
You might not need that $15K coding bootcamp - ingve
https://medium.freecodecamp.com/you-might-not-need-that-15k-coding-bootcamp-be0ba9697885
======
ebiester
My understanding of the current coding bootcamps is that they're becoming a
finishing school. Most people have some basic programming before they come in,
and they are learning the basics of current web development processes on their
dime rather than the company. The company then is taking a smaller risk
compared to someone with no vetting _and_ no experience.

I have a friend who realized academia wasn't for them after their
Ph.D/postdoc. It would be asinine for them to go back for a Computer Science
undergrad, but they're in their mid-thirties and essentially are making a
career change from academia. They have all the internal skills for becoming a
developer or QE, but need some social signaling that they have a chance of
doing the job.

I think of that person as someone for whom the bootcamp is valuable. Spend a
few months learning to code, then apply to the bootcamp as a finishing
school/paid recruiter.

(As an aside, getting off the academia path for those in the humanities is
rather difficult at this point. We have really smart people stuck in terrible
jobs.)

~~~
tannhauser23
I went through coding bootcamp and this is correct. We had former lawyers,
bankers, accountants, IT personnel, database administrators, architects, and
on more recent graduate front, physics majors, math majors, econ majors... We
also had people from totally out of the left fields like designers and
bartenders (both were better coders than practically anyone else). They were
all looking to break into programming. They had spent a long time learning on
their own and decided to do the bootcamp as a finishing school. It was a good
experience for me.

------
menssen
"'Teaching highly motivated students to code is actually not that hard.' — Dan
Sofer"

This broadly matches my experience. The hiring and interviewing of bootcamp
graduates I've done has made me thing it's really just an intense vetting
process for junior developer candidates.

Which is valuable, but potentially could be replaced by something that costs
less than $15k.

~~~
Moshe_Silnorin
I've had a startup idea for this type of thing. We are forbidden, for nonsense
reasons, to use IQ tests when hiring. This makes training your own workforce
untenable for any cognitively demanding field, so we must use proxies like
college education. However, one of the most important findings in
psychometrics is the fact that scores on all cognitive tests are correlated.
Thus there seems to be an opening for a company that is able to skillfully
embed IQ tests in tests that are inarguably domain-relevant, and can be argued
as such in court. If you can create an abundance of such tests for various
occupations, this would seem valuable. Because psychometrics is both wildly
unpopular and correct, this is exactly the type of secret, in Thiel's terms,
one might expect to be under-appreciated.

~~~
always_good
I had to take an IQ test when I was interviewing for ThoughtWorks.

Then again, they also asked me about my cultural and religious views, like my
thoughts on immigration and refugees.

"I don't have strong feelings about this issue either way" was not the right
answer to whatever it was they were asking.

~~~
wyldfire
Not sure if you're joking. "Immigration and refugees" don't sound like
religion to me but if they did ask about religion they shouldn't have.

See 42 U.S.C. § 2000e–2 [1].

[1]
[https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000e%E2%80%932](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000e%E2%80%932)

------
bdcravens
In 1999 I was a college "drop out" (financial aid probation due to poor
discipline and depression, and I was too poor to pay for school for a
semester), so I got my first "real" job doing ISP tech support in the little
Oklahoma town I lived in. Had already learned basics of web dev (HTML via
Notepad on Geocities) and some basic languages (Turbo Pascal, TI-BASIC,
QBasic, Javascript, etc). Got into a little Perl, some heavy experimentation
with ASP, and eventually, ColdFusion (learned via reading the manuals they
shipped in the box).

Within 15 months of starting that job at $6/hour, I had my first development
job in Houston at $30/hour. No degree, and there were no coding schools then.
Just a hunger to learn.

Today there's resources like Stack Overflow, great open source editors like
Atom and VS Code, and frameworks like Rails. I'd like to think it's easier,
but maybe there's a greater depth of knowledge needed that makes it tougher.

~~~
Taylor_OD
Actually there were coding camps in the 1990's. There were not marketed as
heavily and as widely as they are today but there were plenty around. The
industry booms anytime there's a big need for developers.

------
titzer
I think the existence of $15k coding bootcamps is not a good sign for our
industry. It means that without a doubt there is a huge bubble forming. Why?
Because in 2002 I graduated with an undergraduate degree in CS with "only"
$16k in debt. I know college is a lot more expensive these days, but $15k for
a mere month of education, from which is supposed to follow a $100k+/y job?
Get real, market. That seems like both a ripoff and a steal at the same time.
Either way I think our industry is not in a good shape with so many highly
inexperienced people commanding high salaries. A crash is soon to follow.

~~~
drvdevd
One issue I take with the entire concept of "coding bootcamps" is the idea
that "coding" is even a well-defined term. When you tell someone who's looking
for a new field of work they should start coding, you should really be saying,
"There's a job market here, but in reality it consists of thousands of
subfields, some more well-payed than others, and some with a much steeper
learning curve than others. Pick something you like within that _massive_
space and maybe then find a _bootcamp_ or whatever to continue to specialize,
if you find it's even necessary."

Yes I have heard of people doing well out of bootcamps, but what will their
ultimate contribution to the market be? If the value you bring becomes
saturated, your salary will shrink in due time, and competition will increase.

The main point I'd like to drive home to my friends looking at bootcamps is
that programming is a field of continuous learning. No school, bootcamp, or
any other institution can give you that - you have to take it.

------
partycoder
I have over a decade of experience, and have worked with:

\- computer science and engineering graduates

\- people with a degree, just on another fields

\- 100% self-taught people

\- coding camp graduates with varying degrees of computer science education.

From all of them, I have to say that working with the coding camp graduates
was by far the most stressful. Some coding camp graduates come from computer
science programs, some others come from zero... so you get a lot of variance.

Some are good, some others might show proficiency in some areas... but they
might have a lot of important gaps in their knowledge. So you might want to
make a 3x longer technical interview just for them, and start a broad
conversation covering subjects they are expected to understand.

Now, if you come from a camp, or are self-taught, or even if not... if you
want to assess your knowledge I would suggest the following book: the IEEE
SWEBOK (Software engineering Body of Knowledge). It's a summary of topics in
Software engineering, and points you to other books in case you want to learn
more. Now, you can use this book to assess your strengths and weaknesses.

~~~
namiller2
What about people with a degree, just on another fields who are also coding
camp graduates with varying degrees of computer science education?

~~~
partycoder
The thing is that the job market is very competitive, and I can understand if
people don't want to be self-deprecating and admit to not be very good at
topic X since some employers might be picky and choose not to hire if someone
doesn't know about topic X.

Some other employers would just consider that when deciding what role is best
given an applicant strengths and weaknesses and address that deficiency as a
team.

I think that if there's someone who meets the requirements for a position
there should be no problem to hire, the thing is to establish what those
requirements are...

To be more specific now: I think coding camps can help you getting started on
web and mobile development, mostly covering scenarios when things do work as
expected. But to go past the prototyping phase you will need to also
understand how to deal with scenarios where things do not work as expected...

Having that said, that's where some more experience and knowledge starts
adding value. You can accrue that experience and knowledge in different ways.
But when you build a team you need to account for that by having at least one
person who can make sure some advanced requirements are represented.

For instance, low level issues like race conditions, number precision
problems, resource leaks, error handling... and non-functional requirements
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-
functional_requirement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-
functional_requirement))... can be a bit counterintuitive if you don't come
from a computer science/software engineering background, but it's not rocket
science. Through mentoring, collaboration, etc... experience gets accrued and
deficiencies eventually get mitigated. It just takes a bit of time, and some
risk mitigation skills.

Personally my approach to mentoring is to avoid trial and error, and have
people be vocal when they are unsure or they're blocked. I try to do this by
asking newer people to write unit tests, to develop an intuition about how
requirements get implemented and verified. Also, to create a culture in which
asking good questions is perceived as a good trait, and guessing as a bad
trait.

------
canterburry
I too am a bit confused to why coding bootcamps are needed. I am sure they
nicely compress lots of information into a short timeframe but even back in
1997 I was able to teach myself to code simply by sitting at Barnes and Noble
reading book after book after book and then trying things out on my own.
Today, this should be even easier since it's all online anyway.

If it's too much work looking it up yourself, maybe you don't want to code as
much as you think you do.

~~~
SonicSoul
the book at Barnes and Noble won't give you 10 best tools to get the job done
and help you configure them. It also won't answer any of your questions when
you get stuck. It will also not give you insight form other people asking
questions you didn't think to ask. Of course today you can get most of that
with a $30/month subscription to pluralsight or frontendmasters. so yah, 15k
seems a bit nuts. I remember back in the day they had these bootcamps for
html/css also priced in thousands

~~~
bluedino
When I got stuck with Linux or C during my Barnes and Noble learning days, I
just went on IRC

------
falcolas
If you could find a way to create a broadly recognized and meaningful
certification, you wouldn't need school at all. You have the JavaScript
certification? You know how to code. Doesn't matter if you went to an Ivy
League school or (re-)created all of the fundamentals from scratch.

Make the certification standards free as in speech, charge a minimal fee to
cover administration of the exams, and go to town.

~~~
RKoutnik
Hey there. I'm certified to the hilt: IC3, CompTia A+/Net+/Security+ &
Microsoft Certified Professional. All before I left high school.

These certifications were absolutely useless when it came to getting me a job
whenever I interviewed somewhere where they knew what they were doing. All
they proved was that I was particularly good at studying and taking tests.
This may be a useful skill in another career but in IT (the area of the certs)
and even more in software (where I work now) memorizing rote knowledge is
nigh-useless in the era of StackOverflow and Google.

Any sort of programming certification test would be gameable. A test that can
be gamed isn't useful for hiring - once again, you're not proving they're a
competent programmer, just that they're good at taking tests. No company you
want to get hired at will use such a metric.

If it was possible to prove the quality of a coder via a certification test,
we'd be out of a job. One of the key signs of a good programmer is their
ability to expertly handle problems & situations they've never encountered
before, which is (by definition) impossible via some sort of standardized
test.

A certification might prove that I've memorized the parameters that get passed
into the function in Array.prototype.map but it'll never tell me if someone
can build software solutions to real-life problems.

~~~
Spooky23
No offense, but those certifications are pretty low value. The A+, etc solely
exist because the federal government requires them for contractors.

Code bootcamps do provide some usefulness, and you could problably look at
that syllabus and come up with a more portable ciriculum that you could teach
to people with aptitude but without credentials.

It would be great to use something like this in civil service and other areas
to give disadvantaged folks a way to get into the industry without a four year
degree in CS.

It's bizarre though. Companies won't even look at CS graduates from state
schools, but will hire someone who went through a glorified training class.

~~~
linkregister
Which companies are disregarding state school graduates?

Don't Amazon, Facebook, et. al. send recruiting teams to most state schools?

~~~
John23832
I got an offer from Facebook and I went to Virginia Tech, a state school.

I think it depends on the quality/prestige of the CS program.

~~~
linkregister
Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech are probably the highest-regarded state schools
for Computer Science.

(I am excluding the University of California system because its high cost and
stringent admissions make it more similar to private institutions)

------
jondubois
Learning programming takes a really long time and you almost always think you
know more than you really do.

In 2008, I thought I had mastered programming (that was about 5 years after I
had started programming and learning intensively) - I was 2 years into my
Software Engineering degree, I had built websites, Flash games, did AI stuff
(ANNs and decision trees) and I even programmed an ATMEL AVR microcontroller
to decode Morse Code from a binary signal on a circuit board.

... And yet, over the past 8 years (about 6 years after finishing my degree),
I feel like I have learned more than I have ever before.

If you're curious, you will always find more things to learn.

~~~
BoorishBears
Some people have the opposite problem, never feeling like they know much at
all.

~~~
drawkbox
“The more you know, the more you know you don't know.” - Aristotle

------
40_pending
There are definitely options between free and 15k. I went to an online code
bootcamp and paid about 4k. The course came with about 18 hours of one-on-one
mentor sessions, an all original curriculum, office-hours chat help, a
generally good community, and job prep help.

In hindsight, yeah, I could have made up my own curriculum from free and cheap
sources, and just paid a mentor out of pocket for a lot less. But I had
already done Treehouse and Codeschool courses and found I hit a barrier. A lot
of what I was learning just did not stick beyond a certain point and I could
not see the forest for the trees.

I know it's not for everyone, but it turns out what worked for me was a highly
structured course with a focus on building practical projects, checkpoints,
deadlines, and one-on-one guidance. And maybe I did need to sink a non-trivial
amount of money into it just to make me take it all a little more seriously.

In any case, I was able to switch careers (at the age of 40 I might add) and
I've paid off my investment many times over.

Regardless of whether you are considering a paid bootcamp, a free one,
learning by yourself, or getting a traditional college education, my advice
would be the same:

You get out of it, what you put into it.

------
catfood
The point of the bootcamp is the job you get after it's over. I imagine
bootcamps make deals with the local tech companies to direct the grads to
them, so the bootcamp can boast high hiring rates, and the tech companies gets
devs for cheap.

------
ktamiola
'Teaching highly motivated students to code is actually not that hard.' \-
Well... It is hard. Motivation is not enough...

Basic mathematical knowledge + ability to think logically = success

------
SteveWatson
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108575](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108575)

------
mgirdley
Did these guys pay a fee to YC? They seem to pop up weekly on the front page.

~~~
curiouscat321
I doubt they paid a fee. But clearly, they're either gaming the system or
there's a very large population on HN who are trying to break into the
industry with no credentials.

~~~
q3k
What's wrong with having 'no credentials'?

~~~
CN7R
From what I have research, a computer science degree and a boot camp
certificate are very different in terms of education. The former focuses on
depth and the fundamentals of CS. The latter is more practical and focuses
implementation where languages matter more.

~~~
mixedCase
I don't think there are that many people deluded to the fact that a 4/5 year
long CS course teaches you more than a boot camp.

But as many few people will dispute that you can get started writing
production code much faster in the latter.

And what I will add, is that they'll be an average 80% as good as their fresh
out of uni CS peers, if not more.

~~~
somecallitblues
This is spot on. I've employed 2 people in the last year and I can say that
the guy with a CS degree had heard of binary tree and big O notation but has
no idea about how everything ties together. And CSS and HTML concepts are
totally foreign to him. CS degrees are stuck in C land, learning shitty bubble
sort implementation in C++ and other crap that doesn't help day to day at all.

------
huangc10
and guess what? You don't need a website either.

Step 1: Get a copy of "The C Programming Language" by Dennis Ritchie, Brian
Kernighan.

Step 2: Learn the fundamentals

Step 3: Master other languages

 __Edit...I know there 's been a lot of negativity towards my comment and I
can understand why. I like to keep my comments simple and leave it to the
reader's interpretation. However, it seems my comment was too simple...

Let's focus on step 2, as step 1 and 3 are out of the scope of my comment.
"Learn the fundamentals". As with any profession, trade, basketball player,
high-rise building, pyramid, etc. you need to have solid fundamentals. What
does that mean for programmers and developers? It means understanding computer
theory. It means learning about the stack. It means learning the difference
between big endian vs little endian. Learning memory allocation in C for an
array is every bit as important as learning how to var arr = [].

Sure you can skip the fundamentals (hard stuff?) and go straight to high level
languages but should you?

~~~
rublev
Standard HN comment, and also absolutely insane.

Have you met people with limited computer experience just getting 'into' it?
Computers and code are literal magic to them. I mean people who's lives don't
really entail a computer at all beyond social media.

I taught at a local bootcamp. It had less to do with code and more to do with
getting people to think in abstractions within a specific domain.

If you can sit in a room for days on end juggling the uncertainty of learning
something completely new, more power to you I guess. And that's like nobody. I
consider myself decently intelligent and I almost went insane trying to teach
myself something I had zero prior experience in. Literally wasted like 4
months due to uncertainty/following wrong info. Many moments of "oh, I didn't
need to learn any of that actually". This is why bootcamps are amazing, you
have experts roaming around that you can tap into at any second.

Somewhat ironically paying that $15k for the bootcamp would have saved me a
lot of money in opportunity cost and sanity.

>C is a general-purpose programming language which features economy of
expression, modern control flow and data structures, and a rich set of
operators. C is not a "very high level" language, nor a "big" one, and is not
specialized to any particular area of application. But its absence of
restrictions and its generality make it more convenient and effective for many
tasks than supposedly more powerful languages.

Just reading the first paragraph already opens a world of questions, and this
is way before you even get to any Hello World stuff. Just telling a beginner
"Hey you should read this C book" would open up questions like "What is C?
You're telling me I have to learn an _entire new language_ just to make that
tiny thing? Screw that!" Have fun untangling yourself out of that one.

External motivators work, there's a reason we have entire academic
institutions instead of a world of disconnected hermits.

~~~
kybernetyk
>Computers and code are literal magic to them.

Ok, but why do those people think they just need to do a 5 week long $15k
bootcamp to get a job as a senior software dev and make $100k+/year?

I get that people want to expand their knowledge. But these bootcamps don't
cater to this kind of people.

~~~
user5994461
You need a course in negotiation to get a programming job at $100k, not in
programming.

