8 ms·

Community colleges should really be filling this role not for-profit vultures preying on the poor and the desperate. Can't community colleges create an accelera

by qiskit 4y ago

Community colleges should really be filling this role not for-profit vultures preying on the poor and the desperate. Can't community colleges create an accelerated 1 semester boot-camp equivalent? Does the $30K income sharing agreement mean that she has to pay $30K to the school once she starts working? And if that's after tax, then doesn't it mean she'll have to make around $50K to have $30K in after-tax income to pay back the school?

ipnon 4y ago
Hot take: All of the information in boot camps is available online for free, and people who aren't willing to search for it and self-learn have a harder time breaking into the industry. Any programming job requires solving new problems everyday. People who require spoon-feeding and hand-holding have a steep hill to climb.
- gh02t 4y ago
  Isn't the actual material covered in these camps secondary? What people want is a certificate to put on their resume and some help with networking/placement. I mean I also think these programs are just as ripe for shady dealings as places like ITT Tech, but that's why people are paying into them.
  - ipnon 4y ago
    Everyone still has to jump through the Leetcode/whiteboard/design hoops to get in the door. My impression from working with bootcamp grads is that they are well-prepared for this trial, better than CS grads. The bootcamps don't teach them any theory that will "never" be used on the job.
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      While true they still need a certification to put on a resume to get past recruiters. It's fine to think they shouldn't but IRL they probably do.
- sshine 4y ago
  There's also the people who just need a bit of guidance before they can improvise. They live on the spectrum of "independent self-learner" and "can only repeat from memory".
  - trickstra 4y ago
    Ok but the argument is that the people who don't need that bit of guidance are probably better hires than those who do need guidance.
- mindvirus 4y ago
  If you want to learn pretty much anything the information is there, but it's not curated, and you don't have the support of a guide. Especially if you're new to the field, you don't necessarily know how to even ask the right questions about where to start or how to get unstuck. To make an analogy, if you were learning to exercise for the first time, the information is out there, but there's a ton of bad and conflicting information out there too, and if you're not careful you'll make no progress or even get hurt. So it makes sense to hire a trainer or learn from friends, especially in the beginning.
- blowski 4y ago
  In my teens and early 20s, I had all the time in the world to experiment. As a middle-aged father, I get very few hours to learn, and so have to use them efficiently. Being spoon-fed helps a lot with that. It's an especially acute problem given how much junk info exists on the internet. If you can afford the time to spend a whole day learning how to solve the problem yourself, it's probably the best way to learn. But if we restrict the industry to those who can afford that time, we'll be poorer for it. Many people can be good developers despite going through a different learning path.
  - ohashi 4y ago
    The discrimination against different learning styles is a bit off-putting. Just because some folks can just read and self learn everything doesn't mean everyone can. It also doesn't mean those people aren't capable. I am not a parent, but I've definitely found as I've gotten older it's harder to self learn sometimes. Having structure and some guidance can make a world of difference. A good example I had not too long ago was having to go back into Java, something I hadn't written in many many years. Syntactically, I could write basic logic. But I didn't have any feel for how a project should be structured, what sort of libraries exist, and a lot of other things I know implicitly from languages I am working with regularly. I had a friend (who actually happened to be a bootcamp teacher in a previous life) spend a couple hours with me just going through the basics over a screenshare/voice chat. I picked up more in those 2-3 hours than I did in previous 2-3 weeks because I had someone who knew what they were doing, could answer questions, could anticipate what I might be thinking next and could guide me. A good teacher can be infinitely helpful to learning something, even for someone experienced (I've been writing code for over two decades now). I can't imagine how much more helpful a good teacher could be for someone who is just trying to start learning. We shouldn't be discouraging this style of learning, we should be seeing how to make programming accessible to everyone interested in learning.
    - ddaalluu2 4y ago
      I hear you. I'm self taught. I was always the go to guy when there was a problem. I had no one I could ask. Teachers asked me. But no one hired me. So I became self employed. I wonder how much better I would've done if I actually went studying and had a mentor. But I was always on the frontier, always. I also fixed so many bad student projects, aka where someone would hire a student for cheap and the student would abandon the project and I had to step in to finish it. Ah well it is what it is. Nowadays I feel like an outsider, probably because I am. Still being self employed but my projects crashed and income is way below sustainable. So either create something new, but I'm getting old and tired and bored, or find a job, but I'm too used to the comfort of working when I feel like it and not being on a clock. Anyhow I digress and if I had a proper teacher in my young years, how much better could I have done. I'd imagine an increased learning speed of factor at least 5 if not 10. Also not studying means not knowing the language e.g. log(o) or w/e. I never knew what "scalar" meant when I read it, but I knew without having a label "scalar". etc etc
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  I disagree with this hot take and I’m a hiring manager. I know for a fact recruiters aren’t going to be forwarding resumes from single moms who self-teach learn python the hard way purely because there’s no job experience or credential, even a shitty one. They won’t even give her a time of day to send a seedy LinkedIn message. Resumes like that will be sorted out even if she might be brilliant, intelligent, and just needs a chance. At least boot camps I know do job placement as well as the camp itself. An entirely self taught person has all the chips stacked against them.
  - newbamboo 4y ago
    What are your qualifications? Do they have hiring manager boot camp?
  - michigama 4y ago
    My own experience disagrees. I'm a self-taught engineer (on Python even) and I did have recruiters finding me and passing on my resume when I was first entering the job market ten years ago, and I had hiring managers giving me the shot at the screening (which I passed). I've had a pretty smooth career since then.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      The industry has changed in the last decade. There’s enough college (and yes, boot camp) grads, and enough scam artists wasting hiring manager’s time, that someone with no history will need some kind of “in”. The QA route - the modern version of the oft vaunted “start in the mail room and work hard” position - is mostly gone too.
  - tempestn 4y ago
    Depends on the company and how they hire. Yeah, there are many companies that won't even consider you, but that leaves a lot of excellent candidates for others. Our lead developer joined around 6 years ago as a junior with zero prior experience outside his own side projects. (Which isn't to say it would be normal to go from zero to lead in that time period, but to underline how exceptional he is given he was able to do so.) Many of our other top developers over the years have had similarly non-standard backgrounds. Our screening process is definitely unconventional though; I barely consider resumes until well into the process. I think if you're legitimately smart and dedicated, and put the time in to build knowledge, you'll be able to get a start somewhere. And once you have real work experience, the credential becomes less and less relevant. FWIW I do find there's value in actual comp sci and software engineering degrees, and I will give those some amount of weight. But as far as bootcamps, if two candidates demonstrate the same level of skill, knowledge, dedication, etc., it makes zero difference to me if one has a boot camp and the other is self taught.
- psyc 4y ago
  I’d say I have always been conspicuously amazing at learning in isolation, from written text alone. However, it is still the case that I learn even better in a room with other people and some direction. So I can understand why it helps people. Also, it’s a kind of credential.
- x0x0 4y ago
  I've hired plenty of engineers; most hiring managers know that. Problem 1: it's too easy to apply to jobs. Unqualified people blast resumes at you. If each resume takes you 2-3 minutes for a fast discard, and 15+ minutes to really look at, but only a handful of seconds for someone to send to you... Problem 2: interviews aren't all that useful, and junior people don't have a track record to rely on. When I hire someone, I'm investing piles of senior eng time onboarding, etc. A bootcamp is a useful filter for candidate being worth the effort (time, $, opportunity cost) to hire and train. To quote you, > People who require spoon-feeding and hand-holding have a steep hill to climb A bootcamp -- much like a college degree -- shows drive, motivation, and the ability to execute over time. Is this exclusive to bootcamp or college graduates? Absolutely not, and I've hired people with neither. But again, hiring is very time expensive.
- warent 4y ago
  Being an autodidact is not a requirement for being smart enough to become an engineer. Some of the most brilliant people I know happen to have a very hard time with self-teaching. Everyone has different learning styles. Also, being an autodidact myself, having mentorship earlier in my career still accelerated my learning and knowledge significantly.
  - roguecoder 4y ago
    Absolutely. I worked without effective teaching for the first five years of my career, and I was okay at my job. But I learned more in the first six months with solid feedback from skilled developers than I had in five years of stumbling around on my own. There are also skills you basically can't teach yourself, especially how to make code that is easy for other people to collaborate on and how to teach others effectively. People who focus on teaching themselves are doing themselves & whoever has to read their code down the line a disservice.
- sirsinsalot 4y ago
  I'm a hiring manager and coder. This last 12 months alone, i've interviewed 100+ engineers. Bootcampers have these common problems, caused by the bootcamp's perverse incentives: - Inflated sense of self worth. Often, they expect to be senior in 2 years, and consider themselves "experts" after leaving the bootcamp. - Inflated entitlement, making placing them within teams difficult. - Inflated sense of what the job market is like, how hard you have to work, and what an engineers learning curve looks like. This is a generalisation, and there are outliers, but I find the above to be true. They're not students, they're customers, and they're lied to in order to make a sale. I'm self taught, no qualifications; I have no objection to self-learning ... but the bootcamps do real damage.
  - goldcd 4y ago
    Exploitative education has been around for decades - I'm just bemused how it manages to survive in IT. And I do blame 'IT' for not snuffing it out. With a computer and an internet connection, there's more education available for free than any one person could ever need. I'm non-technical, but can't see why anybody couldn't take the skills and say contribute to a open source project to build a CV that could be taken seriously, for no expenditure.
    - sirsinsalot 4y ago
      It is insecurity. Some people aren't that self directing and can't navigate the quantity of information with confidence. These people also tend to be learning for money/career, not fun. Fun-directed learning self generates its reward, so it is easier to do it with confidence. Personally, the "promise of a job" marketing betrays the motivation of the students. Not that the motivation is bad, but it isn't how many self-directed learners get their kicks.
  - roguecoder 4y ago
    I find it varies a lot by bootcamp. It seems like the ones coming out of the Ruby community frequently have better pedagogy & more realistic expectations than the ones teaching React & pretending that's all there is to software engineering. React is like Excel: highly structured & linear. People who are only experienced with React end up completely unprepared when they need to start creating their own abstractions.
- paxys 4y ago
  Would you apply the same logic to a 4-year bachelor's degree?
  - ipnon 4y ago
    No. I was aware during my CS undergrad that I wasn't learning how to be a software engineer. I was learning the theories of computation from professional computer scientists. There were plenty of warnings on HN and the rest of the Web that internships, side projects, and Leetcode grinding would be required to land a job. A CS degree does not guarantee a job.
    - paxys 4y ago
      And yet everything I learned in my CS degree could have been done on my own time without paying a massive amount of tuition. That doesn't make the degree worthless. Same can be said for bootcamps.
- roguecoder 4y ago
  The most important thing about bootcamps, and the reason the best ones produce people who are better-prepared than many CS programs, is because they provide real feedback from skilled coders on the code individual developers are producing. You can no more replace bootcamps with internet websites than you can replace teachers with books: people need interactive experiences built on sound pedagogy to learn most effectively. The reason the VC-funded bootcamps are scams is because they call what they do teaching without having any foundations in pedagogy or instruction and using un-qualified recent students as the only "instructors" looking at students' code.
  - rkk3 4y ago
    IME best predictor of "success" is the prestige/brand of the candidates have before they entered the program. It's based on candidate selection, not ability. But with the VC model there is pressure to grow, so they lower the bar and accept people who aren't transitioning from prestige background; PHD's/name brand schools or companies... and shocker they struggle to find a job. They are scams because they juke the stats. They hire their own graduates to up placement rates & deceptively determine there own exclusion criteria to remove data of people who didn't get placed.
- aaron695 4y ago
- ravenstine 4y ago
  As someone who went to a coding bootcamp (Dev Bootcamp), I have to agree. Most of what I got out of doing the bootcamp was being surrounded by other coders, collaborating on stuff in person, and being exposed to the bay area tech scene. I don't regret going and I had some really great times there, but if today someone asked me if they should go to a bootcamp, I would suggest recreating that experience themselves at a fraction of the price. Here's what I would suggest: - Take online courses and use Stack Overflow. Everything that's available for cheap or free is better than anything I was taught at bootcamp. - If you can, move to somewhere that has some semblance of a tech scene, and find the smallest, cheapest cubby hole to live in so you don't have to worry so much about paying rent. At most, have a part time job that won't interfere with your studies, but even better if you don't need to work. - Go to tech meetups, mixers, etc. Start networking ASAP. Meet other coders. Do presentations, no matter how novice the topic. - Start blogging about what you're learning. - Have some project to show for your effort to your potential first employers. Doesn't matter how dumb and impractical it is. I attribute part of my initial success to hammering out a live chat with playlist and rewind control on top of YouTube years before YouTube implemented that themselves. - Practice working your butt off. If you really want to achieve your goal, you'll stay up late to solve problems when it's necessary. - Make sure you're having fun at every step of the way and don't let people distract you. There, I may have just saved you thousands of dollars. Potentially that can all be done for free depending on where you're situated geographically or how much money you're sitting on. If you know what a shell script is, you probably don't need a bootcamp. That said, if you are completely clueless to tech, maybe a bootcamp would be a good thing. Depending on the bootcamp, of course.
- BizarroLand 4y ago
  I'll give you props for having a divisive opinion that you were able to state without vitriol, but the real thing that schooling brings is structure. All of the information in the world is available in the library, but no one will ever memorize every book in it. The internet has a trillion libraries worth of information, but no one can absorb enough of it without structure and guidance to make something useful out of it. Schools start everyone at the same starting point and guide them through to the same end point, so that companies can rest assured that the lowest graduate of their school is at a specific minimum competency level. Without the school structure, most people would Dunning-Kruger themselves into thinking that they are either vastly better or immensely worse than they actually are.
- aunty_helen 4y ago
  Hot take: there's a thing called unknown-unknowns and it's what separates people with a formal education in the field from everyone else. Years of experience can make you a competent individual in the subject but even elec engineers who do a fair bit of coding aren't as well rounded as someone who has a degree in CompSci / Soft Eng. It's possible to pick up on this if you're 'in the club,' it's impossible to notice it if you're not.
  - AussieWog93 4y ago
    >even elec engineers who do a fair bit of coding aren't as well rounded as someone who has a degree in CompSci / Soft Eng. Goes both ways, mate. I've always been shocked by (even very experienced) CompSci guys' absolute inability to create a simple state machine. Keep shit orthogonal, guys! Same thing, but to a lesser extent, when it comes to timing constraints.
    - aunty_helen 4y ago
      Exactly, I did a bit of work in a jet engine test cell as an asside to my main coding duties. The elec eng that I worked under had state machines and labview as far as the eye could see. I wouldn't put myself in a situation where I was relied upon for designing anything. But debugging / technician duties I was fine, hook an oscilloscope up to that engine? Help with thermocouple calibration? No problems. One thing I will mention though, I've always found elec engineers to have a higher work rate that software devs. Always.
  - listenallyall 4y ago
    Lol, world's lamest club. Ask one of those super well-rounded Comp Sci guys to write a join query in SQL or create a pleasant user interface or build a modestly robust CI pipeline and see what happens.
    - horns4lyfe 4y ago
      This is a weird generalization, I know lots of CS grads who can do those things and have done them professionally. Are you actually suggesting that CS grads can’t write sql queries due to their education?
- scollet 4y ago
  Well that's the problem, is that the incentives for instruction are misaligned and the ramp to excellence are ill-defined. The boot camps are wrong in teaching rotary, where they might benefit from selective regiments. Learn to learn as I've heard it put.
- ivanhoe 4y ago
  You presume that one's time is free, which for many people, especially single moms, is simply not true. Time to spare is probably the single resource that they have the least of - so paying to save some time can mean a difference between being able to pull it, or simply not having a chance at all.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    Cost effective use of time is also important thing. That is spending the couple hours to actually researching subject before engaging in relatively long and expensive undertaking. Maybe it is just my engineer mindset to actually first evaluate and do some basic research.
- lkxijlewlf 4y ago
  >who aren't willing to search for it and self-learn Don't be condescending. People switching careers don't know all the information is already online. That's what makes predatory boot camps that much worse.
  - popcube 4y ago
    yes, if if just surf can resolve it, we should not have any education problems in today :(
- mc4ndr3 4y ago
  Yes, however spoon feeding provides focus. A poor newbie could spin their wheels for a long time traveling down the wrong coding avenues. I wish there were more opportunities for pure UX CSS jobs, without the complexity of frontend coding. Just make pretty themes and charge for that. A gentler learning curve than HTML JS React Node Express SQL and on and on and on.
- isitmadeofglass 4y ago
  All information for any job or position is available online or in books. Why do people think coding is special in this regards?
gfxgirl 4y ago
My guess is the community college can't attract a teacher who knows the topics well and a bootcamp can. Note: I'm not saying all bootcamp teachers are good, nor am I saying community college teachers are bad. Rather I'm completely guessing that bootcamps pay teachers significantly more than community colleges and I'm making the assumption that would attract more talented teachers "on average".
- HarryHirsch 4y ago
  {{citation needed}} Longstanding experience is that tone is set at the top (i.e. the President and Dean), consequently the level of teaching is much more dependent on the leadership than on the money.
JamesBarney 4y ago
Community colleges could probably do it for cheaper, but they probably wouldn't do it as well. Most colleges are really terrible as teaching relevant material. My friend learned more about coding from 4 months of FlatIron than I learned going to a prestigious state school for 4 years.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  But coding (literally coding) is a small fraction of a software engineers job. I hope you came away from your 4 years with the tools to learn & investigate, communicate, design systems, all with a heaping side of general education you might not have otherwise obtained. Not to mention a background in OS, database, programming languages, etc that there’s no possible way to cover in a boot camp. If none of that happened, then you did get ripped off. Most four year degrees shouldn’t be viewed as jobs programs. Yes, they’ve effectively become that, but that’s a mistake, IMO. Exceptions would be true professional programs (engineering leading to a PE, nursing, etc).
  - bdcravens 4y ago
    Even limiting the college discussion to technology, most CS students will be discovering their interests and talents during that time, dabbling in different languages, not just learning one curated stack. (Every developer will shift language focus at some point in their career; discovering the how and why is important) Many may take on internships. That said, I think there's a place for essentially "assembly line" developers. However, the income and career trajectory will reflect that, and that's not the dream they are being sold.
    - alistairSH 4y ago
      That said, I think there's a place for essentially "assembly line" developers. However, the income and career trajectory will reflect that, and that's not the dream they are being sold. This is fair. And I’d argue for a 2-year degree here. Or, employer-run apprenticeships. The for-profit boot camp, like much of the for-profit college industry, is mostly just an awful industry that shouldn’t exist.
okaram 4y ago
They do ... but it is called an associates degree and takes 3-4 semesters. A one semester course is snake oil in most cases.
- bdcravens 4y ago
  Keep in mind that a typical course is 3 hours (in class) per week, where a bootcamp is typically 30-40 hours in class. Perhaps the expectation is that the hours difference is offloaded into "home work" but you often need to do additional work in a bootcamp as well. That assumed, given a typical course load, a "semester" of bootcamp is roughly equivalent to 2-3 semesters of college work.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  If your local community college is lucky enough to have any CS at all, it may be packaged up with gen. ed. requirements (the bulk of an associate's) and designed for transfer to a 4 year college (see: https://www.clark.edu/academics/programs/dept/cse/ https://www.clark.edu/academics/programs/dept/cse/ ). This is the opposite of the vocationally focused curriculum people want from bootcamps (whether one views bootcamps as delivering it or not).
wildrhythms 4y ago
Yup, this is how I first learned PHP, MySQL, HTML/CSS, Javascript, Java, C#... Great option for someone who is willing to learn, and can stay engaged the entire semester. My only advice is to make sure your community college is accredited, so if you want to transfer your credits to a 4-year school you can do so. Most community colleges have some transfer agreement within their respective state.
bsder 4y ago
> Can't community colleges create an accelerated 1 semester boot-camp equivalent? Erm, maybe because what is being learned isn't something that can be absorbed in 1 semester? Most community colleges do have tracks for this. Generally it's four semesters for an Associate's. You probably have core courses of: Programming 101 (Java or Python, generally); Programming 102; Computer Architecture/Assembly; Data Structures; and one of either Discrete Math or Calculus I. That is way more than 40 hours a week for 14 weeks--and that's just the barest minimum to get someone up and running. And note that this doesn't include any "vocational" training in the current Web Frameworks, Android/iOS, basic databases, etc.

by qiskit 4y ago

ipnon 4y ago

Hot take: All of the information in boot camps is available online for free, and people who aren't willing to search for it and self-learn have a harder time breaking into the industry. Any programming job requires solving new problems everyday. People who require spoon-feeding and hand-holding have a steep hill to climb.

gh02t 4y ago
Isn't the actual material covered in these camps secondary? What people want is a certificate to put on their resume and some help with networking/placement. I mean I also think these programs are just as ripe for shady dealings as places like ITT Tech, but that's why people are paying into them.
- ipnon 4y ago
  Everyone still has to jump through the Leetcode/whiteboard/design hoops to get in the door. My impression from working with bootcamp grads is that they are well-prepared for this trial, better than CS grads. The bootcamps don't teach them any theory that will "never" be used on the job.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    While true they still need a certification to put on a resume to get past recruiters. It's fine to think they shouldn't but IRL they probably do.
sshine 4y ago
There's also the people who just need a bit of guidance before they can improvise. They live on the spectrum of "independent self-learner" and "can only repeat from memory".
- trickstra 4y ago
  Ok but the argument is that the people who don't need that bit of guidance are probably better hires than those who do need guidance.
mindvirus 4y ago
If you want to learn pretty much anything the information is there, but it's not curated, and you don't have the support of a guide. Especially if you're new to the field, you don't necessarily know how to even ask the right questions about where to start or how to get unstuck. To make an analogy, if you were learning to exercise for the first time, the information is out there, but there's a ton of bad and conflicting information out there too, and if you're not careful you'll make no progress or even get hurt. So it makes sense to hire a trainer or learn from friends, especially in the beginning.
blowski 4y ago
In my teens and early 20s, I had all the time in the world to experiment. As a middle-aged father, I get very few hours to learn, and so have to use them efficiently. Being spoon-fed helps a lot with that. It's an especially acute problem given how much junk info exists on the internet. If you can afford the time to spend a whole day learning how to solve the problem yourself, it's probably the best way to learn. But if we restrict the industry to those who can afford that time, we'll be poorer for it. Many people can be good developers despite going through a different learning path.
- ohashi 4y ago
  The discrimination against different learning styles is a bit off-putting. Just because some folks can just read and self learn everything doesn't mean everyone can. It also doesn't mean those people aren't capable. I am not a parent, but I've definitely found as I've gotten older it's harder to self learn sometimes. Having structure and some guidance can make a world of difference. A good example I had not too long ago was having to go back into Java, something I hadn't written in many many years. Syntactically, I could write basic logic. But I didn't have any feel for how a project should be structured, what sort of libraries exist, and a lot of other things I know implicitly from languages I am working with regularly. I had a friend (who actually happened to be a bootcamp teacher in a previous life) spend a couple hours with me just going through the basics over a screenshare/voice chat. I picked up more in those 2-3 hours than I did in previous 2-3 weeks because I had someone who knew what they were doing, could answer questions, could anticipate what I might be thinking next and could guide me. A good teacher can be infinitely helpful to learning something, even for someone experienced (I've been writing code for over two decades now). I can't imagine how much more helpful a good teacher could be for someone who is just trying to start learning. We shouldn't be discouraging this style of learning, we should be seeing how to make programming accessible to everyone interested in learning.
  - ddaalluu2 4y ago
    I hear you. I'm self taught. I was always the go to guy when there was a problem. I had no one I could ask. Teachers asked me. But no one hired me. So I became self employed. I wonder how much better I would've done if I actually went studying and had a mentor. But I was always on the frontier, always. I also fixed so many bad student projects, aka where someone would hire a student for cheap and the student would abandon the project and I had to step in to finish it. Ah well it is what it is. Nowadays I feel like an outsider, probably because I am. Still being self employed but my projects crashed and income is way below sustainable. So either create something new, but I'm getting old and tired and bored, or find a job, but I'm too used to the comfort of working when I feel like it and not being on a clock. Anyhow I digress and if I had a proper teacher in my young years, how much better could I have done. I'd imagine an increased learning speed of factor at least 5 if not 10. Also not studying means not knowing the language e.g. log(o) or w/e. I never knew what "scalar" meant when I read it, but I knew without having a label "scalar". etc etc
SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
I disagree with this hot take and I’m a hiring manager. I know for a fact recruiters aren’t going to be forwarding resumes from single moms who self-teach learn python the hard way purely because there’s no job experience or credential, even a shitty one. They won’t even give her a time of day to send a seedy LinkedIn message. Resumes like that will be sorted out even if she might be brilliant, intelligent, and just needs a chance. At least boot camps I know do job placement as well as the camp itself. An entirely self taught person has all the chips stacked against them.
- newbamboo 4y ago
  What are your qualifications? Do they have hiring manager boot camp?
- michigama 4y ago
  My own experience disagrees. I'm a self-taught engineer (on Python even) and I did have recruiters finding me and passing on my resume when I was first entering the job market ten years ago, and I had hiring managers giving me the shot at the screening (which I passed). I've had a pretty smooth career since then.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    The industry has changed in the last decade. There’s enough college (and yes, boot camp) grads, and enough scam artists wasting hiring manager’s time, that someone with no history will need some kind of “in”. The QA route - the modern version of the oft vaunted “start in the mail room and work hard” position - is mostly gone too.
- tempestn 4y ago
  Depends on the company and how they hire. Yeah, there are many companies that won't even consider you, but that leaves a lot of excellent candidates for others. Our lead developer joined around 6 years ago as a junior with zero prior experience outside his own side projects. (Which isn't to say it would be normal to go from zero to lead in that time period, but to underline how exceptional he is given he was able to do so.) Many of our other top developers over the years have had similarly non-standard backgrounds. Our screening process is definitely unconventional though; I barely consider resumes until well into the process. I think if you're legitimately smart and dedicated, and put the time in to build knowledge, you'll be able to get a start somewhere. And once you have real work experience, the credential becomes less and less relevant. FWIW I do find there's value in actual comp sci and software engineering degrees, and I will give those some amount of weight. But as far as bootcamps, if two candidates demonstrate the same level of skill, knowledge, dedication, etc., it makes zero difference to me if one has a boot camp and the other is self taught.
psyc 4y ago
I’d say I have always been conspicuously amazing at learning in isolation, from written text alone. However, it is still the case that I learn even better in a room with other people and some direction. So I can understand why it helps people. Also, it’s a kind of credential.
x0x0 4y ago
I've hired plenty of engineers; most hiring managers know that. Problem 1: it's too easy to apply to jobs. Unqualified people blast resumes at you. If each resume takes you 2-3 minutes for a fast discard, and 15+ minutes to really look at, but only a handful of seconds for someone to send to you... Problem 2: interviews aren't all that useful, and junior people don't have a track record to rely on. When I hire someone, I'm investing piles of senior eng time onboarding, etc. A bootcamp is a useful filter for candidate being worth the effort (time, $, opportunity cost) to hire and train. To quote you, > People who require spoon-feeding and hand-holding have a steep hill to climb A bootcamp -- much like a college degree -- shows drive, motivation, and the ability to execute over time. Is this exclusive to bootcamp or college graduates? Absolutely not, and I've hired people with neither. But again, hiring is very time expensive.
warent 4y ago
Being an autodidact is not a requirement for being smart enough to become an engineer. Some of the most brilliant people I know happen to have a very hard time with self-teaching. Everyone has different learning styles. Also, being an autodidact myself, having mentorship earlier in my career still accelerated my learning and knowledge significantly.
- roguecoder 4y ago
  Absolutely. I worked without effective teaching for the first five years of my career, and I was okay at my job. But I learned more in the first six months with solid feedback from skilled developers than I had in five years of stumbling around on my own. There are also skills you basically can't teach yourself, especially how to make code that is easy for other people to collaborate on and how to teach others effectively. People who focus on teaching themselves are doing themselves & whoever has to read their code down the line a disservice.
sirsinsalot 4y ago
I'm a hiring manager and coder. This last 12 months alone, i've interviewed 100+ engineers. Bootcampers have these common problems, caused by the bootcamp's perverse incentives: - Inflated sense of self worth. Often, they expect to be senior in 2 years, and consider themselves "experts" after leaving the bootcamp. - Inflated entitlement, making placing them within teams difficult. - Inflated sense of what the job market is like, how hard you have to work, and what an engineers learning curve looks like. This is a generalisation, and there are outliers, but I find the above to be true. They're not students, they're customers, and they're lied to in order to make a sale. I'm self taught, no qualifications; I have no objection to self-learning ... but the bootcamps do real damage.
- goldcd 4y ago
  Exploitative education has been around for decades - I'm just bemused how it manages to survive in IT. And I do blame 'IT' for not snuffing it out. With a computer and an internet connection, there's more education available for free than any one person could ever need. I'm non-technical, but can't see why anybody couldn't take the skills and say contribute to a open source project to build a CV that could be taken seriously, for no expenditure.
  - sirsinsalot 4y ago
    It is insecurity. Some people aren't that self directing and can't navigate the quantity of information with confidence. These people also tend to be learning for money/career, not fun. Fun-directed learning self generates its reward, so it is easier to do it with confidence. Personally, the "promise of a job" marketing betrays the motivation of the students. Not that the motivation is bad, but it isn't how many self-directed learners get their kicks.
- roguecoder 4y ago
  I find it varies a lot by bootcamp. It seems like the ones coming out of the Ruby community frequently have better pedagogy & more realistic expectations than the ones teaching React & pretending that's all there is to software engineering. React is like Excel: highly structured & linear. People who are only experienced with React end up completely unprepared when they need to start creating their own abstractions.
paxys 4y ago
Would you apply the same logic to a 4-year bachelor's degree?
- ipnon 4y ago
  No. I was aware during my CS undergrad that I wasn't learning how to be a software engineer. I was learning the theories of computation from professional computer scientists. There were plenty of warnings on HN and the rest of the Web that internships, side projects, and Leetcode grinding would be required to land a job. A CS degree does not guarantee a job.
  - paxys 4y ago
    And yet everything I learned in my CS degree could have been done on my own time without paying a massive amount of tuition. That doesn't make the degree worthless. Same can be said for bootcamps.
roguecoder 4y ago
The most important thing about bootcamps, and the reason the best ones produce people who are better-prepared than many CS programs, is because they provide real feedback from skilled coders on the code individual developers are producing. You can no more replace bootcamps with internet websites than you can replace teachers with books: people need interactive experiences built on sound pedagogy to learn most effectively. The reason the VC-funded bootcamps are scams is because they call what they do teaching without having any foundations in pedagogy or instruction and using un-qualified recent students as the only "instructors" looking at students' code.
- rkk3 4y ago
  IME best predictor of "success" is the prestige/brand of the candidates have before they entered the program. It's based on candidate selection, not ability. But with the VC model there is pressure to grow, so they lower the bar and accept people who aren't transitioning from prestige background; PHD's/name brand schools or companies... and shocker they struggle to find a job. They are scams because they juke the stats. They hire their own graduates to up placement rates & deceptively determine there own exclusion criteria to remove data of people who didn't get placed.
aaron695 4y ago
ravenstine 4y ago
As someone who went to a coding bootcamp (Dev Bootcamp), I have to agree. Most of what I got out of doing the bootcamp was being surrounded by other coders, collaborating on stuff in person, and being exposed to the bay area tech scene. I don't regret going and I had some really great times there, but if today someone asked me if they should go to a bootcamp, I would suggest recreating that experience themselves at a fraction of the price. Here's what I would suggest: - Take online courses and use Stack Overflow. Everything that's available for cheap or free is better than anything I was taught at bootcamp. - If you can, move to somewhere that has some semblance of a tech scene, and find the smallest, cheapest cubby hole to live in so you don't have to worry so much about paying rent. At most, have a part time job that won't interfere with your studies, but even better if you don't need to work. - Go to tech meetups, mixers, etc. Start networking ASAP. Meet other coders. Do presentations, no matter how novice the topic. - Start blogging about what you're learning. - Have some project to show for your effort to your potential first employers. Doesn't matter how dumb and impractical it is. I attribute part of my initial success to hammering out a live chat with playlist and rewind control on top of YouTube years before YouTube implemented that themselves. - Practice working your butt off. If you really want to achieve your goal, you'll stay up late to solve problems when it's necessary. - Make sure you're having fun at every step of the way and don't let people distract you. There, I may have just saved you thousands of dollars. Potentially that can all be done for free depending on where you're situated geographically or how much money you're sitting on. If you know what a shell script is, you probably don't need a bootcamp. That said, if you are completely clueless to tech, maybe a bootcamp would be a good thing. Depending on the bootcamp, of course.
BizarroLand 4y ago
I'll give you props for having a divisive opinion that you were able to state without vitriol, but the real thing that schooling brings is structure. All of the information in the world is available in the library, but no one will ever memorize every book in it. The internet has a trillion libraries worth of information, but no one can absorb enough of it without structure and guidance to make something useful out of it. Schools start everyone at the same starting point and guide them through to the same end point, so that companies can rest assured that the lowest graduate of their school is at a specific minimum competency level. Without the school structure, most people would Dunning-Kruger themselves into thinking that they are either vastly better or immensely worse than they actually are.
aunty_helen 4y ago
Hot take: there's a thing called unknown-unknowns and it's what separates people with a formal education in the field from everyone else. Years of experience can make you a competent individual in the subject but even elec engineers who do a fair bit of coding aren't as well rounded as someone who has a degree in CompSci / Soft Eng. It's possible to pick up on this if you're 'in the club,' it's impossible to notice it if you're not.
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  >even elec engineers who do a fair bit of coding aren't as well rounded as someone who has a degree in CompSci / Soft Eng. Goes both ways, mate. I've always been shocked by (even very experienced) CompSci guys' absolute inability to create a simple state machine. Keep shit orthogonal, guys! Same thing, but to a lesser extent, when it comes to timing constraints.
  - aunty_helen 4y ago
    Exactly, I did a bit of work in a jet engine test cell as an asside to my main coding duties. The elec eng that I worked under had state machines and labview as far as the eye could see. I wouldn't put myself in a situation where I was relied upon for designing anything. But debugging / technician duties I was fine, hook an oscilloscope up to that engine? Help with thermocouple calibration? No problems. One thing I will mention though, I've always found elec engineers to have a higher work rate that software devs. Always.
- listenallyall 4y ago
  Lol, world's lamest club. Ask one of those super well-rounded Comp Sci guys to write a join query in SQL or create a pleasant user interface or build a modestly robust CI pipeline and see what happens.
  - horns4lyfe 4y ago
    This is a weird generalization, I know lots of CS grads who can do those things and have done them professionally. Are you actually suggesting that CS grads can’t write sql queries due to their education?
scollet 4y ago
Well that's the problem, is that the incentives for instruction are misaligned and the ramp to excellence are ill-defined. The boot camps are wrong in teaching rotary, where they might benefit from selective regiments. Learn to learn as I've heard it put.
ivanhoe 4y ago
You presume that one's time is free, which for many people, especially single moms, is simply not true. Time to spare is probably the single resource that they have the least of - so paying to save some time can mean a difference between being able to pull it, or simply not having a chance at all.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Cost effective use of time is also important thing. That is spending the couple hours to actually researching subject before engaging in relatively long and expensive undertaking. Maybe it is just my engineer mindset to actually first evaluate and do some basic research.
lkxijlewlf 4y ago
>who aren't willing to search for it and self-learn Don't be condescending. People switching careers don't know all the information is already online. That's what makes predatory boot camps that much worse.
- popcube 4y ago
  yes, if if just surf can resolve it, we should not have any education problems in today :(
mc4ndr3 4y ago
Yes, however spoon feeding provides focus. A poor newbie could spin their wheels for a long time traveling down the wrong coding avenues. I wish there were more opportunities for pure UX CSS jobs, without the complexity of frontend coding. Just make pretty themes and charge for that. A gentler learning curve than HTML JS React Node Express SQL and on and on and on.
isitmadeofglass 4y ago
All information for any job or position is available online or in books. Why do people think coding is special in this regards?

gfxgirl 4y ago

My guess is the community college can't attract a teacher who knows the topics well and a bootcamp can. Note: I'm not saying all bootcamp teachers are good, nor am I saying community college teachers are bad. Rather I'm completely guessing that bootcamps pay teachers significantly more than community colleges and I'm making the assumption that would attract more talented teachers "on average".

HarryHirsch 4y ago
{{citation needed}} Longstanding experience is that tone is set at the top (i.e. the President and Dean), consequently the level of teaching is much more dependent on the leadership than on the money.

JamesBarney 4y ago

Community colleges could probably do it for cheaper, but they probably wouldn't do it as well. Most colleges are really terrible as teaching relevant material. My friend learned more about coding from 4 months of FlatIron than I learned going to a prestigious state school for 4 years.

alistairSH 4y ago
But coding (literally coding) is a small fraction of a software engineers job. I hope you came away from your 4 years with the tools to learn & investigate, communicate, design systems, all with a heaping side of general education you might not have otherwise obtained. Not to mention a background in OS, database, programming languages, etc that there’s no possible way to cover in a boot camp. If none of that happened, then you did get ripped off. Most four year degrees shouldn’t be viewed as jobs programs. Yes, they’ve effectively become that, but that’s a mistake, IMO. Exceptions would be true professional programs (engineering leading to a PE, nursing, etc).
- bdcravens 4y ago
  Even limiting the college discussion to technology, most CS students will be discovering their interests and talents during that time, dabbling in different languages, not just learning one curated stack. (Every developer will shift language focus at some point in their career; discovering the how and why is important) Many may take on internships. That said, I think there's a place for essentially "assembly line" developers. However, the income and career trajectory will reflect that, and that's not the dream they are being sold.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    That said, I think there's a place for essentially "assembly line" developers. However, the income and career trajectory will reflect that, and that's not the dream they are being sold. This is fair. And I’d argue for a 2-year degree here. Or, employer-run apprenticeships. The for-profit boot camp, like much of the for-profit college industry, is mostly just an awful industry that shouldn’t exist.

okaram 4y ago

They do ... but it is called an associates degree and takes 3-4 semesters. A one semester course is snake oil in most cases.

bdcravens 4y ago
Keep in mind that a typical course is 3 hours (in class) per week, where a bootcamp is typically 30-40 hours in class. Perhaps the expectation is that the hours difference is offloaded into "home work" but you often need to do additional work in a bootcamp as well. That assumed, given a typical course load, a "semester" of bootcamp is roughly equivalent to 2-3 semesters of college work.
kixiQu 4y ago
If your local community college is lucky enough to have any CS at all, it may be packaged up with gen. ed. requirements (the bulk of an associate's) and designed for transfer to a 4 year college (see: https://www.clark.edu/academics/programs/dept/cse/ https://www.clark.edu/academics/programs/dept/cse/ ). This is the opposite of the vocationally focused curriculum people want from bootcamps (whether one views bootcamps as delivering it or not).

wildrhythms 4y ago

Yup, this is how I first learned PHP, MySQL, HTML/CSS, Javascript, Java, C#... Great option for someone who is willing to learn, and can stay engaged the entire semester. My only advice is to make sure your community college is accredited, so if you want to transfer your credits to a 4-year school you can do so. Most community colleges have some transfer agreement within their respective state.

bsder 4y ago

> Can't community colleges create an accelerated 1 semester boot-camp equivalent? Erm, maybe because what is being learned isn't something that can be absorbed in 1 semester? Most community colleges do have tracks for this. Generally it's four semesters for an Associate's. You probably have core courses of: Programming 101 (Java or Python, generally); Programming 102; Computer Architecture/Assembly; Data Structures; and one of either Discrete Math or Calculus I. That is way more than 40 hours a week for 14 weeks--and that's just the barest minimum to get someone up and running. And note that this doesn't include any "vocational" training in the current Web Frameworks, Android/iOS, basic databases, etc.