3 ms·

> Takes about 3 hours of reading to any grad from any decent CS program to figure out git. If you understand graphs then you'll grok git pretty fast. Not all e

> Takes about 3 hours of reading to any grad from any decent CS program to figure out git. If you understand graphs then you'll grok git pretty fast. Not all engineers are CS grads. Not all engineers _need_ to be CS grads. Git is a great tool, but it can also be pretty complicated if you have to go off the beaten path. > Is the market so over-saturated that they have to offer the 4 month trial period? *week And IMO, it's not a question of saturation. It's a question of credibility. You, for instance, are (presumably) skeptical of whether or not Lambda grads would be able to pull their weight on a team. Spending 4 weeks working directly with a Lambda grad seems like a pretty good way to either prove or disprove your hypothesis. > I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning that some of the TA's at Lambda are hired to help with teaching as little as two months into the program as students. Skepticism is healthy, however I object to the idea that one needs to be an expert to teach. Even if you're just a _little_ better at something than someone else, there's no reason that you can't teach someone what you know. Of course, that breaks down if you _pretend_ to be an expert at the thing that you're teaching. It takes some humility, I guess. > It's no better than some diploma mills but any state school with half a decent curriculum sounds better than this. AFAIK, very few schools have an applied software engineering program that adequately prepares grads for doing real work on a real team. That's something that really can only come from experience. Having hired multiple new grads, my biggest problem was that they'd go down the rabbit hole of computing theory rather than focusing on solving the problem at hand in a practical way. IMO, applied software engineering education is pretty lacking across the board and bootcamps are a good place to experiment with new approaches. Even if Lambda and other bootcamps aren't necessarily the perfect solution, they're an attempt at a new solution to a hard problem.

908B64B197 6y ago
> Not all engineers are CS grads. Not all engineers _need_ to be CS grads. Git is a great tool, but it can also be pretty complicated if you have to go off the beaten path. I expect someone that calls himself an engineer to be able to get git, nevertheless. > And IMO, it's not a question of saturation. It's a question of credibility. You, for instance, are (presumably) skeptical of whether or not Lambda grads would be able to pull their weight on a team. Spending 4 weeks working directly with a Lambda grad seems like a pretty good way to either prove or disprove your hypothesis. > Skepticism is healthy, however I object to the idea that one needs to be an expert to teach. Even if you're just a _little_ better at something than someone else, there's no reason that you can't teach someone what you know. > AFAIK, very few schools have an applied software engineering program that adequately prepares grads for doing real work on a real team. That's something that really can only come from experience. My issue with bootcamps is that they teach "tricks" and not fundamentals. Someone with the fundamentals can easily adapt to another tech stack/codebase. But someone who simply learned whatever framework through rote won't. When you look at the "final projects" these bootcamps often get their grads to code, you'll pretty much get N identical github repo of that batch. But sure, if a dev shop measures performance by the number of Jira tickets a new hire can fix then yeah, getting someone from Lambda who learned that exact framework through rote might give you a good signal after 4 weeks while your college hire is still figuring out how the toolchain and lib work. But my bet is that the college hire will outperform the bootcamp grad in the long run. I think the only way to prepare new grads to real work is to blend-in semester-long assignments and projects into the coursework. That and select students that can learn fast.

908B64B197 6y ago

> Not all engineers are CS grads. Not all engineers _need_ to be CS grads. Git is a great tool, but it can also be pretty complicated if you have to go off the beaten path. I expect someone that calls himself an engineer to be able to get git, nevertheless. > And IMO, it's not a question of saturation. It's a question of credibility. You, for instance, are (presumably) skeptical of whether or not Lambda grads would be able to pull their weight on a team. Spending 4 weeks working directly with a Lambda grad seems like a pretty good way to either prove or disprove your hypothesis. > Skepticism is healthy, however I object to the idea that one needs to be an expert to teach. Even if you're just a _little_ better at something than someone else, there's no reason that you can't teach someone what you know. > AFAIK, very few schools have an applied software engineering program that adequately prepares grads for doing real work on a real team. That's something that really can only come from experience. My issue with bootcamps is that they teach "tricks" and not fundamentals. Someone with the fundamentals can easily adapt to another tech stack/codebase. But someone who simply learned whatever framework through rote won't. When you look at the "final projects" these bootcamps often get their grads to code, you'll pretty much get N identical github repo of that batch. But sure, if a dev shop measures performance by the number of Jira tickets a new hire can fix then yeah, getting someone from Lambda who learned that exact framework through rote might give you a good signal after 4 weeks while your college hire is still figuring out how the toolchain and lib work. But my bet is that the college hire will outperform the bootcamp grad in the long run. I think the only way to prepare new grads to real work is to blend-in semester-long assignments and projects into the coursework. That and select students that can learn fast.