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Can someone explain the trend of fetishizing the “bootcamp fairytale” whereby someone doesn’t have a CS background but ends up as a working programmer after goi

Can someone explain the trend of fetishizing the “bootcamp fairytale” whereby someone doesn’t have a CS background but ends up as a working programmer after going to a bootcamp? Let me explain. I didn’t study CS in college, but I did stud CE, a relatively related field. When I started working as a programmer, I immediately felt that there were some fundamentals I was missing, so I’ve spent a lot of time reading in my spare time to fill in some of those gaps. There seems to be a trend where someone switches careers, and glorifies the fact that they don’t have a CS background. Why dismiss the history of the field that you’re in? Not everyone has a PhD in CS, but there has been some incredibly important work done in the field, work that we all stand on the shoulders of. Is this an ego thing? It’s hard to be humble and admit that you have a lot of things to learn, so instead you resent the field and blame it for being arrogant?

mkl95 6y ago
I think it has to do with CS / computer engineering academic skills not carrying over too much to the software industry when compared to, say, how much a Chemistry or Chemical Engineering degree carries over to related industries. I have plenty of formal education, but to this day most of what I learnt after high school has been useless as a software engineer.
- tonyarkles 6y ago
  I’m always surprised when I see people say things like this, based on my own experiences. In the last month or so, I’ve used: - linear algebra (transformation matrices and inverses primarily) - calculus - approximation methods to get “good enough/fast enough” solutions to the Chinese Postman Problem and the Traveling Salesman Problem - a self-derived plane sweep algorithm for doing something special with a ton of planar polygons The only conclusion that I’ve come up with so far is that it either varies dramatically by which industries you’re developing software for, or other organizations have people with specialized skill sets that work out the broad strike solutions to these types of problems before getting the software teams to build the production versions of them.
  - mkl95 6y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I do plenty of exciting stuff on my side projects (involving linear algebra, some AI, etc.) I completely agree with your last paragraph. I am a backend engineer, a job that at its core involves creating and fixing CRUD apps, and writing relatively simple business code. No matter how exciting people try to make it seem.
    - amw-zero 6y ago
      I think the "CRUD app" classification is never accurate. For example, your app almost certainly performs queries that have a where clause. That means that the R step has logic, which means you can (and I know I do) get the logic wrong. Also, there's usually complicated rules during C, where a user is only permitted to actually create data in certain cases, and when data is created other data needs to be updated to remain accurate, etc. So yea, of course data is Created and Read, in that every application maintains data. But that doesn't mean that it's a CRUD app. If you have any where clauses or if expressions, it's not a CRUD app. Finally, the most popular way of storing data is the relational model. Which, is just math applied to the notion of data: https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zives/03f/cis550/codd.pdf https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zives/03f/cis550/codd.pdf
  - amw-zero 6y ago
    I'm with you. I feel like all actual business problems have a lot of applicable CS solutions. Maybe if you're building UI-heavy stuff, there's less theory required there?
richieartoul 6y ago
No intention of fetishizing or dismissing the field was intended. If you read the post I think you’ll see I’m doing the opposite. All the work I do today is predicated on a strong understanding of C.S fundamentals that you dont learn in a programming bootcamp. I’m actually encouraging everyone who did a programming bootcamp to take the time to go back and fill in the knowledge that they’re missing because I think it’s so important for achieving a satisfying career and high impact work. Some of us realized we wanted to work in this field too late after we had already gotten an undergraduate degree in something else. A big part of the message in my post was that C.S education is important and encourages people to find ways to fill in that missing knowledge one way or another (although I don’t usually encourage going back to get another 4 year degree formally because I think there are faster ways these days that don’t involve losing 4 years of income.) There was no intention to brag about my lack of education here and I think if you asked most people I work with they’d probably be surprised to know I don’t have a C.S degree. I know the title is a bit click baitey, but it’s just a hook to get people to read what I think is a lot of practical advice for getting their career to where they want it to be.
- amw-zero 6y ago
  I'm not against click bait personally. You have to get people in the door! And I'm not against bootcamps at all. They have a much denser amount of value-per-time-spent than college. I was just making a general comment on the topic. I agree with everything you've said.
sokoloff 6y ago
My degree is in Mechanical Engineering. I’ve done programming all my life, sometimes in roles where Mech E or Manufacturing knowledge is useful, but mostly not. I took a few programming courses and EE courses as an undergrad. I can’t prove how much they did or didn’t help, but 95+% of what we do in industry is not aided by a deep theoretical grounding and computer science and the 5% that is, 95% of that can be easily picked up outside of a formal CS program. I don’t think it’s an ego thing so much as a belief in the power of the rags to riches bootstrapping story arc. In our field, that story is totally doable. On the “opposing side”, I do see every so often someone without a CS background set out to do something that boils down after not too many simplifications to “First, I’ll solve the general halting problem and then build on that to do task XYZ. Simple!”
coolgeek 6y ago
This was a well-written, informative article. But the trend of fetishizing the “bootcamp fairytale” you're seeing is the bootcamps marketing themselves submarine style. (I am not accusing this author/article of submarine marketing. But swapping the head/subhead would have been more informative and less clickbaity)

mkl95 6y ago

I think it has to do with CS / computer engineering academic skills not carrying over too much to the software industry when compared to, say, how much a Chemistry or Chemical Engineering degree carries over to related industries. I have plenty of formal education, but to this day most of what I learnt after high school has been useless as a software engineer.

tonyarkles 6y ago
I’m always surprised when I see people say things like this, based on my own experiences. In the last month or so, I’ve used: - linear algebra (transformation matrices and inverses primarily) - calculus - approximation methods to get “good enough/fast enough” solutions to the Chinese Postman Problem and the Traveling Salesman Problem - a self-derived plane sweep algorithm for doing something special with a ton of planar polygons The only conclusion that I’ve come up with so far is that it either varies dramatically by which industries you’re developing software for, or other organizations have people with specialized skill sets that work out the broad strike solutions to these types of problems before getting the software teams to build the production versions of them.
- mkl95 6y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I do plenty of exciting stuff on my side projects (involving linear algebra, some AI, etc.) I completely agree with your last paragraph. I am a backend engineer, a job that at its core involves creating and fixing CRUD apps, and writing relatively simple business code. No matter how exciting people try to make it seem.
  - amw-zero 6y ago
    I think the "CRUD app" classification is never accurate. For example, your app almost certainly performs queries that have a where clause. That means that the R step has logic, which means you can (and I know I do) get the logic wrong. Also, there's usually complicated rules during C, where a user is only permitted to actually create data in certain cases, and when data is created other data needs to be updated to remain accurate, etc. So yea, of course data is Created and Read, in that every application maintains data. But that doesn't mean that it's a CRUD app. If you have any where clauses or if expressions, it's not a CRUD app. Finally, the most popular way of storing data is the relational model. Which, is just math applied to the notion of data: https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zives/03f/cis550/codd.pdf https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zives/03f/cis550/codd.pdf
- amw-zero 6y ago
  I'm with you. I feel like all actual business problems have a lot of applicable CS solutions. Maybe if you're building UI-heavy stuff, there's less theory required there?

richieartoul 6y ago

No intention of fetishizing or dismissing the field was intended. If you read the post I think you’ll see I’m doing the opposite. All the work I do today is predicated on a strong understanding of C.S fundamentals that you dont learn in a programming bootcamp. I’m actually encouraging everyone who did a programming bootcamp to take the time to go back and fill in the knowledge that they’re missing because I think it’s so important for achieving a satisfying career and high impact work. Some of us realized we wanted to work in this field too late after we had already gotten an undergraduate degree in something else. A big part of the message in my post was that C.S education is important and encourages people to find ways to fill in that missing knowledge one way or another (although I don’t usually encourage going back to get another 4 year degree formally because I think there are faster ways these days that don’t involve losing 4 years of income.) There was no intention to brag about my lack of education here and I think if you asked most people I work with they’d probably be surprised to know I don’t have a C.S degree. I know the title is a bit click baitey, but it’s just a hook to get people to read what I think is a lot of practical advice for getting their career to where they want it to be.

amw-zero 6y ago
I'm not against click bait personally. You have to get people in the door! And I'm not against bootcamps at all. They have a much denser amount of value-per-time-spent than college. I was just making a general comment on the topic. I agree with everything you've said.

sokoloff 6y ago

My degree is in Mechanical Engineering. I’ve done programming all my life, sometimes in roles where Mech E or Manufacturing knowledge is useful, but mostly not. I took a few programming courses and EE courses as an undergrad. I can’t prove how much they did or didn’t help, but 95+% of what we do in industry is not aided by a deep theoretical grounding and computer science and the 5% that is, 95% of that can be easily picked up outside of a formal CS program. I don’t think it’s an ego thing so much as a belief in the power of the rags to riches bootstrapping story arc. In our field, that story is totally doable. On the “opposing side”, I do see every so often someone without a CS background set out to do something that boils down after not too many simplifications to “First, I’ll solve the general halting problem and then build on that to do task XYZ. Simple!”

coolgeek 6y ago

This was a well-written, informative article. But the trend of fetishizing the “bootcamp fairytale” you're seeing is the bootcamps marketing themselves submarine style. (I am not accusing this author/article of submarine marketing. But swapping the head/subhead would have been more informative and less clickbaity)