5 ms·

I just completed a dev camp in november and the answer is yes. 80% of my class had positions as devs within two months of finishing. Our best student (who had t

by fremn 13y ago

I just completed a dev camp in november and the answer is yes. 80% of my class had positions as devs within two months of finishing. Our best student (who had taught himself a little code before) was hired within a week. Not saying all the schools are good. (some look slightly sketchy to me) "Why would a company hire you, who just finished a boot camp, as opposed to someone who have years of coding experience and knowledge?" An odd premise, its like asking why a company would hire someone straight out of college. Companies hire from devcamps because the good ones are taught by people who work in the industry and know what they would want a colleague to know, furthermore they ask the potential employers what they are looking for and teach that in a hands-on environment.

wpietri 13y ago
Not an odd premise at all. In a startup context, I won't even hire people with a fresh CS degree unless they have something else (personal projects, significant open source effort, real work experience) that convinces me they won't be a liability in a production context. I'd love to find out who's hiring these people, and how satisfied they are with the results. The two conditions where I can imagine hiring somebody with ~3 months total coding experience are A) when it's mainly a filter for ability to learn, and I expect to invest a lot of time getting them to the level of a production coder and then supervising their work, or B) a situation where output quality doesn't really matter. I'm hoping all those people end up in situations like A. But there are definitely things that fit B. Back in Bubble 1.0 there were people selling themselves as an "HTML programmer". And there were consulting shops billing total idiots [1] out at $1500/day plus expenses. Your developers don't have to be very good if your sales guys are great and you have at least one solid technical person to put out fires and impress clients. [1] this kind of idiot: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/02/the-nonprogramming-programmer.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/02/the-nonprogramming-...
- BootThrowaway 13y ago
  There is a third possibility - the company hires the person but makes no investment and they can either quickly come up to speed on their own or they're canned. Seems like very few companies want to make any sort of investment in their people.
  - wpietri 13y ago
    Good point. I think that's still case B, though. Somebody with no experience running around in production code will probably make a terrible mess unless carefully mentored and supervised.
pavs 13y ago
A person who came straight out of college is likely to have at-least 2-4 years worth of programming experience as opposed to someone who attended a bootcamp for a few months. I am still not convinced that this is anything more than a scam. Unless you are exceptionally brilliant at learning new language, no matter how much you push yourself, you will be barely good enough to even know the rudimentary concept of programming in 2-3 months. To me the best way to learning programming is to make fuckton worth of crude programs and then make insanely silly and sometimes good mistakes in the process and then try to figure out how to fix those mistakes by yourself (or at least with some help). 2-3 months is barely enough time to understand _WELL_ rudimentary concepts of programming let alone learn from your mistakes. If you already have prior programming knowledge and know at least one programming language, joining this camp is silly and it doesn't prove anything one way or another. If you already know one programming language, learning a new language should be fairly easier than for someone who have never programmed in his life.
- BWStearns 13y ago
  >> If you already have prior programming knowledge and know at least one programming language, joining this camp is silly and it doesn't prove anything one way or another I have to disagree here. If you taught yourself enough for what you needed at the time and never knew any other programmers then you face a huge impediment to learning. Every time you hit a wall where you know how to describe the problem to a human but not to google or stack overflow you can spend hours (notice I didn't say waste) hunting down what is the proper way to describe the problem. While this can be extremely educational in the broad sense it can be slow in terms of actual progress towards being a better programmer since the overhead associated with troubleshooting/debugging is multiplied when it is most costly. Also, if you're spending 12+ hours a day writing code on average (in my program we did) for 12 hours a week, then you're putting in a hair over a thousand hours of coding time. Assuming a 12 week semester, 2 semesters a year, and 4 years this comes out to about 10 hours per week of actual coding. This clearly isn't the best student in a 4 year program's work schedule, but it's not unrealistic for an undergrad. It takes time to get situated with a given problem and into writing code, but if you're essentially on a 12 week coding binge where you take breaks to sleep and eat then that context switching overhead is reduced. The productive hours of a 12 week bootcamp may seriously outpace the hypothetical student who spends that raw time over 4 years.

by fremn 13y ago

wpietri 13y ago

Not an odd premise at all. In a startup context, I won't even hire people with a fresh CS degree unless they have something else (personal projects, significant open source effort, real work experience) that convinces me they won't be a liability in a production context. I'd love to find out who's hiring these people, and how satisfied they are with the results. The two conditions where I can imagine hiring somebody with ~3 months total coding experience are A) when it's mainly a filter for ability to learn, and I expect to invest a lot of time getting them to the level of a production coder and then supervising their work, or B) a situation where output quality doesn't really matter. I'm hoping all those people end up in situations like A. But there are definitely things that fit B. Back in Bubble 1.0 there were people selling themselves as an "HTML programmer". And there were consulting shops billing total idiots [1] out at $1500/day plus expenses. Your developers don't have to be very good if your sales guys are great and you have at least one solid technical person to put out fires and impress clients. [1] this kind of idiot: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/02/the-nonprogramming-programmer.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/02/the-nonprogramming-...

BootThrowaway 13y ago
There is a third possibility - the company hires the person but makes no investment and they can either quickly come up to speed on their own or they're canned. Seems like very few companies want to make any sort of investment in their people.
- wpietri 13y ago
  Good point. I think that's still case B, though. Somebody with no experience running around in production code will probably make a terrible mess unless carefully mentored and supervised.

pavs 13y ago

A person who came straight out of college is likely to have at-least 2-4 years worth of programming experience as opposed to someone who attended a bootcamp for a few months. I am still not convinced that this is anything more than a scam. Unless you are exceptionally brilliant at learning new language, no matter how much you push yourself, you will be barely good enough to even know the rudimentary concept of programming in 2-3 months. To me the best way to learning programming is to make fuckton worth of crude programs and then make insanely silly and sometimes good mistakes in the process and then try to figure out how to fix those mistakes by yourself (or at least with some help). 2-3 months is barely enough time to understand _WELL_ rudimentary concepts of programming let alone learn from your mistakes. If you already have prior programming knowledge and know at least one programming language, joining this camp is silly and it doesn't prove anything one way or another. If you already know one programming language, learning a new language should be fairly easier than for someone who have never programmed in his life.

BWStearns 13y ago
>> If you already have prior programming knowledge and know at least one programming language, joining this camp is silly and it doesn't prove anything one way or another I have to disagree here. If you taught yourself enough for what you needed at the time and never knew any other programmers then you face a huge impediment to learning. Every time you hit a wall where you know how to describe the problem to a human but not to google or stack overflow you can spend hours (notice I didn't say waste) hunting down what is the proper way to describe the problem. While this can be extremely educational in the broad sense it can be slow in terms of actual progress towards being a better programmer since the overhead associated with troubleshooting/debugging is multiplied when it is most costly. Also, if you're spending 12+ hours a day writing code on average (in my program we did) for 12 hours a week, then you're putting in a hair over a thousand hours of coding time. Assuming a 12 week semester, 2 semesters a year, and 4 years this comes out to about 10 hours per week of actual coding. This clearly isn't the best student in a 4 year program's work schedule, but it's not unrealistic for an undergrad. It takes time to get situated with a given problem and into writing code, but if you're essentially on a 12 week coding binge where you take breaks to sleep and eat then that context switching overhead is reduced. The productive hours of a 12 week bootcamp may seriously outpace the hypothetical student who spends that raw time over 4 years.