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As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

89 points by samsgro 11y ago

nmkn 11y ago
It's an inspiring article, but I wish it highlighted some realities with code schools. There is something to be said about the cost, time commitment, and passion needed to succeed. People who go from 20k to 100k are the exception, not the rule.
sp332 11y ago
Career tests are getting easier http://catandgirl.com/?p=4897 http://catandgirl.com/?p=4897
aesthetics1 11y ago
This article sounds inspiring when taken at face value, but it also strikes fear into my heart. This sounds eerily familiar to the dot-com bubble, and I can't help thinking that churning out zero-to-hero software engineers, web developers, and data scientists at this rate is a recipe for disaster. Sure, there's a huge need right now, but we can't be too complacent -- thinking that it's impossible to saturate the market again, can we? Hopefully this doesn't end poorly.
omouse 11y ago
Millions more lines of instantly legacy code written by inexperienced programmers? Thank the gods we'll all be employed for decades! Decades I tell you! ;p
- pyrophane 11y ago
  My reaction was more along the lines of "I'd hate to be the person who has to clean all that up)."
  - bigtunacan 11y ago
    Mine was more along the lines of, "I'm going to make so much money cleaning that shit up."
    - omouse 11y ago
      You're going to need a lot of booze or drugs or to cap the time you do that. It can get real frustrating real fast despite the gigantic checks.
      - bigtunacan 11y ago
        Definitely gets frustrating, but I've done plenty of "cleanup" contract work. Usually someone (business person) without technical knowledge hired the cheapest outsourcing they can find. Money has been sunk, and often there is 80 to 90% of a finished project, but the original contractor doesn't have enough experience to get it that last mile. It's frustrating work, but it's also gravy train. When I get that call they are desperate and coming in on referral where someone has said, "I know a guy that's a finisher, but he's really going to cost you."
- untog 11y ago
  You're assuming these startups will be around for long enough for it to matter.
- civilframe 11y ago
  As long as these rookies aren't writing nuclear reactor firmware, who cares? Most of programming is mundane. Have them make CRUD apps while we experts work on something interesting ;)
  - vorg 11y ago
    > Have the[se rookies] make CRUD apps while we experts work on something interesting The reality is the opposite: the smooth-talking aptitudeless "rookies" with a years experience 7 times get themselves onto teams designing "interesting" stuff from scratch, then the programming experts are put on the team to clean up the many bugs for years to come.
    - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
      This happens way more often than it should.
      - joedavison 11y ago
        Often times, only the smartest people can reverse engineer and maintain vast amounts of poorly written code. When code is terrible, it is very difficult to reason about. Hence, you need to be very smart to reason about it, and be successful in modifying it.
      - nostrademons 11y ago
        That's not really a fair comparison: the "rookies" (somehow, I doubt that always applies) are working in an environment where they often don't know the requirements and the only way to find them out is through trial and error, and the fact that the organization can even afford "programming experts" means they must have been somewhat successful. Put a programming expert in a situation where the boss doesn't know what he wants and the only way to find out is to build it 20 times and he'll produce a pile of crud too.
  - numo16 11y ago
    > Have them make CRUD apps while we experts work on something interesting Slightly more complex CRUD apps? ;)
- akilism 11y ago
  one easy trick: code reviews.
falsestprophet 11y ago
Here is some salary data for the two metro areas mentioned in the story for "Software Developers, Applications" from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported for May 2014 [1]. Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, CO 10%ile 25%ile median 75%ile 90%ile 64470 80110 100140 122350 146930 New York-White Plains-Wayne, NY-NJ Metropolitan Division 10%ile 25%ile median 75%ile 90%ile 66100 83010 106710 135600 164390 The woman hired by Galvanize achieved a 25th %ile salary for Denver on her first day. Seems hard to believe that someone with so little training could be more productive than 25% of developers of software applications in Denver. I think it's at least a little suspicious that the single data point that demonstrates the success of Galvanize is paid directly by Galvanize. How about any other student? The math guy did an undergraduate degree in mathematics!, so he is hardly a characteristic example of waiters in New York who generally shouldn't expect to achieve a median salary for the industry on their first day. [1] http://data.bls.gov/oes/search.jsp?data_tool=OES http://data.bls.gov/oes/search.jsp?data_tool=OES
- woah 11y ago
  I find it extremely believable that someone with ambition and drive could do better than many developers who are coasting off a CS degree.
  - DeBraid 11y ago
    This and tech stacks change so often that someone with 3-6 months of javascript exp could be more effective than 2-5 years with java.
    - juliangregorian 11y ago
      Developers make tech stacks, not the other way around.
- jboggan 11y ago
  Salary is not a monotonic mapping of developer productivity. Besides, given the general increase of salaries across the board and the poor raise-negotiating skills of coders in general, it isn't hard to imagine the 25% of salaries under hers were mostly of an older un-altered vintage for underperforming programmers.
AtmaScout 11y ago
Sounds eerily similar to the 2000s bust when English majors were being vacuumed up for web development. Maintenance will be fun, I'm sure.
unabashedturtle 11y ago
As someone that's done a fair bit of hiring for engineer and data scientist positions, my outlook on these 'coding academies' is pretty grim. If you want someone that can hack together a web app in rails/node.js/django/framework of your choice then that's fine. But the reality is most people going through these code academies tend to get a really poor foundation in both writing "good" and "fast" code. There's very little focus on algorithmic fundamentals. But really, it's the academies that claim to spew out data scientists that I have a problem with. Every candidate I've interviewed that came from one of these knew how to run a regression, use R, and fit a variety of classifiers (eg; random forest, feed-forward ANN). But not one of them could answer really basic questions about sampling and experimental design (one of them asked: "multiple comparisons..? What's that?"). I've found that people that come in completely self-taught oddly enough don't have these issues. Many of them really do focus on the fundamentals first. It's easier to teach someone that understands experimental design and probability theory how to fit a few models in R than to teach probability theory to a kid that knows how to copy and paste from stackoverflow.
dreaminvm 11y ago
While the demand is real, I am just not sure it will last with the level of skills being pumped out of these bootcamps. I recently interviewed a few candidates from a coding bootcamp mentioned in the article and while they can write basic rails code, they all lacked problem solving skills. Most candidates were hung up on basic performance related questions.
- Johnny555 11y ago
  Even "experienced" developers who haven't had formal computer science training can run into performance problems. At my last job, our application was running slower and slower as we added clients. None of the Ruby devs could figure it out, the code was "fine", all of the tests passed and ran quickly (with a stubbed 10 item customer table), and everything ran great until we grew beyond a hundred or so customers so it fell on me to optimize the database which was clearly the problem. I finally took a look at the code and found the problem -- it was a loop within a loop within a loop doing a full scan across the entire customer table disguised by the two inner loops being inside separate Gems. The application had O(n^3) performance. None of the developers knew what that meant so I gave a "lunch-and-learn" presentation on big-O notation and what it means for performance.
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    I've seen this happen with experienced developer with a CS degree. They say, it's "not my job" to test with large data. B.S., it is your job so sit down, shut up and do it. The job of QA isn't to find all your bugs, it's to ensure you don't have any.
  - greenyoda 11y ago
    Long ago, I was asked to fix a bug about a user interface hanging when too many items were added. After poking around, I discovered that there was an algorithm, whose run time was an exponential function of the number of items, that was taking several minutes to run (after which the UI would be responsive again). The punch line was that this algorithm was actually computing a value that was never used by the rest of the code, so I just deleted it. That was in C++ code written by an experienced developer.
GuiA 11y ago
Somehow I have a hard time believing that if you have a math major, the only difference between you waiting tables and living on the brink of poverty or making bank as a software engineer is a 3 months Ruby course (I have a double math/CS major); I feel like there may be something more going on here. I'm happy for the gentleman's success, but it seems like a poor example to use in any case.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  Shouldn't a math degree already have at least a little programming? Matlab? Python? Something?
  - browles 11y ago
    Should? Maybe. But plenty of math graduates have little to no programming experience, even from top schools.
    - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
      Interesting. I did not know that. So do math majors do any numerical analysis?
  - DavidHm 11y ago
    Probably some mathlab, but it really depends on the course/ university. For example in Europe many courses focus on pure theory.
- jdminhbg 11y ago
  I don't have trouble believing that a short course to learn to use tools that put his previously-acquired math knowledge to good use drastically increases his productivity.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
Once everyone is a programmer, then what?
- sarwechshar 11y ago
  We'll run out of food and starve!
- chadgeidel 11y ago
  Once everyone can read and write, then what? We live in a computer age. Knowing how to program is no longer a "specialized skill", it's mandatory (on some level) to effectively interact with ever more complex systems that run our lives.
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    Yeah, no. Those things are not the same thing. Try again.
  - a3voices 11y ago
    Mandatory in what sense? Most people get by without having to code anything more complex than an Excel formula.
    - chadgeidel 11y ago
      In my opinion "programming" should be generalized to "instructing the computer to do a series of tasks", or "applying the output of one system into the next system". I don't think that's overgeneralizing.
      - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
        Let's not redefine words. What you're suggesting "programming" be generalized to already has a definition, "Computer Literacy".
    - joedavison 11y ago
      "Most people" cannot code an Excel formula.
onedev 11y ago
I guess I should start a consulting company to clean up the messes these people are going to make :)
seibelj 11y ago
We made a conscious decision to try and hire someone from these camps as an experiment. I went to their demo day and winnowed the graduating class of 40 down to 6. Of the 6 we interviewed we decided to give 6 month internships to 3 of them, 2 developer and 1 qa. Despite being hourly with minimal benefits, they were making the yearly equivalent of 50k a year which I found more than reasonable given the fact they had no coding experience other than 12 weeks of study. On the first day, the woman who was QA quit because she wanted to do development, despite being explicitly hired as a QA. 2 months later I had to let one of the developers go because she produced very little and was surfing YouTube for much of the day. The last developer I did not opt to hire at the end of his internship. He was a smart guy, but he needed years more experience to operate at the level of our other engineers and he was demanding a 75k salary. I used the 75k he wanted and hired a competent developer with a CS degree and a couple years experience. He is orders of magnitude better than the boot camp guy was. It is possible that a boot camp graduate could be useful after several years' experience, but fresh out of school they are extremely raw and need years of training. Therefore I won't be hiring any fresh graduates again.
- eastbayjake 11y ago
  > He was a smart guy, but he needed years more experience to operate at the level of our other engineers and he was demanding a 75k salary. Two questions: Are you in San Francisco, and which bootcamp was this?
  - wh-uws 11y ago
    Yeah these are vitally important questions. The curriculums and the level rigor of the different bootcamps varies widely. Some have a very high bar for entry and are basically just a way for someone who could quickly become competent (i.e. someone with a deep math or some type of engineering background) to ramp up on coding. Others just let anyone in and teach very basic things so the graduates level would vary widely as well.
  - seibelj 11y ago
    I'm in Boston, the salaries here are high but not SF levels. I'd rather not say which boot camp to preserve relationships and not malign their organization. They were very helpful, I just simply think hiring straight from boot camps doesn't work for my method of managing software development organizations.
santaclaus 11y ago
Also discussed in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9963720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9963720
narrator 11y ago
I went to a meetup at a coding bootcamp. It was weird. All these people from different backgrounds wanting to be programmers. Being a computer nerd since the 80s, it's so strange how the culture has shifted.
eastbayjake 11y ago
I knew as soon as I checked the comments on this article there would be a barrage of negativity. I just wasn't prepared for it to be unanimous. I've made similar comments on HN in the past but much of this griping seems to boil down to "I was interested in [thing] way before all these johnny-come-latelys just bum-rushed it for a paycheck!" It's an irritatingly hipster thing to do -- I did X before X was cool, but now X is sooooo over. I also wish people who complain in these comments would name the schools when they complain. Who are you worried about offending? Will you help everyone else by identifying degree-mill schools that turn out low-quality people? I hate that great programs like Hack Reactor or MakerSquare -- which never have people on the job market for more than a couple weeks and continue to have ridiculous industry demand -- get lumped in with fly-by-night HTML/CSS bootcamps in third-tier tech markets like Atlanta.
- dreaminvm 11y ago
  I disagree. What I got from the comments was that while everyone is capable of learning how to program, the expectation that a 3 month bootcamper can do/learn the same amount of information as a 4 year CS degree is insanity. Anyone who has studied STEM can tell you, 4 years is actually fast pace for a competitive program. What's next, a bootcamp to turn out doctors in 6 months instead of the 8/9 years of schooling? And yes, most of these bootcampers (regardless of their location) are chasing a big paycheck because VC money is flooding the markets (many references in the article).
mooreds 11y ago
I for one think this trend is great. We need more developers. But... I lived through the last boom when it seemed anyone who could spell 'java' was hired as a developer. (OK, it wasn't that bad, but there was definitely a giant sucking sound as folks were pulled into technology for the money.) I hope this time is different.
- robalfonso 11y ago
  I think we need more good developers. 100% you can get a great developer from this education channel, but that person would be good whether they came to you via a code school or a more traditional route. I also think people should be encouraged to better themselves and work towards higher paying careers. That said, as someone who hires engineers the signal to noise ratio continues to go up. It makes it that much harder to find good developers in the forest of bad. I make it a point of seeing almost anyone who is close to fitting the bill so I kiss a lot of frogs, and I could be more harsh weeding out people at earlier stages but I've had absolutely spectacular hires being a bit more flexible (I do tend to fire fast though, no reason for everyone to pretend its not a good fit) Flooding the market with folks though just makes it more challenging for those hiring.
  - mooreds 11y ago
    Hard to argue that we need more good developers. In my experience, some component of 'good' is experience, some is aptitude, some is knowledge, and some is willingness to grind. The code schools can take care of the latter two (depending on the quality of the school). Sorry to hear that the signal to noise ratio is going up. That is probably due to more people being pulled into the profession (just as it was 15 years ago). > Flooding the market with folks though just makes it more challenging for those hiring. All other things being equal, wouldn't you want a larger candidate pool? I have done some hiring and while it was a grind to screen applicants, that beat the pants off of not having any applicants.
    - robalfonso 11y ago
      Well if you're letting me order it the way I want it, I wan the candidate pool to be infinite and to all be extremely qualified :) What I'm actually finding is the candidate pool is getting larger but the quality hires are about the same. Ostensibly this is a function of the pay rate pressuring people to join the hiring pool. >All other things being equal, wouldn't you want a larger candidate pool? I >have done some hiring and while it was a grind to screen applicants, that >beat the pants off of not having any applicants. No argument, I have played that game and its not fun. For the sake of argument though if we look at the total number of candidates you want to hire (1) then any pool size over one does create more work as it grows (I'd like to avoid that if at all possible :) ). Assuming the individual that matches your criteria is in your pool at all (again an oversimplification). I also can't stress enough aptitude as a component of a good dev, which you alluded to. I've never seen a dev who was great (whether self taught/code school/cs degree who had no aptitude for the work. I've also seen people with tons of aptitude and no credentials absolutely own people with phd's and masters degrees in a tough problem. Before we had colleges/code schools there were always engineers, how do you think we got the wheel?
npalli 11y ago
So, everyone knows that Software is eating the world and coding is hot. However, something about this article seems off to me 1. All persons quoted are coding camp organizers/owners. Could it be they have some vested interest in pushing forward the idea that you can go from zero to hero in a few weeks of coding bootcamp. 2. The 'hot' areas that have been listed - mobile, analytics, cloud are actually a very tiny percent of jobs!. A quick Glassdoor search showed 25/1 ratio for software engineer/mobile engineer. In fact, if you go away from SF and NY, the number of jobs in these areas are even rarer. Which calls into question the whole premise of what is being taught. Paul Graham's submarine article is spot on about these PR stunts. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
sosuke 11y ago
I don't remember a time since the first boom that workers weren't interested in the fast easy money image of programming and startups. Combine that with the bootstrap programming education companies selling ITT Tech style train and earn big bucks package I bet business is booming. The math grad was a silly story. Before I started working I made 0 dollars, now that I am working I make money! When I was in a grocery store I made minimum wage, when I got a job with more responsibility I made a lot more money! Of course there is a part of me a bit sore, my first coding job was $27k for full-time. Also, this is a very long ad for Galvanize isn't it?
danso 11y ago
The lede anecdote talks about a 26-year-old math major who went from $20,000/yr as a writer to $100,000/yr as a data scientist, after a bootcamp. Ignoring the "but what is data science" debate for now...this to me seems totally reasonable. He's a math major. Programming is founded upon math...and at the very least, requires the same kind of mathematical deduction and ability to not be freaked out by symbolic representations of values. Now, if it were a pure writer (i.e. literature/English major)...I would not expect that person to make the necessary growth in the short span of a bootcamp. Three months may be enough to cover syntax and some base engineering concepts...but it's definitely not enough to become a rigorous mathematical thinker.
- ritchiea 11y ago
  While I'm sure it helps to be a math major anywhere, anyone who has been trained to be a careful analytic thinker would be a good candidate to become a programmer. For instance if you were a humanities major from a school with a strong academic reputation and you actually took your coursework seriously as an undergrad. As much as programming is applied math, most companies are not Google or Facebook and have problems that can suffer the inefficiency of a non-expert. A lot of programming jobs ask you to get data from a form or API, do something with it and show some HTML. And that HTML needs to be styled in CSS and have some neat UI elements that are fine tuned in Javascript. There is nothing about that kind of work that favors a math major over English major. The situation changes if your company is huge, handling thousands of requests a second so small inefficiencies add up and are wasteful on a large scale or even cause the software to break entirely. But assuming you have a smart CTO/Lead you should know where potential pain points in your code are and still be able to hire a relatively inexperienced junior and get good work out of that person. I have a friend who was an Ivy CS grad, worked at Google then worked at Squarespace. He said he was intimidated by designers who knew HTML, CSS & Javascript and were good with forms because a lot of work for developers could be handled as quickly by those type of developers as he could handle it with his vastly more technical background.
- ThrustVectoring 11y ago
  That's basically the demographic that is both the coding bootcamp's core demographic and what you want to look for while hiring. Intelligent, analytical folks who go from under-employed to having enough of a skill-set to do something of value. Engineering school students who had to drop out for non-academic reasons and are flipping burgers, math majors who are for some reason writing for $20k/yr, grad students tired of running experiments for peanuts, etc.
seansmccullough 11y ago
Startup idea: 3 month mechanical engineering bootcamp! I'd totally drive on that bridge.
adultSwim 11y ago
Pop
siavosh 11y ago
There's nothing special about programming. Everyone wanted to be a trader and banker until 2008. Everyone also wanted to buy a house or be a real estate agent until 2008 too. And everyone wanted to be a web developer until 1999. People follow the money signal that an economy broadcasts. You can't blame individuals who want to better their prospects. What we can do is blame the following: 1. Predatory schools (not all) with big price tags producing ill equipped developers 2. Greedy herd like VC's making bad investments that society has to pay for 3. And finally often overlooked, shoddy and uncritical journalism like this article that fail to provide context and attempt at finding the deeper real story
hiharryhere 11y ago
There are Plumbers, Plasterers and Bricklayers... and there are structural engineers. There's a need for both kinds of coders. I'm all for it. Not all places need a CS genius, most just need someone with the skills to use established frameworks and tools. Doesn't make you a bad programmer.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > Not all places need a CS genius, most just need someone with the skills to use established frameworks and tools. Unfortunately, many of them think they need a CS genius, or only want to hire them for the prestige of having an elite workforce.
paulpauper 11y ago
Companies cannot hire fast enough. Glassdoor, an employment site, lists more than 7,300 openings for software engineers, ahead of job openings for nurses, This agree with the post-2008 hollowing out of the middle theme - lots of of opportunities for high-IQ employment (coders) and the polar opposite: low-paid service workers and bedpan changers. It's like if you're IQ is not in the top quartile, go directly to the low-income, do not go pass go, do not collect $60-100k a year. I'm very suspicious of the claim that these boot camps can turn novices into job-ready professionals in just 3 months. There's too much to learn and unless you're one of those high-IQ people who has an aptitude for math, as the example in the article, you won't be competent enough get a job and, to make things worse, you'll also be out $10,000. Instead, if you're not smart enough to work in tech, take that $10k and buy Facebook, Google, Amazon or QQQ stock using in-the-money-call options. You can leverage 5-1 and make $30k a year from a $10k account doing this. The tech boom has much further to go. You don't need to be a member of Mensa to ride an obvious bull market trend.
- Nicholas_C 11y ago
  Is this post satire?
NumberSix 11y ago
There are a number of studies that about half of all software developers do not have a CS degree. From what I have seen, many of these have degrees in other so-called STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields such as mathematics. Paul Minton's LinkedIn profile lists a 4 year B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2009-2011). He apparently was a transfer from University of Vermont. GPA is listed as 3.31. His LinkedIn profile also lists courses in probability, statistics, and linear algebra. https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulminton https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulminton Data scientists in particular tend to be people with degrees (often Ph.D.s) in other STEM fields involving heavy statistics and data analysis. Most do extensive software development for these data analyses. It is not clear how much programming experience he had prior to the coding boot camp either from the New York Times article or his LinkedIn profile. These days, most people taking probability and statistics probably do some programming in class. It is also worth noting that San Francisco is quite expensive with apartment rents running over $4,000/month in the city. Software jobs are concentrated in high cost of living areas. http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2015/06/02/san-franciscos-median-rent-hits-a-ridiculous-4225/ http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2015/06/02/san-franciscos-...
stillsut 11y ago
I got a degree in Finance alongside lots of Accounting majors. Turns out that's not who gets hired in most of the top business jobs, e.g i-banking. I think there's a growing amount of positions that take some coding, but where the soft skills are equally as important and let's be honest: the average CS major is not known for strength in that area. (Just as accounting majors aren't known for having "dynamic" and risk-taking personalities which are sought in high-finance.) That being said, I think these code bootcamps are providing an important injection into tech diversity (the real kind of diversity).

89 points by samsgro 11y ago

nmkn 11y ago

It's an inspiring article, but I wish it highlighted some realities with code schools. There is something to be said about the cost, time commitment, and passion needed to succeed. People who go from 20k to 100k are the exception, not the rule.

sp332 11y ago

Career tests are getting easier http://catandgirl.com/?p=4897 http://catandgirl.com/?p=4897

aesthetics1 11y ago

This article sounds inspiring when taken at face value, but it also strikes fear into my heart. This sounds eerily familiar to the dot-com bubble, and I can't help thinking that churning out zero-to-hero software engineers, web developers, and data scientists at this rate is a recipe for disaster. Sure, there's a huge need right now, but we can't be too complacent -- thinking that it's impossible to saturate the market again, can we? Hopefully this doesn't end poorly.

omouse 11y ago

Millions more lines of instantly legacy code written by inexperienced programmers? Thank the gods we'll all be employed for decades! Decades I tell you! ;p

pyrophane 11y ago
My reaction was more along the lines of "I'd hate to be the person who has to clean all that up)."
- bigtunacan 11y ago
  Mine was more along the lines of, "I'm going to make so much money cleaning that shit up."
  - omouse 11y ago
    You're going to need a lot of booze or drugs or to cap the time you do that. It can get real frustrating real fast despite the gigantic checks.
    - bigtunacan 11y ago
      Definitely gets frustrating, but I've done plenty of "cleanup" contract work. Usually someone (business person) without technical knowledge hired the cheapest outsourcing they can find. Money has been sunk, and often there is 80 to 90% of a finished project, but the original contractor doesn't have enough experience to get it that last mile. It's frustrating work, but it's also gravy train. When I get that call they are desperate and coming in on referral where someone has said, "I know a guy that's a finisher, but he's really going to cost you."
untog 11y ago
You're assuming these startups will be around for long enough for it to matter.
civilframe 11y ago
As long as these rookies aren't writing nuclear reactor firmware, who cares? Most of programming is mundane. Have them make CRUD apps while we experts work on something interesting ;)
- vorg 11y ago
  > Have the[se rookies] make CRUD apps while we experts work on something interesting The reality is the opposite: the smooth-talking aptitudeless "rookies" with a years experience 7 times get themselves onto teams designing "interesting" stuff from scratch, then the programming experts are put on the team to clean up the many bugs for years to come.
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    This happens way more often than it should.
    - joedavison 11y ago
      Often times, only the smartest people can reverse engineer and maintain vast amounts of poorly written code. When code is terrible, it is very difficult to reason about. Hence, you need to be very smart to reason about it, and be successful in modifying it.
    - nostrademons 11y ago
      That's not really a fair comparison: the "rookies" (somehow, I doubt that always applies) are working in an environment where they often don't know the requirements and the only way to find them out is through trial and error, and the fact that the organization can even afford "programming experts" means they must have been somewhat successful. Put a programming expert in a situation where the boss doesn't know what he wants and the only way to find out is to build it 20 times and he'll produce a pile of crud too.
- numo16 11y ago
  > Have them make CRUD apps while we experts work on something interesting Slightly more complex CRUD apps? ;)
akilism 11y ago
one easy trick: code reviews.

falsestprophet 11y ago

Here is some salary data for the two metro areas mentioned in the story for "Software Developers, Applications" from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported for May 2014 [1]. Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, CO 10%ile 25%ile median 75%ile 90%ile 64470 80110 100140 122350 146930 New York-White Plains-Wayne, NY-NJ Metropolitan Division 10%ile 25%ile median 75%ile 90%ile 66100 83010 106710 135600 164390 The woman hired by Galvanize achieved a 25th %ile salary for Denver on her first day. Seems hard to believe that someone with so little training could be more productive than 25% of developers of software applications in Denver. I think it's at least a little suspicious that the single data point that demonstrates the success of Galvanize is paid directly by Galvanize. How about any other student? The math guy did an undergraduate degree in mathematics!, so he is hardly a characteristic example of waiters in New York who generally shouldn't expect to achieve a median salary for the industry on their first day. [1] http://data.bls.gov/oes/search.jsp?data_tool=OES http://data.bls.gov/oes/search.jsp?data_tool=OES

woah 11y ago
I find it extremely believable that someone with ambition and drive could do better than many developers who are coasting off a CS degree.
- DeBraid 11y ago
  This and tech stacks change so often that someone with 3-6 months of javascript exp could be more effective than 2-5 years with java.
  - juliangregorian 11y ago
    Developers make tech stacks, not the other way around.
jboggan 11y ago
Salary is not a monotonic mapping of developer productivity. Besides, given the general increase of salaries across the board and the poor raise-negotiating skills of coders in general, it isn't hard to imagine the 25% of salaries under hers were mostly of an older un-altered vintage for underperforming programmers.

AtmaScout 11y ago

Sounds eerily similar to the 2000s bust when English majors were being vacuumed up for web development. Maintenance will be fun, I'm sure.

unabashedturtle 11y ago

As someone that's done a fair bit of hiring for engineer and data scientist positions, my outlook on these 'coding academies' is pretty grim. If you want someone that can hack together a web app in rails/node.js/django/framework of your choice then that's fine. But the reality is most people going through these code academies tend to get a really poor foundation in both writing "good" and "fast" code. There's very little focus on algorithmic fundamentals. But really, it's the academies that claim to spew out data scientists that I have a problem with. Every candidate I've interviewed that came from one of these knew how to run a regression, use R, and fit a variety of classifiers (eg; random forest, feed-forward ANN). But not one of them could answer really basic questions about sampling and experimental design (one of them asked: "multiple comparisons..? What's that?"). I've found that people that come in completely self-taught oddly enough don't have these issues. Many of them really do focus on the fundamentals first. It's easier to teach someone that understands experimental design and probability theory how to fit a few models in R than to teach probability theory to a kid that knows how to copy and paste from stackoverflow.

dreaminvm 11y ago

While the demand is real, I am just not sure it will last with the level of skills being pumped out of these bootcamps. I recently interviewed a few candidates from a coding bootcamp mentioned in the article and while they can write basic rails code, they all lacked problem solving skills. Most candidates were hung up on basic performance related questions.

Johnny555 11y ago
Even "experienced" developers who haven't had formal computer science training can run into performance problems. At my last job, our application was running slower and slower as we added clients. None of the Ruby devs could figure it out, the code was "fine", all of the tests passed and ran quickly (with a stubbed 10 item customer table), and everything ran great until we grew beyond a hundred or so customers so it fell on me to optimize the database which was clearly the problem. I finally took a look at the code and found the problem -- it was a loop within a loop within a loop doing a full scan across the entire customer table disguised by the two inner loops being inside separate Gems. The application had O(n^3) performance. None of the developers knew what that meant so I gave a "lunch-and-learn" presentation on big-O notation and what it means for performance.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  I've seen this happen with experienced developer with a CS degree. They say, it's "not my job" to test with large data. B.S., it is your job so sit down, shut up and do it. The job of QA isn't to find all your bugs, it's to ensure you don't have any.
- greenyoda 11y ago
  Long ago, I was asked to fix a bug about a user interface hanging when too many items were added. After poking around, I discovered that there was an algorithm, whose run time was an exponential function of the number of items, that was taking several minutes to run (after which the UI would be responsive again). The punch line was that this algorithm was actually computing a value that was never used by the rest of the code, so I just deleted it. That was in C++ code written by an experienced developer.

GuiA 11y ago

Somehow I have a hard time believing that if you have a math major, the only difference between you waiting tables and living on the brink of poverty or making bank as a software engineer is a 3 months Ruby course (I have a double math/CS major); I feel like there may be something more going on here. I'm happy for the gentleman's success, but it seems like a poor example to use in any case.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago
Shouldn't a math degree already have at least a little programming? Matlab? Python? Something?
- browles 11y ago
  Should? Maybe. But plenty of math graduates have little to no programming experience, even from top schools.
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    Interesting. I did not know that. So do math majors do any numerical analysis?
- DavidHm 11y ago
  Probably some mathlab, but it really depends on the course/ university. For example in Europe many courses focus on pure theory.
jdminhbg 11y ago
I don't have trouble believing that a short course to learn to use tools that put his previously-acquired math knowledge to good use drastically increases his productivity.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

Once everyone is a programmer, then what?

sarwechshar 11y ago
We'll run out of food and starve!
chadgeidel 11y ago
Once everyone can read and write, then what? We live in a computer age. Knowing how to program is no longer a "specialized skill", it's mandatory (on some level) to effectively interact with ever more complex systems that run our lives.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  Yeah, no. Those things are not the same thing. Try again.
- a3voices 11y ago
  Mandatory in what sense? Most people get by without having to code anything more complex than an Excel formula.
  - chadgeidel 11y ago
    In my opinion "programming" should be generalized to "instructing the computer to do a series of tasks", or "applying the output of one system into the next system". I don't think that's overgeneralizing.
    - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
      Let's not redefine words. What you're suggesting "programming" be generalized to already has a definition, "Computer Literacy".
  - joedavison 11y ago
    "Most people" cannot code an Excel formula.

onedev 11y ago

I guess I should start a consulting company to clean up the messes these people are going to make :)

seibelj 11y ago

We made a conscious decision to try and hire someone from these camps as an experiment. I went to their demo day and winnowed the graduating class of 40 down to 6. Of the 6 we interviewed we decided to give 6 month internships to 3 of them, 2 developer and 1 qa. Despite being hourly with minimal benefits, they were making the yearly equivalent of 50k a year which I found more than reasonable given the fact they had no coding experience other than 12 weeks of study. On the first day, the woman who was QA quit because she wanted to do development, despite being explicitly hired as a QA. 2 months later I had to let one of the developers go because she produced very little and was surfing YouTube for much of the day. The last developer I did not opt to hire at the end of his internship. He was a smart guy, but he needed years more experience to operate at the level of our other engineers and he was demanding a 75k salary. I used the 75k he wanted and hired a competent developer with a CS degree and a couple years experience. He is orders of magnitude better than the boot camp guy was. It is possible that a boot camp graduate could be useful after several years' experience, but fresh out of school they are extremely raw and need years of training. Therefore I won't be hiring any fresh graduates again.

eastbayjake 11y ago
> He was a smart guy, but he needed years more experience to operate at the level of our other engineers and he was demanding a 75k salary. Two questions: Are you in San Francisco, and which bootcamp was this?
- wh-uws 11y ago
  Yeah these are vitally important questions. The curriculums and the level rigor of the different bootcamps varies widely. Some have a very high bar for entry and are basically just a way for someone who could quickly become competent (i.e. someone with a deep math or some type of engineering background) to ramp up on coding. Others just let anyone in and teach very basic things so the graduates level would vary widely as well.
- seibelj 11y ago
  I'm in Boston, the salaries here are high but not SF levels. I'd rather not say which boot camp to preserve relationships and not malign their organization. They were very helpful, I just simply think hiring straight from boot camps doesn't work for my method of managing software development organizations.

santaclaus 11y ago

Also discussed in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9963720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9963720

narrator 11y ago

I went to a meetup at a coding bootcamp. It was weird. All these people from different backgrounds wanting to be programmers. Being a computer nerd since the 80s, it's so strange how the culture has shifted.

eastbayjake 11y ago

I knew as soon as I checked the comments on this article there would be a barrage of negativity. I just wasn't prepared for it to be unanimous. I've made similar comments on HN in the past but much of this griping seems to boil down to "I was interested in [thing] way before all these johnny-come-latelys just bum-rushed it for a paycheck!" It's an irritatingly hipster thing to do -- I did X before X was cool, but now X is sooooo over. I also wish people who complain in these comments would name the schools when they complain. Who are you worried about offending? Will you help everyone else by identifying degree-mill schools that turn out low-quality people? I hate that great programs like Hack Reactor or MakerSquare -- which never have people on the job market for more than a couple weeks and continue to have ridiculous industry demand -- get lumped in with fly-by-night HTML/CSS bootcamps in third-tier tech markets like Atlanta.

dreaminvm 11y ago
I disagree. What I got from the comments was that while everyone is capable of learning how to program, the expectation that a 3 month bootcamper can do/learn the same amount of information as a 4 year CS degree is insanity. Anyone who has studied STEM can tell you, 4 years is actually fast pace for a competitive program. What's next, a bootcamp to turn out doctors in 6 months instead of the 8/9 years of schooling? And yes, most of these bootcampers (regardless of their location) are chasing a big paycheck because VC money is flooding the markets (many references in the article).

mooreds 11y ago

I for one think this trend is great. We need more developers. But... I lived through the last boom when it seemed anyone who could spell 'java' was hired as a developer. (OK, it wasn't that bad, but there was definitely a giant sucking sound as folks were pulled into technology for the money.) I hope this time is different.

robalfonso 11y ago
I think we need more good developers. 100% you can get a great developer from this education channel, but that person would be good whether they came to you via a code school or a more traditional route. I also think people should be encouraged to better themselves and work towards higher paying careers. That said, as someone who hires engineers the signal to noise ratio continues to go up. It makes it that much harder to find good developers in the forest of bad. I make it a point of seeing almost anyone who is close to fitting the bill so I kiss a lot of frogs, and I could be more harsh weeding out people at earlier stages but I've had absolutely spectacular hires being a bit more flexible (I do tend to fire fast though, no reason for everyone to pretend its not a good fit) Flooding the market with folks though just makes it more challenging for those hiring.
- mooreds 11y ago
  Hard to argue that we need more good developers. In my experience, some component of 'good' is experience, some is aptitude, some is knowledge, and some is willingness to grind. The code schools can take care of the latter two (depending on the quality of the school). Sorry to hear that the signal to noise ratio is going up. That is probably due to more people being pulled into the profession (just as it was 15 years ago). > Flooding the market with folks though just makes it more challenging for those hiring. All other things being equal, wouldn't you want a larger candidate pool? I have done some hiring and while it was a grind to screen applicants, that beat the pants off of not having any applicants.
  - robalfonso 11y ago
    Well if you're letting me order it the way I want it, I wan the candidate pool to be infinite and to all be extremely qualified :) What I'm actually finding is the candidate pool is getting larger but the quality hires are about the same. Ostensibly this is a function of the pay rate pressuring people to join the hiring pool. >All other things being equal, wouldn't you want a larger candidate pool? I >have done some hiring and while it was a grind to screen applicants, that >beat the pants off of not having any applicants. No argument, I have played that game and its not fun. For the sake of argument though if we look at the total number of candidates you want to hire (1) then any pool size over one does create more work as it grows (I'd like to avoid that if at all possible :) ). Assuming the individual that matches your criteria is in your pool at all (again an oversimplification). I also can't stress enough aptitude as a component of a good dev, which you alluded to. I've never seen a dev who was great (whether self taught/code school/cs degree who had no aptitude for the work. I've also seen people with tons of aptitude and no credentials absolutely own people with phd's and masters degrees in a tough problem. Before we had colleges/code schools there were always engineers, how do you think we got the wheel?

npalli 11y ago

So, everyone knows that Software is eating the world and coding is hot. However, something about this article seems off to me 1. All persons quoted are coding camp organizers/owners. Could it be they have some vested interest in pushing forward the idea that you can go from zero to hero in a few weeks of coding bootcamp. 2. The 'hot' areas that have been listed - mobile, analytics, cloud are actually a very tiny percent of jobs!. A quick Glassdoor search showed 25/1 ratio for software engineer/mobile engineer. In fact, if you go away from SF and NY, the number of jobs in these areas are even rarer. Which calls into question the whole premise of what is being taught. Paul Graham's submarine article is spot on about these PR stunts. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

sosuke 11y ago

I don't remember a time since the first boom that workers weren't interested in the fast easy money image of programming and startups. Combine that with the bootstrap programming education companies selling ITT Tech style train and earn big bucks package I bet business is booming. The math grad was a silly story. Before I started working I made 0 dollars, now that I am working I make money! When I was in a grocery store I made minimum wage, when I got a job with more responsibility I made a lot more money! Of course there is a part of me a bit sore, my first coding job was $27k for full-time. Also, this is a very long ad for Galvanize isn't it?

danso 11y ago

The lede anecdote talks about a 26-year-old math major who went from $20,000/yr as a writer to $100,000/yr as a data scientist, after a bootcamp. Ignoring the "but what is data science" debate for now...this to me seems totally reasonable. He's a math major. Programming is founded upon math...and at the very least, requires the same kind of mathematical deduction and ability to not be freaked out by symbolic representations of values. Now, if it were a pure writer (i.e. literature/English major)...I would not expect that person to make the necessary growth in the short span of a bootcamp. Three months may be enough to cover syntax and some base engineering concepts...but it's definitely not enough to become a rigorous mathematical thinker.

ritchiea 11y ago
While I'm sure it helps to be a math major anywhere, anyone who has been trained to be a careful analytic thinker would be a good candidate to become a programmer. For instance if you were a humanities major from a school with a strong academic reputation and you actually took your coursework seriously as an undergrad. As much as programming is applied math, most companies are not Google or Facebook and have problems that can suffer the inefficiency of a non-expert. A lot of programming jobs ask you to get data from a form or API, do something with it and show some HTML. And that HTML needs to be styled in CSS and have some neat UI elements that are fine tuned in Javascript. There is nothing about that kind of work that favors a math major over English major. The situation changes if your company is huge, handling thousands of requests a second so small inefficiencies add up and are wasteful on a large scale or even cause the software to break entirely. But assuming you have a smart CTO/Lead you should know where potential pain points in your code are and still be able to hire a relatively inexperienced junior and get good work out of that person. I have a friend who was an Ivy CS grad, worked at Google then worked at Squarespace. He said he was intimidated by designers who knew HTML, CSS & Javascript and were good with forms because a lot of work for developers could be handled as quickly by those type of developers as he could handle it with his vastly more technical background.
ThrustVectoring 11y ago
That's basically the demographic that is both the coding bootcamp's core demographic and what you want to look for while hiring. Intelligent, analytical folks who go from under-employed to having enough of a skill-set to do something of value. Engineering school students who had to drop out for non-academic reasons and are flipping burgers, math majors who are for some reason writing for $20k/yr, grad students tired of running experiments for peanuts, etc.

seansmccullough 11y ago

Startup idea: 3 month mechanical engineering bootcamp! I'd totally drive on that bridge.

adultSwim 11y ago

Pop

siavosh 11y ago

There's nothing special about programming. Everyone wanted to be a trader and banker until 2008. Everyone also wanted to buy a house or be a real estate agent until 2008 too. And everyone wanted to be a web developer until 1999. People follow the money signal that an economy broadcasts. You can't blame individuals who want to better their prospects. What we can do is blame the following: 1. Predatory schools (not all) with big price tags producing ill equipped developers 2. Greedy herd like VC's making bad investments that society has to pay for 3. And finally often overlooked, shoddy and uncritical journalism like this article that fail to provide context and attempt at finding the deeper real story

hiharryhere 11y ago

There are Plumbers, Plasterers and Bricklayers... and there are structural engineers. There's a need for both kinds of coders. I'm all for it. Not all places need a CS genius, most just need someone with the skills to use established frameworks and tools. Doesn't make you a bad programmer.

vonmoltke 11y ago
> Not all places need a CS genius, most just need someone with the skills to use established frameworks and tools. Unfortunately, many of them think they need a CS genius, or only want to hire them for the prestige of having an elite workforce.

paulpauper 11y ago

Companies cannot hire fast enough. Glassdoor, an employment site, lists more than 7,300 openings for software engineers, ahead of job openings for nurses, This agree with the post-2008 hollowing out of the middle theme - lots of of opportunities for high-IQ employment (coders) and the polar opposite: low-paid service workers and bedpan changers. It's like if you're IQ is not in the top quartile, go directly to the low-income, do not go pass go, do not collect $60-100k a year. I'm very suspicious of the claim that these boot camps can turn novices into job-ready professionals in just 3 months. There's too much to learn and unless you're one of those high-IQ people who has an aptitude for math, as the example in the article, you won't be competent enough get a job and, to make things worse, you'll also be out $10,000. Instead, if you're not smart enough to work in tech, take that $10k and buy Facebook, Google, Amazon or QQQ stock using in-the-money-call options. You can leverage 5-1 and make $30k a year from a $10k account doing this. The tech boom has much further to go. You don't need to be a member of Mensa to ride an obvious bull market trend.

Nicholas_C 11y ago
Is this post satire?

NumberSix 11y ago

There are a number of studies that about half of all software developers do not have a CS degree. From what I have seen, many of these have degrees in other so-called STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields such as mathematics. Paul Minton's LinkedIn profile lists a 4 year B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2009-2011). He apparently was a transfer from University of Vermont. GPA is listed as 3.31. His LinkedIn profile also lists courses in probability, statistics, and linear algebra. https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulminton https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulminton Data scientists in particular tend to be people with degrees (often Ph.D.s) in other STEM fields involving heavy statistics and data analysis. Most do extensive software development for these data analyses. It is not clear how much programming experience he had prior to the coding boot camp either from the New York Times article or his LinkedIn profile. These days, most people taking probability and statistics probably do some programming in class. It is also worth noting that San Francisco is quite expensive with apartment rents running over $4,000/month in the city. Software jobs are concentrated in high cost of living areas. http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2015/06/02/san-franciscos-median-rent-hits-a-ridiculous-4225/ http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2015/06/02/san-franciscos-...

stillsut 11y ago

I got a degree in Finance alongside lots of Accounting majors. Turns out that's not who gets hired in most of the top business jobs, e.g i-banking. I think there's a growing amount of positions that take some coding, but where the soft skills are equally as important and let's be honest: the average CS major is not known for strength in that area. (Just as accounting majors aren't known for having "dynamic" and risk-taking personalities which are sought in high-finance.) That being said, I think these code bootcamps are providing an important injection into tech diversity (the real kind of diversity).