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My concern would be whether people who take the bootcamp or self taught approach would have the grounding in engineering and CS theory that someone with a degre

My concern would be whether people who take the bootcamp or self taught approach would have the grounding in engineering and CS theory that someone with a degree has. I tend to feel that under-emphasizing these things are why the software industry has so much of a problem with poor designs, low code quality, and missed deadlines. Maybe it would be possible to create a two year degree that would fill in those gaps.

lsiebert 6y ago
It's not like people can't learn those things on the job if it's important to the company.
ckdarby 6y ago
Here are my opinions being in the industry through various roles as a dev, technical lead, and dev manager. I think there is too much weight put on CS theory but it is valuable if you already have it through a degree. Outside of FAANG and similar unicorn growth kind of companies nearly nobody else needs a new X or a different design of Y. I'd even go as far to say most of the time we don't even need to understand the internal of the tool itself. Gut feel says upwards of 99% of companies just need existing solutions combined. I'd say 20% of the industry itself thinks they're actually apart of the 1% that are truly facing a problem nobody else has. I've seen companies suffer from too much CS theory. They get caught up in the technical problems and the most ideal solutions instead of focusing on providing customer value. We hear this through the many talks about premature optimization and reinventing the wheel but in the real world I hear a lot of individuals calling the work a hack when it isn't the most optimized solution.
- hpkuarg 6y ago
  Yeah, 99% of companies that need software developers can (and should) get away with boring CRUD solutions using boring persistence like an RDBMS. You could probably go a little fancier on your choice of language, using a nice functional language like F# versus something like Java.
  - xwdv 6y ago
    99% of those companies building boring CRUD solutions don't even need developers. They could just piece something together off the shelf and be done with it. There's tons of products out there.

lsiebert 6y ago

It's not like people can't learn those things on the job if it's important to the company.

ckdarby 6y ago

Here are my opinions being in the industry through various roles as a dev, technical lead, and dev manager. I think there is too much weight put on CS theory but it is valuable if you already have it through a degree. Outside of FAANG and similar unicorn growth kind of companies nearly nobody else needs a new X or a different design of Y. I'd even go as far to say most of the time we don't even need to understand the internal of the tool itself. Gut feel says upwards of 99% of companies just need existing solutions combined. I'd say 20% of the industry itself thinks they're actually apart of the 1% that are truly facing a problem nobody else has. I've seen companies suffer from too much CS theory. They get caught up in the technical problems and the most ideal solutions instead of focusing on providing customer value. We hear this through the many talks about premature optimization and reinventing the wheel but in the real world I hear a lot of individuals calling the work a hack when it isn't the most optimized solution.

hpkuarg 6y ago
Yeah, 99% of companies that need software developers can (and should) get away with boring CRUD solutions using boring persistence like an RDBMS. You could probably go a little fancier on your choice of language, using a nice functional language like F# versus something like Java.
- xwdv 6y ago
  99% of those companies building boring CRUD solutions don't even need developers. They could just piece something together off the shelf and be done with it. There's tons of products out there.