbers, programmers etc... exist. >honestly, a degree really doesn't show competence -- nor does experience from what i've seen. Its clearly hard to create a fault tolerant system, but its just as hard to quantify what makes people able to do just that Of course, but in experience hiring programmers, computer science grads from reputable programs (either programs I'm aware of, or programs where I thought their curriculum looked decent) are much more likely to be able to create fault tolerant systems than non graduates--assuming approximately equal work experience and age. This levels out at some point, e.g., I don't think the degree is the primary differentiator between 2 talented programmers with 10 years experience. And there is definitely a very strong correlation between years of experience and the ability to create fault tolerant systems.
- mcguire 7y ago
  Sometimes x = x + 1; is meaningless drudge work and sometimes it's going to cost tens of millions of dollars, a company's reputation, the private data of thousands of innocent bystanders, and sometimes lives. Unfortunately, it's also not immediately obvious which case is which.
snazz 7y ago
I’ve seen many super-talented self-taught programmers who never received any formal education, and I’ve seen college graduates who can’t get FizzBuzz working. Of course the code camps are scams, but a degree isn’t much better for many people who have very little internal motivation to learn.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  Ok. Yes, you’re right. There are proficient programmers who never went to college and complete idiots who did go. However. Most decent programmers do have a four-year degree, mostly in computer science (or something similar like math or physics) and most people who couldn’t hack it in college also can’t hack it solving coding problems 8-10 hours a day, all day, for decades. Stop acting like college degree _means_ moron.
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- learc83 7y ago
  People regularly say this. But there is no way you made it through my program without literally paying someone else to do your entire degree without being able to code FizzBuzz. And I went to a no-name state school. I don't doubt that you've seen it, but my guess as that it either was someone from a very poor program, their degree was long time ago and they haven't been doing actual programming since then, or they just get nervous in interviews. Degrees aren't equal and you should definitely at least look through the curriculum if you aren't familiar with the program when evaluating a candidate. I've noticed several times that a candidate will have a degree from a department of Computer Science and Computer Information Systems. And everyone will assume their degree is CS, but if you look through their transcript it's clear they concentrated in IT/sysadmin stuff. Also, in general, their is a huge difference between someone who took the easiest classes and barely passed and someone who has a 3.0+ with challenging coursework. Look at transcripts.
  - johnsimer 7y ago
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chillacy 7y ago

That’s disappointing. I remember I was very supportive of coding as trade education when I first heard of it but it hasn’t really panned out. I can’t quite decide if it’s because we’re bad at teaching (the example in the article seems like an execution failure) or if it’s fundamentally infeasible (programming is hard and unintuitive for most people).

brianwawok 7y ago
It’s weird. No one says anyone can be a basketball pro, here’s a play basketball boot camp to get you into the NBA. But clearly there is demand for a lot more programmers than NBA players. The kind of people who make good programmers are competing with people going into law and finance. More programmers means less lawyers and less business people. Which I guess is fine, but it is weird to just assume anyone can do it.
- matwood 7y ago
  The NBA is a bad analogy. That would be closer to saying that anyone can get a job at Google. Most programming jobs are not Google, and more akin to rec league basketball. With desire and practice many people can be effective rec league players.
  - purple_ducks 7y ago
    Google is not analogous to the NBA. It's the IBM of the 2010's.
detaro 7y ago
Bootcamps aren't really a full "trade education", are they? You'd be looking more at an apprenticeship model, which is quite rare for coding (I know some examples here in Germany), or something else practical to follow up on the basics from the bootcamp.
tyingq 7y ago
16 weeks is just unrealistic though. Credible auto mechanic trade schools are a year or so. And once you graduate, there's plenty of low end work for you to earn your keep while you continue to skill up.

tyingq 7y ago

Not terribly surprising that 16 weeks of training doesn't make you ready for a coding job. The only way I see that working is a pretty aggressive pre-test that washes out most of the candidates. You'd need some related experience and programming aptitude for 16 weeks to make you employable.

DoctorOetker 7y ago
I totally agree about the 16 weeks = 4 months being insufficient: I think we can all agree that most of the coal miners went to school in a different era, and so probably never had much of a high school education, and even if they did we can all agree that half a career in the coal mines (combined with the prospect of working there until retirement) would pretty much obliterate the motivation to keep up your high school knowledge. So essentially (without pointing fingers) if the goal is to end up with a programming job, we can say that at entering this course they are pretty much at the level of midway highschool. The problem is not re-educating these people to become programmers (which I believe could work). The problem is the claim it can be done in 4 months without proof or trials. It's unethical to trial and thus social experiment this on people who may be giving up their current status and jobs believing it is already proven. If the technology was available today to achieve such a feat in 4 months, why are people going to colleges and universities? Why isn't this already being done in high schools, so that they can always become a programmer as a backup job? Because the feat has not been achieved yet. 4 months seems very short, but I do believe such a feat is certainly possible in a few years. Perhaps even within a year if it's really intensive and education technology would become so advanced that software recognizes your mistakes in thinking, can answer why questions, etc... But that is not today. This was just a fig leaf proposal to abdicate social responsibility...
- JoelMcCracken 7y ago
  I think people need to realize that these boot camps are a start, not an end. They give you the minimal viable education to do the job. After that, you need to keep educating yourself.
  - 7y ago

RhodesianHunter 7y ago

I know I'll catch flak for this, but where did this idea that "anyone can learn to code" come from? Coding requires a certain drive and curiosity, without delving into the capability side. What makes anyone think that they can take a bunch of people who never or barely passed highschool and have been working in a mine for a decade+ and teach them this? By all means subsidize a laptop and point them at some great online (free) resources, but beyond that if they won't/can't help themselves...

hirundo 7y ago
> Coding requires a certain drive and curiosity > By all means subsidize a laptop If you have a certain drive and curiosity for coding the price of a used low-end laptop is unlikely to be a significant barrier, when adequate new ones are available from Walmart for $159. I just found a 3 year old Chromebook on ebay for $57, or around 10 hours work at the federal minimum wage after taxes. And there's a salutary pride of ownership in earning it. I earned my first computer by working the grill at Burger King. Dreaming of what I'd buy with my wages made finally getting it particularly sweet.
- PorterDuff 7y ago
  Exactly. After years of getting highest-end company-supplied desktops, one of my holy missions is to reduce the cost of home computing. Typing on my eBay Chromebook, desktop box is a $35 i5 Optiplex running Qubes. There's better things to spend your money on.
- ip26 7y ago
  A wonderful world we live in. The best I could come up with as a kid was a used Xbox running Linux and a homemade VGA cable for something like $150. A then-modern machine for $50, I sure couldn't find one. (Of course adult-me is better at bargain-hunting)
- daveslash 7y ago
  To introduce people to the very most basic concepts of programming (if-then, loops, etc, and making hello-world, fizz-buzz, etc...), I've been using the javascript console in the Chrome (or Firefox) developer tools. In casual conversations with non developer friends (30-40 y/o), I'll say "here, pass me your laptop... " and I'll do fizz-buzz real quick. I haven't tried with any one, but I would think that teaching someone how to wrap their head around those concepts could be done with a cheap net-book and built-in browser development tools. In the beginning, get all of the dependencies out of the way - no need for a compiler, source control, package manager, etc....

BlackJack 7y ago

We can discuss code camp pro/cons all day, but the article spells out that there was little coding being taught here. Instructors with little tech experience, high rate of firing and stuff turnover, students being told to "google it", operating without licenses, all while the founder has fancy offices in Chicago with rapacious and alcoholic parties. Amanda Laucher, the founder, essentially stole funds from governments and made false promises and is now going to Law School in Chicago. Meanwhile, these people quit their jobs on false hope and now are unemployed or have to rejoin at the bottom of the rung. Assuming the article is fair, this is a sad situation and Laucher should be prosecuted.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
Won't happen. Unless some WV politician makes a crusade out of it nobody is going to get prosecuted for ripping off poor people.
- dingbat 7y ago
  yup, and since Sen. Manchin took credit for bringing them in and giving them tons of public money, doubtful he'll be up for that crusade
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
> “Instructors with little tech experience, high rate of firing and stuff turnover, students being told to "google it", operating without licenses, all while the founder has fancy offices in Chicago with rapacious and alcoholic parties.” Hmmm sounds like pretty much every start-up I’ve ever heard of.
iguy 7y ago
It sounds uncomfortably close to a cynic's view of aid projects in poor countries. The customers aren't the students, but rather the Commission, and they were apparently sufficiently impressed with the TED talks to part with $1.5 million to start this thing. Maybe someone trying to get re-elected got to cut a ribbon on TV too. And I bet this also made a great story for the founders to tell in their law school applications.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

The untrustworthy city slicker stereotype doesn't come from nowhere. Nobody ever engages with these people except to take their money or tell them they're backwards hicks and their way of life is somehow wrong/bad (this being an example of the former).

redisman 7y ago
Some do care about people left behind but they usually don't care about a big social media boost to their ego so you don't really hear about their work
Nasrudith 7y ago
Just because it "comes from somewhere" doesn't mean it is valid. The rural they would already be disinclined to trust those from without - their mechanisms of trust are based upon personal knowledge and history which outsiders lack. Also the latter is clearly bidirectional. I haven't heard of the urban calling the rural "not real Americans" for one.

commandlinefan 7y ago

I guess people believe what they want to believe, but it should be obvious that if programming is really something you can learn in a few months in your spare time, it’s not going to be a very valuable skill. Either programming requires extensive education and experience to be really proficient (read: employable) in, or it’s going to be a minimum wage “we can throw a rock and replace you this afternoon” call-center job.

jimmaswell 7y ago
You can learn it in a few months in your spare time if you're cut out for it, which the vast majority are not. CS education for programming jobs is mostly a very expensive formality to convince hiring managers you know what you already knew before enrolling, or at least it was in my case.
- mratzloff 7y ago
  "You can learn how to be a lawyer in a few months in your spare time if you're cut out for it" would be considered a ridiculous statement. Perhaps you could learn enough to be an assistant to a legal secretary. The same applies to programming.
  - jimmaswell 7y ago
    They're not the same thing at all. Being a lawyer involves cramming in an enormous volume of rote information over many years and passing an exhaustive exam; programming is just a combination of problem solving, being able to deal with abstract concepts and how computers work, and learning a relatively small amount of syntax and general concepts. You can easily get a grip on all that in a few months if it's your thing.
    - johnsimer 7y ago
      I disagree that it takes just a few months. I'd say there are tons of hidden dependencies you have to learn in writing programs. Stuff that the tutorials and books often leave out. And that most developers take a few years to learn these dependencies, because there currently is no widely-known easy way to learn all this "tribal knowledge". And when universities try to systematize ways to learn this tribal knowledge, they come up with a curriculum that takes most people 4 years to get through. (Yes there are many smart developers who could learn the curriculum faster.)

erentz 7y ago

The “anyone can code” and “just learn to code” phenomena needs to die in a fire. This reminds me of many other scams in our education system, it’s disgusting how much money is being leeched out of people on private “schools”. This “anyone can code” idea is actually an easy thing to test if we were serious and honest about it. But we are not. And I believe boot camps give a false sense that more people are successful at it than aren’t. It really seems boot camps are in reality is a very expensive filtering system to separate those with some ability to teach themselves coding from those who can’t.

vsskanth 7y ago
As a counter-point, I would like to point out India's IT industry. When the IT outsourcing industry was booming and there was a serious programmer shortage, outsourcing firms such as Infosys, Cognizant, Tata would hire college graduates en-masse regardless of major (like, entire batch of 20XX would get a job offer). They would then spend 6 months actually training them and weeding out poor performers. The ones who get through would be placed on actual projects for their clients. I do not know if this still happens today due to the sheer number IT majors on offer in India. Now you can rightly argue with regards to the overall quality of products they created and the culture they proliferated but for their clients it appeared to suffice to achieve their business objectives. Sure most of them won't be FAANG grade but might be totally adequate for making some CRUD app or maintaining some system. IMO, I don't think one needs a four year degree to code, two years at the max would suffice (obviously not for cutting edge work) . In fact, I would go as far to say beginners can be trained on a good declarative low-code (not low code) guardrails-type DSL incorporating best practices to create simple CRUD or reporting web apps. There have been many attempts but I don't know if this is solved yet.
- erentz 7y ago
  It doesn’t sound strictly like a counter-point? More like we agree. As you say they weeded out those who had the capability from those who didn’t. Which in my experience is what bootcamps do, very expensively. Watching someone go through one of the more “legit” bootcamps: they first filter for candidates that can largely grok it and self teach by putting through a few hours of basic tutorial and quizzes. But a fair amount of ground is covered quickly in this which when you look at the people going through it (in chat rooms etc) means it’s very much a lot of googling and self teaching to understand what they’re saying in the videos. So after this point you selected people who can get basic programming and teach themselves. And the rest don’t go into the course and so don’t pollute their success rate statistics.

sheeshkebab 7y ago

Do these bootcamps ever give programming aptitude tests to people before accepting them into programs? Or is it all about money grab from grants for “learn to code” (which it sounds like it is based on this article)

erentz 7y ago
A lot of them do. This one seems like an outright scam, but for example well known boot camps like Lamba School put you through some tutorials and tests before hand. When you look at these tutorials it really seems to be a filter for “can you teach yourself coding”. IMO making the bootcamps fairly useless given the huge amount of online courseware and free tutorials available now.
- sheeshkebab 7y ago
  I guess if lamda school has a consistent track record in the industry & companies are hiring from them, i could see that being of value to someone switching careers. (Employers seem to be inept in interviewing for programming positions - and otherwise - On their own)
  - erentz 7y ago
    Yes, I tell people thinking about a boot camp to first try really damn hard to teach themselves first, then if they still want to, to just use something like Lambda School as interview preparation and to “credential” yourself.
- xenadu02 7y ago
  It’s no different than hiring a personal trainer. Sure everyone can go to the gym but having a set schedule, paying money, and being accountable to someone is a life hack that uses human social nature to one’s advantage.
  - bittercynic 7y ago
    It's a little different because you know from the start that hiring a personal trainer is not going to magically make you prosperous. There is a widespread idea that working in tech is easy and will make you rich, and all you have to do is get your toe in the door, and many "entrepreneurs" use that misunderstanding to set up programs that waste students time and extract money from donors and government programs that are unable to meaningfully evaluate what they're donating to.

in_cahoots 7y ago

The real shame here is that apparently nobody throwing money at this company did any due diligence. In an interview, the co-founder claims that all of its graduates get jobs, and that the skills taught are worth $200-$250 an hour (i.e. 400-500k a year) in San Francisco. The website’s success testimonials include quotes from a co-founder and one from a co-founder’s brother. If the people donating a million dollars had done ten minutes of background research they could have prevented this debacle in the first place.

asveikau 7y ago

> When word spread of a trip by the Mined Minds leadership to a tech conference in Lithuania in November, she saw an opportunity. I am partly of Lithuanian descent. With respect, I don't understand why someone in the US would think to attend a tech conference in Lithuania, when there is a much larger tech industry closer to home.

jen20 7y ago
Have you looked at the line ups of Build Stuff in Vilnius? It has many of the same speakers as QCon, historically at a fraction of the price, and attendees from across Western Europe and the US. I have priced it out several years running, and with flights from major US cities or (especially) Europe, a hotel and expenses it is substantially cheaper than attending a US conference in the same tier. Disclaimer: I have worked on the CFP for that conference several times over there last few years, but have no financial interest in the conference.
- jen20 7y ago
  Also since this came up out-of-band (ugh) and apparently is not the norm for US conferences: Build Stuff pays full travel expenses for all speakers, whether they come from Kaunas or San Francisco.
- asveikau 7y ago
  Interesting, thanks. I could certainly see it as less of a stretch for people elsewhere in Europe especially.
in_cahoots 7y ago
Apparently the co-founders met while in Lithuania: https://money.cnn.com/2016/04/22/news/economy/coal-workers-computer-coders/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2016/04/22/news/economy/coal-workers-c.... Given the overall tone of this article I’m guessing it was a vacation dressed up as a business trip.

jen20 7y ago

This article seems (at best) poorly researched and one-sided - and it does not chime even slightly with my experience of this group. I have personally met several people who have been through Mined Minds training with no prior coding experience - and those people were the first who convinced me that development “boot camps” were not a completely lost cause.

mothsonasloth 7y ago

[Warning Exremely Controversial Post Ahead] I am currently working for a big corporate in the UK, who have been showing off their "pioneering" and "visionary" strategy to focus recruitment from code boot-camps. All I can say is that as a senior developer, it has made my life misery. I've gone from writing code and producing features, to a full-time mentor and babysitter. Half of the boot-camp graduates I believe have become coders for the wrong reasons like: * developers have an easy life, getting into work whenever they choose * they get to wear t-shirts and baggy jeans * they get all the latest toys to play around with and shiny MacBooks * I hated my last job, looking at developers on TV in these Silicon valley places looks like the dream life * I am a single mother who was given the course for free The others, have aptitude but are so inexperienced from their 3 month session that it will take them atleast two years before they can be fully independant engineers. These codecamps are licenses to print money it seems, they charge the students a hefty fee for the course and companies then pay a recruitment fee at the end. Needless to say, I will be leaving my company very soon to go to a place where there is a coding test and filtering to prevent most of these bootcampers from getting in. Yes its snobby, but I didn't study and spend my student loan on my passion just so I can train up a bunch of people looking for the "easy life".

mathattack 7y ago
Why did your company fall for this? The only logical reasons I’ve seen are an inability to hire otherwise, and staff moonlighting at the boot camps. Both are bad reasons.
- mothsonasloth 7y ago
  I believe the main reasons were: * The local management are non-technical and have a rudimentary equation that 1 developer = 1 productivity unit * The bootcamp has some really great salespeople * Hiring is generally difficult for great dev talent, so their logic is just to hire anyone for the numbers, otherwise their budget gets constrained by kafkaesque finance practice from the companies HQ. * Local political and PR reasons, the company is "hiring local talent", "equal opportunities" etc.

mathattack 7y ago

Looks like the allegations of fraud were in the air in 2017 before WV started. https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2017/12/21/miners-sue-mined-minds-program/ https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2017/12/21/miners-sue-mined-...

auston 7y ago

Any ideas on how we (HN) could help these people that dealt with Mined Minds? Perhaps some free remote tutoring? Some interview coaching? Resume review? A whole lot of bagging on coding boot camps, the founders of Mined Minds & people looking for an easier life. I’m game to help myself! If anyone knows those folks & they want some help - I’m happy to connect & spend time doing any of the above!

Kalium 7y ago
It might be worth considering that the underlying question - does this model even work at the scale it was sold as? - goes unanswered. With that in mind, it sounds like what might be needed is the education they were looking for in the first place. Resume review, remote tutoring, and coaching are great ideas, born of a genuine blossoming of kindness and compassion. It may be possible that these well-meant ideas could be of perhaps slightly limited value for people who, based on the contents of the article, seem to have roughly as much marketable knowledge of Ruby as they did before they started the program.
- pbourke 7y ago
  The students in the article were taken advantage of. It sounds like nobody even got the chance to find out whether they would like or succeed at coding. So many responses in this thread are written from a middle/upper-middle class context. Folks who had reasonably good schools, access to computers at a young age, a stable home environment in which to work with them, a culture (parents and/or peers) that supported them, an expectation and pathway to higher education at a young age. Maybe not all of those boxes are ticked for every successful software engineer but I bet a good number of them are. The people in this article didn’t have as many of these factors. Maybe they had none of them. That doesn’t mean that they’re dumb, untrainable or not cut out to be coders. I think what it means is that an appropriate approach to training needs to be taken. That approach is probably something akin to a gateway aptitude test to demonstrate ability and commitment followed by a significant period of apprenticeship combined with some formal classes at the community college level. This is the way that people enter the skilled trades, and also seems similar to military occupational training. I don’t see why it couldn’t produce competent entry-level folks who are capable of working on 95% of business systems/websites/etc at the end of their training.

peter303 7y ago

In the mid 20th century coding was seen as a trade school skill. Perhaps boot camps are another version of this. When I attended MIT in the 1970s there was no pure computer science major even though competitor schools had such. The faculty said it was a skill most of the students picked up in high school. In 1980 MIT made computer science a co-major with electrical engineering. And finally last year an independent school.

redisman 7y ago
My highest level of education is trade school (electronics). Trade school doesn't take 4 months, it's usually 2-3 years with multiple internships and apprenticeships.

rayiner 7y ago

This is a byproduct of the (in my view, very positive) tradition in programming of not requiring a college degree. It offers the political class an easy message for dealing with the ramifications of the jobs exodus in places like Appalachia. Nobody would suggest, for example, training people up as doctors or lawyers or accountants to be a solution to that problem. The degree requirements are a signal: “this is not for everyone.” With programming, politicians have gotten this idea that because there are no formal educational requirements, programming and “tech” jobs are an avenue for employing the large numbers of economically displaced. But of course, programming is hard. Most people don’t have the analytical/mathematical mindset necessary to be even competent programmers. All of these coding boot camps and public programs just capitalize on this misconception and wishful thinking.

wutbrodo 7y ago
> But of course, programming is hard. Most people don’t have the analytical/mathematical mindset necessary to be even competent programmers. All of these coding boot camps and public programs just capitalize on this misconception and wishful thinking. It works both ways too; When bootcamps first popped up, I was dismissive of them until I realized that there was (to be fair, relatively new) high demand for people who could even do the bare minimum of stringing together CRUD apps, forming a labor market that had nothing to do with me, despite nominally being an "engineer". I think a lot of the pathologies of eng hiring stem from the broadness of the role "engineer", which just ends up causing credentialism and the metaphorical ghetto-ization wrt talent of parts of the stack, like frontend.

coconut_crab 7y ago

My experience with code bootcamp trained developers is positive, due to the follow reasons: - Most of them have engineering background: electrical engineering, civil engineering, petroleum engineering. - Since they lack formal education in IT, they have to train twice as hard, which our company encourages (2 months of probation = 2 months of training, it's almost impossible to find developer with Scala experience around here anyway). - We work with the Bootcamp to improve their program: giving reference to 'hard', 'theoretical' books such as Algorithms & Datastructure or Database Design and cutting down some unnecessary parts. - Most importantly, we strongly prefer people who switched to IT because they actually love programming, not just looking for higher wage.* * It may sound weird but actually many people here didn't picked their university by themselves but by the guidance of their parent, so they might study something else than their favourite.

jdhn 7y ago
>Most of them have engineering background: electrical engineering, civil engineering, petroleum engineering. That's great, but what about the people who come from a non-engineering background? I feel like people with a technical background will be able to pick up coding a lot quicker than people who don't have a lot of engineering aptitude. >We work with the Bootcamp to improve their program: giving reference to 'hard', 'theoretical' books such as Algorithms & Datastructure or Database Design and cutting down some unnecessary parts. That's great that you guys do this. I'm a real big proponent of this private/public model since it benefits both businesses (they get people who are trained in key business areas) and colleges/bootcamps (they can brag about knowledgeable grads whose job placement boosts their numbers).
- Kalium 7y ago
  > That's great, but what about the people who come from a non-engineering background? I feel like people with a technical background will be able to pick up coding a lot quicker than people who don't have a lot of engineering aptitude. You're almost certainly correct. It's perhaps possible that the bootcamp model, which can work well for people with solid technical backgrounds, might not work equally well for others. That's fine. Not every tool is a fit for every job. A hammer is very useful, but it makes a poor saw.

cr4ig_ 7y ago

Hey, it served it's purpose -- as a shiny prop for whatever political candidate championed it to come and spout some pretty words and get a nice photo op.

i_am_proteus 7y ago

> She doesn’t know the motives of the people at Mined Minds, she said, whether they had bad intentions or were just “incredibly sloppy” with good ones. Is there a term for this kind of hustle? Raising money from unsavvy investors for a technically-complicated effort, then "failing" in a way that isn't obviously fraudulent.

mcguire 7y ago
A "start-up". :-)

thwg 7y ago

Programming is not for everyone. Teaching programming is no easy task either. In the end, one of them, even if only one, got a real software job. This is enough to say this program is not a failure.

dvtrn 7y ago

For anyone here, that went through one of these CodeSchools/Bootcamps/training.jargon[2] courses, I have a question: At any point in these camps was there a section on interviewing and job seeking? I'm asking as both a hiring manager who has seen a very fair share of...sorry, BAD resumes coming from people who finished a local code school, who struggled through the interview (only one made it to a technical assessment, he struggled on the syntax but seemed to grok the concepts. He ultimately did not get hired)and as a friend of someone who went through a code school and has absolutely zero interview skills,. Their resume-upon reading-would have you wondering if they've applied for a "Junior React Developer" by mistake (restaurants, service industry jobs, stints at hotels, and at the very bottom: "React Bootcamp, Chicago - 2017-2018"). The generic cover letter this friend had me read jumped from topic to topic and was at least 5 paragraphs and two pages long, their only portfolio item was a single page "Hi I'm Bob" they made in the class. It just makes me wonder what else these schools are doing to help their students actually succeed.

barbecue_sauce 7y ago
I went to a bootcamp. I won't say which one. It was in a major city, and it was a residential program (anybody who was in the bootcamp but not local lived together in apartments included in the cost of the program). The program was structured beginning with a quick review of language basics (you were expected to know JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to a reasonable degree before the course began) and layouts, then moved on to Angular (this was a few years ago during MEAN stack hyper) and its associated patterns and best practices, then Node.js APIs and Mongo (the program has since shifted to PostgreSQL instead). Along the way, students were given assignments to augment these areas, such as reimplementing popular javascript libraries (like Underscore) against a test suite. The mid-point of the course culminated with presenting a solo project to the class, which was a good indicator of who was and who wasn't excelling. By this point, several students had dropped out and returned home or just stopped attending. After this, students were funneled into groups, with the higher performing students clustering together. The groups were given suggestions for projects to work on, typical web applications built on a combination of your own backend and third-party APIs. My group's project, for example, was a hybrid mobile budgeting application using Plaid and APN/GCM for push notifications. We had an exploratory phase where we tested the limits of the Plaid API (response times, features, webhooks, etc.) and determined user stories and requirements, then had stand-up meetings every morning and worked off of wireframes and ERD diagrams that we had designed. We were required to use git versioning so that we would inevitably experience merge conflicts and integration issues. There was about a week towards the end of the program that was focused on practice interviews (though these were admittedly somewhat half-assed) and resumes, in addition to the daily toy problems. At the end of the program, recruiters and local businesses were invited to see group and individual projects at a showcase day and this led to interviews for most of the students. A "Hi I'm Bob" page seems like it would not be the product of an actual full-time bootcamp, but maybe a short part-time bootcamp? Even the relatively lower achievers were capable of hooking up some sort of front end for a public API by the mid-point of the course, putting it on github and getting it up on Heroku. That said, many of the people I attended with had higher education or experience. My group was a former QA engineer, a bioengineering bachelor, an MBA, another biologist, and myself (Masters in Information Systems). By the end, we were relying more on the members of our group for disbursing useful information than on the instructional infrastructure of the bootcamp. I think subsequent jobs came mostly through networking between the groups of whoever was left by the end rather than the bootcamp itself.

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lgleason 7y ago

quelle surprise! Most of these programs are a joke. I remember when Tech Square Labs in Atlanta did a program to "help" inner city black kids. I went down to talk to them and get more information. For one year of this program they were charging the sponsors $57K. That is more than the tuition at many private schools. But it gets better. They had The Iron Yard (which is now closed) doing the course material so I had a chat with the people teaching the courses etc.. It was very apparent they had no idea what they were doing. The supposedly "disadvantaged" founders of this did not even understand the kinds of things they kids in the program actually were going through, such as having a lack of financial literacy or even a bank account at times. I'm white but live in a disadvantaged neighborhood and knew this because I don't live in the rich bubble that these "disadvantaged" founders did. When the political climate was right they were bilking the tax payers for this program with funding from the city of Atlanta, the feds etc., but after 2016 the funding went away, as did the founders profits. There have been many programs like this one in Atlanta and the one for the people in Appalachia. I'm all for bringing people who do have the aptitude to the industry. That said, not everybody has the aptitude to be a developer, in the same way that not everybody has the aptitude to be a prize winning author, language guru, doctor, top athlete etc.. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. The coding bootcamp industrial complex appears to be a movement of grifters from a non tech background trying to make a quick buck and flood the market with cheap labor. In the end most of the students were poorer than they would have been in an accredited program, without training that would actually get them a job and as an industry we've had to deal with the fallout from it. I'm saying all of this as someone who actively supports one of these, but the one I support is run by computer science majors, who grew up poor, have made enormous personal sacrifices to run the program and targets people who truly have no option to go to the university and do it for far less than what the grifter orgs were doing it for. Truth be told, "learn to code" is not the way to economic prosperity. Paying livable wages for things is, irregardless of the country etc..

WoodenChair 7y ago

Ms. Laucher on Twitter responding to a critique from the article: "Retraining won't fix it. Give them UBI. Free training programs should only have viable candidates when it isnt for quick $" Is the last sentence a little ironic given the article? Source (perhaps will be deleted): https://twitter.com/pandamonial/status/1127627288676270081 https://twitter.com/pandamonial/status/1127627288676270081 Edit: To be fair, in other comments she claims many of the statements in the article are false and refused to comment for the article based on legal advice. I assume there are two sides to this story and the NY Times article does seem pretty one sided.

mynameishere 7y ago

They just hint at it, but the solution to the problem is already there for such people. Keep your job, go to a community college, and if you have the aptitude and build up the credits, transfer to WVU (or whatever) for the completion. Even failing that last part, an associates degree is still better than a phony cert.

whack 7y ago

I understand that building a startup is hard. I've often heard founders being advised to "overpromise" and operate in a "reality distortion field" in order to get the ball rolling. That all works out great when things eventually go well. But sometimes, there's a lot more at stake than simply investor money. This article does a great job of showing the human carnage that happens when founders overpromise jobs and riches that fail to materialize. Please keep that in mind the next time you are pitching your startup's mission to change the world.

duxup 7y ago

I went from a different technical career through a coding camp. I loved the experience. Having said that I'd say at least half my class was unemployable by the end. The camp did not filter candidates nearly enough and really hurt the class and I fear their own financal well being. I think coding camps could be done right, I just don't know if anyone is really doing it right...

ng12 7y ago
The problem is there's no incentive to fail out a paying customer. And this isn't isolated to bootcamps -- I've noticed many universities babying CS majors by dumbing down CS101 and offering enough soft-skill electives that you can basically get a degree without knowing how to code.
- duxup 7y ago
  Agreed, the incentives are all wrong for camps. A classmate said "it's a boot camp... people should be kicked out / quit". But presumably that might mean a partial refund and the camps do not want to do that.... so they sit in class weeks behind not doing well and dragging the whole class down with them. At least in universities you MIGHT fail a class. Not so much in coding camps. But yeah I've ran into and worked with some CS folks I wondered about... like dude you should know a lot more than me... you're having trouble logically doing anything here...

TheLuddite 7y ago

Coding jobs in Appalachia...wow I've heard it all. The people living in these places are still semi-barbaric, they need a long civilizing process before they can cut it in the modern world, 2 months long boot-camps is definitely not going to do this. It's a process that should start from childbirth.

murphy214 7y ago
https://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/People-are-pooping-more-than-ever-on-the-streets-13778680.php https://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Pe...

cavisne 7y ago

The issues with these bootcamps are 1) Developers tend to sneer at this model, because they learnt themselves online (and dont think sitting in an intensive bootcamp would help) or went to a university for multiple years. This means these bootcamps are often run by people on the fringes of tech, recruiters or in this case "consultants" 2) There is no reason for a developer to teach these bootcamps, they pay less than an equivalent job and most firms would look at experience teaching at one of these bootcamps as a red flag (because most of the teachers are students who couldn't get jobs). University is different here, as your research can be viewed valuably by tech companies, even if while at the university you earn less money, and there are other quality of life benefits 3) Once they get in most students get the impression (even subconsciously) that they've been scammed. Thats mostly for above reasons (founders and teachers who don't have tech experience), combined with a hard sell getting them into it. This gives graduates intense imposter syndrome. Even worse they follow the lead of people who run the boot camp and "fake it till they make it", mainly because these bootcamps offer them TA jobs to juice their stats and incentivizing them to say nice things about the bootcamp. The combination of these factors means you get graduates who have been taught by people without experience, with a bunch of baggage that makes them worse developers, afraid to ask questions for fear of being seen as an imposter, exaggerating any real projects/experience they've worked on, resistant to learning anything new because they've only been taught specific frameworks with no theory.

gyc 7y ago

Don't they have community colleges with programming courses in Appalachia? I remember years ago I took a single 3-month long summer class at a local community college that taught C, basic data structures, and basic algorithms. Based on what I learned in that class I was able to actually pass tech white boarding interviews and get a summer internship at a local tech company.

torgian 7y ago

I still see myself as a junior dev since I am still self-teaching a lot of stuff. While running my own business, working on projects with my customer. I’m not a good dev. But I am good at working with others and getting stuff done. So, there’s that going for me I guess. I probably wouldn’t be employable if I had to go through coding tests. But I can fix problems since I study and research a lot.

hluska 7y ago

I’m not shocked by HN’s attitude towards bootcamp grads, but I am very surprised that so many here are blaming the grads and not the bootcamps themselves. Bootcamps use absolutely disgusting marketing techniques to appeal to people with little ability outside of being able to pay tuition. Their grads are closer to victims.

slow_donkey 7y ago
They absolutely are the victims but it's also a students responsibility to do due diligence on the bootcamps just like you would (should?) research an employer before signing the job offer.
- em-bee 7y ago
  how would they do that? if they are the kind of people described in the article, then they have no means with which to evaluate the school. as a programmer, i can judge if a potential employer is doing proper software development, and if i am already in the field, i can judge whether the next class/school will teach me something that relates to what i am doing, but as a student completely new to the field i don't even know yet what and how i can best learn. so i can't necessarily judge the quality of the school. i can look at statistics for past students, but those can be faked, so short of actually talking to a number of past students, evaluation of a school is hard.
- hluska 7y ago
  Let me pull out a quote from the article. “But Tori and her mother, Stephanie, 45, stayed. Every weekday morning, Tori would wake up early, her mother would feed the chickens and together they would head down the serpentine mountain road to Beckley. Nights and weekends they spent in the glow of their laptops — bought from a website on credit — learning the rudiments of Ruby, the programming language.” To steal a shitty term from mainstream media, let’s unpack this. Tori [Frame] used to be an assistant manager in a Family Dollar location. She decided to take a bootcamp with her mom so she quit her job. And, the family bought laptops on credit from a website. I’m pretty sure we can all guess what kind of website that is. With all due respect to the Frames, I don’t buy that either of them were qualified to assess whether the bootcamp was any good. Instead, they sound a lot like desperate people caught up by predatory marketing.

burfog 7y ago

What we need is a relatively standardized degree that is like a Bachelor's minus the Associates. That is, we don't need the two years of useless filler classes. Taking two years (4% of career time, more of lifetime earnings) for that gunk is a huge opportunity cost. I'm still waiting for my employer to ask me to do a Marxist literary criticism of a poem. When that day comes, I'm prepared! These coding boot camps could have been what we need, but they are far too short and not at all standardized. I doubt the students ever write a boot loader, compiler, or kernel. I doubt the students do much analysis of algorithms or even know what a Turing machine is. The same applies to non-coding careers that involve college degrees. We don't want surgeons with only a 14-week surgery boot camp, but cutting two years off of the lengthy education would increase the supply of doctors and reduce the cost (including opportunity cost) of their education. It's better than adding two years to every career.

zeade 7y ago

The HTML on minedminds.org is pretty sad for being a coding bootcamp site. Ignoring the basic badness of it looking like the output of Google+Stack Exchange copy-paste, it's not even valid (multiple head tags, div sitting outside of body/html tags, etc).