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Do Coding Boot Camps Make Sense in an A.I. World?

j45 2y ago
Learning to code, both in person, and online, both formally, and informally are invaluable.
- benopal64 2y ago
  Agreed. The more unique situations I program in, whether it is new people I am building software for or whether I am building on a new tech stack, the more I realize why so many packages and solutions exist in pip and npm. Coding new solutions in new ways has helped me learn so much. Getting a career that supports that was one of the biggest catalysts for me (unsurprisingly), however, attempting to code anything is certainly beneficial.
  - j45 2y ago
    Getting started in any way, keeping going, keeping growing is the key. Self-taught developers are equally as formidable and can be found at or near the top of any company and required on balanced teams with “formally” educated developers. Different styles of thinking, both are required on a successful team.
carbine 2y ago
The inherent nature of the technology industry is that we all always have to be levelling up and finding new ways to create value. The better your ability to reason from first principles, learn new tech, etc. the better you will do. Teaching people a specific approach and tactical skillset without the underlying fundamentals does not set them up for success in a fast moving industry, particularly right now when we're undergoing an enormous shift on virtually every level. But it _can_ be an accelerant for some people, so I'd never discount a bootcamp grad on the basis of their learning method alone.
holtkam2 2y ago
This bootcamp grad now works on AI (LLM augmented services as well as traditional ML models) on a daily basis at a big tech company.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
thegrim33 2y ago
I feel like "AI taking programming jobs" is just yet another in a long list of hyped up things that so many people seem convinced about, but then never ends up happening. In X years from now are the people that pushed this idea going to reflect and change their approach to things? I doubt it, they'll just have moved on to hyping up the next thing. Off the top of my head, hyped up things that everyone "knew" that have yet to happen: - Driverless cars. 10-20 years ago they were all the hype, my friends thought that in a year or two they'd have a driverless car, and now it's 10-20 years later and they can still not buy a driverless car. - Bitcoin hype. All the people that were so convinced that bitcoin would take over, and people would be paying for groceries with bitcoin, and everyone would switch to bitcoin for everything and it'd be a huge revolution .. and it has yet to happen. - NFT stuff. I feel like I don't need to explain this one. - Another current one is "just keep scaling LLMs and AGI will magically happen, we're really close". Related to AI programming I guess. Check back in in 10 years on this one, it ain't going to happen. - Various short-lived hypes where a bank closes down and everyone on HN and elsewhere is spreading doom about how it'll be a chain reaction and the whole economy will crash and .. it never happens, and everyone just forgets what was said. It's just hype after hype after hype, it's exhausting.
- joseangel_sc 2y ago
  printing press was hyped radio was hyped tv was hyped planes were hyped the internet was hyped things arrive slow, big things take time btc is almost 100k today i can take a waymo right now i agree in between a there are letdowns and scams, but not all is hype hype after hype is not exhausting, it’s exciting
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
seangrogg 2y ago
Of course they do. It doesn't matter if it's independent self-study, a bootcamp, or a formal degree. The goal is to iteratively build on your knowledge, grasp the fundamentals, develop intuitions, and put yourself in a place to continue to build upon that foundation in perpetuity. It's a starting point. Not a stopping point.
deprecative 2y ago
Do CS degrees make sense in an A.I. World? No, nor does it matter that it's not A.I. nor that it's not fundamentally useful for replacing humans. What matters is cost reduction for businesses who leverage the technology. Why bother hiring six SWEs when you can hire three and make them clean up a "prompt engineer"'s work?
Kurtcheng 2y ago
[dead]
Tracybrownn88 2y ago
[dead]
n_ary 2y ago
Non-paywalled link: https://archive.ph/yYVus https://archive.ph/yYVus Opinion: I am extremely tired of this same old bs about “almost 60% developers use AI”. Yes, 60% developers use AI because the previous glorious Google/Bing has drowned in slop and now my search for documentation of a particular library or an arcane question returns 100% SEO spam, so I need to ask claude(or my local llama running on ollama) and get a decent enough(albeit outdated) valuable result from which I can pursue more from somewhere. At no time does it mean that, AI is doing a significant part of my work, and no my IDE already generates all the code I need and no I am not going to blindly use the rote replication of the example from StackOverflow that the AI just generated when I said it to generate a particular function, because these examples are often not the best implementations. The AI hype and the desperate lobbying is doing a lot of harm to our industry as a whole. We should see it for what it is, some rich naive dudes invested a lot of money because they feel FOMO from last gold mind rush if AirBnB/Uber/Netflix/Spotify era and is freshly burned from crypto dud hype, so they want to kill the industry by scaring away new folks and make everyone as lazy so we get slow frog boiled to accept garbage from these AI crop. Also, the market and macro economy is unstable for almost 5 years now due to ZIRP expiring, random war, uncertain geopolitical power struggle, failed regulatory keep up allowing a handful of tech predators to acquire and extinguish new ideas and competitions and so many factors. It is just an uncertain time, money now flows on hype and not so much on good ideas because previous good hype has paved way to too much greed, and of course certain giants built too big of a moat and raised the bar and now the new management is milking the cows until the cows collapse in next few years when the new competition rise once the macro settles a bit. I am optimistic, from next year, we will see a massive improvement in prospects(despite trump happened). We just need to hold on a bit.
- _aavaa_ 2y ago
  Reminds me of quote Sussman gave when asked about MIT switching away from Scheme: "Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don’t know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts. This is a fundamentally different job, and it needed a different course."
- 2y ago
simonw 2y ago
"Between the time Mr. Rendon applied for the coding boot camp and the time he graduated, what Mr. Rendon imagined as a “golden ticket” to a better life had expired. About 135,000 start-up and tech industry workers were laid off from their jobs, according to one count. At the same time, new artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, an online chatbot from OpenAI, which could be used as coding assistants, were quickly becoming mainstream, and the outlook for coding jobs was shifting." The big question for me is how much of the reduction in available job for boot camp graduates is because of AI-assisted programming productivity boosts, and how much is because they are now competing with 100,000+ more experienced people who got laid off in the last couple of years (due to a retraction in market size after an over-exuberant hiring period by tech companies during the pandemic). Anyone seen any credible studies about that?
- downrightmike 2y ago
  Microsoft is not going to subsidize AI forever, they'll need to make a profit, and last quarter the spent $19B and only earned $2.5B from it. People are cheaper in the long run, probably forever.
  - kristopolous 2y ago
    it will be people + machine as it always is. For instance, modern robotics hasn't made factories unmanned, instead it's just a small fraction of what was once needed. Same thing is true for mining. Over 90% of the jobs will vanish and they will be different. In the 1800s, the professional photographer replaced the portraiture painter. Different pricing point, different skill, comparable product. But none of these 100% disappeared. Ai is not a buggy whip to programming. It's more of a camera to painting.
- hedora 2y ago
  For experienced developers, copilot and friends seem to be a slight win. (Maybe 2x one day out of five.) That’s as not as big a boost as, say, IDE autocomplete. However, for entry level Lego style coding, I can imagine it’s a bigger improvement. I’d be curious to see a study that breaks productivity gains out by task. (Including learning new languages/frameworks/code bases). My prediction is that the sorts of jobs coder camps target will get hit harder than most, because most productivity gains will be there. That probably implies that type of development training will need to focus more on higher level tasks, like incorporating requirements or making tactical design decisions.
Havoc 2y ago
To me they never made sense in the first place - outside of ZIRP era that is which was very much a fluke. Something that someone from the street can pick up in a couple months isn’t likely to command an enduring market premium. Doesn’t help that most of them taught precisely the things LLMs are good at. Boiler plate front end and a sprinkling of glue together back ends.
- j45 2y ago
  You are missing out on the huge world of self-taught developers who run many of the massive companies out there. Many of them dropped out too. Learning informally, or formally, in person, online, in groups is all valuable.
  - tredre3 2y ago
    Someone who is self-taught is likely to have an interest in the topic of programming. Most bootcampers I've come across have no interest in understanding the fundamentals. In my experience, the former produces much higher quality developers and it's not even close.
    - j45 2y ago
      Bootcampers can absolutely learn the fundamentals. I'd put that on the material being taught, how it's organized, and being presented. Why? Teaching adults is very different than teaching children, and universities mostly teach how to teach children as a degree program. In terms of teaching adults, there are ways that have existed for hundreds if not a few thousand years at least: apprenticeship, learning with and beside someone who knows how. Pro-tip for all bootcampers: run thru something like javascript30.com first.
- harrall 2y ago
  A bootcamp can be someone’s best entry into the field if they’re later in their life where a 4-year institution would be difficult to swing. The average lower bound for the quality of a bootcamp graduate is likely lower but the upper bound is limitless. And I’m saying that as a electrical engineering graduate who knows some basic things that some CS grads don’t know that they should really know better than I know.
psunavy03 2y ago
Today: "We can save money! We don't have to hire all these junior devs!" 2035-2045: "Why does our software suck? Why is it so hard to find good senior devs and architects?"
- downrightmike 2y ago
  "Why are we having to pay 10x what we paid a couple years ago for a senior developer???"
- flustercan 2y ago
  I hope so. Also possible: "Wow people are still paying good money for our sucky software. I guess we never needed good software nor good developers."
- layer8 2y ago
  "Why has our built-with-AI code base become unmaintainable?"

j45 2y ago

Learning to code, both in person, and online, both formally, and informally are invaluable.

benopal64 2y ago
Agreed. The more unique situations I program in, whether it is new people I am building software for or whether I am building on a new tech stack, the more I realize why so many packages and solutions exist in pip and npm. Coding new solutions in new ways has helped me learn so much. Getting a career that supports that was one of the biggest catalysts for me (unsurprisingly), however, attempting to code anything is certainly beneficial.
- j45 2y ago
  Getting started in any way, keeping going, keeping growing is the key. Self-taught developers are equally as formidable and can be found at or near the top of any company and required on balanced teams with “formally” educated developers. Different styles of thinking, both are required on a successful team.

The inherent nature of the technology industry is that we all always have to be levelling up and finding new ways to create value. The better your ability to reason from first principles, learn new tech, etc. the better you will do. Teaching people a specific approach and tactical skillset without the underlying fundamentals does not set them up for success in a fast moving industry, particularly right now when we're undergoing an enormous shift on virtually every level. But it _can_ be an accelerant for some people, so I'd never discount a bootcamp grad on the basis of their learning method alone.

holtkam2 2y ago

This bootcamp grad now works on AI (LLM augmented services as well as traditional ML models) on a daily basis at a big tech company.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

thegrim33 2y ago

I feel like "AI taking programming jobs" is just yet another in a long list of hyped up things that so many people seem convinced about, but then never ends up happening. In X years from now are the people that pushed this idea going to reflect and change their approach to things? I doubt it, they'll just have moved on to hyping up the next thing. Off the top of my head, hyped up things that everyone "knew" that have yet to happen: - Driverless cars. 10-20 years ago they were all the hype, my friends thought that in a year or two they'd have a driverless car, and now it's 10-20 years later and they can still not buy a driverless car. - Bitcoin hype. All the people that were so convinced that bitcoin would take over, and people would be paying for groceries with bitcoin, and everyone would switch to bitcoin for everything and it'd be a huge revolution .. and it has yet to happen. - NFT stuff. I feel like I don't need to explain this one. - Another current one is "just keep scaling LLMs and AGI will magically happen, we're really close". Related to AI programming I guess. Check back in in 10 years on this one, it ain't going to happen. - Various short-lived hypes where a bank closes down and everyone on HN and elsewhere is spreading doom about how it'll be a chain reaction and the whole economy will crash and .. it never happens, and everyone just forgets what was said. It's just hype after hype after hype, it's exhausting.

joseangel_sc 2y ago
printing press was hyped radio was hyped tv was hyped planes were hyped the internet was hyped things arrive slow, big things take time btc is almost 100k today i can take a waymo right now i agree in between a there are letdowns and scams, but not all is hype hype after hype is not exhausting, it’s exciting
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

seangrogg 2y ago

Of course they do. It doesn't matter if it's independent self-study, a bootcamp, or a formal degree. The goal is to iteratively build on your knowledge, grasp the fundamentals, develop intuitions, and put yourself in a place to continue to build upon that foundation in perpetuity. It's a starting point. Not a stopping point.

deprecative 2y ago

Do CS degrees make sense in an A.I. World? No, nor does it matter that it's not A.I. nor that it's not fundamentally useful for replacing humans. What matters is cost reduction for businesses who leverage the technology. Why bother hiring six SWEs when you can hire three and make them clean up a "prompt engineer"'s work?

Kurtcheng 2y ago

[dead]

Tracybrownn88 2y ago

[dead]

n_ary 2y ago

Non-paywalled link: https://archive.ph/yYVus https://archive.ph/yYVus Opinion: I am extremely tired of this same old bs about “almost 60% developers use AI”. Yes, 60% developers use AI because the previous glorious Google/Bing has drowned in slop and now my search for documentation of a particular library or an arcane question returns 100% SEO spam, so I need to ask claude(or my local llama running on ollama) and get a decent enough(albeit outdated) valuable result from which I can pursue more from somewhere. At no time does it mean that, AI is doing a significant part of my work, and no my IDE already generates all the code I need and no I am not going to blindly use the rote replication of the example from StackOverflow that the AI just generated when I said it to generate a particular function, because these examples are often not the best implementations. The AI hype and the desperate lobbying is doing a lot of harm to our industry as a whole. We should see it for what it is, some rich naive dudes invested a lot of money because they feel FOMO from last gold mind rush if AirBnB/Uber/Netflix/Spotify era and is freshly burned from crypto dud hype, so they want to kill the industry by scaring away new folks and make everyone as lazy so we get slow frog boiled to accept garbage from these AI crop. Also, the market and macro economy is unstable for almost 5 years now due to ZIRP expiring, random war, uncertain geopolitical power struggle, failed regulatory keep up allowing a handful of tech predators to acquire and extinguish new ideas and competitions and so many factors. It is just an uncertain time, money now flows on hype and not so much on good ideas because previous good hype has paved way to too much greed, and of course certain giants built too big of a moat and raised the bar and now the new management is milking the cows until the cows collapse in next few years when the new competition rise once the macro settles a bit. I am optimistic, from next year, we will see a massive improvement in prospects(despite trump happened). We just need to hold on a bit.

_aavaa_ 2y ago
Reminds me of quote Sussman gave when asked about MIT switching away from Scheme: "Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don’t know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts. This is a fundamentally different job, and it needed a different course."
2y ago

simonw 2y ago

"Between the time Mr. Rendon applied for the coding boot camp and the time he graduated, what Mr. Rendon imagined as a “golden ticket” to a better life had expired. About 135,000 start-up and tech industry workers were laid off from their jobs, according to one count. At the same time, new artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, an online chatbot from OpenAI, which could be used as coding assistants, were quickly becoming mainstream, and the outlook for coding jobs was shifting." The big question for me is how much of the reduction in available job for boot camp graduates is because of AI-assisted programming productivity boosts, and how much is because they are now competing with 100,000+ more experienced people who got laid off in the last couple of years (due to a retraction in market size after an over-exuberant hiring period by tech companies during the pandemic). Anyone seen any credible studies about that?

downrightmike 2y ago
Microsoft is not going to subsidize AI forever, they'll need to make a profit, and last quarter the spent $19B and only earned $2.5B from it. People are cheaper in the long run, probably forever.
- kristopolous 2y ago
  it will be people + machine as it always is. For instance, modern robotics hasn't made factories unmanned, instead it's just a small fraction of what was once needed. Same thing is true for mining. Over 90% of the jobs will vanish and they will be different. In the 1800s, the professional photographer replaced the portraiture painter. Different pricing point, different skill, comparable product. But none of these 100% disappeared. Ai is not a buggy whip to programming. It's more of a camera to painting.
hedora 2y ago
For experienced developers, copilot and friends seem to be a slight win. (Maybe 2x one day out of five.) That’s as not as big a boost as, say, IDE autocomplete. However, for entry level Lego style coding, I can imagine it’s a bigger improvement. I’d be curious to see a study that breaks productivity gains out by task. (Including learning new languages/frameworks/code bases). My prediction is that the sorts of jobs coder camps target will get hit harder than most, because most productivity gains will be there. That probably implies that type of development training will need to focus more on higher level tasks, like incorporating requirements or making tactical design decisions.

Havoc 2y ago

To me they never made sense in the first place - outside of ZIRP era that is which was very much a fluke. Something that someone from the street can pick up in a couple months isn’t likely to command an enduring market premium. Doesn’t help that most of them taught precisely the things LLMs are good at. Boiler plate front end and a sprinkling of glue together back ends.

j45 2y ago
You are missing out on the huge world of self-taught developers who run many of the massive companies out there. Many of them dropped out too. Learning informally, or formally, in person, online, in groups is all valuable.
- tredre3 2y ago
  Someone who is self-taught is likely to have an interest in the topic of programming. Most bootcampers I've come across have no interest in understanding the fundamentals. In my experience, the former produces much higher quality developers and it's not even close.
  - j45 2y ago
    Bootcampers can absolutely learn the fundamentals. I'd put that on the material being taught, how it's organized, and being presented. Why? Teaching adults is very different than teaching children, and universities mostly teach how to teach children as a degree program. In terms of teaching adults, there are ways that have existed for hundreds if not a few thousand years at least: apprenticeship, learning with and beside someone who knows how. Pro-tip for all bootcampers: run thru something like javascript30.com first.
harrall 2y ago
A bootcamp can be someone’s best entry into the field if they’re later in their life where a 4-year institution would be difficult to swing. The average lower bound for the quality of a bootcamp graduate is likely lower but the upper bound is limitless. And I’m saying that as a electrical engineering graduate who knows some basic things that some CS grads don’t know that they should really know better than I know.

psunavy03 2y ago

Today: "We can save money! We don't have to hire all these junior devs!" 2035-2045: "Why does our software suck? Why is it so hard to find good senior devs and architects?"

downrightmike 2y ago
"Why are we having to pay 10x what we paid a couple years ago for a senior developer???"
flustercan 2y ago
I hope so. Also possible: "Wow people are still paying good money for our sucky software. I guess we never needed good software nor good developers."
layer8 2y ago
"Why has our built-with-AI code base become unmaintainable?"