
Changing Education – How bootcamps outperform a university education - themattwilliams
http://lizthedeveloper.com/changing-education-how-bootcamps-outperform-a-university-education
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plinkplonk
If you are writing basic CRUD apps, 12 weeks of good instruction can make you
(somewhat) productive. One of my former employers (ThoughtWorks) had a 6 week
'immersion' programming training, which ramped up people just out of school to
a point where they were able to contribute to a production app in that period.
Of course, they had plenty of ongoing mentoring and supervision, a great
company culture (given enterprise services) and so on, but it can be done, for
some definition of 'done'[1]

But as the amount of theory/Computer Science knowledge required in your job
increases, the less relevance these boot camps have. I personally think of
bootcamps as a borderline scam engaged in a 'shovels in gold rush' business.

Any half way motivated individual with a laptop and internet connection can
learn their syllabus for free, but it takes a certain type of individual to do
that, who is not dependent on external discipline, can tolerate ambiguity etc.

And if I'm hiring, even for a CRUD job, I would be very dubious about bootcamp
resumes (just a personal opinion, YMMV). They seem to combine the worst of
credentialing, and frivolous 'education'.

[1] Whether that ultra basic knowledge is worth the insane amounts charged by
some of these 'boot camps' is a different issue altogether. As a completely
self taught developer, I would never pay those amounts for that amount of
learning, but hey different strokes for different folks.

~~~
uptownJimmy
I'm a technical college graduate, so I have no pretensions about this stuff.
But I view the bootcamps as part of the current frothiness and dysfunction
around front-end development in general.

The idea that one is prepared to grapple with software applications
development without AT LEAST 2-3 years of intense study is absurd to me. After
school, I still needed a year of interning to get up to speed.

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brianchu
I study CS as UC Berkeley. If you want to be a web developer, a mobile
developer, a product engineer, or something like that, go to a bootcamp. That,
and then getting 2-3 years of work experience is a _much_ better deal than
studying CS in college, even Berkeley, and even if you get scholarships.

But I would like to point out that many of these criticisms don't apply to top
schools like Berkeley. Berkeley's intro-CS classes are all taught by lecturers
- and the lecturers are given tenure (e.g. people evaluated solely on
teaching). As a result, I have had a nearly-uniformly-positive experience with
the quality of teaching in CS - extending to and especially professors who are
also leading researchers.

There are also more areas than buildings apps. If you're interested in
distributed systems, robotics, machine learning, finance, etc., then going to
a great CS school like Berkeley is a fantastic choice. There is truly cutting-
edge, industry-leading work being done in distributed systems, computer
architecture, machine learning, deep learning, and databases at Berkeley, and
that undergrads are able to contribute to.

~~~
jfaucett
I think your assertion that you need to study at a higher education
institution to do something besides building apps sadly true.

That statement however has nothing to do with whether or not the form of
education at colleges is better than bootcamps at training individuals to
become good at some task set X.

It does say something about the barriers to entry in those other fields. For
instance in robotics, money for hardware, access to cutting-edge research and
journals are the minimum requirements for anyone interested in jumping into
that field, and this jump is made easier for students who have access to all
of this via their university.

I would hypothesize that the form of intense applied study that bootcamps
offer is better suited than the traditional 4 year CS degree for training
individuals in any field, whether that be research in theoretical computer
science or building a distributed database system, mainly because of the
higher degree of specialization, applied project based approach, and dedicated
mentor based guidance in the bootcamp model.

This topic is fascinating. I think we have so much more space for vastly
improving the output of the education process at every level of the system.
But I think a lot of improvement domains will depend on the degree to which we
can alter and manipulate the current status quo in industry and the system
itself.

~~~
brianchu
Okay, I agree in the abstract that "intense immersive study" is a better form
of education than any other. This is really obvious. But the breadth and depth
of knowledge required in the areas is huge. (e.g. for distributed systems,
you'd ideally understand things at all levels of the computing stack - OS,
networking, databases, C/C++, data structures, algorithms, some basic discrete
math). This could easily require a "bootcamp" to be a year long. Would it
really be a bootcamp then?

Also, the world experts in all those areas are at research universities. Now,
it's true you could probably offer them a lot of money to teach bootcamp
courses, but one of the best routes to developing skills in these areas is to
do actual research in these fields. Research takes a long time (> 1 year), so
this goes back to my original point.

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49531
I was speaking with a friend of mine who recently graduated med school about
this topic. An insightful point he made was that with some careers, you need a
lot of education before you can start working, like being a doctor. In other
areas you're able to be productive in a workplace with less "education" than
you find in a university program.

As a former bootcamp instructor, it has been amazing to watch the careers of
some of my students. Bootcamps are more about setting up a student's learning
trajectory than making them a computer scientist. I think most software
developers would say that this is the kind of career which requires continuous
improvement and learning, if you give a student the tools to learn and improve
then you've set them up on a good path.

Can you become a software engineer in 12 weeks? Probably not, but I've seen a
good number of my students become fairly successful engineers within 1-2 years
of completing the program I worked at.

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Brainix
We're painting in broad strokes as there are exceptions to every trend. But in
my experience, bootcamp graduates are more like tinkerers and university
graduates are more like engineers.

Most bootcamps don't cover computational complexity, for example. Or
functional programming, or objected oriented design, or music or ethics or
philosophy. Instead, most bootcamps focus on tools rather than ideas.

~~~
icyfenix
Well, I cover that stuff. I think it's foundational to learning to program,
rather than just assembling toy projects. Exposing students to the real
implications of their high-level code can only make them stronger, better
programmers. They don't need to write an OS to do app development, but they
sure as hell need to know their big O, how to do estimation, their data
structures, and some fundamental algorithms and techniques. We try to give
them the tools to continue exploring as well- those who are interested tend to
follow up with MOOCs, having been well versed enough in programming that they
can use videos and exercises to learn on their own.

~~~
icyfenix
Also, to clarify, I'm the author :D

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msb
"The relationships built between bootcamp instructor and student are deeper
than those between college professors and their students. The advice is solid
too, because instructors come from the actual industry the students are trying
to get into."

The relationships exist in academia too, but the students have to want to
them. As a PhD student with actual industry experience I make sure I have room
for at least 3-4 undergrads during any given quarter. We love research in my
lab, but we also respect mentorship.

------
formula1
I really liked this article and liz seems like she is on the right side of
progress. I recently helped a freind at berkly with her work, this led me to
find out that she had never learned java, and was expected to make a mini text
editor. She explained this was berkly and not everyone was meant to pass. Liz
presents things that really touched my heart, tinkering rather than jumping
through hoops.

However, from working at a bootcamp and speaking to students who went to
others. They are expensive, Unorganized and built in a way that makes students
"feel satisfied" rather than prepared and hungry. GA in particular apparently
hand holds immensely rather than have students sweat it out a bit. At 5 am, no
one is there to help you or tell you what tp search. Additionally, those
involved in this space usually are working with big investor money and paying
big in order squeak out dollars from college students or people who font have
the money to pay. The only person who worked with us above fourty quit because
he didnt want to be a tax collector. Hack Reactor seems to be the best one out
there but they are more interested in seeing who will survive than in seeing
how to make sure everyone can swim

Bootcamps are imperfect but certainly in demand. I Do believe they are a good
mutation in the education field. Cutting out fat and creating cultures. But
there is still a lot of work to be done before I can say they can accept my
praise

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arcticfox
> project based learning, and relationship-based learning

You could also go to a university that emphasizes those aspects of learning
(e.g. [http://www.olin.edu/](http://www.olin.edu/)). Admittedly, there aren't
many of them, but I feel like it's the best of both worlds.

------
mathattack
I generally take these types of articles with a grain of salt. The authors are
selling their services.

I've seen two types of bootcamp outcomes:

1) Data Science - For better or worse, the 3-4 data points I have did not
produce great results. All but 1 struggled to get jobs. The 1 that did get a
job with the help from his teacher struggled to keep jobs. The boot camp just
wasn't long enough to teach what's needed.

2) Programming - Only one data point - I had a person who was a non-technical
resource at a software company who used the bootcamp to get into a tech
support (not development) role. He said it was much harder than his (non-
technical) college degree. I'm inclined to agree, and it moved him nominally.

I'm not a fan of much of college education, but the jury is still out on if
these will supplant them.

------
jveld
The tendency to characterize educational institutions as 'factories' for
producing intellectual laborers (or _knowledge workers_ , to use a synonomous
but less harsh sounding term) is deeply unsettling to me. Although this piece
mainly presents the author's arguments for bootcamp-contra-university in terms
of her positive cultural experiences, these aren't presented on the strength
of their own merits. The argument is (as usual), that the author's favored
approach would increase the efficiency of the technology for transforming
unskilled laborers into skilled laborers. Although this might seem like a hair
splitting point, I think that this view of education causes larger problems
than irritating continental-philosophy-reading, freeBSD-loving overall
curmudgeons like yours truly.

Education in America was never intended to produce laborers. In fact, the
"liberality" of those arts which form a traditional university curriculum
doesn't refer to their tendency to attract war protesters, communists, or
critical theorists: these "liberal" arts are the arts of free men (free as in
speech, not beer, yada yada), who would need a deep understanding of history
and culture to prepare them for participation in political life. Historically,
this freedom was enjoyed only by clerics and aristocrats. The hope of
democratic societies is to extend political agency to ever broadening sectors
of society, and to base political agency upon merit, rather than social caste.
Universal education, it was argued, would produce the _citizens_ that a large
democracy would need, which would compensate for the fact that receiving such
an education reduces one's available time for labor. One might recall that
summer vacations were conceived to alleviate the imposition that schooling
represented on a families ability to avail themselves of the labor of their
offspring [1].

Now would be a reasonable time to point out to me that political agency and
economic welfare aren't exactly cleanly seperable goals, and that I'm still
actually just splitting hairs, and that jobs are important by golly! Point
taken. But here's the punchline: I would argue that out confusion about the
purpose of higher education has caused us as a society to waste a huge amount
of effort 'fixing' universities to accomodate the needs of industry, rather
than investing in new strategies - I think that a concerted effort to create
an apprenticeship system for training IT workers (and probably other kinds of
workers too) would better suit the needs of businesses, as well as the tastes
of more restless students, at a vastly reduced expense. Freed from the
pressure to teach industry-ready but highly transient skills, universities
could be preserved as places to learn deep, ready for students who have a
knack for academic work, or have become interested in the theoretical aspects
of their practical work. As it stands, the standoff between vocational and
traditional perspectives is undermining our ability to teach both theory and
praxis.

It's also led to the illusion that the quality of an education can be more or
less straightforwardly quantified using crude economic heuristics. Maybe
nobody actually believes that this is a good way to evaluate education, but
the demand for such quanititative measures nevertheless persists -- to the
great detriment of students and faculty. Since no individual element of a
University experience can be easily correlated with these "measurements" of
educational excellence, the approach by business-oriented administrators seems
to be something like "let's see how much we can cut without making people too
angry [2]." Of course, neither the constant cutting of less 'profitable'
programs, nor the withering wages of the underclass of adjuncts has stopped
the university administrations from availing themselves of the near-infinite
price elasticity afforded them by the finincial aid system -- after all, it
_is_ all about the bottom line, isn't it?

[1] Everything about this paragraph is pretty drastically oversimplified. For
a fuller exposition of these ideas as they were expressed in the relevant
historical period, check out John Dewey's _Democracy and Education_ ,
published in 1916.

[2] I don't mean to imply that University administrators are moustache-
twiddling evil capitalists out to suck the education system dry. It's just
that, faced with the task of administering a complex system with difficult-to-
measure outputs, people who are trained in business and generally encouraged
to view their task in business terms seem to settle into this approach.

~~~
tariqali34
>>" Freed from the pressure to teach industry-ready but highly transient
skills, universities could be preserved as places to learn deep, ready for
students who have a knack for academic work, or have become interested in the
theoretical aspects of their practical work."

As a person who was immersed in academia (even to the extent of writing a
peer-reviewed article and serving as an adjunct college instructor for a
period of time), I had a slightly negative view of academia for that reason
alone. It appeared to be a self-referential entity, where the only people
reading your research papers are other researchers who are only interested in
writing their own research papers. The 'outside world' doesn't quite respect
your theoretical research fully (as you are not a productive member of society
actually helping out other people), and the academic world itself doesn't
quite care enough about you either (too obsessed with promoting their own
theoretical research).

I think universities need to be _more_ leaning towards vocational skills, or
to make their research more "vocationally" relevant. That way, laymen will
actually see a use for academics, instead of seeing them as prestigious
eggheads. Theory has its place, but it has its place as a _part_ of a
vocational curriculum. Nothing more. I also support even more measurement of
the quality of education, because without any level of accountability, you do
not know whether what you're doing is actually working. I can write and teach
all I want, but if I'm not sure if what I'm doing actually have any impact in
the long term...then what's the point?

I left academia because I knew that adjuncting would be a dead-end job and
that the administration prefers to hire them over that of full-time faculty,
but it doesn't take a genius to suggest that low-paid teachers are definitely
going to have a negative impact on a future curriculum, even on the measurable
metrics. In fact, it is possible that adjunct instructors provide the
"breathing room" that allows for the full-time faculty to continue to churn
out research papers (although their replacements may wind up being more
adjuncts). The fact that academia itself doesn't want to hire its own children
suggest even further that academia needs to focus on vocational skills, so
that academics can transfer out into a "post-academic" career.

As for me, I am still interested in the "theoretical aspects of [my] practical
work". Maybe I may one day find a use for it. But I am unlikely to find an
outlet for it within the the insular and corporate nature of present-day
academia. For now, theory is just a hobby.

~~~
jveld
>> The fact that academia itself doesn't want to hire its own children suggest
even further that academia needs to focus on vocational skills, so that
academics can transfer out into a "post-academic" career.

Or perhaps it suggests that University administrators should stop treating
their professorate as factories for research "products," who must continually
publish to avoid being fired.

~~~
tariqali34
But "should" does not at all mean "will". We live in an imperfect world, and
must deal with reality..or find some way to change that reality. Maybe the
real solution is for us to create a "new academia" to compete against the "old
academia".

~~~
jveld
I agree, thus my suggestion that we try and move towards apprenticeships. But
I think we should avoid framing apprenticeships/bootcamps/whatever as a
_replacement_ for universities, and instead frame them as an _alternative_.

addendum: imagine how self-referential and masturbatory Turing's 1936 paper
would have seemed from the perspective of the time, especially given that it
was written during the depths of the depression.

I realize that it's a stretch to imagine university bureaucrats changing their
ways. That's why I think that _academics and educators_ should tenaciously
promote the value of education for its own sake, rather than trying to attach
the value of education to some economic measurement. It's the use of this kind
of rhetoric by academics themselves that unsettles me - for bureaucrats it's
simply par for the course.

~~~
tariqali34
I don't believe in "education for its own sake", though that may be because I
still associate it with the "publish or perish"/mindless research attitude. I
still like learning stuff for fun though, and I may eventually come around to
supporting "education for its own sake", but I have to first believe it, and I
cannot do so now. Practical knowledge is still better than theoretical
knowledge.

I still think the solution lies outside "old" academia, though on a different
track that can also run parallel to the "vocational" track of
apprenticeships/bootcamps. Academics can simply publish their findings online,
via comments, blogs, and open-access academic journals...and can also attempt
to teach their ideas (also online). Even research grants could be replaced by
Pateron and crowdfunding. A system where academics and educators slowly
promote their ideas and gain followers/supporters is one that has the
potential of being slightly more just than the old system.

