
Bootcamps vs. College - kwi
http://blog.triplebyte.com/bootcamps-vs-college
======
brudgers
There are several factors that don't enter this analysis.

1\. Bootcamps can be selective over a range of non-academic criteria such as
interview skills, personal hygene, and prior work experience. Or to put it
another way, unlike a public university, a boot camp can select for culture
fit both in its internal cohorts and in the workplaces it targets.

2\. Bootcamps tend to attract people with previous work experience: someone
more likely to have several years of working to keep a roof over their head
than a recent CS grad. There's a difference between a junior programmer with
their first real job and a junior programmer who has spent six years working
crappy jobs [or good ones].

3\. Bootcamps have much more latitude to train for employment and
employability. Listening to Jeff Meyerson's hours of bootcamp love songs,
those interviews have left me with the distinct impression that doing so is
common.

4\. Bootcamp grads may come out with a stronger alumni network that can
provide recent feedback about interview processes like Triplebyte's. Going in
with some idea of what's coming is likely to produce better results.

5\. Bootcamps don't have to report their "failures". There's no independent
oversight or accountability of the sort common in university education. A "C
student" may simply find it impossible to graduate a bootcamp. The bootcamps
are free to shape their "graduate" pool however they wish.

~~~
warlox
Isn't not letting C students graduate a good thing?

~~~
2muchcoffeeman
Perhaps we should think of graduating as simply 'finishing' the curriculum.

If you paid course fees and did the work, you should be able to walk out and
say 'I am a C student at RoR' with a certificate.

A company which hires through boot camps can ask for grades and choose to hire
or not.

A C level student with other skills may still be valuable because of other
skills they have and employable for junior or non dev roles.

Setting such a high bar pretty much just seems to be a way to manipulate data
for marketing purposes.

~~~
gohrt
How does the company/school defend its brand against the C students sending
out resumes that say "I am a student at RoR' with a certificate" and leaving
out the grade part?

~~~
jacalata
They do a better job of teaching them, which is what they are implicitly
promising by telling prospective students "all our graduates get six figure
programming jobs". If the unspoken caveat is "but half of our entering
students were kicked out when we realised they wouldn't get one" then that's a
much weaker claim, more like "given five weeks of intensive tutoring we can
identify candidates for good jobs".

------
lloyd-christmas
_How is this possible?_

I think one key aspect that is missing is that boot camp graduates aren't
straight off the barista lineup. I took one at age 28 after having worked in a
technical role in finance since undergrad. The average age of my class was
probably 29. Beyond just time in the workforce, I had a double major in math
and economics with a minor in applied statistics. Had I dropped "Behavioral
Economics" and taken "Data Structures" along with some other random course, I
could have switched my Econ major to a minor in CS. Many people in my class
were of a similar background.

~~~
SilasX
Ditto! I went to a bootcamp after having worked in aerospace for 6+ years and,
I had a mechanical engineering degree. I had programmed for a long time and
had no problem with basic algorithm exercises (of the kind they spend the
early part of these camps on). [1]

The problem is, there was no easy way -- for someone like me wanting to go
into software -- to (convincingly) say, "Hey, I can code and think abstractly.
Give me a chance?"

(If you're going to say, "just contribute to an open source project", there's
actually a big gap between being able to code and being able to debug the
zillion things that can go wrong in just setting up the builds for a given
project. The Open Hatch project c. 2011 was _specifically dedicated_ to
helping people contribute, and yet following their instructions would still
dump you in a an unnamed text editor with no way to exit.)

[1] Frustratingly, the instructors were very unhelpful at the stuff I needed
help with the most -- forming a mental model of how and why Rails works.

~~~
morgante
> Hey, I can code and think abstractly. Give me a chance?

That's more or less all most CS graduates can say though. I personally don't
think anyone is qualified to be a professional developer until they've been
programming for several years (especially coding in an unstructured way).

I don't want to be combative, but what made you think you needed a bootcamp? I
learned to program long before I went to college and was hired for programming
projects long before I graduated.

~~~
SilasX
That's the point -- I _didn 't_. I just needed it to convince someone to give
me a chance. Employers would assume someone still in college for CS can
program, and so look there. They don't automatically make that assumption for
some rando with a different degree.

To be sure, there were also probably some job-searching techniques that would
have worked, but they're also hard to learn from reading pointers online if
you don't automatically have the skill.

~~~
morgante
Did you actually try to interview before the bootcamp though? (Ideally after
building a few portfolio projects.)

I ask because I had no trouble getting jobs and freelance work without a
degree or bootcamp.

In fact, a bootcamp is usually a strong negative signal for me. I'd much
rather hire a self-taught developer than a bootcamper.

~~~
eonw
that works both ways; you hire self taught because you are self taught, just
like CS grads tend to prefer hiring other CS grads.

me, i have no preference when i interview a candidate... can you code? and can
you solve complex problems? other then that i dont care about how you got your
skills.

~~~
morgante
> you hire self taught because you are self taught, just like CS grads tend to
> prefer hiring other CS grads.

I like and hire plenty of CS grads as well. I also have a CS degree. It's just
bootcamp grads that I steer clear of.

~~~
gohrt
You seem arbitrarily biased against something you think is too "hipster".

------
madmax96
I have a slightly more pessimistic view of the situation:

Sure, bootcamp grads can write a web application just fine; after all, it's
usually only CRUD. But what __value __are they bringing to an organization?
Why would I pay them the same amount as a college graduate who undoubtedly has
more total knowledge not only in CS, but in other areas as well? Ideally, a
college should expose students to a diverse range of knowledge, each tidbit
providing additional value to an organization. If I just wanted an application
constructed, I could offshore the job and get it done cheaper.

Yes, a well-run bootcamp might be a better __coding__ education than a
computer science degree, but coding is the easy part. There are other valuable
skills that aren't being taught (i.e. the ability to communicate clearly, how
to do research, how to learn independently) that make an organization strong.

We aren't in the coding business, we're in the building business. Code is
simply a means to an end.

~~~
lloyd-christmas
> Why would I pay them the same amount as a college graduate

These people ARE college grads. I'm not sure where this seemingly pervasive
view is coming from. My class had 1 person without an undgraduate degree, and
several with masters.

> i.e. the ability to communicate clearly, how to do research, how to learn
> independently

The average age of my class was 29. 6-10 years in the workforce tends to
demonstrate an existing ability to do this.

~~~
marcelluspye
It's a reaction to the question, "can bootcamps replace a CS degree?", to
which these people would say, "no."

On the question, "are bootcamps good or bad?" I think most people would tend
towards good, though exactly how good is another matter of debate.

~~~
lloyd-christmas
> It's a reaction to the question, "can bootcamps replace a CS degree?"

If someone is posing this question, it's not one based in reality. The
question is 4 years of a CS degree vs a bootcamp, not 4 years of college vs no
college. As I clearly stated, only one classmate didn't have an undergraduate
degree. That question is a strawman at best.

~~~
doeixd
I think it depends on the bootcamp. Some bootcamps do market themselves as
college alternatives. I spoke with a bootcamp requiter recently and he
attempted to convince me that pursuing a CS degree was a waste of time.

~~~
lloyd-christmas
I think of bootcamp in the same terms of the finance bootcamp I took coming
out of college. It was a 1 month program mandated by my employer as focused
learning. Both have been supplements to my undergrad, not replacements. The
ones you mention I see more as a trade school, which I think is a different
and potentially viable career path. The reason I say viable is because:

"Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity"

It's my favorite terminology from undergrad. It's from time series analysis.
My job coming out of college was as an equities trader. It's hard to get much
more time series analytical than that, and yet I never used it even once. Had
I gone into quantitative finance, I'm sure I'd use it constantly. 95% of us
just use our undergrad as a permission slip to join the real world, CS
included. They hand out those permission slips like candy. Most people end up
as accountants, not mathematicians. You don't need to know parametric
equations to calculate EBIDTA.

It's not a waste of time if it's something you're interested in and you're
intelligent enough to use it. It IS a waste of time getting an engineering
degree if you think it will give you a leg up on competing for a welding job.

------
AlldenKope
Companies focus too much on attracting talent, not enough on developing it.

If both of these screened avenues of entry to software development are as
promising as these metrics indicate (each with their pros and cons) here are
some potential larger takeaways for companies:

1) Invest in the continuous development of your employees, regardless of their
background and seniority

2) Hire for teams, and diversify teams with both CS and BC grads

3) Hire more people in general (maybe on a probationary period)

Fit to small teams with the goal of cultivating experientially diverse teams,
and spend significant time developing employees - junior and senior.

Any intellectual work should involve continuous learning and development. If
the company's focus is restricted to current projects, or on the bottom line,
or if managers enforce strict division of labor, an organization will warp to
optimize for those metrics and become less adaptable to inevitable changes in
the market (or within the company) and the company will fail to compete - or
at minimum incur major opportunity costs.

What these metrics suggest is that if you take relatively successful
candidates and invest in their individual development, both in depth and
breadth, that investment will pay off. You'll create engineers who find better
solutions to problems and - more importantly - who find better problems to
solve.

~~~
andreasklinger
I agree in all points.

How i usually justify this (anti)pattern in hiring for myself:

For startups it's hard to think/plan/project further ahead than they are old.
Especially if you are measured by short term impact vs spending or long term
planning.

------
HNcow
I'm in the process of hiring a junior position and have no bias towards
college grads or bootcamp grads. The only negatives towards boot camp grads
I've seen so far is:

1) One candidate had no idea what the terms "Class" or "OOP" even meant. I'm
FINE with them not understanding stuff like sorts/advanced data structures,
but he ACTUALLY had 0 idea what an int was. No lie!

2) I wish there wasn't such a heavy reliance on MongoDB in most of these
programs. Some do have SQL as well, but I feel like 80% of workplaces will be
dealing with SQL, so I'm not sure what the focus on Mongo is all about if the
purpose of these programs is to make you hireable. I think it's that it's an
easier concept to relay since you're working with JSON everywhere already, but
I've seen a bunch of people have a very strong bias towards Mongo to the point
where they seem to not understand why you even would use SQL.

3) This part might get me in trouble here, but we are a small company in NJ
and budgeting 50k for the junior 0 experience position. Most of these
bootcamps in Brooklyn or Manhattan instill that you minimum should be making
60k and not to even look for anything else. I disagree with that personally,
but I realize it is possible for grads to make this (especially in NYC). I've
just come across a few that scoff at us for the pay we have, and I do
understand it, but some of my higher ups who don't really feel comfortable
with the bootcamp concept don't think they are worth it.

Obviously there are a lot of pros with hiring them as well. I think typically
they are the more qualified candidates skill wise. None of the ones we've come
across have been a great fit so far though, but I think it's because of how
close to NYC we are. These programs are based there, and we have trouble
competing with the salaries there. That's why we have been having more luck
finding college grads from the NJ area though, they don't have these kind of
higher expectations.

~~~
autotune
1) That's not really a "bootcamp" issue as it is with a candidate who can't be
bothered to learn basic programming concepts or open a book on their own.
Almost every book I've read on programming covers OOP in most languages. You
can even hack it together in BASH
([http://lab.madscience.nl/oo.sh.txt](http://lab.madscience.nl/oo.sh.txt)),
not that you should.

2) LAMP stack is still probably the safest bet (substitute PHP for Python
maybe), but yeah, just because it's the current hotness for a few startups
doesn't mean it'll get you hired to know the most hyped tech.

3) Stop looking for candidates from Manhattan, or only hire those looking to
move who have done just a little bit of research? CNN's COL calculator shows
$100K in NYC is equal to about $54K in NJ so you don't seem too far off base
for what you're looking for ([http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-
living/](http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/)). From personal
experience their calculations were accurate when I made my move from the
midwest to SF. Regardless, again that doesn't sound like a "bootcamp" issue so
much as "candidates who can't be bothered to do basic googling/research
issue."

~~~
bobwaycott
> _1) That 's not really a "bootcamp" issue as it is with a candidate who
> can't be bothered to learn basic programming concepts or open a book on
> their own. Almost every book I've read on programming covers OOP in most
> languages._

I wholeheartedly disagree here, and think it very much is an issue with
bootcamps. If a bootcamp doesn't even introduce its students to such concepts
as classes, instances, OOP, and basic data types, then it has failed to
adequately serve its students with fundamental knowledge and offered a shitty
introduction to programming. I've worked to mentor a few people who have come
out of bootcamps, and I see this lack of knowledge consistently. When I do, it
has never been because the student couldn't be bothered to read or study. It
has always been because the concepts were never mentioned and introduced, and
thus the student _didn 't even know it existed_, thus that it was something
they should understand. Whenever I have introduced the concepts, the students
eat that shit up, because they really are interested in learning.

Personally, I think a great many bootcamps are poor places to learn
programming because they overwhelmingly focus on web-stack. When you're
learning to place shit into the DOM, you don't need to care if it's an int,
string, dictionary, array, etc. When you aren't being taught to store your
data in an SQL table, you don't become aware of data types, parsing ints,
casting strings, coercing one type to another, validating types, etc. You're
just being introduced to storing blobs of JSON into Mongo or whatever. Hell,
when I started with JS so many years ago, I was rather dumbfounded there was a
difference between == and ===. This leads to fresh, potentially valuable
developers who _don 't even know what they don't know_. And when that's your
starting point, it's a bit unfair to think it's the students' fault. We
wouldn't say that of CS graduates.

Bootcamps provide an often too-rudimentary introduction to programming with
poor technologies chosen for education. They'd be much better if they sought
to teach real CS concepts, not just web-stack basics.

~~~
Zeno84
>If a bootcamp doesn't even introduce its students to such concepts as
classes, instances, OOP, and basic data types, then it has failed to
adequately serve its students with fundamental knowledge and offered a shitty
introduction to programming.

Honestly, if someone doesn't understand these very basic concepts, what's
his/her curiosity level regarding computer programming? I would not want to
hire him/her based soley on that.

~~~
st3v3r
It's still the bootcamp's fault for not at least introducing them to those
concepts. I mean, you can't really google what an int is if you don't even
know that an int is a thing.

~~~
Zeno84
Oh, bootcamps are certainly failing here, but if I were to google "Computer
Science," or "Computer Programming," I'd eventually run into the concept of
types.

As an analogue, I learned about the functional programming paradigm far before
it was ever brought up in a classroom setting. Sure I knew what programming
paradigms were, so maybe it's not a perfect example...

------
ammon
I'm happy to answer any questions about this (I expect it to be
controversial). When we started Triplebyte one year ago, I was pretty
skeptical of bootcamps. Doing credential-blind interviews and seeing what some
bootcamp grads can do, however, has won me over. Clearly there are a lot of
bad bootcamp grads (and probably a lot of bad bootcamps). But the model is
working really well at the top.

~~~
dtran
Great stuff Ammon and team!

Can you discuss how you might test for bootcamps overfitting their curriculums
to interviews? They definitely would seem financially incentivized to do just
that. From a personal anecdote, someone I interviewed was able to code a
solution for a problem, but then couldn't discuss how or why they did it that
way at all, or solve a closely related problem, which made me strongly suspect
that they just memorized an answer. How would you test for this?

I would also be curious to see if there was any way to breakdown bootcamp
grads with previous programming experience vs. without and by what they
studied in undergrad if they went to undergrad.

~~~
ammon
Interesting questions. Bootcamps are clearly incentivized to do this. However,
they do not seem to be particularly good at it. Algorithms are over
represented in interviews relative to most jobs, and yet (as our data shows)
bootcamps are not very good at teaching this. Now, we are measuring
algorithmic skill by asking candidates to actually implement non-trivial
algorithms. We've observed that a lot of interviews involve what is
essentially trivia about algorithms, and it's possible that the bootcamps are
better at preparing students for this (we don't measure this skill so I am not
sure). I think that this gets at the answer. If you make your interview go
deep, it gets increasingly hard to specifically prepare for it, to that point
where preparing is actually becoming a better programmer. Rather than a
30-minute question that covers knowledge of sorting algorithms (easily
learnable), have your candidate spend an hour building a collision detection
systems using a axis-sorted list of rectangles, and reason about maintaining
this sort as objects move around. That's the theory. In practice there will
always be some noise.

------
Jormundir
These results aren't very surprising because this is about interviewing
performance. The goal of bootcamps is "teach you enough to get a job"; they're
basically gaming the interview process by teaching to the test. University
programs on the other hand are "teach you CS theory"; learning to interview
well is up to the student and the specific school's offering of interview
training.

I think there's a strong argument to make that university programs are too
focused on theory, when the vast majority of their students are going to go
out and get practical engineering jobs. I don't want the pendulum to swing too
far to the practical side, though, because then you lose the long-term
benefits of getting a CS degree. Although, schools can certainly buff up their
practical material.

Anecdotally; when I participate in hiring, I tend to discount the bootcamp
grads. Maybe it's unfair, but my experience hiring them has been that they
know how to interview well, and know their tools well, but when you compare
them a year in, they're pretty far behind their university counterparts. I see
a plateau, where it's hard for a lot of bootcamp grads to move from doing
generic web development to designing more challenging systems. Obviously it
depends on the individual, but this seems to be a categorical struggle for
bootcamp grads with little technical background. A lot of companies really
just need more people doing web development, so being open to the bootcamp
pool is essential, and ruling out bootcamp grads is silly.

~~~
tetrep
> I think there's a strong argument to make that university programs are too
> focused on theory...

Is there? I found practical programming knowledge to be very easy to pick up
due to having piles of theory that back up why it's a good idea, why it makes
sense to do so, etc. You just need someone or something to tell you to do it.
It's why side projects are such a good idea, you get a great wealth of
knowledge just from your own mistakes/failures that will occur naturally as
you map theory to reality. But you can learn so much more so much more easily
when you have that theory to start with.

~~~
uptownfunk
At the least something like a 1 unit weekly seminar on how to approach
interviews would be super helpful. It would also make it feel like Unis were
coming from a good place if they said "Hey, we're gonna teach you the theory,
but we're also gonna make sure you kickass at an interview as well so that you
come out strong when looking for a job". I'd really appreciate that attitude
more.

------
jhchen
It was not long ago that Computer Science degrees itself faced a similar
challenge, against more well-rounded liberal arts programs, championed and
prided by the Ivy Leagues. Today MIT and Stanford are ahead by the strength of
their more “practical” engineering degrees. The data from Triplebyte supports
the same narrative, just in greater granularity: businesses value practical
skills.

There is value in being balanced and diversity, but this applies to teams, not
necessarily individuals. Not everyone on your engineering team needs to be an
architect. After your globally distributed, fault tolerant, realtime, highly
available system is designed, somebody’s got to build it. And most startups or
software teams have no business even trying to design such a system in the
first place.

In the US, my generation was told we all needed four year degrees. We don’t.
Some jobs and some roles certainly but the entire population of future adults?

There is an engineering shortage in the US because everyone was too busy
getting four year degrees in more well rounded fields. Meanwhile Apple needs
tens of thousands of engineers that could have been trained by two year
vocational programs that the US was apparently above for our children, and
thus cannot meet their business needs.

And yet this data from Triplebyte is incredibly encouraging because while we
screwed up the educational policy, it may not be so difficult to fix.

~~~
azth
> it may not be so difficult to fix.

Would you want graduates of such programs working on the software that goes
into your operating system, your car, or other such systems? I doubt you'll
find people graduating from these programs working at places like SpaceX or
the JPL (unless they're doing some CRUD/web dev work), or even at Apple
designing compilers or iphone processors.

Just as an anecdote, my current company hired a couple of graduates of these
programs, and they didn't fair well.

~~~
xigency
No, probably not coming from a web development bootcamp, but with an
associate's degree and a software engineering background, I could totally see
someone working at any of these named places (for engineering work).

------
morgante
I'd love to see some more mathematical analysis of these differences. In
particular, I suspect that while the averages are similar, the distributions
look extremely different.

Specifically, the average engineer out of either a bootcamp or college is
pretty mediocre. But the top 10% of engineers are mostly college graduates and
are definitely not bootcampers. This is because the best developers are
overwhelmingly passionate about development and have been doing it since high
school. If you love programming, you _might_ go to college to get a firmer
academic standing. You definitely _won 't_ go to a bootcamp—if you've been
programming for 5 years, a 3 week bootcamp makes no sense.

On the other hand, when it comes to the bottom tier I suspect bootcampers are
a lot better. This is mostly because the bottom tier of CS graduates are
atrociously bad. Regrettably, it is possible to graduate with a degree in CS
without ever having written a single program by yourself. They slink by mostly
through cramming for exams and "collaborating" with peers. My impression is
that bootcamps are actually less tolerant of this behavior: you won't make it
through a bootcamp without ever programming autonomously.

~~~
RegEx
> if you've been programming for 5 years, a 3 week bootcamp makes no sense

If you want to make a transition to web dev from say, systems programming,
cramming that knowledge into a few weeks might not be a bad way to go. At that
point, you should already know how to learn, it's just a matter of sitting
down and learning it.

------
caconym_
It makes a lot of sense that bootcamp grads would outdo fresh college grads on
"web system design"; they've presumably spent most of their bootcamp time
focusing heavily on web systems. Stuff like load balancers/reverse proxies,
distributed message queues, noSQL DBs, etc. may be totally foreign to a lot of
fresh college grads, while a bootcamp grad can probably be expected to have a
not-too-shabby understanding of how those components fit together.

The "practical programming" bit is a little more depressing, though it does
ring somewhat true based on what I've seen in real life. How people can spend
4 years programming and still consistently fail at building decent
abstractions, I have no idea.

Also, where is the "neither" category? There are dozens of us... dozens!

~~~
ammon
We also work with a bunch of great self-taught folks! Perhaps I'll blog about
this in the future!

------
WWKong
Go to college. Life is long and it is not about passing your first interview.
Real world is complex and ever changing. The point of going to college is not
to acquire coding skills to pass the interview. It is about facing real world
challenges: people, responsibilities, complicated decisions, uncomfortable
situations etc. And hopefully at the end of it you are better prepared to take
on life. It is a harder path than going to a coder factory. Take the hard
path.

~~~
Sk1pp
Makes total sense if you're coming out of high school I think. But we can
assume that there is a decent amount of people that are switching post college
to a programming related field.

And in terms of college being the hard path, I'm not sure that it was. I don't
know how college helped me with "responsibilities" or "Uncomfortable
Decisions". Not to mention the cost of college is pretty extreme, taking on 7k
(usually more) a year at a state school would be expensive and stressful.
(Real world challenges lol)

I think the solution would might be to step up the bootcamps to be a little
more in-depth, and probably take a little longer, like a year at night, or
something like that.

~~~
WWKong
If you are thinking of bootcamps as supplemental education, sure. But the
article and title was talking "in lieu of". Always go from general to
specialised along with age. So, definitely finish college/univ and then get
specialization as needed.

------
bunnymancer
Bootcamper here,

Of course 3 months is going to get you running with a solid basic knowledge of
your stuff.

In what world would low-level, algorithms and data structures be doable in 3
months?

Point is, I don't think Bootcamps and Colleges are comparable.

It's like being a woodworker and a forester..

There's a place for each and it's not the same positions...

Now, here's my big question:

If your interview includes Practical programming, Web system Design,
Algorithms and Low level system design...

What in the nine hells are you hiring for?

Had it been for a trucker position you'd be asking for "driving license, laws
and regulations, engine design and car physics"..

For reference:
[https://i.imgur.com/sh7LJgj.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/sh7LJgj.jpg)

~~~
vlunkr
> Point is, I don't think Bootcamps and Colleges are comparable.

This is the key takeaway here. I'm working with a bootcamper now and the
experience has been pretty bad. But it is a fairly large app, I think it's
difficult for him to grasp all the parts, how they connect, and how his
changes impact everything else. He can code and make things work, but that's
it, we have to make big changes to almost everything he does.

A bootcamper who can focus on HTML, CSS, and some simple code would be fine,
until they get some more real world experience. In my opinion college vs.
bootcamp education are probably the same after a few years of experience if
the person is a motivated learner.

~~~
bunnymancer
Absolutely. I'm glad to have been hired by a company who had experience with
bootcampers before.

They gave me a smooth and solid ramp-up to the mid/senior I am now.

Being thrown in on the deep end with the expectations that the guy with 3
months experience is somehow wellrounded with the basics of CS is just
foolish.

Also, of course, not all bootcamps are equal, nor are all students.

------
felix_thursday
There's something to be said about a person doing a bootcamp. Not only is it a
drastic career pivot, but choosing to invest in yourself like that is a huge
sign of maturity, growth mindset, and awareness. It's no surprise that a
bootcamp grad can quickly get up to speed in their first professional dev
environment.

I did the WDI bootcamp through GA, and loved the experience. My motivations
weren't to become a full-time web dev, but to become a much better, more well-
rounded product manager. It's paid off 5x over so far.

There's a ton of garbage bootcamps out there, and it's unfair to lump them all
together -- it's unfair that these exist. period. While, you can't replace the
deep technical and theoretical understanding you get with a classic CS degree,
if your goal is to build web apps, do you really need the formal experience,
or can you learn that on the job?

------
avs733
there is a simple confounding variable here that unfortunately triplebyte
can't touch with a ten foot pole...age/work experience

College is largely about transitioning children to adults (we can argue that
separately) the personal and professional development that students go through
over 4 years is vast. They are becoming adults in many frames, including
understand the world and technology as systems. They aren't just learning to
code, they are learning how to think.

To the extent that I know (warning: anecdata) Bootcamps presume a lot more
worldly knowledge, attract and expect more grown up students, get students
with direct interest in web/software/apps, and are much more likely to get
career transitioning students (from the people I know who have bootcamp'ed).
They have a much broader knowledge base to build on which will help them in
some areas and hurt them in others. I would be curious if Triplebyte has any
data they can touch at all looking at that.

Simply said...a 22 year old college student with a CS degree and a 35 year old
BC grad may look similar on metrics but function entirely differently as
employees in both the short and the long term...caveat emptor, figure out what
you need.

~~~
Jemaclus
I think you may be making a faulty assumption that Bootcamp means the
candidate didn't go to college. Many, many bootcamp grads DID go to college...
just not for CS.

~~~
avs733
sorry if it reads that way, I was intending to communicate the opposite
actually, that BC students often had gone to college, and/or had other
careers, just not in CS.

------
ogrev
This is basically a warning to every single person going through bootcamps
right now: Your skills are not special. You can be replaced with ease. Unless
you differentiate yourself through what you learn either at your job or after
the camp and demonstrate it through your work then your job will be kaput.
That's basically what all of those Everyone Can Code advertisements were
trying to achieve which is to make these skills a commodity.

Good luck.

~~~
mattnedrich
Great advice - also applies to college graduates. It applies to everyone,
really :)

------
harlanji
This is the most honest comparison I've read so far.

I dropped out of high school because I was making good money by 18... kept
working, saw my own limitations, and did a BS degree in 3 years, graduating at
26. That was 5 years ago today, actually :)

I see this same distinction in practice, thanks Triplebyte for quantifying it.
If I were staffing an engineering team, I'd absolutely take junior engineers
from bootcamps and senior engineers with university backgrounds. I like the
surgical model from The Mythical Man Month, and have seen elements of it
working by hiring junior test engineers of varying technical backgrounds and
training them.

I think a BS degree in CS makes a lot more sense when you're hitting the edge
of your capability as an independent contributor--many may never need it, some
will love going on a few year sabbatical and earning their 'piece of paper'
(as I did).

Biggest factor that gave me an edge was I had lots and lots of context for all
the content of classes, and I took notes every single day, Beginner's Mind
style and didn't try to test past intro classes... even CS 101 with Scheme. I
was also able to work on my mentoring/leadership skills with classmates.

------
humbleMouse
I think a well-run bootcamp is a better coding education than college computer
science. The only thing most grads have on bootcamp people is algorithm
knowledge. This is easy to fix. Just teach algos in bootcamp. It really isn't
that hard to understand.

Ideal bootcamp:

-css/html/javascript

-angular or any mvvc data mirroring framework

-OOP and ntier patterns

-Stored Procs/ORM/SQL training

-Algos

-Webservices SOAP/REST

The college grads I work with tend to have written a couple shitty programs
that don't really do anything, and their "final project" was hooking up a
database to a business logic layer.

source: I have taught in bootcamps before and work with lots of new college
comp sci grads now.

~~~
eropple
_> The only thing most grads have on bootcamp people is algorithm knowledge._

"Just teach algorithms." Do you have two years to spare to do so? Because I'm
a platform engineer and I regularly use the extent of my CS mathematics
education to write better code--you'd think this'd just be Ruby slinging,
"what sort of _math_ do you need to automate systems", but it ends up being
remarkably more than that! But you know what else I use, _while doing my day
job_? I use the lessons from my economics courses. I use the lessons from my
sociology courses. I use the lessons from my political science courses. Are
you gonna bootcamp those, too? Or are you going to turn out a marginally
skilled worker with a worse educational foundation?

The only thing a civil engineer has over a carpenter is physics knowledge.
Obviously.

Don't get me wrong: _bootcamps are fine for some purposes_ , but in my
experience they (and there are certainly exceptions in that experience, though
rare--I'm thinking of a couple mid-career switches here) turn out mostly-
employable workers with a shallower improvement curve and a relatively low
ceiling by comparison. There are definitely roles for which I'd hire most of
the folks I know who've gone into tech via boot camp classes. But, in my
experience, those roles tend to be ones that are more junior than I'd other
expect for their tenure and unless I need immediate productivity (and why
would I be building a pipeline where I need that, but not the wisdom that
comes with experience?), I will prefer somebody who is educated and not merely
trained. Code and "coding" are stump-dumb simple and filtering for those minor
applicative skills would be a disaster. Because I can teach skills, even if it
requires an investment of effort on my part (heaven forfend!). I can't,
practically, teach how to think.

~~~
humbleMouse
I like your post and agree with most of what you said, except about the
algorithms. I don't think you need 2 years to teach them. You need a
highschool level understanding of Math and about a week. Obviously this varies
from person to person - but I learned them extremely quickly.

I think where we are not seeing eye to eye here is that I envision a
bootcamper that has a high aptitude for abstract thought, can read quickly,
has a good understanding of math, and is motivated to keep learning and read
books outside of "class".

If we are talking about two people who both do no outside reading other than
what they are assigned - then yes, the college grad will be more prepared for
abstract ideas/thought. However, if you take an otherwise smart person who
reads lots of books and can learn things on the fly - then I think the sky is
the limit.

~~~
spdionis
What algorithms did you learn in a week?

"I learned Algorithms in a week" sounds weird.

------
jedberg
> It backs up the assertion that algorithm skills are not used on the job by
> most programmers, and atrophy over time.

This was the most interesting part to me. I'd love to see more on this.

I've always found it silly to ask algorithm questions of senior engineers.
There seems to be an exponential falloff of that knowledge as one gets further
from graduation.

------
superuser2
If I were stranded on an island with the laptop I used in college and a power
source, I'd have a pretty good idea of how to stumble through:

\- A multithreaded UNIX-like operating system with user programs, system
calls, and a filesystem, with reasonable (if not entirely optimal) caching
strategies.

\- A TCP/IP stack for that operating system.

\- An authenticated encrypted channel over my TCP/IP stack with forward
secrecy by building a pseudrandom function up to a stream cipher, RSA with
OAEP, Diffie-Helman, etc.

\- Network services from the RFCs in C (we did a router and IRC).

\- A high-level programming language with support for both functional and OO
idioms based on the typed lambda calculus with recursion, lists, records,
tuples, ref cells, subtyping, etc.

\- A lexer, typechecker, and interpreter for that language using parser
generator tools, a recursive descent parser, or a shift-reduce parser in a
pushdown automata model.

\- A formal specification of the evaluation and typing rules and a type
soundness proof for that lanugage.

\- A distributed KV store with Paxos, Raft, or Byzantine Generals running on
my encrypted channel and written in my language (we used 0MQ and were given a
0MQ broker that could be told to drop messages for testing purposes).

\- Greedy, dynamic programming, network flow, and ILP algorithms with proofs
of correctness and efficiency.

My class work repositories put me about three quarters of the way there.

I'm sure bootcamps can teach people enough to tread water in a dynamic
language web framework, and that meets real business needs and adds real
value. But college is a chance to go deeper.

I know nobody is paying us to build our own lightsabers. But - and call me old
fashioned if you'd like - I think a professional ought to be able to build his
own lightsaber anyway.

------
danellis
I swear, articles like this are going to cause me to have an existential
crisis. I started learning programming as a child in the 80s. More than 30
years later, I like to think that I've acquired a lot of valuable knowledge
and experience across a broad range of topics, and yet... when I hear about
people training for three months and walking into decent jobs, I start to
wonder what actually differentiates me at all.

For the sake of my ego, I'd love to hear that these bootcamp graduates have
shallow, fragile knowledge in a narrowly focused area.

~~~
blister
Shit man, I feel your pain. I'm actually quasi-looking for a job now at a
super senior level (lead engineer or above) and finding it surprisingly
frustrating. I'm employed full-time and have a family. I get daily phone calls
from recruiters with interesting positions and then expected to be available
for 8 hours of interviews and crap like that.

I jumped through a few of these hoops early on but since I have a breadth of
experience instead of a laser specific focus on one technology, I'm apparently
getting disqualified from some of these positions. It's been a really weird
experience for me. I mostly gave up, figuring that if I lost my current (good)
job I'd have the free time to devote 16+ hours each week interviewing/applying
for the types of gigs I want. Our industry is bizarre at times.

It's weird being on the other end. Almost all of my jobs have come from word
of mouth and personal networking where I never even needed to interview. I
interview and hire all of my engineers by taking them to lunch and just
getting a feel for their interests and personality, so seeing how everyone
else seems to be doing it has been a huge culture shock.

------
dontscale
I think the debate about Colleges vs. Bootcamps is an apples to oranges
comparison

Algorithms are commoditized into libraries. Web design has been commoditized
with templates.

Open-ended programming is still more complicated, but putting apps on the web
today is easier than static HTML just 5 years ago. Parts of programming will
continue being commoditized.

So if it's easy to create something and put it out there, the great and all-
important challenge that faces developers today is making it matter.

------
danso
I wouldn't be surprised that a bootcamp grad could beat a college CS student
in practical web knowledge. Stanford has a web applications elective, CS142
[0]...in the previous years, it focused on Rails [1]; this year, it moved to
the MEAN stack. In both syllabi, a week is spent on learning HTML/CSS
alone...this year, I believe they spend a couple weeks learning JavaScript.

This class is an elective, which means that students aren't expected to know
HTML/CSS/JS before taking it, though the core CS classes (Java, C) are
prereqs. This also means that students who don't take 142 could quite graduate
without having any practical knowledge about web development.

That said, it's not because the CS students couldn't actually learn practical
web dev, and as others have said here, the best bootcampers are often folks
who have a STEM background already.

[0]
[http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs142/](http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs142/)

[1] [http://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-
bin/cs142-winter14/index...](http://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-
bin/cs142-winter14/index.php)

------
nappybrainiac
I'm not sure that a comparison between bootcamps and college is viable.

College is not just about learning to code. You also learn to deal with
professors and how to get the best grades out of them. You figure out how much
you can drink without the glaring hangout that interferes with your morning
philosophy class. You sign those forms to get credit cards that haunt you till
you have a job. If you're smart, chose a good college and get really lucky,
you might actually learn something and get a job after graduation.

Boot camps are about learning to code, creating networks and passing
interviews for tech jobs. You can't pledge, or hang out with the furries,
paint your face with your college colors for the football game at the weekend,
or struggle figure out if your summer course fulfills the requirement for your
social science elective.

These two places of learning can peacefully co-exist and each one has its
purpose.

I even think that it would be good for some CS Degrees to walk into a bootcamp
to explore something new and expand their knowledge.

Bootcamp replacing college? I don't think so. Not till bootcamps have long
lines of students trying to change their course selections at the registrar's
office.

There are some options that lie somewhere in the middle...

------
pbiggar
It's not discussed, but I would guess that the best CS grads beat the best BC
grads, but average/bad BC grads beat average/bad CS grads.

~~~
ammon
Pretty close. I don't talk about this in the post, but you are right. The
college grads had more variance. You occasionally get a college grad who has
been working on open source since they were 15, and actually looks a lot like
a, engineer with 3 years experience.

~~~
pbiggar
In my experience, bad CS college grads can't code at all, and >50% are
terrible programmers (they probably self select out of your interviews
though). I would wager a "bad" bootcamp grad could put together a single-page
app using some APIs, with relative success.

------
lsadam0
> Bootcamp grads match or beat college grads on practical skills, and lose on
> deep knowledge.

I feel as though you are attempting to lower the bar of what is acceptable in
order to sell something :). The word 'practical' is thrown around in this
article without much of a definition. Are we talking about making simple web
pages?

I've just finished conducting a round of interviews for a junior level
position, and based on this experience I highly doubt I will be considering
bootcamp graduates in the future. As an example, for a question which involved
sorting an integer array, and providing a method GetElementAt(index)....95% of
the bootcamp applicants implemented sort within the GetElementAt method so
that the entire array is sorted with every single call. A handful of CS grads
made the same mistake, but most of them did not. Is this sort of oversight
excused in the idea of 'practical' programming? Or in your definition, is this
considered deep knowledge?

~~~
busterarm
Personally, I never expect people to pick the right algorithm the first time.
In the real world it's hard to do. I'm much more interested in if they think
about alternatives to their solution, know where the problems with theirs are
and if they might find an alternate solution to the problem online.

If you're hiring junior developers without expecting to be hands-on in their
work and with plan to train them, then you aren't really hiring junior
developers, you're just trying to pay at junior rates. It's not doing them or
your business a service to hire them.

There are plenty of CS grads out there with all sorts of algo skills but no
practical and will take 3 months + to build anything in your stack. This is
basically the same problem with different symptoms: You don't have the
resources to hire a junior developer.

It's just way easier to blame the hire than your company.

~~~
lsadam0
I believe we are misunderstanding each other, as you are making some
assumptions. We do spend time training junior developers. We are hands on
during work.

I'm talking about one problem at the start of the process. In the example, I
didn't touch on their choice of sort algorithm. I was pointing out that they
believed that re-sorting the same array, for every single GetIndexAt(x) call,
was an ok thing to do. The majority of boot campers did, the majority of CS
grads did not.

So if we have two distinct groups applying for a junior level position, and
one group has a stronger grasp on fundamentals, I fail to understand how a
company is at fault for choosing the better candidate. Objectively, the junior
level CS grad had a better understanding of the problem.

~~~
busterarm
Are they saying that it's an actual okay thing to do? ...like, you challenged
them on it and had a discussion and they said it was perfectly okay regardless
of size of array?

Or it was just allowed to let lie and they said it's an okay thing to do
because that's what's in their code?

I think it's a huge mistake to conflate whether someone does know and whether
they can know something. Some of the best programmers I've ever seen started
off pretty clueless - most of that group learns things absurdly quickly too.

I don't think that exercise gives you good information other than to confirm
your expectations. I don't know whether that can tell you if they'll bring
value to your organization or not.

~~~
lsadam0
There were a few hundred applications to sort through for the position.
Applicants all received the same test. The initial response is used to filter
the pool and decide with whom to speak with further. Only with a filtered
applicant pool is it reasonable to sit and discuss their solution with. Some
criteria is needed to filter the pool, so obviously those that have submitted
a better initial solution will be selected. The exercise shows that some
applicants will require more training than others.

~~~
busterarm
There are many reasons why I think this process is broken that others have
written so much at length about enough that I'm not going to bother taking the
time.

If it's enough for you to say that because you have a test that everyone takes
and it filters your candidates so that's proof of ability, without even going
into the results and asking if your test is optimizing for the correct things,
there's nothing I can say to convince you otherwise.

Anecdotal, but I know about a half dozen people with experience and CS degrees
who would blow your filter but can really get shit done and don't really need
any training.

Hiring is hard and the real shame of this industry is that collectively we
don't approach this problem with the same level of rigor that we do everything
else because by and large we consider this sort of work to be beneath us and
not worth a significant investment of our time.

~~~
busterarm
I just want to leave my response to your now-deleted followup:

I don't advocate talking to every candidate but I don't think it's possible to
estimate someone's skill without talking to them (even email is a form of
conversation).

I find much better filters for that sort of thing are ability to follow
directions and attention to detail. If you have hundreds of applications, I
guarantee they're not all great spellers or communicate effectively. I value
the soft skills way above programming ability (since we have to communicate
effectively every day) in the early stage.

I find that it's pretty easy to demonstrate that you "have it" from portfolio,
resume, cover letter and the application process.

Personally it's a huge pet peeve of mine in an interview process whenever I
have to write code and there isn't some discussion about that code - to the
point that I feel it a waste of my time and a strong signal not to work there.

------
DougWebb
After reading through all of the comments so far, my impression is that
bootcamps are for training the developers whose jobs will be automated away in
the coming years, and college is for training the developers who will be
writing the code that automates those jobs.

~~~
devhead
That seems pretty cynical; your logic breaks down when a CS graduate goes into
a bootcamp after college.

malkovich,malkovich

------
lordnacho
Well this is interesting to me, as I've recently worked with a bootcamp
graduate, and I've been looking over my brother's shoulder while he finishes
his CS degree at Columbia.

\- Bootcamp lady was very able on the iOS project we were working on. She
seemed to know where things were in XCode, and she understood Obj-C and Swift
(no embarrassing questions about what classes are). She didn't seem to know
about other environments (and said so), but we were doing an iOS project.

\- Ivy league guy seems to have touched every common language (c, c++, Python,
HTML/JS/CSS, R, and more), along with common tools (vim, pyCharm, tmux, gcc,
VC++, laundry list). I was surprised by how practical it was, actually. I
thought it would be obscure algorithms the whole way, but I guess they take
the theory and essentially force you to learn the practical aspects by
implementing things in relevant stacks.

\- Bootcamp lady was very good working in our little MVP team. Understood how
common management ideas like Agile work. Conscientious with looking at the
Trello board, asking questions in Slack. Not sure if this is just her
personality, or because they tell you how software teams work.

\- Ivy league guy had lots of group projects, but they tended to be
dysfunctional. There was always someone shirking. Some people had no clue what
was being built or how to compile it. There didn't seem to be any management
oversight, just blind "let's get this piece done" type organisation.

\- Degree guy has way more breadth. He was routinely looking at machine
learning, implementing demos with scikit, setting up VMs for himself, looking
at assembly, looking at SQL optimisation, and other diverse tasks. Bootcamp
grad didn't need this stuff, but also would need significant training to get
to that level.

\- Ambitions were similar. My background is in financial code, and they both
want to do that. Bootcamp grad has quite a mountain to climb, particularly
with things that take more explanation than MVC. She has a good attitude, so
if someone would teach her she could do it. My brother is better positioned
though, and would need less teaching to reach the same place.

------
pbiggar
> This does not leave bootcamp grads equivalently skilled to university grads.
> If you want to do hard algorithmic or low-level programming, you’re still
> better served by traditional CS eduction.

Or, if I may suggest, a low-level/algorithmic bootcamp.

~~~
ammon
I think it's possible that these things just fundamentally take more time to
learn well. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, however.

~~~
pbiggar
Judging from my own experience, spending some time through the start of
Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual, with a side of Programming Pearls or
Practice of Programming, would do wonders and easily outstrip a CS education.
I'd say you could do it in less than 200 hours, which is about 3 weeks of
dedicated bootcamper time.

Maybe dev-bootcamp should offer an optional extra module?

~~~
adpirz
As a bootcamp grad m'self who would love to do more deep dives into algos/data
structures, I'm intrigued. Any other recs?

------
somecodemonkey
Bootcamp without years if experience will not replace a Computer Science
degree. It lacks the depth to build a solid foundation. While this is just an
anectdote every company I have worked for refuses to hire bootcamp grads.

------
RankingMember
I think that both college and boot-camp styles of training have their place.
I'd think my default inclination would be to want to hire the CompSci majors
to do the deep-scope planning/figuring and use boot-camp hires to do the
grunt-work of supporting that vision.

It's important to note that this is just my initial inclination. I have no
expectation that there won't be instances of boot-camp hires being better than
CompSci hires in cases. It really comes down to the particular person, and
hopefully any hiring process would do a decent job of evaluating each person.

~~~
enjo
This just isn't how software is built in practice. Engineers make dozens of
architectural decisions every day. They may feel like small ones, but over
time they add up to a whole lot of surface area. The skills you learn in
Computer Science provide a whole lot more context for your decision making
when actually building things. Bootcamps, at least from the folks I've
interviewed so far, simply don't prepare their graduates to do real work. This
is particularly true when it comes to data structures and basic algorithms.
Two really key fundamental knowledge areas if you're goal is to build actually
reliable and relatively efficient software.

This isn't to say that all CompSci graduates are good programmers (clearly
they are not). It also isn't to say that everyone coming out of a bootcamp is
bad (they are not, I recently hired my first). But when painting with a broad
brush bootcamp's right now seem to mostly churn out students who are sort of
comfortable with syntax and very basic logic, but not much else.

I'd be interested to see this article go farther. What do these cohorts look
like in two years? Does that fundamental knowledge gap hold those bootcamp
graduates back? I suspect it does, but I have very little proof but my own
intuition. I'd love to be wrong.

~~~
pbiggar
> Engineers make dozens of architectural decisions every day.

> Two really key fundamental knowledge areas if you're goal is to build
> actually reliable and relatively efficient software.

I would challenge you on this, and suspect that you're looking at a relatively
thin slice of developers: can you clarify why you believe this to be the case.
As a counter-example, a lot of modern web development is building frontends
(mobile or JS), where good code organization matters, but systems architecture
doesn't matter so much.

~~~
DougWebb
I've been building web-based frontends for my entire professional career, and
my systems architecture skills have been invaluable throughout. Web frontends
don't stand alone; they run on server, they make use of networks and
networking hardware, they talk to other services on the same server and other
server, and they interact with the operating system. Being able to understand
all of those moving parts is crucial to producing a high-quality frontend
that's not going to fall apart as soon as it gets put under stress, and that
will be maintainable and extensible over time.

~~~
pbiggar
Can you clarify why CS skills are necessary, vs the ones you learn in
bootcamps (which I would guess are much more specific to this use case)? I
agree they do all these things, but in a way that can be taught quickly and is
mostly learned through experience, no?

------
partycoder
Having interacted with a lot of both lately, my impressions are that bootcamp
graduates focus on mostly on functional requirements.

They have a hard time identifying non-functional requirements, assessing and
mitigating risk, and start getting confused when things go low level.

In my experience, all "friendly" technologies have sharp edges somewhere,
where you start getting exposed to low level issues. When you face these
issues, there's no guarantee the answer will be in stack overflow and you will
appreciate having learned some theory.

------
madiathomas
Bootcamps are filling a void which existed for a long time in the CS industry.
Most of the time, A CS grad is hired to do a job that can be done by someone
with little programming knowledge. I feel it is a waste of resources to hire a
CS grad to do CRUD app with maximum 5 users on a very good day.

Now companies can use people from bootcamps for such kind of jobs and use CS
grads for deep and high level stuff. Surely some top bootcampers will be able
to do high level stuff too.

------
lxe
Do you remember your college web programming courses? The curriculum is always
woefully out of date and seems that traditional undergraduate programs don't
focus on updating it. This makes sense -- there are very few academic research
areas that deal with practical web applications, and this is obviously
mirrored in your undergraduate classes.

Don't forget -- universities are also research institutions, while bootcamps
are not, and the coursework will reflect this.

~~~
mywittyname
My college had state-of-the-art web programming courses along with many other
practical classes (mobile, iOS, database design, data mining, 3d graphics).
All of which were developed to ensure that students could move onto
internships in that field after the course.

All of these courses were optional, but the school was very clear about their
purpose: to give their students job skills. Most of the recruiters that came
to the campus job fairs knew which of these courses they wanted their interns
to take and would ask specifically, "did you take CS___"?

Obviously there was tons of research-oriented classes too, but those targeted
jr/seniors.

------
babbeloski
Bootcamps make people employable for sure, I work with a team of people mostly
from Bootcamps. I think the problem with some of them is they don't actually
like programming. Learning new things and change is met with a lot of feet
dragging. Don't get me wrong, I know a lot of programmers that are just
9-5'ers. It just seems like anytime there's any extra effort involved a ton of
justification and selling needs to happen.

------
Mc_Big_G
That's because bootcamps specifically teach you how to pass interviews. I'm a
senior developer and suck at interviews because I haven't taken my spare time
to specifically study for interviews. I don't remember how to reverse sort a
b-tree or whatever inane questions are asked because I don't need to know that
to do my job spectacularly. It's actually kind of a joke that bootcamp grads
interview better.

------
enricobruschini
Thel real big difference that too often Americans forget is that college (and
all the education system below colleges) gives you the structural mindset to
break down complex problems and find solutions. They create your way of
thinking and your rational side. Bootcamps, instead, just teach you how to
execute some actions. It's like the difference between colleges and industrial
schools.

------
balls187
> We’ve found bootcamp grads...worse at algorithms and understanding how
> computers work.

Solution: hire a college grad and send them to a boot camp.

------
savrajsingh
One of my close friends said it best: "savrajsingh, Lebron James doesn't care
if you start playing basketball."

------
JustSomeNobody
Likely, you see more people getting a CS degree because they feel it's a good
job than the people going to bootcamps. The people going to bootcamps are more
likely to be doing it because they've done some development and really like
it.

Now, what bootcamps aren't going to give you is the breadth of a CS degree.
But if you're getting a CS degree just for the money, you're not picking
things up very well either.

So, I can see where a certain % of CS students and bootcampers are roughly
equivalent.

I feel if you're very interested in CS and get a college degree and do really
well in college, you're going to come out ahead of someone taking a 3 month
bootcamp. I also feel there's more opportunity for CS degrees. ie, one
probably isn't going to see too many 3 month bootcampers doing real time
development. (I'm talk real real-time, not that buzzword web real time.)

------
megapatch
This is obviously comparing different things. Bootcamps and College are not
replacing each other. But there is a difference between learning because you
are hungry for knowledge (college) and learning because you are hungry for
food (boot camp, you need to do your job). The former makes you better in the
trade.

------
Fiahil
Could it be possible to combine both worlds? Getting a university degree by
spending four years with a strong focus on practical skills and intense
workload[1].

To my knowledge only the top tier of american colleges (MIT, Berkeley,
Stanford, ...) come close to that achievement. But, in France, where I live; I
had the opportunity to go to a private school "specialized" in computer
science (Epitech, 42, if you wanna look it up), that was mostly an "enlarged
bootcamp" from year one to year three. It was kind of funny, for me, when my
peers from traditional schools ended up discovering version control in their
final internship.

[1]: Once you replace the shitty paper exams by actual projects in programming
classes, you'll be amazed by how much you'll increase student proactivity.

------
shubhamjain
I started programming before college and I was always on my own. I never had a
programmer friend until I started working. Although I was always able to get
things done but the code I wrote is something that should never go into
production. It took lots of mistakes, a lot of reading and shooting my own
foot to finally start writing worthy code after like 2-3 years. (Although,
there were code bases I worked with that were way worse!)

One thing I am curious about is, does a bootcamp make you proficient enough to
avoid those mistakes and contribute directly to the application? I am pretty
sure, it could have been a lot of help if someone could point out the mistakes
I am making in my code, but I am not sure if it would have been enough.

~~~
grayrest
> It took lots of mistakes, a lot of reading and shooting my own foot to
> finally start writing worthy code after like 2-3 years.

This is completely normal and I expect this out of any junior developer hire.
My brother-in-law went through a boot camp and picked up a job writing
unit/integration tests and he makes the same errors. Having to maintain your
own code and seeing the consequences of your decisions gets you over this
hurdle. I've seen the same for junior web devs coming out of agency work.

------
norea-armozel
My employer has been hiring a few people from some local coding bootcamps here
in the Minneapolis area. Most of them are very decent at programming, so I'm
not sure if they had any experience prior to their bootcamps or not, but I
can't say I have any complaints for those they've hired. Never had a fix any
of their code since they've been on the job either. Sometimes they need more
help since they didn't get the discrete structures or software architecture
knowledge that I did from my traditional CS degree. Honestly I think that
should be something you pick up on the job or have been taught in high school
(I'm biased of course).

------
wanderr
The problem I have with bootcampers is that the bootcamps greatly over promise
where they will be skill level wise when they finish, so expectations are way
beyond junior developer roles. They also usually come out of bootcamps with a
very narrow skillset; they can somewhat easily whip out a web app with a
simple backend and rudimentary data sets using whatever framework that
bootcamp focused on. Increase the complexity of the project even just a little
and they get stuck.

There are some diamonds in the rough and some bootcamps are better than others
but in general I'd much rather see someone who learned by hacking on things
alone than a college or bootcamp grad.

------
redschell
I think there's a great opportunity for bootcamps to help people like me. I'm
currently a pre-sales professional, and have been for a few years now. I'm
closing in on 28, and while I've been served very well by developing product
expertise, my background isn't in CompSci, and I've never actually formally
learned to code. If I want to be a good Solutions Architect down the line, and
I certainly do, this could be how I bridge the skill gap.

Sure, I could learn most of what I need to know on my own time, but this might
be a great way to get it done quickly in a batch and then move on to applying
it in a very practical way with my customers.

~~~
DougWebb
Among developers, there are unkind terms used to describe people who call
themselves "Solutions Architect" who have no development experience.
"Architect" itself is often used as a derogatory term.

In my experience, "Product Manager" is a much better term for someone who's
responsible for and guiding the development of a software product, but who
doesn't have the technical skills to do the development themselves. Architects
who are respected earn that title by working to gain lots of experience doing
development.

------
seattledev14
When you think about it as skills training vs. college I think it delivers on
it's promise.

In college, most people don't declare a major until their Sophomore or Junior
year, so the idea that competition is a 4 year degree is a bit misplaced. Code
Schools don't teach music appreciation, though there are a lot of musicians.
Bootcamps offer an intensive at 40+ hours a week vs. a two hour class two days
a week.

Can you deliver skills based training in 10 weeks? The placement rates would
say yes. Do some schools focus on placement while others focus on taking
tuition... That's true as well.

Look to find the school that has a placement track record.

------
ArkyBeagle
Programming isn't all one thing. You have to have what amounts to an
epistemology about the system you're working on right now or you're going to
break things.

A degree improves the chances of this. About half of what I do is _teach_
these things, on the job. Just being able to classify a systems error can be
daunting - is it a show stopper, or an ignore, or something in between?

I see bootcamps as being fine for getting people into seats, but the rest
takes a long time.

Finally, employability and what (IMO) CS/programming should be about are
diverging rapidly. This was not always so. This is starting to be a real
problem.

------
egonschiele
Hey, I wrote an algorithms book aimed at bootcampers! The epub is out today,
print book to follow: [http://amzn.com/1617292230](http://amzn.com/1617292230)

I'm hoping this will be an easy to read algorithms book for bootcamp grads.
Here's a sample chapter for anyone interested: [https://manning-
content.s3.amazonaws.com/download/f/a75f93d-...](https://manning-
content.s3.amazonaws.com/download/f/a75f93d-81e7-4c32-b1b8-7033df6bbf36/GrokkingAlgorithms_SampleChapter2.pdf)

~~~
m0ngr31
I bought the book on Amazon, is there a way to get the .epub before it ships?

~~~
egonschiele
You should get a download link from Manning in your email, let me know if you
dont!

~~~
m0ngr31
I haven't seen anything yet. Do I have to register the book after it ships?

~~~
egonschiele
What is your email? I'll have Manning check on the order.

------
Philipp__
They definitely are comparable. But I think going to both would be best thing
if there is time and strength. Just as I thought college gives you most of
theoretical stuff. If you are not used to working on your own, on side
projects and are taking college for granted, then you aren't off to a great
start. But if you are used to doing something besides college, whether it is
paid job or some tinkering projects you do in free time that you later put on
github, then need for bootcamp maybe isn't present. So hitting it somewhere in
the middle might be best...

------
AlexeyMK
I'm most curious to see what the stats are deeper into the funnel,
specifically:

\- At what rate do bootcamp grads vs new grads get offers (intro --> offer at
portfolio companies)?

\- Is the above metric significantly different for different classes of
companies (either segmented by company size, field, or "CRUD-eyness" of
company?

As a former hiring manager at a "much harder than CRUD" company, I remember
looking at some bootcampers and saying "I wish we could interview these
people, but the knowledge gap is just too significant".

------
kemiller2002
Boot camps have their place, but they are not a replacement for a traditional
CS degree. I have met good and bad programmers from both types of programs
(some from well respected colleges who I still wonder how they exactly
passed), but here's the thing, I don't care about practical skills. I care
about the person being able to think.

All those concepts that they teach in CS isn't about knowing the name of an
algorithm, it's about thinking abstractly. I honestly don't care if a recent
grad knows how to use IDE x or even much about source control. I can easily
teach them that. I can't easily teach a person how to understand pointers or
pass functions as parameters. I don't need someone who can write code; I need
someone who can look at a problem and realize that we can cut the amount of
work we have to do by understanding programming concepts at an abstract level.
It is very hard to achieve this in a 12 week course. Can some people do this?
Sure, they may have the background from a previous career that aids them in
this, but they are the exception and not the rule.

~~~
hornd
How do you suggest structuring an interview to find candidates who are able to
think abstractly? I don't think the current trivia-esque style interview
works.

~~~
arebop
I've worked for places with trivia-esque interviews and I agree it works
really badly. The only things worse was the "tell me about your greatest
weakness..." style favored by the MBAs.

I'm very happy with the people I work with now, who were mostly hired by an
audition-style interview: here's a problem that's simple to explain and not
simple to solve; solve it with a mix of whiteboard coding (required) and
(optionally) proofs, drawings, arguments...

------
seanhandley
We've hired a couple of junior developers lately that had no college
experience but significant online training and the experience so far has been
very positive.

Given how long it takes universities to update course materials, I'm not sure
they can compete with this kind of education programme. It's true that a lot
of the fundamental computer science is missing but with senior devs on the
scene, any gaps can be filled with an afternoon around a whiteboard.

------
AJRF
One thing I realised my final year of University is how much marketing
Universities do towards the job market.

They shop their students and curriculum around to employers all over the
county (some on an international level).

There is going to be a lot of inertia involved when it comes to hiring from
Universities that most Bootcamps don't even consider or spend time doing. I
don't think they give universities any cause for concern, and wont, for some
time.

------
swalsh
So basically, the guy who builds a rafter is a woodworker, the guy who nailed
the rafter to the structure is a woodworker and the guy who made the dining
room table is a woodworker. Each guy is important, but the skill level and
education time are different. Not every rough carpenter needs to have an
extensive education in fine carpentry to be successful in their area of
woodworking.

------
lyime
It's hard to measure hunger. My intuition is that it plays a big role when it
comes to finding success after going through a bootcamp.

------
andrewfromx
when I read "4 years" I don't remember doing nothing but code for all 4 years
during my CS degree. Part of the appeal must be that you focus on just coding
intensely for a short period of time. I'm thinking back on my 4 years at
pitt.edu and my god did I waste a lot of time. If you distill it all down,
maybe it does == 3 months at good camp.

------
vparikh
I would love it if Computer Science grads took a boot camp course - one that
covers css/html/javascript, any MVC framework, ntier patterns, ORM/SQL/NoSQL
training. Because from my experience, they apparently don't teach any of that
in comp-sci school.

~~~
grayrest
None of the things you mention are part of the Computer Science academic
discipline, which is what they teach. Computer Science undergrad generally
covers algorithms, data structures, parsing/compiling, operating systems,
discrete mathematics, and linear algebra.

------
baron816
All you need to know: some companies can use bootcampers very effectively,
some cannot. It all depends on what the company is doing. It's evident that
since many companies have found great success while employing bootcampers that
the skills they provide are useful.

------
kbuchanan
I think this supports the hypothesis that schooling (secondary, post
secondary, bootcamps, whatever) is first and foremost a sorting mechanism.
Bootcamps have discovered _one_ avenue for quickly assessing and sorting
students into a career they can succeed at.

------
data4lyfe
So triplebyte still can't infer anything about how well a software engineer
performs on their job from the metrics that they are gathering though if
they're basing performance on how well they do on their coding questions and
interviews?

------
brandonmenc
Bootcamps seem to encapsulate and accelerate the "I taught myself to program
in middle school and high school" experience for adults who missed that boat -
which is great.

The results make a lot more sense when you look at it that way.

------
personjerry
I think this misses a huge point: College is a huge factor in social
development; This is extremely important not only for developing software on a
team, but to developing a healthy lifestyle in and out of the workplace.

~~~
duaneb
College is far from a panacea for becoming accustomed to how an adult lives
and interacts with other adults. American society encourages taking on massive
debt, moving away from a support base, and tying social interaction to
practices that are often deeply unhealthy. It took me three years of attending
myself to realize my mistake—it nearly drove me to suicide. Dropping out and
actually trying to interact with real adults was what got me humming again.

------
puppers
Universities don't necessarily teach students programming. They teach them
Computer Science.

Bootcamps teach students programming, definitely not CS. I highly doubt they
could teach a student 4 years of CS material in 3 months.

------
Kinnard
I would love to see a break out for people who are neither bootcamp grads nor
college grads but who are completely self-taught, like me :)

Surely they've received some applicants in this category.

------
strathmeyer
Triplebyte figured out in twenty minutes that I didn't learn enough while
getting a CS degree at CMU in order to get a programming job so... good luck
to them.

------
emodendroket
This is neat, although as someone who attended neither (well, not for
computers anyway) I guess I can't do the solipsistic thing and look for
myself.

------
provemewrong
I find the whole premise a bit amusing, because in my country the prime target
audience for bootcamps are undergrad CS students or fresh graduates.

------
findjashua
I'm not sure why this is a surprise. Computer Science and Software Engineering
are different things, the only common factor being programming.

------
mmkx
Nice ad.

------
forgotAgain
I wonder how many of the engineers at this weeks Google I/O or the next Apple
Dev conference went to bootcamps.

~~~
TheCowboy
Probably not a lot.

One obvious reason is because they heavily recruit from elite universities.
They have the budget, size, and reputation to make that approach work.

Another reason is because the number of people who have gone through bootcamps
likely represent a tiny portion of the programmer labor force. So looking at
the percentage of Google engineers who attended bootcamps has to be compared
to the larger pool of applicants, otherwise it may not be measuring what
people think it means.

------
soneca
I believe not all bootcamps are equal.

Is there anywhere a curated list of good, recommended, worth your money
bootcamps?

------
genzoman
whether or not you come from a CS background, or a bootcamp background the
proof is in the pudding: can you answer the whiteboard questions? if so, you
pass, and nobody cares where you went/did not go to school.

if that's not enough, revise the whiteboard question.

------
andrewvc
What a load of crap.

What, they bred the capacity for abstract thought into you in college?

College attracts a generally higher quality applicant pool. You're mistaking
selection bias for an effect.

Let me tell you, I've interviewed programmers from all over. There are
boatloads of people with CS degrees with close to zero capacity for creative
thinking. There are also boatloads of CS grads who can barely code their way
out of a while loop (true story!).

I've spent my career (no CS degree!) working alongside CS grads. I've gone
further, faster, than most of them. I've had to deal with this kind of idiotic
commentary over and over again.

CS grads are always surprised that I never got a degree (oh, I never would
have guessed! you're different, its those OTHER people without degrees who are
idiots). Four years of school + the associated debt creates a big incentive to
believe that you got a square deal out of college.

~~~
dionidium
I think you might be attacking a straw man. I'm a strong believer in the
traditional CS path, but when I argue for it in the context of a 4-year
degree, I'm really just using shorthand to describe the most obvious way to
get there.

Will Hunting was right about a library card, but _many_ \-- I think most --
people require the discipline imposed on them by a university setting to
actually _do the work_. Obviously -- obviously! -- you can learn this stuff on
your own. But I doubt there are many self-taught programmers who've actually
spent hours drawing out trees and solving recurrences and so on. To the extent
that you've done that, then hooray for you!

~~~
danso
Definitely agree with you here...as a current faculty member, but someone who
has been largely self-taught in recent years, I have to keep reminding myself
that I myself needed the structure and artificial deadlines of homework and
finals to get into the groove, to get to the point where I could get a job in
which I learned more skills at a significantly faster rate (daily professional
deadlines tend to do that to you). Not everyone starts out as a self-learner.

Recently, a guy named Haseeb made some news for scoring a job worth $250K at
Airbnb even though he was an English major who was not even a year removed
from his bootcamp entry date. People were pissed but if you read the guy's
story, you'd see that he's not your regular bootcamper...he was a millionaire
as a teenager after teaching himself how to play poker...and this is how he
describes his bootcamp experience:

[http://haseebq.com/farewell-app-academy-hello-airbnb-part-
ii...](http://haseebq.com/farewell-app-academy-hello-airbnb-part-ii/)

> _Entering into App Academy, barely knowing the basics of Ruby, I came into
> the office and grinded every day, spending 80+ hour weeks just coding and
> studying. I’d come in at 9AM in the morning and leave around midnight, 7
> days a week, sleeping in a bunk bed in SOMA in a 200 square feet shared
> room._

How many students at even the best colleges can describe themselves as working
that hard on _anything_ (well, other than athletes)?

------
Ologn
> it still just seems hard to believe that 3 months can compete with a 4-year
> university degree.

Yes, it is very hard to believe. Impossible, actually.

> Bootcamps, are intense. Students complete 8 hours of work daily

In-class time is not the gauge for college. Students are supposed to spend at
least three hours studying for every hour spent in class. On top of that are
office hours with the professor, as well as contact with the TAs or study
labs.

If my courseload for a semester is Calculus 102, Theory of Computation,
Algorithms 201, Principles of Programming Languages, and Computer
Architecture, I don't see how it is different than a bootcamp because a
bootcamp is "more intense". I don't know how you can get more intense than
juggling these five topics.

> Traditional CS programmers spend significant amounts of time on concepts
> like NP-completeness and programming in Scheme...But it is not directly
> applicable to what most programmers do most of the time. Bootcamps are able
> to show outsized results by relentlessly focusing on practical skills...How
> to use an editor is something that a traditional CS degree program would
> never think of teaching.

Ugh.

I took a course in OS principles and then one in distributed systems. The
first course covered mutual exclusion somewhat, the second much more. I spent
quite a lot of time writing complex Java programs that handled mutual
exclusion well. Guess what I am doing today, years after that course? Writing
a complex Java program that uses mutual exclusion. I only took that second
course because it fit my schedule, but it has come in very handy over the
years.

Insofar as NP-completeness being "academic CS", I have unfortunately seen too
many bugs (
[https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3188](https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3188)
,
[https://sourceforge.net/p/jedit/bugs/3278](https://sourceforge.net/p/jedit/bugs/3278)
etc.) where people did not heed the polynomial growth of algorithms.

They're trying to dumb down what you can't dumb down.

The reality can be seen if you look around a SoMa startup and wonder where all
the grey-haired programmers went. Where did those programmers who were in
their mid-20s in the late 1990s, programming for the dot-com startups, in an
even more inflated market, go? Where are the grey-haired, balding programmers
in your company?

And this bootcamp is the answer. Just look at the real estate prices and you
know the market has heated up. Naval Ravikant turned down $600 million last
year because he said there weren't enough places to invest that. Despite talk
of perhaps some cooling since the beginning of the year, things are pretty
hot. So get some kid to go to a bootcamp for a few months. They can only get
their hands on one real programmer, but they can hire a few of these bootcamp
kids to do a few MVP's, or maybe code some features up, which the real
programmer will have to fix later.

What happens to these kids later, who have no foundation in what they're
doing, who have no deeper understanding of what they're doing?

> programming in Scheme...How to use an editor is something that a traditional
> CS degree program would never think of teaching.

That's because a traditional CS degree program teaches you to write your own
editor if need be. Stallman went to MIT and wrote Emacs, Bill Joy went to
Berkeley and wrote vi.

What the hell point is there to teaching an editor? I was using Eclipse with
Android plugins a year ago, now I'm using Android Studio. University is to
teach concepts which will exist decades from now, not the Javascript library
framework du jour.

The ones who will make out on this are the bootcamps, and the companies who
can use these kids when the market is hot and will dump them when their
usefulness is over. Just like what happened in 2000 (or 2008). You'll see what
your bootcamp and two years working at a failed startup amounts to when the
economy cools, job listings dry up and the posted ones say "BSCS required".
Being able to cut and paste from Stack Overflow and use frameworks other
people wrote and extended is not an educational foundation.

There are a lot of strawman arguments on the other side. Yes, the hardest
working, brightest bootcamp graduate is probably better than the laziest,
dullest person who managed to graduate from some third-rate college and get a
CS degree. And so forth. None of that detracts from the point though.

------
eastWestMath
This just in: web dev body shop is perfectly happy with bootcamp grads.

------
puppetmaster3
Also cheaper and faster, a good way to save tax resources maybe?

------
DaveParkerCF
Over the last three years at Code Fellows in Seattle (www.CodeFellows.com)
we've seen the market change a lot for students, hiring companies and
curriculum.

At launch, there was a lot of pent up demand. 400 people applied for a Ruby
class of 25. Most that took that first class had been self taught and in the
surveys said they had been hacking at projects for an average of 18 months.
Code school was a way to speed their path into a professional developer role
(note developer, not engineer).

The majority of students today already have a degree and are looking to switch
careers, average age of ~30. They are looking for skills to transition so in
that way, going back to college isn't an option unless it's for advanced
degree. The same is true for the veterans that are transitioning to the
workforce, they have been in a very structured environment and want to speed
through job ready training vs. four more years at college.

"Stack switchers" tend to be the top of the compensation range. If you have 10
years of .Net experience and want to switch to iOS. You'll earn top dollar. If
you don't have much real world experience you'll land an entry level
JavaScript job with that skill.

The needs of hiring companies has also shifted as the market has matured.
There are more "code school grads" in the market looking for jobs, so the
process of screening needs to be better, interviews need to be improved and
tools like triplebyte.com improve transparency of skills. Hiring Junior
developers has never been the preference for employers. Everyone would rather
hire both skill and experience. But when you're competing with larger
companies in a hot job market, you'll often take Junior talent that is a good
culture fit.

By culture fit I mean a combination of past education, work experience and new
skills. Combine that with work ethic and desire and you see why most of the
strong code schools have a high (90%+) placement rate.

Curriculum have changed as well. Code schools have to be teaching at the front
end of the hiring demand. Teaching an old tech stack where job postings are
heading down won't work. Review StackOverflows recent survey if you're curious
about stack preferences.

Code schools are also required to be licensed with each state where they do
business. That's a requirement not all schools follow. It's really about
consumer protection in that way so check with your state.

The industry is still immature and you're correct that there isn't any
reporting standards, e.g. are placements rates reported at 90 or 180 days past
graduation, etc? We're working with a number of companies like the Iron Yard
to standardize on reporting and moving to audited results over time. I hope
that someday we can apply the same placement rate standards to other academic
institutions. As a dad of college age kids that would be amazing (note the
White House tried that two years ago with a scorecard and the Universities
said no).

Regarding the debate of should everyone learn to code or no one learn to code?
It's a skill, it's not for everyone. It's a job that isn't for everyone. There
are a lot of online resources, information sessions and one day courses, start
with the low risk version and see if it's for you. With an average starting
salary of $71k in Seattle, the compensation appeal is a strong draw for people
outside of the tech industry. You may be drawn to the compensation just make
sure that you are also drawn to the work.

------
trich7
I would love to add a few comments. I do not know about the specific CS
program nor code bootcamp they are specifically are comparing about, but I can
speak to a general CS degree and the general bootcamp education. Full
disclosure, I am a founder of a coding bootcamp.

Nothing can replace a 4 yr degree with basis in theory and multiple subjects
but bootcamps offer people a way to jumpstart a lagging career or make a step
into a new one. Being hirable in this industry is saying something, and that
is what a great bootcamp should do.

That being said bootcamps are teaching current real world and career-like
solutions. Many argue that you don't actually get the real-world experience in
CS 4-year degrees due to behind the time curriculum (due to long approval
processes that coincides with accreditation) and long and sometimes boring
lectures without a lot of application. Bootcamps take a flipped classroom,
hands on, and immersive approach. Less lecture, more project-based learning.

Many developers fall under the 41.8% group on the recent StackOverflow study
of self-taught developers. A very large number of developers in the market are
finding their skills in very non-traditional ways. What many CS grads learn is
undoubtedly useful, I would never take anything away from that, but with
software expanding into so many different fields, blurring the lines between
who was traditionally an "engineer" and who isn't, and with the increasingly
rapid pace at which languages/frameworks/best practices are constantly
changing, there are a lot more opportunities to contribute in code than by
cooking up advanced algorithms with linked lists.

In fact, many of our partner employers were frustrated by the lack of
applicable, modern technology competency by the CS grads they were
interviewing. As only one piece of anecdotal evidence to this: we've had
various CS grads take our programs because (as they described) they only
learned languages that were not anywhere to be found in the companies they
were interviewing with.

Companies are starting to recognize that those who apply themselves in a
bootcamp are able to learn quickly and adapt to new technologies and projects
easily. Employers are looking for someone to get the job done with the skill
set that matches the technologies that they practice. Many employers don't
care if employees have acquired that skill set in a garage when they were 12
years old, at MIT, or at a coding bootcamp.

But, bootcamps aren't for everyone, you really have to apply yourself and
consume content quickly. But if those requirements are met, bootcamp attendees
really can excel! I know because at ours we have had so many success stories
just like the afore mentioned where a student truly applies themselves, lands
an amazing job, or starts a hot tech company and truly changes the trajectory
of their life. Plus it happens in a tenth of the time of a 4-year degree and
at a fraction of the cost ;)

Bootcamps offer a more personalized mentoring. Being able to see delegates,
resonate with students emotionally, pick up on subtle nuances of communication
and respond appropriately is the very essence of education. I believe
passionately that training and coaching are not about getting something from
one head to another, but are an intimate dance that transforms both parties.

I hope that helps a bit.

------
analognoise
Of course employers love bootcamps - they need business logic monkeys who lack
the fundamentals and therefore don't increase in value over time as much as
the people who actually put in the time with said fundamentals.

It's cheaper to have somebody who doesn't have a real education.

~~~
MaxfordAndSons
That's a remarkably cynical opinion. Why do you assume bootcamp grads learn
and become more valuable at a lesser rate than CS degree grads? You're also
making the assumption that bootcamp grads decided to forgo a CS degree in
favor of an easier route, which in my experience is rarely the case - by and
large bootcampers are there because they want to change careers, not as a way
to cheat the system without learning "the fundamentals".

~~~
changkx
Obviously this isnt every case but quiet frankly it's bullshit if somebody who
studied some "worthless" major like psychology or history then thinks they can
do a 10 week coding bootcamp and be on par with a CS grad.

If anything the TIME alone that a CS grad has to put in to graduate puts them
above coding bootcamps.

~~~
MaxfordAndSons
I don't think most people come out of bootcamps claiming they're "on par" with
CS grads, but rather that they're good enough to be given a chance for some
subset of programming jobs.

Also the time based argument strikes me as misleading - bootcamps are much
more intensive than university curriculums. University students aren't
studying 10-12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week every week; most Bootcamp
students are. That said, I recognize that the University student undoubtedly
takes in a greater volume of material, but the ratio is severely distorted by
referring to it as 4 years.

~~~
kin
Bootcamps certainly sell on the promise of an engineer salary. They preach it
and let it get into your head. At the end of the day you have bootcamp grads
feeling entitled to a six figure salary.

Personally, I work with some great bootcamp devs but as a 4 year college grad
I don't enjoy seeing the time and energy I spent undervalued that way.

------
douche
So would the best of both worlds be the combination? Four-year CS program for
the fundamentals and the deep knowledge, then the summer after graduating (or
really, senior spring, when the coasting sets in) a bootcamp-style training on
practical development?

I don't think that a traditional CS degree makes you code enough to become a
good software engineer. I certainly wouldn't have gotten enough practice
actually writing code if I just did my coursework and didn't dabble in other
things, like game development. Let alone other practical skills, like
debugging/profiling (barely touched upon), source control (likewise), testing
(completely ignored), project management/estimation (noop...).

I'm still amazed and horrified that I took a Data Structures and Algorithms
course that required nothing beyond proofs and a little pseudocode - not a
line of actual, working code. It could be tailor-made for really understanding
memory-management or TDD.

------
serge2k
> How to use an editor is something that a traditional CS degree program would
> never think of teaching.

Of course not. Why would they ever do that. It falls into the same bucket as
version control. It's useful, but go learn it yourself because it's not that
hard.

------
indatawetrust
> Note: We are only accepting applications from programmers.

significant.

