
Why students are throwing tons of money at a program that won't give degrees - wallflower
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/03/17/why-students-are-throwing-tons-of-money-at-a-program-that-wont-give-them-a-college-degree/
======
cm2187
To be honest 95% of large corporate software development doesn't require a
computer science degree. They are usually one form of another of CRUD
application. The novelty is only that they need to support more than one
platform or be web based. It's not exactly rocket science. And even scaling
problems are basically common sense, not advanced maths.

To me this lack of training is more concerning from a quality point of view,
and in software who says quality says security. But I am not convinced a
formal computer science education teaches coding best practices either (but
not having done one myself it is hard to judge).

~~~
ethanbond
You're kind of off-base. A formal computer science education doesn't really
teach _coding_ at all. You'll learn how to write code (hopefully) as a
corollary to learning how computation works. At least in my program, there
isn't any single course that's oriented around the act of writing code.

~~~
tptacek
That may be true but it's not responsive to his real point, which is that you
don't need to understand computation to build a typical line-of-business
application.

Companies used to build LOB apps in Microsoft Access, and nobody believed you
needed a degree to use Access (plenty of business people figured it out for
themselves, just like Excel). Now nobody uses Access anymore, but the web
frameworks that replaced it aren't that much harder to use, and don't really
involve a lot of complexity theory or parser generators.

~~~
gaius
In some ways understanding computation actually undermines you.

Here's a true story, a few years ago I was a DBA on a large-ish Oracle
database (~50T) supporting many users. One guy would run his report, and it
would time out (in his client software, Business Objects I think). So he would
run it again and it would time out. But on the 4th or 5th attempt, it would
work! Why was this? I was curious enough to investigate and what was happening
was he was gradually getting more and more of his working set into the cache,
and eventually he had enough in-memory that his query could complete in time.
Let me tell you for sure, that guy did not have _any_ mental model of
computation that led him to discover this. He just tried it and it worked.
Would a guy with a classic CS education have done this?

~~~
paulryanrogers
While his solution worked for him, it also revealed a flaw that could've been
a deal breaker if sales were demoing the system. Of course what constitutes a
significant problem is often up to a nontechnical department.

~~~
toomuchtodo
If sales was demoing it, they would've pre-warmed the cache by running the
report until it no longer fails before the demo.

Not that I've seen sales people do such activities before...

------
lloyd-christmas
Maybe I'm reading too much into these articles, but it seems like people think
that the individuals taking these bootcamps are all ex-baristas. I took one,
and most people had several years of high-professional work experience, many
of whom had undergraduate degrees in STEM. My current boss is our lead
architect with more than 20 years of programming experience. He has an
undergraduate degree in neuroscience. My father is a physician/oncology
researcher. He has an undergraduate degree in physics. Skills are
transferable, especially within the entire STEM bubble.

> “You emerge from a bootcamp fit to do an oil change, but not design a car,”

You emerge from an undergraduate degree with a permission slip to join the
professional world. Undergraduate CS degrees aren't 5 year engineering
programs. They are just your average bachelors like the rest of them. Your
major is a demonstration of what you were interested in during college, not
whether or not you're capable of being a a contributing member of an industry.
The vast majority of the fundamental career knowledge is learned within your
first two years. A couple years into my career in finance, my coworkers with
English Literature degrees were impossible to differentiate from those with
Finance degrees (those that made it that far). The reason isn't because the
Finance major was entitled or less capable. It's because the two were
_equally_ capable, and the general industry knowledge plateau comes quickly
before you start working towards some specialization.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"Undergraduate CS degrees aren't 5 year engineering programs."

It depends on where you go, really. Undergraduate "CS" programs are all over
the place, ranging from programs that might be better called "IT", to ones
that are basically just specialized math degree. A good marker, IMO, is
whether the program requires a compilers course that actually requires that
the student implement a compiler. Of course, I would say that, of course,
since mine did. :-)

It also required enough math that I could've gotten a dual degree in math by
taking (IIRC) two more courses. I was in calculus-based physics and ODE right
there with the engineers, too. Where the programs diverged was when they
started taking statics and dynamics (after physics), and I started taking
compilers, theory of computation, and stuff of that nature.

~~~
lloyd-christmas
> It also required enough math that I could've gotten a dual degree in math by
> taking (IIRC) two more courses

That's my point. I did a double major in Math/Econ with a minor in Applied
Statistics. I could have switched 2 courses away from my Econ major and
instead received a minor in CS. There are countless boot-campers that just
didn't take enough 300 level courses to put it on their resume. Looking back
on my degree and my career so far, I can't say I've used the phrase
"generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity" in a context other
than a joke or in conversations exactly like this. That's from Stats-3xx _time
series analysis_. I worked as an _equities trader_ for the first half of my
career before switching to programming. It's harder to get more time-series
analytical than that. Who uses that phrase? The PhD econo-quants and risk
managers who spent a bit more time studying it than the 2 weeks I went over it
in an alcohol filled second semester of my senior year.

I'm simply saying, undergraduate degrees aren't much more than a rubber stamp.
Sure, you may have learned more about data structures than I did. We both
probably took some form or another of graph theory, linear algebra, algorithm
design, etc. What you learned in a semester of data structures, I'm sure I
learned 95% of it in a year on the job. Similarly, if you decided to go into
finance, I'm sure you could pick up all the meaningful parts of macroeconomics
in a year. Because that information is USEFUL in the day-to-day. If you
decided to apply to a job as an equities trader, you wouldn't be dismissed
because you don't know how to implement a model you will never use.*

* unless, of course, you decide to work towards being a quant. In which case, you'll probably know more about it than I do in 2 weeks. * poof *, there goes the value of my undergraduate degree.

------
aczerepinski
I went to a bootcamp, and I think people are way too fixated on the three
month thing. You have to write code to get accepted to a decent school, so the
students on day 1 are definitely not "straight out of Starbucks." For me it
was 2-3 months of full-time study while I applied and got the school lined up
(including pre-curriculum while I waited for my cohort to start).

The program itself was three months of intense 50-60 hour weeks. Then I
continued studying full time for a month until I got a job. So by the time I
showed up to work, I had put in ~7 months of full time coding.

Since then, I've still been going hard, as have most of my classmates. I've
been working in two languages that I didn't learn at school, and using a third
one in my side projects. Nine months removed from school, I still spend a lot
of my free time studying whatever looks interesting to me at
frontendmasters/egghead/pluralsight. I read a lot about programming, and
listen to 5-10 podcasts each week on my commute. At some point the three
months I spent at a bootcamp or the four years somebody else spent in a CS
program are irrelevant. How passionate are you, and how hard are you willing
to work?

~~~
nedwin
As with all things, YMMV.

Keen to hear if you think you're an average example of your cohort or in the
top x%.

~~~
d2xdy2
I recently finished out a stint at General Assembly's Web Development course
in Atlanta. I'm definitely not an average example of my cohort, though I would
like to say that prior experience I brought in really drove up the "average"
for many of my peers.

Of a class size of 17 people, many of us had jobs lined up before we finished
while several were / are still taking time to "get ready"; There was only one
who sort of remained clueless during the cohort, but in spite of that they
have worked very hard to keep up in class.

The coding required to get into GA was minimal, and the interview beforehand
was not very difficult-- the person I mentioned who was generally clueless
actually blew through the admissions process (better than I did, in fact).

I'm not sure where it's appropriate to set that barrier to entry, especially
given that most of the early material caters to someone with very limited
knowledge-- it would have been interesting to see a course targeted at someone
who already has a foundation in basic web technologies.

Living in Atlanta, I've had the opportunity to speak with grads of many other
bootcamps both in Atlanta and on the West coast. The biggest difference I
really notice is between people who were able/willing to work those 60/70 hour
weeks to gain as much as possible and those who couldn't/wouldn't.

------
yomly
This will always be a divisive subject and my opinion will likely be equally
divisive.

For the record, I took a bootcamp over doing a master's in CS: the clincher
for such a decision came when an engineer friend at a tech unicorn said he'd
take a smart bootcamper over a regular CS grad on the basis that from hiring
experiences:

\- you don't use most of the stuff you learn from CS at work (when was the
last time you proved root two was irrational, or used red-black trees on the
job?)

\- a bootcamper will write cleaner code and is less likely to have some of the
stereotypical traits engineers are prone to having (e.g. takes feedback
badly/doesn't communicate well/takes feedback badly) he attributes this to the
more diverse pool of people boot camps attract

To be frank, I think the aversion to bootcampers primarily stems from
individuals' need to validate their own life choices thinking things like "I
studied CS for four years to become a Software Engineer so how could someone
come close to playing catch up in 3 months!?"

But really this style of thought is flawed - people underestimate the
fundamental value of doing a degree, which teaches you way more than just
knowledge. Think how much less developed you were intellectually coming out of
high school than post college.

With that said, it's also probably true that there are plenty of bootcamp
graduates out there with an inflated sense of worth and companies that have
hired/rejected poor bootcampers and now have a set opinion about bootcamps.

To these people it's worth noting that bootcamps have only been around for a
couple of years, and as is the case in any good startups, the product improves
as the companies grow and mature and have time to iteratively improve it.

Graduates from a bootcamp today are probably of appreciably higher quality
than they were back then.

~~~
mitchty
> \- you don't use most of the stuff you learn from CS at work (when was the
> last time you proved root two was irrational, or used red-black trees on the
> job?)

Used them yesterday in fact. Then again, using red black trees and knowing
when you need to isn't uncommon in kernel programming. I'd couch this more:
you generally don't need to care about using red-black trees. Until you do
need them that is. The key is knowing and realizing when that time has come.

Just thought I'd put my $0.02 in on that one as it is both my opinion and
experience.

~~~
dagamer34
It takes a really special person who hasn't gone through a CS education to be
aware that when faced with a problem that have an obvious solution, they
realize that there are things they don't know and either seek out resources to
learn them or identify people that can ask for help beyond a simple "I'm
stuck, solve this for me!" response.

And that's why of you're a good software engineer, your job is secure. Because
most people definitely aren't that and just end up making a real mess of
things.

~~~
BWStearns
I think after a certain amount of time writing code you get a feel for that
though, even without a CS degree. Anyone who's opened a terminal knows they
don't know everything, but it takes a few iterations of shittily reinventing
the wheel before you internalize it. After that things start to smell(?) like
someone solved them and then it's a matter of finding the right chapter in a
book or set of google search terms.

------
jypepin
So... I'm biased because I did a bootcamp.

I think the comparison of bootcamp vs 4years CS degree is not very apple to
apple, because well, you compare on 1 side people who almost "discovered"
programming 3 months earlier to people who have been studying it for 4 years +
most of the time have had internships etc.

What I can say tho, is that, for junior positions (I guess one of the points
of the article) those bootcampers can be 1. very good and productive, and
because of the nature of the bootcamps, 2. usually very motivated and eager to
learn, get feedback etc.

So if you are willing (and have resources) for some extra mentoring, bootcamps
can be a very good additional pool for hiring (since hiring engineers is very
hard is most places) and can be very good long term for your company.

I joined a YC startup after my bootcamp and continued to work my ass off there
for a year (during work, and after work to continue to learn CS concepts etc.)
and I think I can say I was successful there. I had good mentoring despite our
size (3-4 engineers at most) but I eventually became a good asset to the
company.

After 1 years, the company was sold and I needed to find a new job. I did well
on multiple interviews, both startups and big cos (facebook and co) and am now
very successful at a top startup in the bay.

You just need to expect what is expectable - I remember when I did my
bootcamp, I was never promised to get a CS degree in 3 months - I was promised
to learn the basics I would need to 1. be hirable at a junior level and 2.
learn how to learn, to be able to figure things myself and continue growing.
That's what I got from it.

I think everything's the same - if you are motivated and driven to be
successful, you'll be successful, if not, cruising through both a CS degree or
a bootcamp won't do it. I've interviewed hundreds of people, from bootcamps,
new grads, masters, phds, experienced people, and people from each background
have done from bad to great.

~~~
laredo
Couldn't you have done it using Internet, books, video tutorials, etc.?

~~~
leesalminen
I did, as I'm sure many here have as well. However, not everybody has that
kind of self motivitation.

Some people need that $30k expenditure to keep their wandering minds in check
when the going gets tough at the beginning.

I remember my first paid experience coding...was reading/learning 6+ hours
every day on top of the project itself.

------
tracker1
Software development is not the same as Computer Science... Even then, it's a
small part of STEM, and beyond that, how much shortage is there, really? In
the end, I've seen far better results from self-starters that _try_ than
graduates with C.S. degrees that don't.

I think that there is a lot of arrogance in the software industry, and it
tends to do far more harm than good. It bubbles certain mindsets and pushes
out others. In the end, it does little for what's being worked on, and when
good enough solutions that work are displaced by "best" solutions that come
out months/years late and/or outright fail.

In the end, you can get a _LONG_ way with pragmatic choices... you can go even
further, with consistently simpler ones. The more complex something is, the
more likely it is to fail when you need it to grow the most. Time and time
again, people just don't see this. I've been guilty of it myself.

You don't need a C.S. degree, or a bootcamp, and honestly, if you do, you're
probably not enough of a self starter to actually be productive, help and work
with a team checking your ego at the door anyway. I'm guilty of this myself at
times. But the debate is pretty silly. Nobody should go six figures into debt
for a job that starts out at less than six figures. And nobody should expect
to master anything in much less than a couple years.

What often bugs me more than anything is institutional resistance to anything
new.

Okay, going to sign off this messy rant... I just find the whole debate the
article makes irritating, as it's the people more than the process that
determine success.

~~~
npx
I like to think that software can actually be perfect, and that "good enough"
is the mortal enemy of excellent. I agree regarding arrogance, though... I
think it's insane to imagine that the insertion sort (for example) is somehow
more innovative than the plane, train, automobile, or combine.

I think that you can actually get very far in terms of educating yourself with
the materials and tools that are now publicly available. I'm currently
spending a lot of time doing this, so I suppose it's an axiom that I've
accepted.

[https://github.com/hypoalex/machine_learning/blob/61d6729489...](https://github.com/hypoalex/machine_learning/blob/61d6729489cfa9d68bcd585bae692627304e0f1d/classes/MIT/18.01/lectures/lecture_1.ipynb)

For instance, I personally find Jupyter Notebooks many times more useful than
traditional course notes. They're executable, they can be revisited and
expanded upon, and they're actually used commercially... so you're killing
many birds with one stone. It would be a very different world if the first
thing you learned in high school was version control and Python, but it might
actually be one worth living in.

~~~
tracker1
Perfect is entirely subjective though... One software usage that I usually
rally against is DI/IoC usage... most of the time it only adds indirection and
complexity that hinder the development of an application and rarely help it.
Time and again I see it used in conditions where there aren't multiple
implementations of interfaces, and there isn't any testing at all. So it
serves no purpose in these contexts, but is argued as "better".

That's just one piece, but one I've consistently come up against. There's also
the more functional vs. classical (class oriented) approaches.

In any case you can come up with "perfect" is entirely subjective... and if it
takes significantly longer, it's rarely the better option.. so long as every
piece is modular enough that it can be ripped out, rewritten or replaced
easily, and with that mindset in play... then it isn't even good enough.

------
Futurebot
"He’s skeptical of bootcamper applicants and is more inclined to hire four-
year CS degree graduates, especially for the most in-demand positions: “full
stack” developers who possess a range of coding skills. He compares the
skillsets of bootcampers to performing auto repair on a car, versus the kind
of large-scale, architectural skills of your standard CS degree holder, who
can do everything from small repairs to making deep structural changes. “You
emerge from a bootcamp fit to do an oil change, but not design a car,” he
said."

If employers prefer actual CS degrees, they should be pushing to make
obtaining said degrees not require people to go into massive amounts of debt.
The "gold rush" might be part of the issue here, but the cost of bootcamp
certs vs degrees is not insignificant, as the article states.

~~~
pjmlp
Which mirrors, as far as I understand, the current state of affairs at US
universities.

In many countries degrees are state sponsored and you don't need to debt
yourself for life just to get a CS degree.

------
danso
The best bootcamp curriculums, on paper, offer skill sets that college
computer science/engineering schools would envy. I'm teaching some coding to
university students now, some of who've gone through a couple quarters of the
CS track, and am sometimes surprised when they have trouble with file I/O
(opening text files, deserializing their contents) or lack experience with
doing things like interacting with web service APIs or creating and running
code outside of an IDE (if the CS track does the Java/C/C++ track). I'd be
more shocked if that weren't _my_ experience as a computer engineering
graduate (though web APIs and products like Github and Sublime Text were not
around in my day)...I don't ever remember running code outside of Eclipse or
Microsoft Studio...when I worked professionally, an intern had to show me how
to use version control.

That said, 10-12 weeks of "intensive" coding is only as effective as what
students bring to it. If you have a science background, and have less
instinctive shock at dealing with "symbols", rigor in language, and scientific
hypothesis (or rather, knowing how to recognize the difference between a
system error and and error in your expectations)...you'll undoubtedly benefit
from being thrown into an intense course of learning devops and software
engineering best practices. If not? You may be able to know and memorize the
steps of complicated processes...e.g. how to deploy a Rails app from scratch
onto a production server...but you might be likely to only adopt the skillset
described in the article as "the same skillset that can be easily outsourced
or offshored."

10-12 weeks is a short time to learn the ropes and get all the moving pieces
together...but it is almost certainly too short of time to build the right
_mindset_ \-- the kind that can properly _debug_. I've noticed that top-tier
bootcamps that promise 90% to 100% rates of employment at $80K+ also have
stringent acceptance rates, such that the vast majority of students they're
working with are STEM graduates looking to get into dev. The outcome is
probably significantly different for non-STEM students looking to do the same.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
That's my experience with a bootcamp as well. I had the right mindset from
attending an engineering school, but no degree / not living in the SF Bay Area
/ not having the structure and organization to put myself out there.

The faculty was also concerned about succeeding through the acceptance filters
- if they couldn't make less prepared students successful, then expanding in
order to accept more students is a _really_ poor choice.

------
bcg1
Bootcamps could be useful if students just use them to get their foot in the
door at a truly entry level job that is basically a learning experience.

If you pay cash for a bootcamp and then work for $30,000 a year for 4 years on
real projects, you would be a much more attractive job candidate than many
people with an undergraduate CS degree, and you might even have some savings
instead of massive debt.

The problem with "bootcamps" seems to be that some people think that they can
short circuit the learning/experience process, which is just not possible. If
willing to keep learning after the initial program, seems like it could be a
good option.

------
rbkarbka
I attended a bootcamp and was fairly unimpressed by the curriculum and general
quality of teaching. The absolute biggest advantage of a bootcamp was that it
held my feet to the fire. For the most successful students, it was pretty
clear that the bootcamp was (pedagogically at least) not responsible for their
success, rather mostly providing a space and opportunity to the kind of group
work that is difficult to do alone.

At the same time, people are very arrogant about their CS degrees. I was very
successful as a student in a non-technical field and it's honestly amusing
that a student in a giant CS department at a random public university would
think that they have a competitive advantage against someone like me in the
workplace simply because they have a technical degree. CS majors don't have a
monopoly on smarts and 95% of enterprise software development is honestly not
rocket science.

------
gearoidoc
The content of programming boot camps will eventually be moved to high school
curriculums (I'm not sure if they currently do this in North America or not).

This will be a good thing. Students who were somewhat interested in
programming (but not so much after delving into it) will have picked up some
basic skills. Those who were very much interested in it will have to take less
of a 'leap of faith' when it comes to a third level course.

------
pink_dinner
It's like anything in life. You have enthusiastic people that have this vision
in their head about becoming a software developer and joining a startup.

When the realities hit and they realize that some of it is mentally taxing and
boring work, they give up and quit.

I've been writing software for 20 years. I haven't gotten bored yet.

In any boring task, I can always learn something new that's interesting.

------
88e282102ae2e5b
What's with the assumption that you can only learn fundamental computer
science in a classroom? If you go through a bootcamp and get a real job but
never grow, that's not because you never got a CS degree, it's because you
never took advantage of the Internet and a workplace full of practical
problems and people who know more than you.

------
loeg
It seems like something in the middle would be a good idea. Low cost, 2 year
program, sufficient to cover some theory — but CS only, unlike community
college associate degrees today. Do we really need to pay $10,000-30,000/year
for gen. ed.?

~~~
ntkachov
I see little difference between this and a community college degree. Community
college CS associates can teach you everything you need to keep yourself up to
date on basic algorithms and enough theory to get you ready for industry. It
has the added benefit of also transitioning into a 4yr degree if you need it.
All for about $20k. Some of the best engineers I know took 2 years at CC and
then moved to a 4 year degree.

~~~
ajford
It really depends on the quality of the CC and it's faculty. I was a Physics
major attending a branch university that merged with the local community
college. The Phys dept was fantastic, though a single focus. The CS department
was a joke.

I learned more about software on my own and by working with some of the
physicists who specialized in data analysis that I did in any of my CS
classes. Many of the CS junior/senior level CS students couldn't do anything
real-world. Couldn't hand-optimize code. They also couldn't get anywhere
without a fancy IDE that did everything for them.

~~~
ajford
The faculty wasn't very good. Some of them may have been OK at implementing
the things they taught, but most of them seemed to follow the "if you can't
do, teach" philosophy.

Had an argument with one of the faculty members about the viability of Python
as a useful language. They dismissed it as anything more useful than a
scripting language, and likened it to an uppity BASH substitute. I argued that
when used properly, it is a very dynamic language with many uses.

All in all, the faculty was all over the board. There was a particular faculty
member who was fairly skilled with machine learning and NLP. Until he went on
vacation, joined a cult, wiped the NLP research server, and went around campus
spouting how the planets were going to align the following December and life
as we know it would end.

------
49531
As a former instructor at a bootcamp, there are some massive pros to the
bootcamp model, but low quality programs will typically produce low quality
producers.

Our program spent a considerable amount of time setting career expectations
and preparing for interviews. High performing students would regularly find
themselves landing mid-level software engineering jobs based on their
interview performance, but we would try to maintain the expectation that an
internship or a Jr dev position was really great. We saw some of our
competitors get torn apart by past students who's expectations were higher
than the reality of being a bootcamp grad. You can't tell someone they're
going to make 100k/yr after 12 weeks of learning to code. People believe you,
buy into your bullshit, and get burned.

With so many bootcamps popping up, consumers have a lot of resources and
choices to find a good program. Low quality programs are slowly being edged
out by the market. It's becoming more competitive, which I think is good.

Bootcamps aren't a silver bullet, but they help a lot of people get on a
trajectory of a successful engineering career.

They also help with diversity, a lot of folks can't afford to get a CS degree,
whether it's because they have an aversion to crippling debt, or they're a
single mother who has to work full-time, or they just don't thrive in a
university-style environment. I know a lot of really unique engineers that
wouldn't have been able to have the careers they do without a bootcamp.

------
carlosnunez
I think a bootcamp is pretty useful for someone who has no experience in
development and wants to obtain it in a relatively short time frame.

Teachers come to mind here. Many of them encounter a LOT of difficulty when
they try to find jobs outside of education. Many, many companies completely
discount their experience regardless of the length of time they've spent in
the profession. This essentially means that teachers who've been in the system
for a while and are becoming disillusioned with it are almost forced to
restart their career; this is very painful for those that have many, many
years in the game.

A bootcamp is a great way of getting the experience needed to restart their
career into a well-paying industry (for now). Yeah, they don't learn Big O or
discrete math, but they do learn how to write an app that will make their
founders a LOT of money if it sells, and that's worth a lot.

BTW: A lot of high-falutin places (like Jane Street, which I worked at a few
years ago) care much more about your experience and what you've done than
where you came from (at least on the development side of the house, which pays
handsomely compared to market; the trading side still heavily recruits from
the Ivies). I remember them hiring a few Hacker School type devs, and if they
survived our interview process, that means they HAD to be good.

------
BWStearns
> They don’t have the fundamentals to pick up a new set of tools and
> technologies. Will they be bootcamping every 3 years?

Programming professionally requires constant learning even when your stack
remains roughly the same. No one survives professionally on the strength of
memorized rails g commands, and even if one did you'd have to be insane to
want to.

I'm sure some people muddle through bootcamps who really don't have the desire
or ability to always be learning, but, at least at quality schools, they're in
the minority.

(Disclosure, I'm a bootcamp product who had previously been learning on my
own)

------
methehack
A tiny bit off topic, but I keep thinking there should be a "Software
Development" degree separate from a "Computer Science" degree. Less (but some)
math, more process and communication. Lots of code.

Bootstrap programs seem great as an accelerator for folks who are inclined to
otherwise be self-taught (of which there are lots). Others would make great
developers, want a little more time or standard academic environment, but
don't want all the math.

~~~
_delirium
A lot of schools have a Software Engineering degree, which is more development
and process oriented. Not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, but
it's one alternative to a CS degree.

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hugh4life
I went to a top 5 CS university and liked what I received(and it wasn't too
expensive with instate tuition), but I honestly think my time would have been
better spent with something like Pluralsight(& similar) + newsgroup of fellow
learners moderated by mentors + Github.

I don't like the idea of boot camps unless there's some follow through but I
think it's very important for there to be good alternatives to the 4-year CS
degree path.

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mrdrozdov
Why wouldn't we want to train people to do the jobs that are being outsourced?
Especially when the jobs that are being outsourced can be critical to a
business and provide valuable experience to the workers that take them on?
Gigs that I've heard are being commonly outsourced: machine learning (usually
NLP), android development, QA (typically related to frontend)

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acomjean
This isn't entirely new. When I graduated in the mid nineties a lot of friends
that took non technical degrees (history, english, psychology) did temp work
and got "certificate" at a university which helped them secure work. They
ended up doing pretty well. Of course the tech economy was just starting to
take off back then....

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LoSboccacc
This problem is more than a decade old
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html)
and doesn't seems the quality of those bootcamp improved meanwhile.

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analognoise
I'd hire an enthusiastic person with an associate's degree in computer science
before I hired someone from a coding bootcamp. Why not just get the AS?

