6 ms·

Agreed. I am incredibly dubious that "bootcamps" have any value whatsoever in any case, except maybe for introducing practicing developers to new technologies.

by rpcope1 11y ago

Agreed. I am incredibly dubious that "bootcamps" have any value whatsoever in any case, except maybe for introducing practicing developers to new technologies. I know tech is the hot place to be any more, but man it's amazing the number of charlatans that have started to show up surrounding "hot technology."

nfoz 11y ago
Different people have different learning styles. And many people do not have an effective or appropriate learning environment where they can learn new tech through free resources. So I think direct-mentorship can be very helpful to some people; even it can help wade through what's out there to understand what's important to learn, how long you should spend learning x, etc. But until this article, I had never thought much about bootcamps requiring accreditation, or the dangers of this type of training. Yikes!! Thanks very much to the author for sharing this experience.
- rpcope1 11y ago
  I get that not everyone can sit down and start grepping how a kernel works, how to architect database solutions, or get what it means to be reentrant in the context of parallel programming. Not everyone can be efficient successful autodidacts; however we have places to learn, like colleges. I would rather see community colleges or university start offering more individual courses to help you get up to speed. There is probably some room for just emerging people in technology completely for a period of time, like some bootcamps seem to do, but these sort of operations reek the same way for-profit universities do, feeling very strongly like whoever is teaching is in it for the money and that the whole operation is a fly-by-night. Beyond that, I wouldn't hire someone out of a bootcamp to do much more than maintain my generic off the shelf CMS, as I'm not sure 6-12 weeks is enough to truly gain the experience and knowledge to avoid anything but the most superficial problems when attempting to build and maintain effective codebases.
  - rhc2104 11y ago
    One of the big "problems" with learning at college is the sequential nature of Computer Science. You have to take CS1 your first semester, then CS2 your second semester, and then you finally have the prerequisites to take multiple classes at once. Coding bootcamps have a semester's worth of material, so it would be cool if colleges had a one-semester full-time class that covers Intro CS, Data Structures, Web Development, and Intro to Software Engineering. Because that basically is a coding bootcamp (except coding bootcamps have class all day in lieu of giving out homework).
    - johnreddington 11y ago
      This was a big reason for me to do a coding bootcamp. I was switching majors out of engineering and into CS. I didn't want to spend 2 years slowly learning CS to find out if I liked it. It was faster and cheaper for me to do one of these schools to see if I really did want to do this for a living. Now I'm employed and do do it for a living and love it. I still push myself everyday to learn and do more learning outside of work. Unfortunately this style of teaching just doesn't fit the mould of traditional universities, but I think it's a great way to find out if you really want to pursue a career in this field.
- VLM 11y ago
  "So I think direct-mentorship can be very helpful to some people" Something to think about is when my father was still alive and retired/contracting he charged about $200/hr for very specialized database work in a very specific financial field. I've heard thats not totally out of line today. Anyway my point is some of these bootcamps cost $16K and for $16K you could hire "most specialized programming consultants" for 1:1 time for a rather amazing 80 hours. Obviously you'd be better off with a modest amount of hours across many consultants unless you've already found a specialty or someone you work very well with. Now most tutors aren't going to charge $200/hr for some easy noob questions, then again the middleman (and they'll be middlemen) are going to want an unacceptably large cut. Its just something to think about, throwing out the advice, that if you've got questions and $16K burning a hole in your pocket there's already a strong and established ecosystem of consultants willing to take your dough in exchange for some answers. As a point of comparison, music teachers and flight instructors don't really make that much per hour, although much like programming the pros at the top of those fields do clear $100K/yr. It seems like a rational alternative.
Dirlewanger 11y ago
The value is pretty easy to understand. If one sees more value in participating in a structured and relatively grueling X week course, networking with a lot of apparently well-connected people in the industry, potential employment opportunities upon completion vs. spending however long doing free-learning, figuring out something to build, continue to build a portfolio, having to market yourself/prove your worth for employment, etc. This is all not even getting into the quality of the programs. For those who want everything laid out for them, there's definite more value vs. doing it the old-fashioned way. With all that said, I have my own also not positive opinions about the proliferation of these schools and how they affect the industry as a whole. I just think that there is a fair-ish tradeoff (granted one picks the right "school").
zastavka 11y ago
I think caveat emptor absolutely applies with bootcamps, but there are also ones that are certainly worth the money. I'm a recent App Academy grad (full disclosure) and almost all of my cohort are now at high-paying jobs at companies they love, including Google, Groupon and Tumblr. (I'm still looking for work right now, but only because of extenuating personal circumstances.) Having talked with my friends who are working now, there are definitely things a/A doesn't teach you much about (e.g. deployment/devops, advanced Git) but on the whole we all feel like we learned more than enough to prepare ourselves for working in software development. I've heard very good things about Hack Reactor as well, though they expect you to come in with some coding experience already. So yes, there are good/great ones out there, but I'd agree that your bullshit detector should be set very high if you're looking into bootcamps.
- hikz 11y ago
  I've heard very good things about Hack Reactor as well My first impression of them is dishonesty. They claim to be "The CS degree for the 21st century" which is simply not true for an intensive web development course.
  - better_no_name 11y ago
    I went through Hack Reactor. It's not a CS degree, but I work next to people having one. I don't think they're necessarily better at their job. "The CS degree for the 21st century" can mean anything. It's just marketing bullshit. That being said, judging startups (and IMO Hack Reactor is essentially a startup) based on their marketing would mean that 90% of startups are - what you call - "dishonest". I enjoyed HR, I'm valuable for the company I'm working for, I maintain a couple of successful Open Source projects (~ 500 stars each) in Go, JavaScript and Haskell. Without being too arrogant, most CS graduates can barely code. And realistically that's what most of us either do or should do all day long.
  - zastavka 11y ago
    While it's maybe a bit of an exaggeration, good bootcamps have an emphasis on (ahem) marketable skills that a lot of CS programs don't. You'd be right that you don't learn a ton of theory like you would in CS, but App Academy at least (and I'd assume Hack Reactor as well) makes sure you have enough grounding in programming fundamentals that learning new languages/frameworks/stacks isn't hard. That said, one weird thing I've heard about Hack Reactor is that they purposely will hold back students they feel aren't 100% where they want them to be and keep them from graduating. Whether that's out of genuine concern for students or it's just to inflate their job placement numbers (or both), I couldn't tell you.
amorphid 11y ago
I'm a full stack Rails developer now, and attended an online bootcamp called Tealeaf Academy. I liked it a lot because the guys who run it understand development pretty well, and they were accessible to answer questions as I had them. They made no promises about my career prospects after attending the course, charged a fair price. In my mind, the 4 month program was closer to a supercharged college course, not an overhyped bootcamp.

by rpcope1 11y ago

nfoz 11y ago

Different people have different learning styles. And many people do not have an effective or appropriate learning environment where they can learn new tech through free resources. So I think direct-mentorship can be very helpful to some people; even it can help wade through what's out there to understand what's important to learn, how long you should spend learning x, etc. But until this article, I had never thought much about bootcamps requiring accreditation, or the dangers of this type of training. Yikes!! Thanks very much to the author for sharing this experience.

rpcope1 11y ago
I get that not everyone can sit down and start grepping how a kernel works, how to architect database solutions, or get what it means to be reentrant in the context of parallel programming. Not everyone can be efficient successful autodidacts; however we have places to learn, like colleges. I would rather see community colleges or university start offering more individual courses to help you get up to speed. There is probably some room for just emerging people in technology completely for a period of time, like some bootcamps seem to do, but these sort of operations reek the same way for-profit universities do, feeling very strongly like whoever is teaching is in it for the money and that the whole operation is a fly-by-night. Beyond that, I wouldn't hire someone out of a bootcamp to do much more than maintain my generic off the shelf CMS, as I'm not sure 6-12 weeks is enough to truly gain the experience and knowledge to avoid anything but the most superficial problems when attempting to build and maintain effective codebases.
- rhc2104 11y ago
  One of the big "problems" with learning at college is the sequential nature of Computer Science. You have to take CS1 your first semester, then CS2 your second semester, and then you finally have the prerequisites to take multiple classes at once. Coding bootcamps have a semester's worth of material, so it would be cool if colleges had a one-semester full-time class that covers Intro CS, Data Structures, Web Development, and Intro to Software Engineering. Because that basically is a coding bootcamp (except coding bootcamps have class all day in lieu of giving out homework).
  - johnreddington 11y ago
    This was a big reason for me to do a coding bootcamp. I was switching majors out of engineering and into CS. I didn't want to spend 2 years slowly learning CS to find out if I liked it. It was faster and cheaper for me to do one of these schools to see if I really did want to do this for a living. Now I'm employed and do do it for a living and love it. I still push myself everyday to learn and do more learning outside of work. Unfortunately this style of teaching just doesn't fit the mould of traditional universities, but I think it's a great way to find out if you really want to pursue a career in this field.
VLM 11y ago
"So I think direct-mentorship can be very helpful to some people" Something to think about is when my father was still alive and retired/contracting he charged about $200/hr for very specialized database work in a very specific financial field. I've heard thats not totally out of line today. Anyway my point is some of these bootcamps cost $16K and for $16K you could hire "most specialized programming consultants" for 1:1 time for a rather amazing 80 hours. Obviously you'd be better off with a modest amount of hours across many consultants unless you've already found a specialty or someone you work very well with. Now most tutors aren't going to charge $200/hr for some easy noob questions, then again the middleman (and they'll be middlemen) are going to want an unacceptably large cut. Its just something to think about, throwing out the advice, that if you've got questions and $16K burning a hole in your pocket there's already a strong and established ecosystem of consultants willing to take your dough in exchange for some answers. As a point of comparison, music teachers and flight instructors don't really make that much per hour, although much like programming the pros at the top of those fields do clear $100K/yr. It seems like a rational alternative.

Dirlewanger 11y ago

The value is pretty easy to understand. If one sees more value in participating in a structured and relatively grueling X week course, networking with a lot of apparently well-connected people in the industry, potential employment opportunities upon completion vs. spending however long doing free-learning, figuring out something to build, continue to build a portfolio, having to market yourself/prove your worth for employment, etc. This is all not even getting into the quality of the programs. For those who want everything laid out for them, there's definite more value vs. doing it the old-fashioned way. With all that said, I have my own also not positive opinions about the proliferation of these schools and how they affect the industry as a whole. I just think that there is a fair-ish tradeoff (granted one picks the right "school").

zastavka 11y ago

I think caveat emptor absolutely applies with bootcamps, but there are also ones that are certainly worth the money. I'm a recent App Academy grad (full disclosure) and almost all of my cohort are now at high-paying jobs at companies they love, including Google, Groupon and Tumblr. (I'm still looking for work right now, but only because of extenuating personal circumstances.) Having talked with my friends who are working now, there are definitely things a/A doesn't teach you much about (e.g. deployment/devops, advanced Git) but on the whole we all feel like we learned more than enough to prepare ourselves for working in software development. I've heard very good things about Hack Reactor as well, though they expect you to come in with some coding experience already. So yes, there are good/great ones out there, but I'd agree that your bullshit detector should be set very high if you're looking into bootcamps.

hikz 11y ago
I've heard very good things about Hack Reactor as well My first impression of them is dishonesty. They claim to be "The CS degree for the 21st century" which is simply not true for an intensive web development course.
- better_no_name 11y ago
  I went through Hack Reactor. It's not a CS degree, but I work next to people having one. I don't think they're necessarily better at their job. "The CS degree for the 21st century" can mean anything. It's just marketing bullshit. That being said, judging startups (and IMO Hack Reactor is essentially a startup) based on their marketing would mean that 90% of startups are - what you call - "dishonest". I enjoyed HR, I'm valuable for the company I'm working for, I maintain a couple of successful Open Source projects (~ 500 stars each) in Go, JavaScript and Haskell. Without being too arrogant, most CS graduates can barely code. And realistically that's what most of us either do or should do all day long.
- zastavka 11y ago
  While it's maybe a bit of an exaggeration, good bootcamps have an emphasis on (ahem) marketable skills that a lot of CS programs don't. You'd be right that you don't learn a ton of theory like you would in CS, but App Academy at least (and I'd assume Hack Reactor as well) makes sure you have enough grounding in programming fundamentals that learning new languages/frameworks/stacks isn't hard. That said, one weird thing I've heard about Hack Reactor is that they purposely will hold back students they feel aren't 100% where they want them to be and keep them from graduating. Whether that's out of genuine concern for students or it's just to inflate their job placement numbers (or both), I couldn't tell you.

amorphid 11y ago

I'm a full stack Rails developer now, and attended an online bootcamp called Tealeaf Academy. I liked it a lot because the guys who run it understand development pretty well, and they were accessible to answer questions as I had them. They made no promises about my career prospects after attending the course, charged a fair price. In my mind, the 4 month program was closer to a supercharged college course, not an overhyped bootcamp.