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[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"

[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
    On point 1, perhaps it’s time to whip out the Mythical Man Month?
    - pmiller2 7y ago
      Probably not going to do any good, based on the rest of the description of the situation.
    - dilyevsky 7y ago
      Yeah good luck with that. Most managers I talk to still think adding more people to late project = faster delivery.
  - joejerryronnie 7y ago
    Sounds like four political reasons. Better strap in for the long haul cause it doesn’t sound like things are gonna change quickly. Unless you happen to find that person who can understand and motivate developers while navigating the political power structure toward real solutions. Unfortunately, those people are even more rare than the 10x developer.
    - dilyevsky 7y ago
      3 is not political. It’s hard to maintain hiring standards in this crazy market when you’re under business pressure to scale and it’s only natural management gets desperate after some time. I’ve seen this firsthand several times.
- deleted 7y ago
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- walshemj 7y ago
  Its a UK company so they have the British Disease = "don't want to pay for training"
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Should we call it "British Disease" if it's already universally infecting companies world-wide?
jen20 7y ago
> developers have an easy life, getting into work whenever they choose Why exactly is that the wrong reason?
- sudosteph 7y ago
  I know people with 4 year CS degrees from reputable schools who picked tech jobs for the same reason. I think wanting a job that allows you the means and time to enjoy other parts of life is perfectly valid. Being incompetent at said job is where the problems come from.
- mothsonasloth 7y ago
  Nothing wrong with that, but if I ask you why did you become a developer and you list that as a main reason, then I will immediately dismiss you as not being serious.
  - zaphar 7y ago
    Why? Nothing about that reason has any bearing on whether you will be any good at it. Passion provides motivation to gain skill but it's not the only thing that can provide motivation. It's not even the only reliable motivator. Having a better career or pay can also be pretty reliable motivator.
    - jen20 7y ago
      Dismissing someone as “not serious” because of their reasons for following a particular career path says a lot more about the person doing the dismissing than those being dismissed. By the parent’s criteria, I am “not serious”. My record on OSS and early work at companies which were acquired or have outsized valuations suggests the parent is 100% wrong, however.
      - mothsonasloth 7y ago
        Fair enough but what you have said shows to me that you are most likely a 10x'er, therefore I would say you're in a different league altogether. Tell me, when you typed your first line of "Hello world" in C, Python etc. Was your motivation to have an easy life?
fma 7y ago
To a lesser extent, the same can be said for those who get an "IT" degree from a no name school from the college of business. I've spent a lot of my time training people who graduate from local small colleges instead of say, Georgia Tech or UGA (I'm in Atlanta) because management at my big corp is throwing cheap bodies at the solution. Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed mentoring but done kids graduate with no clue and the wrong expectations. I've mentioned to management these kids don't graduate with the proper foundation... And I'm told it's my job to give it to them....sure, I'd love to if they give me their college tuition!
- scj 7y ago
  If you don't mind me asking, what is the ratio of mentors : grads where you work? What do you think is an acceptable ratio?
  - pmiller2 7y ago
    Depends how much mentoring is expected and what the productivity expectations for the mentors is, IMO.
  - fma 7y ago
    I don't really have a good answer but I'll give it a shot. I can only speak for my team. In big corp, your work experience is based on your team. We have 4 senior dev, 7 college hires who have been with us between 0-4 years. The experience/aptitude varies. i.e. there are some who have been with us for 2 years that is not as good as the one hired. We've had some come on our team and move onto other teams. I have one who's been with us for 4 years, and at 3 years I felt is like a competent senior dev. He's moved to another team and runs laps around his new teammates. Because I have the most patience in the group...I end up being the person most of them come to for help. I'm technically the architect on the team (manager gave me the title recently, too modest to accept it...) and the senior devs even come to me with questions...but of course I don't truely mentor them. But to give continuing education to the team, I've implemented a "Tech talk Friday" where I book a 1.5 hour of our time on Friday and watch and discuss various conference talks on YouTube that I feel are applicable for us. It's a nice way to end a Friday, too :) There's no defined ratio. A grad who has a good foundation, is a go-getter and can learn on their own only needs to be guided. While others need to be handheld. Mentors' should not be bogged down to the point they are not able to do their real work - otherwise they'd get burned out and would just dismiss mentees.
deleted 7y ago
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hatchnyc 7y ago
This has been my experience, and I'll add I have noticed there is a massive disconnect from the reality of just how complicated modern software is. I remember beginning my career what I think used to be a quite common experience of being quite a bit overwhelmed by how much I had to learn, very aware that I didn't even know what I didn't know and this definitely motivated me. This awareness is completely absent from 100% of the boot camp grads I've encountered, who have been sold and apparently internalized the idea that "everything is easy" and are quite resistant to the suggestion that they might not fully grasp the scope and difficulty of the situation. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I also suspect these people would have found their way into software development without going to a boot camp.
- mothsonasloth 7y ago
  Completely agree, I would like to blame it on this dichotomy of "frontend and backend development". Most of the bootcampers did three months of "frontend" work and are oblivious to what goes underneath in the murky world of business logic and services. Until they have been able to demonstrate they are confident in: * Presenting data to a user * Validating inputs * Making correct requests and understanding the interactions of an API (whether its REST, RPC, programmatic, internal) * Processing requests * Persistance and access of data * Basic security * Be able to document and explain all areas to a basic level. * Debug and provide a root cause analysis. Then they will remain a junior developer and I think that will be many of these bootcampers fate, as they are either unwilling or incapable of doing work outside their comfort zone.
  - jen20 7y ago
    > Then they will remain a junior developer and I think that will be many of these bootcampers fate This is a fair assessment - not just of boot camp developers but of all developers. I don't think I agree that it is a problem that some people working as a junior developer today will never become a Technical Fellow, however. I've personally found (especially in the "enterprise") that many senior developers do not actually have fifteen years of experience - but one year of experience fifteen times, and are functionally junior developers with the wrong title. Educational background does not tend to be an indicator of this.
DiseasedBadger 7y ago
I look at it the other way around. I get paid 115k$ in a very cheap area to do code reviews and go to a few meetings. I make things at home now. I don't want to go back to the stress of rapid fire "three parallel orthogonal lines for Miss Business" development. The baby-devs are a cudgel of tender emotions with which to push back against the exploitative wiles of business. I fondly imagine I'll actually have the time to strike out on my own any day now, but the reality is that my life is already better.
sideaccount 7y ago
They could still administer a coding test to the bootcamp certificate holders. Just because you have a CS degree does not mean we hire you without a coding test. Some of the least productive coders I have worked with have had degrees. Most degrees only prove that you have some ability to memorize things, practical application is a very different skill.
- mothsonasloth 7y ago
  Coding tests are effectively a benchmark, and as Goodhart's law says about metrics. They cease to become a useful measure. That's why I am interested in someone's portfolio, if they don't have a portfolio, then why?
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Coding tests are often meant as a fizzbuzz type filter - if it is meant only for a very basic level of competence.
- stale2002 7y ago
  Coding tests are the easy part. I truly believe that almost anyone could spend 6 months studying interview questions and go from zero coding experience to getting a job at Google. Is this person going to be a good engineer? Almost certainly not. But by God's will they be good at programming tests and Google interview questions.
- learc83 7y ago
  >Most degrees only prove that you have some ability to memorize things, practical application is a very different skill. My degree put very little focus on memorization. Individual and group projects certainly had nothing to do with memorization. My experience hiring and working people from other schools indicates that their degrees were similar. I'm not sure where this degree == memorization thing comes from.
  - bigred100 7y ago
    I don’t really know either. Obviously a degree isn’t a necessary or sufficient condition for competence, but I don’t know why a lot of people seem to pretend it’s borderline useless, a scam, etc.
Uptrenda 7y ago
Honestly, I agree with you. I don't mean to discourage anyone trying to learn software engineering but: IMO its something that takes years to learn the fundamentals. There are so many small details that aren't what you expect them to be that I see no way bootcamps could prepare you. Things like how file systems work, what system calls do -- how write() works -- does it write data or not? How do blocking / non-blocking calls differ? What concurrency models are there in programming? How does parallel execution really work? How do you (properly) handle I/O, networking, and other events? How do you evaluate and compare the efficiency of algorithms? What kinds of security threats lie in different types of code? Practically, how do you prevent them? How do databases work? How do you design applications to avoid corruption? What are the different isolation levels in a database? What parts of the database are 'locked' for a given query, what 'order' are transactions executed in? How does the OS allows multiple programs to run? Cryptography. Sessions, encryption, hashing, salting, peppers, verifiable delay functions, public keys, symmetric vs asymmetric crypto. Signatures. Mutual authentication. Message integrity. I guarantee you most developers have screwed up their handling of I/O, security, db use, or concurrent code at at least once in their career. These are deep concepts that can be "learned" in 10 minutes from a tutorial, but have tons of weird, undefined behavior that only shows up if you don't completely understand what you're doing. IMO, what seems to have changed recently is there's now more ways to shoot yourself in the foot. I.e- more open source libraries that are usable right off the bat as black-box-plugabble, square-peg-in-circular-hole type deals. Kind of like how people trick themselves into feeling like experts from reading wikipedia -- a little knowledge can be just as dangerous as no knowledge at all.
- ip26 7y ago
  Consider however that not all software jobs require all that knowledge. As software spreads, not all new software jobs are rockstar positions. A lab full of scientists, for example, might benefit a lot just from a couple people who know how to operate a database and do some basic data crunching. Or, consider the vast number of people who get their job done in Excel today, who don't need to call write() but could do their job better & faster if they switched to Python. If the future is software, then there will be places for PhDs & bachelors, but also for associates and even bootcamps/certs. Even people who are not deeply passionate about software can make a useful contribution. Putting men on the moon took a lot more than just rocket scientists.
tarsinge 7y ago
> who have been showing off their "pioneering" and "visionary" strategy to focus recruitment from code boot-camps. Seems like the kind of company which would be relying on interns and juniors (that need training too) instead of hiring seniors engineers, they just found a way to make it look good.
john_moscow 7y ago
The key to handling such environments is to not care about the result more than the others. So socialize with the newbies, maybe go have some beers, be a pleasant person and absolutely don't give a damn that they are utterly completely useless. It wasn't your decision to hire them and you shouldn't be wasting your passion and energy on rectifying it. If you care about what you're doing, it consider starting a side project and growing it into a fully-fledged business instead.
- draw_down 7y ago
  It’s unfortunate that people will describe such a view as “cynical”, it’s entirely pragmatic. The cynicism is in whoever clearly doesn’t care that the people they hire are not effective in their jobs.
MattyRad 7y ago
I've shared this experience of being a mentor and babysitter for people who seek all the things you listed, although in my case it's inexperienced coworkers who are "self taught" (no boot camp even). Their charisma and our shallow interviewing process usually lands them a job and leaves me cleaning up after the messes they perpetually make. You would think proper communication would prevent these things, but often they are so alack of experience it goes right over their head, and other times they're overconfident or just disinterested in improving themselves. If you try and give them too much constructive criticism, then you quickly become the office asshole. Other engineering industries have to take rigorous exams to achieve any forward momentum in their job (civil engineering had the PE, for example). This is something I think I could get behind for our industry .
- murphy214 7y ago
  24 yo CE here with FE here, the question becomes do you think a test can be designed for something as large as software to accurately judge competency. Competency in code comes from getting stuff wrong and having to live with it and fix it, that stuff isn't super easy to test.
  - megaremote 7y ago
    You don't even need a test. Just drill down on one particular area and see how much they know. For example, get them to explain a model they would use to represent user login. Then get them to explain how that would link to their use info. Then how they would display that on a login screen. Then how they would save that into the database. Anything to watch out for? Any security concerns?
    - throwaway55554 7y ago
      Everything is so web based on HN. Give them a device protocol and ask them to code up the state machine for it.
  - MattyRad 7y ago
    You're right, it would be pretty difficult to make a test that actually gauges competency. That shouldn't necessarily be a reason not to try though. Honestly, it might be easier to adjust the hiring process. If the hiring process were able to easily select driven individuals who retain "software engineer" as part of their identity, and people that take pride in their work, seek constructive criticism and want to learn, then that would be good enough. I should also clarify that being self taught isn't necessarily a bad thing (one of the best coworkers I had was self taught), lacking any of the above traits is.
deleted 7y ago
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pmiller2 7y ago
I don’t see how any of those things you listed are “wrong” reasons to go into software development. All of them are true or roughly true, so, if that’s important to someone, then great. Believe me, given a choice between software development and service work or factory work, I would always choose development for the “easy life,” too. OTOH, you’re right about boot camp grads not being ready to operate independently, but that’s your employer’s fault for hiring too many of them. You’re totally free to leave and go somewhere that doesn’t hire boot camp grads if you don’t like it.
brian-armstrong 7y ago
Given how little UK pays developers in general, is there any reason good devs shouldn't move away from there anyway?
- rogual 7y ago
  Our visa options can be fairly limited if we don't have 4-year degrees.
- hcho 7y ago
  At will employment in UK pays compareable to US.
  - walshemj 7y ago
    Err no compare what Google pays in London with what Google pays in SV
    - hcho 7y ago
      Is there any location that comes close to SV?
      - walshemj 7y ago
        But you just said the pay was comparable between the UK and USA ???
        hcho 7y ago
        Indeed. Not much difference between, say London and NYC. SV is an outlier, even with in US.
        phonebanshee 7y ago
        Not compared to Seattle, as far as I can tell. Things have changed rapidly in the last few years.
gcmeplz 7y ago
> 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. I went to a bootcamp, and the first hour of every day was spent learning to solve the types of coding tests that companies use in interviews. So, when companies look at the graduates of these bootcamps, it's really hard to differentiate between people who perform really well on the interview but will require significant investment before they're useful (this was me) and people who have been programming and working with computers for years and simply lacked a little bit of polish & training (like some other people in my program). All that's to say -- traditional coding tests & filtering doesn't necessarily work that well when you have people training for the test (rather than training for the ability to do the work that the test is supposed to be a proxy for).
- ape4 7y ago
  After attending that bootcamp do you thing you could design tests to stump people who only knew how to do tests.
  - gcmeplz 7y ago
    Coding tests -- I don't think so. Within three months of practice, folks were generally proficient at the "Cracking the Coding Interview" style of problems. When you have a curriculum that's partially designed for that purpose, any question you have that would stump bootcamp graduates is also going to flummox some amazing engineers with years of experience. I'd instead try to pair with people on solving a problem that translates well to the problem domain that you're trying to hire for. Anybody who's new to the industry is going to need a decent amount of support & mentorship starting out before they're able to contribute meaningfully to a team and working with someone for a day is a good way to figure out how much support they're going to need and what it's going to be like to mentor them. Bootcamp graduates would likely be open to a day of paid pairing to figure out if a job would be a good fit. If you did want to go with the more traditional coding test route, I'd try and do something relatively concrete: - download a set of log files & group them based on a search - hit an API route & use that to render and update a list of items - connect to a database, figure out what schema migrations are necessary to support a new feature, and then talk through how to do the migration - figure out why a test is occasionally failing on a CI server - add metrics, logs, tests, and alerts to a service with two routes (/healthcheck and /doSomethingImportant) Like all interviews, the closer the interview maps to the day-to-day of what your needs actually are, the better it will be. There's something beguiling about questions about dynamic programming or red-black trees, but being good at answering those questions has almost no relationship to day-to-day work. (Unless you're at a place where deeper knowledge of data-structures and computer science really matters... and in that case, you're not going to have much with recent bootcamp graduates anyways)
maxxxxx 7y ago
I always think the we should send CS graduates to a bootcamp to get some coding skills. Or send old-time devs so they get up to speed with newer tech. But starting from zero in 12 weeks seems almost impossible except for a few.
- learc83 7y ago
  Company training used to be very common, but now they just want to whine about how people don't step out of school as senior developers.
- throwawayjava 7y ago
  Being able to learn these things on your own is exactly what a CS degree is supposed to teach. In my career, I've taught myself how to make complex CLIs. Then CGI-based web apps. Then Java desktop apps. Then MVC frameworks. Then JS frameworks. Etc. Ditto for changes in development and deployment processes. Ditto for changes in DB technology. etc. My employer rightfully expected that, for a six figure salary, I should be a professional who is able to keep up with best practices. That's why they pay me well. They let me attend conferences and I negotiate for some "experimentation" time whenever there's a big shift in the tech landscape, but it's not like I'm disappearing for months at a time every 5 years. That'd be insane. I'm not very old. Hell, I don't even work in web development. It's just one of those skills I need to keep fresh because it comes in handy every once in a while. The changes in my actual domain of expertise have been even larger and much more difficult to keep up with. Coding bootcamps are expensive -- they often cost on the order of a single year of college. If you're going to need to go through a few of them in your career just to keep up with a single skill set -- building UIs -- that's more of a baseline competence than a real specialty, why not front-load and just get a good-quality degree that prepares you to teach yourself the easy stuff? Double major while you're at it.
  - maxxxxx 7y ago
    Maybe at some point you will notice that once you have more responsibility in one area it will use up all our time and energy and you simply don't have time to learn other stuff on the side. I am in that situation right now and I think an 8 week bootcamp to focus on Machine Learning would be a good starting point. I could learn it myself but I would need some dedicated time to focus on it and not have to worry about my regular job.
ErotemeObelus 7y ago
This isn't a soul-crushing job babysitting (only outdone in horror by being in a chicken suit waving a sign for a fried chicken restaurant). This is an opportunity for you to study various psyches and all the gory "this is how sausage is made! details. Also exposure to abnormal psyches. The Chinese word for disaster is opportunity.
- thebooktocome 7y ago
  > The Chinese word for disaster is opportunity. That's a well-known false trope. See: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1212 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1212 and links therein.
g837382 7y ago
I'm currently in a bootcamp in SF after several years in product/analytics type roles in tech. I decided to finally go for it after considering it for a few years because structured learning/accountability helps me learn a lot faster. I just finished my first final project using React/Redux/PostgreSQL/Rails/S3 -> http://www.orangemusic.xyz http://www.orangemusic.xyz I don't think I could have learned what I've learned in that amount of time with self-study alone.
pfortuny 7y ago
It’s not that you are training people. It is that your company is taking advantage of you to get public funds. You did not state it but I bet so. This is so EU... Happens in Spain all the time.
xrd 7y ago
To sum up: * Your job is no longer easy * ---- * You have to help people, no longer get to play with your toys all day * You hate your current job * ---- I'm seeing a pattern of 3/5 but only because I'm assuming you aren't a mother. If I was wrong, Happy Mother's Day! Have you ever been in a company where senior people were responsible for helping new people? Or, are you searching for that company where everyone comes in magically perfect and at exactly the same level of competence? I've never been at that company, when you find it, please share it here so we can all go work there.
whack 7y ago
Many of the things you said sound pretty representative of new CS graduates as well. It'll take them at least a year, and a lot of mentoring, to learn the best practices and get their hands dirty. I get the impression the problem at your company isn't with bootcamp-vs-CS-graduates. I suspect the problem is that your company is hiring too many inexperienced developers at once (to save money), and isn't doing a good job of hiring the best bootcamp graduates (probably also to save money). I might be biased since I have an engineering degree, but no CS degree. Self-taught myself a bunch of stuff, made the switch to software, and have now worked for 2 of the FAANGs. My very first software employer certainly had to mentor me quite a bit for the first 4 months, but I certainly justified the investment over the following year.
- jayd16 7y ago
  A self motivated person can break into CS but that's not what he's talking about. A 16 week class isn't enough to prepare a dispassionate person looking for anything. The problem with these camps is they help those who don't need it.
- hermitdev 7y ago
  I think part of the problem is people assuming CS degrees teaching software development and best practices. They don't. They teach theory and on the side as either a lab or project, you write some code. Best practices? Nope. SCM? Nope, unless you have an external influence. Like you, I learned a lot of beat practices on the job. SCM? Was SourceSafe (Yeah. I know, cringe, but also 2000). But also practices about how to release, when, notification of releases, post mortem of incidents, none of that was mentioned in school. All on the job. I landed in finance, and any single fuck up can land you on the wrong side of the door. But if you accept you screwed up, most people I've worked with will give you a second chance as long as you don't repeat your mistake.
- wolco 7y ago
  Self taught is the key skill. If you can learn on your own you have a good chance of facing a developers life. Bootcamps are the opposite. Quick compressed learning certified by a brand. Good for experienced developers learning a new language but lacking for the type who haven't used a computer before.
freewilly1040 7y ago
Bootcamps don’t provide an adequate training to become an engineer, yes, but believe it or not there are plenty of very good engineers who have things besides work at the top of their value list. Your post reflects narrow mindedness and a lack of empathy.
- mothsonasloth 7y ago
  > Your post reflects narrow mindedness and a lack of empathy. Which are the tenets of big corporate, which is why I am getting the hell outta there to a smaller, more "organic" company.
- lozenge 7y ago
  When at work you should be ready and interested to learn about how to improved your work. It's as simple as that
  - freewilly1040 7y ago
    I agree. That's not what the parent post was talking about. The post disparaged people based on who they are not what they do.
duxup 7y ago
What is really disheartening is for those of us who went to camps.... we're painted with the same brush after people have experiences with our bad classmates. About half my coding camp class was unemployable by my estimation. At one interview I'm fairly sure they had interviewed a classmate or two before me and the questions they asked were painfully simple to start.... if they felt they had to ask that, I can't imagine they'd ever want to hire someone at that level. Obviously I showed them otherwise and the interview went well, but I felt like their perception was so poor to start, there was no chance. At least I'm working now so it's not just "coding camp" on my resume as far as coding goes (I had another technical career previous to this one). I"m hesitant to mention the coding camp when I meet other people who are in the same industry. I really enjoyed my coding camp experience (going back to school was a surprisingly wonderful experience as I was a poor student earlier in life) and yet I'm inclined to say "self taught" and that isn't exactly true although much of what I know now would fall into that category.
- throwawayjava 7y ago
  > I had another technical career previous to this one This seems to be the huge differentiator. I've had really good experiences with boot camp grads who had a previous technical career or came from a STEM phd. Camps are great for getting already well-educated people up to speed on how to hack together a website, which is an enormous value add to an existing skill set.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Absolutely, familiarity with troubleshooting, how layers of technology interact, dealing with new tech regularly, working with technical teams is a big leg up.
Dylan16807 7y ago
That doesn't sound like a problem with the people you're hiring. It's perfectly normal to train new hires. The problem is that you were not hired for a training job, but they're making you do a training job.
Noos 7y ago
So here's the thing. What do those people do? tech people have been automating jobs away and insisting the future is code for a long time now. Now all of a sudden we get "coding is hard" and the non-traditional bootcamp education they pitched only really works for highly motivated self-starters, often with preexisting engineering or science backgrounds. So what do they do? What exactly are they going to train into?
- throwawayjava 7y ago
  > tech people... they We're commenting on an article about a coding camp founded by a professional TED talker who's now in law school. The "they" pitching bootcamps and the "they" automating jobs away are two different "theys". People who have been doing software for the last 20 years have always been saying "coding is hard" and "a few months in a coding bootcamp isn't sufficient preparation for a career in tech, especially when the winds of the market shift". But no one wants to hear "high-paying jobs require spending years getting good at doing hard things".
commandlinefan 7y ago
> very soon go to a place where there is a coding test Sadly, I fear that will be like “going to a place that doesn’t require unpaid overtime” or “going to a place that doesn’t have a noisy airplane hangar ‘open office’” - once it catches on, it will spread everywhere.
joe_the_user 7y ago
.
- shard972 7y ago
  Why are you assuming this is a class issue? Are you implying that the lower classes are not as intelligent/not as capable? I just saw it as a people issue.
- closeparen 7y ago
  If they had received a CS education they would be in a different class.
- rubyboss 7y ago
  Outraged social justice responses like this is the reason why the OP gave you a trigger warning. But I guess you chose not to heed the warning.
Lazare 7y ago
You're describing an unfortunate situation, but it feels like you may have mis-identified the issue. > 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. Your employer is trying out a new HR strategy to cut costs and boost productivity. Is that strategy working for them? It doesn't sound like it's working for them if they're hiring bad coders and driving away experienced staff. Do they think it's working? Is your management aware of your concerns? Because honestly, this sounds a lot like "my management team is doing something dumb, and it's all the fault of the new junior devs we hired". That sounds unlikely. Also: > I didn't study and spend my student loan on my passion just so I can train up a bunch of people Mentoring is a key part of the job. If your HR department is hiring poor candidates for that, that's an issue, but if you don't want to mentor people at all, is this really your passion?
hluska 7y ago
> 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". It is extremely snobby and frankly, I feel sorry for the poor juniors who are forced to learn from you. Very few of us entered the workforce with the requisite skill to succeed. Some of us were lucky enough to learn from amazing mentors. Others were cursed to attempt to learn from people with your attitude.
- eecsninja 7y ago
  I've been in OP's boat, mentoring people (normal hires, not from boot camps) who couldn't be bothered to put in the effort. It was a colossal time and energy sink. My attitude today is that you have to put in the initial effort to demonstrate that whatever I invest in training you will be paid off by your future work using that training over and over again. Otherwise it's a wasted investment. And that attitude is basically that of the old kung fu master: First prove that you are a worthy student, then I will spend time to teach you. Yet in a modern software dev environment, it somehow becomes snobby and elitist? Edit: I've gotten the same criticism from elsewhere, so the the parent comment (which has since been flagged) is not unique.
  - hluska 7y ago
    Part of life is getting to choose how we behave and what actions we model. In a situation like this, we have a choice. We can be snobby towards junior developers. Or, we can be kind to juniors and push back at the management structures which brought in less than qualified talent. When we follow the snobby path, we model that that type of toxicity is acceptable for senior developers. We also teach smart juniors that the best way to avoid our considerable wrath is to fly under the radar and avoid asking questions. How does that help anyone? I can point out several situations over my career where less experienced people have asked questions that exposed a gap in my thought processes. And I can point out more situations where relatively basic questions have turned into major teaching opportunities. Or, we can follow a different path and ‘gripe up’. We can keep open minds about juniors and model kindness and approachability. And, we can tell management about our concerns and seek actual change. I would rather model leadership than elitism.
throwaway34241 7y ago
> I will be leaving my company very soon to go to a place where there is a coding test Maybe that's your problem right there? I'm in SV and know someone who successfully did a bootcamp, but they certainly didn't get a special route through job interviews. They had to compete with graduates and pass regular technical interviews with algorithm questions (and they could do fairly hard ones that certainly many college graduates fail). BTW the bootcamp only charged on successful job placement, so it's hard to see how they could stay in business if it was just a scam. > and filtering to prevent bootcampers from getting in > 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 Why should the interview be for anything other than to determine technical competence and organizational fit? I'm sorry if you've had difficulty with your student loans but I don't see why it is relevant here. There's plenty of mediocre programmers that managed to pass a CS program somewhere. Maybe their course material covered a broad range of topics but certainly not everyone retains it or can even answer basic questions. Assuming two people with no experience, I would strongly prefer to work with whoever performs better on coding challenges and computer architecture questions even if they went to a bootcamp. Probably especially if they went to a bootcamp. If someone has 4x as much time to study and still does worse, that's hardly encouraging is it? To me it sounds like the hiring process at your company is what is at fault, and it would be better to fix that than to rely on expensive credentials (that can only set a low minimum bar anyway) as some sort of proxy. Maybe if you are overwhelmed with applicants you could filter by individual school, bootcamp, github portfolio, etc. But this seems to be painting with an overly broad brush.
throw-away-2346 7y ago
Do these bootcamps charge what a real uni charges? I recently went back to school (a well known one here in the UK) to get a MSc in Data Science (have gotten interested in research now) so I ended up doing a research dissertation. I already had a MSc (CS) and B.Sc (CpE) and 20 years experience, so it was not too difficult. It was a bit less math heavy than I expected, but ok. But the MSc in CS course for this uni... it really is less than a proper B.S. in CS course - it was nothing but the very basics. Aka a fairly expensive bootcamp, albeit with a "dissertation" at the end. The uni is making serious ££££ churning out "MSc graduates" and now I know where the trope of people with MSc who can't program comes from. My MSc course was a real course, from a much better school, but that was 15 years ago... Not all the MSc in CS students were bad, mind you - the ones who could have been engineers did well. But they still only got the very basics of what you need to know coming into industry now (or what a BSc student would get) and if I was in charge, I'd re-label the degree to something other than a MSc. But degree inflation is here to stay...
distant_hat 7y ago
Haha. There is a lot of this happening in data science as well for software engineers and with exactly similar kind of results. I hate mentoring tons of new people who just learned to throw tensorflow at pandas dataframes.

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
  On point 1, perhaps it’s time to whip out the Mythical Man Month?
  - pmiller2 7y ago
    Probably not going to do any good, based on the rest of the description of the situation.
  - dilyevsky 7y ago
    Yeah good luck with that. Most managers I talk to still think adding more people to late project = faster delivery.
- joejerryronnie 7y ago
  Sounds like four political reasons. Better strap in for the long haul cause it doesn’t sound like things are gonna change quickly. Unless you happen to find that person who can understand and motivate developers while navigating the political power structure toward real solutions. Unfortunately, those people are even more rare than the 10x developer.
  - dilyevsky 7y ago
    3 is not political. It’s hard to maintain hiring standards in this crazy market when you’re under business pressure to scale and it’s only natural management gets desperate after some time. I’ve seen this firsthand several times.
deleted 7y ago
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walshemj 7y ago
Its a UK company so they have the British Disease = "don't want to pay for training"
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Should we call it "British Disease" if it's already universally infecting companies world-wide?

jen20 7y ago

> developers have an easy life, getting into work whenever they choose Why exactly is that the wrong reason?

sudosteph 7y ago
I know people with 4 year CS degrees from reputable schools who picked tech jobs for the same reason. I think wanting a job that allows you the means and time to enjoy other parts of life is perfectly valid. Being incompetent at said job is where the problems come from.
mothsonasloth 7y ago
Nothing wrong with that, but if I ask you why did you become a developer and you list that as a main reason, then I will immediately dismiss you as not being serious.
- zaphar 7y ago
  Why? Nothing about that reason has any bearing on whether you will be any good at it. Passion provides motivation to gain skill but it's not the only thing that can provide motivation. It's not even the only reliable motivator. Having a better career or pay can also be pretty reliable motivator.
  - jen20 7y ago
    Dismissing someone as “not serious” because of their reasons for following a particular career path says a lot more about the person doing the dismissing than those being dismissed. By the parent’s criteria, I am “not serious”. My record on OSS and early work at companies which were acquired or have outsized valuations suggests the parent is 100% wrong, however.
    - mothsonasloth 7y ago
      Fair enough but what you have said shows to me that you are most likely a 10x'er, therefore I would say you're in a different league altogether. Tell me, when you typed your first line of "Hello world" in C, Python etc. Was your motivation to have an easy life?

fma 7y ago

To a lesser extent, the same can be said for those who get an "IT" degree from a no name school from the college of business. I've spent a lot of my time training people who graduate from local small colleges instead of say, Georgia Tech or UGA (I'm in Atlanta) because management at my big corp is throwing cheap bodies at the solution. Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed mentoring but done kids graduate with no clue and the wrong expectations. I've mentioned to management these kids don't graduate with the proper foundation... And I'm told it's my job to give it to them....sure, I'd love to if they give me their college tuition!

scj 7y ago
If you don't mind me asking, what is the ratio of mentors : grads where you work? What do you think is an acceptable ratio?
- pmiller2 7y ago
  Depends how much mentoring is expected and what the productivity expectations for the mentors is, IMO.
- fma 7y ago
  I don't really have a good answer but I'll give it a shot. I can only speak for my team. In big corp, your work experience is based on your team. We have 4 senior dev, 7 college hires who have been with us between 0-4 years. The experience/aptitude varies. i.e. there are some who have been with us for 2 years that is not as good as the one hired. We've had some come on our team and move onto other teams. I have one who's been with us for 4 years, and at 3 years I felt is like a competent senior dev. He's moved to another team and runs laps around his new teammates. Because I have the most patience in the group...I end up being the person most of them come to for help. I'm technically the architect on the team (manager gave me the title recently, too modest to accept it...) and the senior devs even come to me with questions...but of course I don't truely mentor them. But to give continuing education to the team, I've implemented a "Tech talk Friday" where I book a 1.5 hour of our time on Friday and watch and discuss various conference talks on YouTube that I feel are applicable for us. It's a nice way to end a Friday, too :) There's no defined ratio. A grad who has a good foundation, is a go-getter and can learn on their own only needs to be guided. While others need to be handheld. Mentors' should not be bogged down to the point they are not able to do their real work - otherwise they'd get burned out and would just dismiss mentees.

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hatchnyc 7y ago

This has been my experience, and I'll add I have noticed there is a massive disconnect from the reality of just how complicated modern software is. I remember beginning my career what I think used to be a quite common experience of being quite a bit overwhelmed by how much I had to learn, very aware that I didn't even know what I didn't know and this definitely motivated me. This awareness is completely absent from 100% of the boot camp grads I've encountered, who have been sold and apparently internalized the idea that "everything is easy" and are quite resistant to the suggestion that they might not fully grasp the scope and difficulty of the situation. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I also suspect these people would have found their way into software development without going to a boot camp.

mothsonasloth 7y ago
Completely agree, I would like to blame it on this dichotomy of "frontend and backend development". Most of the bootcampers did three months of "frontend" work and are oblivious to what goes underneath in the murky world of business logic and services. Until they have been able to demonstrate they are confident in: * Presenting data to a user * Validating inputs * Making correct requests and understanding the interactions of an API (whether its REST, RPC, programmatic, internal) * Processing requests * Persistance and access of data * Basic security * Be able to document and explain all areas to a basic level. * Debug and provide a root cause analysis. Then they will remain a junior developer and I think that will be many of these bootcampers fate, as they are either unwilling or incapable of doing work outside their comfort zone.
- jen20 7y ago
  > Then they will remain a junior developer and I think that will be many of these bootcampers fate This is a fair assessment - not just of boot camp developers but of all developers. I don't think I agree that it is a problem that some people working as a junior developer today will never become a Technical Fellow, however. I've personally found (especially in the "enterprise") that many senior developers do not actually have fifteen years of experience - but one year of experience fifteen times, and are functionally junior developers with the wrong title. Educational background does not tend to be an indicator of this.

DiseasedBadger 7y ago

I look at it the other way around. I get paid 115k$ in a very cheap area to do code reviews and go to a few meetings. I make things at home now. I don't want to go back to the stress of rapid fire "three parallel orthogonal lines for Miss Business" development. The baby-devs are a cudgel of tender emotions with which to push back against the exploitative wiles of business. I fondly imagine I'll actually have the time to strike out on my own any day now, but the reality is that my life is already better.

sideaccount 7y ago

They could still administer a coding test to the bootcamp certificate holders. Just because you have a CS degree does not mean we hire you without a coding test. Some of the least productive coders I have worked with have had degrees. Most degrees only prove that you have some ability to memorize things, practical application is a very different skill.

mothsonasloth 7y ago
Coding tests are effectively a benchmark, and as Goodhart's law says about metrics. They cease to become a useful measure. That's why I am interested in someone's portfolio, if they don't have a portfolio, then why?
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Coding tests are often meant as a fizzbuzz type filter - if it is meant only for a very basic level of competence.
stale2002 7y ago
Coding tests are the easy part. I truly believe that almost anyone could spend 6 months studying interview questions and go from zero coding experience to getting a job at Google. Is this person going to be a good engineer? Almost certainly not. But by God's will they be good at programming tests and Google interview questions.
learc83 7y ago
>Most degrees only prove that you have some ability to memorize things, practical application is a very different skill. My degree put very little focus on memorization. Individual and group projects certainly had nothing to do with memorization. My experience hiring and working people from other schools indicates that their degrees were similar. I'm not sure where this degree == memorization thing comes from.
- bigred100 7y ago
  I don’t really know either. Obviously a degree isn’t a necessary or sufficient condition for competence, but I don’t know why a lot of people seem to pretend it’s borderline useless, a scam, etc.

Uptrenda 7y ago

Honestly, I agree with you. I don't mean to discourage anyone trying to learn software engineering but: IMO its something that takes years to learn the fundamentals. There are so many small details that aren't what you expect them to be that I see no way bootcamps could prepare you. Things like how file systems work, what system calls do -- how write() works -- does it write data or not? How do blocking / non-blocking calls differ? What concurrency models are there in programming? How does parallel execution really work? How do you (properly) handle I/O, networking, and other events? How do you evaluate and compare the efficiency of algorithms? What kinds of security threats lie in different types of code? Practically, how do you prevent them? How do databases work? How do you design applications to avoid corruption? What are the different isolation levels in a database? What parts of the database are 'locked' for a given query, what 'order' are transactions executed in? How does the OS allows multiple programs to run? Cryptography. Sessions, encryption, hashing, salting, peppers, verifiable delay functions, public keys, symmetric vs asymmetric crypto. Signatures. Mutual authentication. Message integrity. I guarantee you most developers have screwed up their handling of I/O, security, db use, or concurrent code at at least once in their career. These are deep concepts that can be "learned" in 10 minutes from a tutorial, but have tons of weird, undefined behavior that only shows up if you don't completely understand what you're doing. IMO, what seems to have changed recently is there's now more ways to shoot yourself in the foot. I.e- more open source libraries that are usable right off the bat as black-box-plugabble, square-peg-in-circular-hole type deals. Kind of like how people trick themselves into feeling like experts from reading wikipedia -- a little knowledge can be just as dangerous as no knowledge at all.

ip26 7y ago
Consider however that not all software jobs require all that knowledge. As software spreads, not all new software jobs are rockstar positions. A lab full of scientists, for example, might benefit a lot just from a couple people who know how to operate a database and do some basic data crunching. Or, consider the vast number of people who get their job done in Excel today, who don't need to call write() but could do their job better & faster if they switched to Python. If the future is software, then there will be places for PhDs & bachelors, but also for associates and even bootcamps/certs. Even people who are not deeply passionate about software can make a useful contribution. Putting men on the moon took a lot more than just rocket scientists.

tarsinge 7y ago

> who have been showing off their "pioneering" and "visionary" strategy to focus recruitment from code boot-camps. Seems like the kind of company which would be relying on interns and juniors (that need training too) instead of hiring seniors engineers, they just found a way to make it look good.

john_moscow 7y ago

The key to handling such environments is to not care about the result more than the others. So socialize with the newbies, maybe go have some beers, be a pleasant person and absolutely don't give a damn that they are utterly completely useless. It wasn't your decision to hire them and you shouldn't be wasting your passion and energy on rectifying it. If you care about what you're doing, it consider starting a side project and growing it into a fully-fledged business instead.

draw_down 7y ago
It’s unfortunate that people will describe such a view as “cynical”, it’s entirely pragmatic. The cynicism is in whoever clearly doesn’t care that the people they hire are not effective in their jobs.

MattyRad 7y ago

I've shared this experience of being a mentor and babysitter for people who seek all the things you listed, although in my case it's inexperienced coworkers who are "self taught" (no boot camp even). Their charisma and our shallow interviewing process usually lands them a job and leaves me cleaning up after the messes they perpetually make. You would think proper communication would prevent these things, but often they are so alack of experience it goes right over their head, and other times they're overconfident or just disinterested in improving themselves. If you try and give them too much constructive criticism, then you quickly become the office asshole. Other engineering industries have to take rigorous exams to achieve any forward momentum in their job (civil engineering had the PE, for example). This is something I think I could get behind for our industry .

murphy214 7y ago
24 yo CE here with FE here, the question becomes do you think a test can be designed for something as large as software to accurately judge competency. Competency in code comes from getting stuff wrong and having to live with it and fix it, that stuff isn't super easy to test.
- megaremote 7y ago
  You don't even need a test. Just drill down on one particular area and see how much they know. For example, get them to explain a model they would use to represent user login. Then get them to explain how that would link to their use info. Then how they would display that on a login screen. Then how they would save that into the database. Anything to watch out for? Any security concerns?
  - throwaway55554 7y ago
    Everything is so web based on HN. Give them a device protocol and ask them to code up the state machine for it.
- MattyRad 7y ago
  You're right, it would be pretty difficult to make a test that actually gauges competency. That shouldn't necessarily be a reason not to try though. Honestly, it might be easier to adjust the hiring process. If the hiring process were able to easily select driven individuals who retain "software engineer" as part of their identity, and people that take pride in their work, seek constructive criticism and want to learn, then that would be good enough. I should also clarify that being self taught isn't necessarily a bad thing (one of the best coworkers I had was self taught), lacking any of the above traits is.

deleted 7y ago

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pmiller2 7y ago

I don’t see how any of those things you listed are “wrong” reasons to go into software development. All of them are true or roughly true, so, if that’s important to someone, then great. Believe me, given a choice between software development and service work or factory work, I would always choose development for the “easy life,” too. OTOH, you’re right about boot camp grads not being ready to operate independently, but that’s your employer’s fault for hiring too many of them. You’re totally free to leave and go somewhere that doesn’t hire boot camp grads if you don’t like it.

brian-armstrong 7y ago

Given how little UK pays developers in general, is there any reason good devs shouldn't move away from there anyway?

rogual 7y ago
Our visa options can be fairly limited if we don't have 4-year degrees.
hcho 7y ago
At will employment in UK pays compareable to US.
- walshemj 7y ago
  Err no compare what Google pays in London with what Google pays in SV
  - hcho 7y ago
    Is there any location that comes close to SV?
    - walshemj 7y ago
      But you just said the pay was comparable between the UK and USA ???
      - hcho 7y ago
        Indeed. Not much difference between, say London and NYC. SV is an outlier, even with in US.
        phonebanshee 7y ago
        Not compared to Seattle, as far as I can tell. Things have changed rapidly in the last few years.

gcmeplz 7y ago

> 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. I went to a bootcamp, and the first hour of every day was spent learning to solve the types of coding tests that companies use in interviews. So, when companies look at the graduates of these bootcamps, it's really hard to differentiate between people who perform really well on the interview but will require significant investment before they're useful (this was me) and people who have been programming and working with computers for years and simply lacked a little bit of polish & training (like some other people in my program). All that's to say -- traditional coding tests & filtering doesn't necessarily work that well when you have people training for the test (rather than training for the ability to do the work that the test is supposed to be a proxy for).

ape4 7y ago
After attending that bootcamp do you thing you could design tests to stump people who only knew how to do tests.
- gcmeplz 7y ago
  Coding tests -- I don't think so. Within three months of practice, folks were generally proficient at the "Cracking the Coding Interview" style of problems. When you have a curriculum that's partially designed for that purpose, any question you have that would stump bootcamp graduates is also going to flummox some amazing engineers with years of experience. I'd instead try to pair with people on solving a problem that translates well to the problem domain that you're trying to hire for. Anybody who's new to the industry is going to need a decent amount of support & mentorship starting out before they're able to contribute meaningfully to a team and working with someone for a day is a good way to figure out how much support they're going to need and what it's going to be like to mentor them. Bootcamp graduates would likely be open to a day of paid pairing to figure out if a job would be a good fit. If you did want to go with the more traditional coding test route, I'd try and do something relatively concrete: - download a set of log files & group them based on a search - hit an API route & use that to render and update a list of items - connect to a database, figure out what schema migrations are necessary to support a new feature, and then talk through how to do the migration - figure out why a test is occasionally failing on a CI server - add metrics, logs, tests, and alerts to a service with two routes (/healthcheck and /doSomethingImportant) Like all interviews, the closer the interview maps to the day-to-day of what your needs actually are, the better it will be. There's something beguiling about questions about dynamic programming or red-black trees, but being good at answering those questions has almost no relationship to day-to-day work. (Unless you're at a place where deeper knowledge of data-structures and computer science really matters... and in that case, you're not going to have much with recent bootcamp graduates anyways)

maxxxxx 7y ago

I always think the we should send CS graduates to a bootcamp to get some coding skills. Or send old-time devs so they get up to speed with newer tech. But starting from zero in 12 weeks seems almost impossible except for a few.

learc83 7y ago
Company training used to be very common, but now they just want to whine about how people don't step out of school as senior developers.
throwawayjava 7y ago
Being able to learn these things on your own is exactly what a CS degree is supposed to teach. In my career, I've taught myself how to make complex CLIs. Then CGI-based web apps. Then Java desktop apps. Then MVC frameworks. Then JS frameworks. Etc. Ditto for changes in development and deployment processes. Ditto for changes in DB technology. etc. My employer rightfully expected that, for a six figure salary, I should be a professional who is able to keep up with best practices. That's why they pay me well. They let me attend conferences and I negotiate for some "experimentation" time whenever there's a big shift in the tech landscape, but it's not like I'm disappearing for months at a time every 5 years. That'd be insane. I'm not very old. Hell, I don't even work in web development. It's just one of those skills I need to keep fresh because it comes in handy every once in a while. The changes in my actual domain of expertise have been even larger and much more difficult to keep up with. Coding bootcamps are expensive -- they often cost on the order of a single year of college. If you're going to need to go through a few of them in your career just to keep up with a single skill set -- building UIs -- that's more of a baseline competence than a real specialty, why not front-load and just get a good-quality degree that prepares you to teach yourself the easy stuff? Double major while you're at it.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  Maybe at some point you will notice that once you have more responsibility in one area it will use up all our time and energy and you simply don't have time to learn other stuff on the side. I am in that situation right now and I think an 8 week bootcamp to focus on Machine Learning would be a good starting point. I could learn it myself but I would need some dedicated time to focus on it and not have to worry about my regular job.

ErotemeObelus 7y ago

This isn't a soul-crushing job babysitting (only outdone in horror by being in a chicken suit waving a sign for a fried chicken restaurant). This is an opportunity for you to study various psyches and all the gory "this is how sausage is made! details. Also exposure to abnormal psyches. The Chinese word for disaster is opportunity.

thebooktocome 7y ago
> The Chinese word for disaster is opportunity. That's a well-known false trope. See: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1212 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1212 and links therein.

g837382 7y ago

I'm currently in a bootcamp in SF after several years in product/analytics type roles in tech. I decided to finally go for it after considering it for a few years because structured learning/accountability helps me learn a lot faster. I just finished my first final project using React/Redux/PostgreSQL/Rails/S3 -> http://www.orangemusic.xyz http://www.orangemusic.xyz I don't think I could have learned what I've learned in that amount of time with self-study alone.

pfortuny 7y ago

It’s not that you are training people. It is that your company is taking advantage of you to get public funds. You did not state it but I bet so. This is so EU... Happens in Spain all the time.

xrd 7y ago

To sum up: * Your job is no longer easy * ---- * You have to help people, no longer get to play with your toys all day * You hate your current job * ---- I'm seeing a pattern of 3/5 but only because I'm assuming you aren't a mother. If I was wrong, Happy Mother's Day! Have you ever been in a company where senior people were responsible for helping new people? Or, are you searching for that company where everyone comes in magically perfect and at exactly the same level of competence? I've never been at that company, when you find it, please share it here so we can all go work there.

whack 7y ago

Many of the things you said sound pretty representative of new CS graduates as well. It'll take them at least a year, and a lot of mentoring, to learn the best practices and get their hands dirty. I get the impression the problem at your company isn't with bootcamp-vs-CS-graduates. I suspect the problem is that your company is hiring too many inexperienced developers at once (to save money), and isn't doing a good job of hiring the best bootcamp graduates (probably also to save money). I might be biased since I have an engineering degree, but no CS degree. Self-taught myself a bunch of stuff, made the switch to software, and have now worked for 2 of the FAANGs. My very first software employer certainly had to mentor me quite a bit for the first 4 months, but I certainly justified the investment over the following year.

jayd16 7y ago
A self motivated person can break into CS but that's not what he's talking about. A 16 week class isn't enough to prepare a dispassionate person looking for anything. The problem with these camps is they help those who don't need it.
hermitdev 7y ago
I think part of the problem is people assuming CS degrees teaching software development and best practices. They don't. They teach theory and on the side as either a lab or project, you write some code. Best practices? Nope. SCM? Nope, unless you have an external influence. Like you, I learned a lot of beat practices on the job. SCM? Was SourceSafe (Yeah. I know, cringe, but also 2000). But also practices about how to release, when, notification of releases, post mortem of incidents, none of that was mentioned in school. All on the job. I landed in finance, and any single fuck up can land you on the wrong side of the door. But if you accept you screwed up, most people I've worked with will give you a second chance as long as you don't repeat your mistake.
wolco 7y ago
Self taught is the key skill. If you can learn on your own you have a good chance of facing a developers life. Bootcamps are the opposite. Quick compressed learning certified by a brand. Good for experienced developers learning a new language but lacking for the type who haven't used a computer before.

freewilly1040 7y ago

Bootcamps don’t provide an adequate training to become an engineer, yes, but believe it or not there are plenty of very good engineers who have things besides work at the top of their value list. Your post reflects narrow mindedness and a lack of empathy.

mothsonasloth 7y ago
> Your post reflects narrow mindedness and a lack of empathy. Which are the tenets of big corporate, which is why I am getting the hell outta there to a smaller, more "organic" company.
lozenge 7y ago
When at work you should be ready and interested to learn about how to improved your work. It's as simple as that
- freewilly1040 7y ago
  I agree. That's not what the parent post was talking about. The post disparaged people based on who they are not what they do.

duxup 7y ago

What is really disheartening is for those of us who went to camps.... we're painted with the same brush after people have experiences with our bad classmates. About half my coding camp class was unemployable by my estimation. At one interview I'm fairly sure they had interviewed a classmate or two before me and the questions they asked were painfully simple to start.... if they felt they had to ask that, I can't imagine they'd ever want to hire someone at that level. Obviously I showed them otherwise and the interview went well, but I felt like their perception was so poor to start, there was no chance. At least I'm working now so it's not just "coding camp" on my resume as far as coding goes (I had another technical career previous to this one). I"m hesitant to mention the coding camp when I meet other people who are in the same industry. I really enjoyed my coding camp experience (going back to school was a surprisingly wonderful experience as I was a poor student earlier in life) and yet I'm inclined to say "self taught" and that isn't exactly true although much of what I know now would fall into that category.

throwawayjava 7y ago
> I had another technical career previous to this one This seems to be the huge differentiator. I've had really good experiences with boot camp grads who had a previous technical career or came from a STEM phd. Camps are great for getting already well-educated people up to speed on how to hack together a website, which is an enormous value add to an existing skill set.
- duxup 7y ago
  Absolutely, familiarity with troubleshooting, how layers of technology interact, dealing with new tech regularly, working with technical teams is a big leg up.

Dylan16807 7y ago

That doesn't sound like a problem with the people you're hiring. It's perfectly normal to train new hires. The problem is that you were not hired for a training job, but they're making you do a training job.

Noos 7y ago

So here's the thing. What do those people do? tech people have been automating jobs away and insisting the future is code for a long time now. Now all of a sudden we get "coding is hard" and the non-traditional bootcamp education they pitched only really works for highly motivated self-starters, often with preexisting engineering or science backgrounds. So what do they do? What exactly are they going to train into?

throwawayjava 7y ago
> tech people... they We're commenting on an article about a coding camp founded by a professional TED talker who's now in law school. The "they" pitching bootcamps and the "they" automating jobs away are two different "theys". People who have been doing software for the last 20 years have always been saying "coding is hard" and "a few months in a coding bootcamp isn't sufficient preparation for a career in tech, especially when the winds of the market shift". But no one wants to hear "high-paying jobs require spending years getting good at doing hard things".

commandlinefan 7y ago

> very soon go to a place where there is a coding test Sadly, I fear that will be like “going to a place that doesn’t require unpaid overtime” or “going to a place that doesn’t have a noisy airplane hangar ‘open office’” - once it catches on, it will spread everywhere.

joe_the_user 7y ago

shard972 7y ago
Why are you assuming this is a class issue? Are you implying that the lower classes are not as intelligent/not as capable? I just saw it as a people issue.
closeparen 7y ago
If they had received a CS education they would be in a different class.
rubyboss 7y ago
Outraged social justice responses like this is the reason why the OP gave you a trigger warning. But I guess you chose not to heed the warning.

Lazare 7y ago

You're describing an unfortunate situation, but it feels like you may have mis-identified the issue. > 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. Your employer is trying out a new HR strategy to cut costs and boost productivity. Is that strategy working for them? It doesn't sound like it's working for them if they're hiring bad coders and driving away experienced staff. Do they think it's working? Is your management aware of your concerns? Because honestly, this sounds a lot like "my management team is doing something dumb, and it's all the fault of the new junior devs we hired". That sounds unlikely. Also: > I didn't study and spend my student loan on my passion just so I can train up a bunch of people Mentoring is a key part of the job. If your HR department is hiring poor candidates for that, that's an issue, but if you don't want to mentor people at all, is this really your passion?

hluska 7y ago

> 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". It is extremely snobby and frankly, I feel sorry for the poor juniors who are forced to learn from you. Very few of us entered the workforce with the requisite skill to succeed. Some of us were lucky enough to learn from amazing mentors. Others were cursed to attempt to learn from people with your attitude.

eecsninja 7y ago
I've been in OP's boat, mentoring people (normal hires, not from boot camps) who couldn't be bothered to put in the effort. It was a colossal time and energy sink. My attitude today is that you have to put in the initial effort to demonstrate that whatever I invest in training you will be paid off by your future work using that training over and over again. Otherwise it's a wasted investment. And that attitude is basically that of the old kung fu master: First prove that you are a worthy student, then I will spend time to teach you. Yet in a modern software dev environment, it somehow becomes snobby and elitist? Edit: I've gotten the same criticism from elsewhere, so the the parent comment (which has since been flagged) is not unique.
- hluska 7y ago
  Part of life is getting to choose how we behave and what actions we model. In a situation like this, we have a choice. We can be snobby towards junior developers. Or, we can be kind to juniors and push back at the management structures which brought in less than qualified talent. When we follow the snobby path, we model that that type of toxicity is acceptable for senior developers. We also teach smart juniors that the best way to avoid our considerable wrath is to fly under the radar and avoid asking questions. How does that help anyone? I can point out several situations over my career where less experienced people have asked questions that exposed a gap in my thought processes. And I can point out more situations where relatively basic questions have turned into major teaching opportunities. Or, we can follow a different path and ‘gripe up’. We can keep open minds about juniors and model kindness and approachability. And, we can tell management about our concerns and seek actual change. I would rather model leadership than elitism.

throwaway34241 7y ago

> I will be leaving my company very soon to go to a place where there is a coding test Maybe that's your problem right there? I'm in SV and know someone who successfully did a bootcamp, but they certainly didn't get a special route through job interviews. They had to compete with graduates and pass regular technical interviews with algorithm questions (and they could do fairly hard ones that certainly many college graduates fail). BTW the bootcamp only charged on successful job placement, so it's hard to see how they could stay in business if it was just a scam. > and filtering to prevent bootcampers from getting in > 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 Why should the interview be for anything other than to determine technical competence and organizational fit? I'm sorry if you've had difficulty with your student loans but I don't see why it is relevant here. There's plenty of mediocre programmers that managed to pass a CS program somewhere. Maybe their course material covered a broad range of topics but certainly not everyone retains it or can even answer basic questions. Assuming two people with no experience, I would strongly prefer to work with whoever performs better on coding challenges and computer architecture questions even if they went to a bootcamp. Probably especially if they went to a bootcamp. If someone has 4x as much time to study and still does worse, that's hardly encouraging is it? To me it sounds like the hiring process at your company is what is at fault, and it would be better to fix that than to rely on expensive credentials (that can only set a low minimum bar anyway) as some sort of proxy. Maybe if you are overwhelmed with applicants you could filter by individual school, bootcamp, github portfolio, etc. But this seems to be painting with an overly broad brush.

throw-away-2346 7y ago

Do these bootcamps charge what a real uni charges? I recently went back to school (a well known one here in the UK) to get a MSc in Data Science (have gotten interested in research now) so I ended up doing a research dissertation. I already had a MSc (CS) and B.Sc (CpE) and 20 years experience, so it was not too difficult. It was a bit less math heavy than I expected, but ok. But the MSc in CS course for this uni... it really is less than a proper B.S. in CS course - it was nothing but the very basics. Aka a fairly expensive bootcamp, albeit with a "dissertation" at the end. The uni is making serious ££££ churning out "MSc graduates" and now I know where the trope of people with MSc who can't program comes from. My MSc course was a real course, from a much better school, but that was 15 years ago... Not all the MSc in CS students were bad, mind you - the ones who could have been engineers did well. But they still only got the very basics of what you need to know coming into industry now (or what a BSc student would get) and if I was in charge, I'd re-label the degree to something other than a MSc. But degree inflation is here to stay...

distant_hat 7y ago

Haha. There is a lot of this happening in data science as well for software engineers and with exactly similar kind of results. I hate mentoring tons of new people who just learned to throw tensorflow at pandas dataframes.