
The Coding Bootcamp That Wants To Be The CS Degree Of The Future - xiaoma
http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/02/hack-reactor-coding-bootcamp/
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suhailpatel
I don't think a programming bootcamp can ever be comparable to a Computer
Science degree.

I very recently graduated with a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science here in
the UK. Course length was three years and i'd say only the first year was
hands on coding most of the time to get everyone up to speed. The two years
that followed were all theoretical courses on fields in Computer Science
(Natural Language Processing, Computational Vision, Robotics, Artificial
Intelligence, Machine Learning etc.). Of course there was a coding requirement
for each module but it was a lot more of a theory and research oriented
approach. I feel i've gotten the most worth from my degree from this theory
side of things. The real worth from a computer science degree is having access
to cutting edge researchers and lecturers and having them teach you their
interests and generating discussions.

What these bootcamps look like are just the basics where they teach you how to
create a basic REST app in <insert hot language here>. Sure it'll get you a
job at a place where REST developers are necessary but it won't prepare you
for jobs beyond that whereas a proper computer science degree would. A
computer science degree has a very large scope of topics covered beyond just
programming.

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atjoslin
I think a heavy theory focus is very less likely to be useful. In my CS
degree, we learned some cool theory. Eg I learned what big O was, which these
guys probably won't. But I think for most people it's much more important to
learn to make things than to learn advanced theory that only a very select
group of programmers use (eg compiler writers). And I know how to learn any
theory I need to learn or any language I need to learn. my CS degree never
taught me to teach myself, though, I had to do that.

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barry-cotter
Hey Xiaoma,

how many of the people who were admitted to your cohort were kicked out before
graduation? This may be unfair to Hackreactor but it appears some of the dev
bootcamps would look less attractive if they included everyone who started
with them[0].

[0][http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/18/floor-
employment/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/18/floor-employment/)

Ctrf + F "A warning: some friends here mention that these companies’ claims of
“90+% job placement rate” are misleading, as halfway through they expel anyone
who they don’t think will get a job in order to keep their numbers up."

~~~
xiaoma
From what I know, my cohort had to worst attrition of any in history but no
students were kicked out. A total of two dropped. One of those two left in the
first or second week and the other had some medical issues, left and then
returned to join a later cohort.

As far as I know, students who have left have all left in the first half of
class and generally because they don't enjoy spending all their waking hours
coding and realize they don't want to pursue that career.

Even counting those students against HR (which is ridiculous since post
graduation employment stats never count dropouts), the hiring rate would be
over 90%. The salary figure (110k avg.) is also depressed by the fact that the
school itself hires the strongest students from many cohorts.

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vukmir
Isn't it a bit pretentious to call a bootcamp that will teach you how to build
modern web apps: "The CS Degree for the 21st Century."?

~~~
ng12
What do you mean? What is there to CS besides node.js and Ruby?

~~~
konstantintin
you forgot mongodb

~~~
vukmir
konstantintin, there in no need to be _MEAN_.

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malandrew
So we recently spoke with a bunch of Hack Reactor graduates and were very
impressed with several of them.

What I took away from the experience is that the Hack Reactor approach is
excellent for retraining within the industry. Several of the graduates were
not new programmers, but had instead been programming largely in an entirely
different part of the industry and had attended Hack Reactor to get up to
speed in the JavaScript and web technologies community.

I personally think it would be awesome to be able to leave not only a job but
an entire section of the industry and go explore some completely different
part of the industry via a highly specialized bootcamp. I would love to take
full stack web programming skills and spend 3-6 months in an accelerated
program to get in depth in a specific area that is interesting today and
likely to be very in demand for the foreseeable future like machine learning,
cryptography or distributed systems.

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cliveowen
Programming != CS

~~~
SiVal
This is very true, but what most employers want is programmers, not computer
scientists. In the same way people used to have to buy the whole album full of
songs to get the one song they really wanted, employers are often forced to
buy CS grads to get people who could program.

Just as a la carte songs eventually became available, significantly reducing
but not eliminating demand for entire albums, reliable programming
certification could eventually reduce but not eliminate demand for CS degrees.

~~~
cliveowen
I highly doubt you could call yourself a programmer if you don't have the
basic knowledge of induction proof, recursion, dynamic programming and greedy
algorithms. If you write code for a program with a running time of O(2^n) do
you know (after a 12-week course) how to leverage memoization to bring it down
to polynomial time? Do you even know _what_ polynomial time means?

~~~
konstantintin
what % of developers regularly make use of such knowledge? what prevents non-
cs graduates from opening a book on algorithms?

~~~
cliveowen
Everyone serious enough about his work to care about efficiency. And no one
prevents a self-taught programmer to learn algorithms techniques (or anything
at all, really) but the chance of one doing so are really low, especially
considering that people opting for a 12-week course instead of a 4+ years-long
route aren't the kind you would think of as particularly dedicated to
something.

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duiker101
> Hack Reactor claims that 100 percent of its graduates are now employed as
> software engineers, with an average salary in the six figures

Oh come on!

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porter
Hard to be a decent software engineer without learning discrete math, proofs,
algorithms & data structures. These boot camps unfortunately don't teach these
topics with any depth. They might be a good fit depending on your goals, but I
am skeptical that they are a replacement for a traditional CS degree.

~~~
xiaoma
I admit I had some edge due to being a math prodigy long, long ago, but HR
_did_ teach us data structures and algorithms. We re-implimented underscore
from scratch, we built our own hash tables, did recursive descent, etc...

While I won't claim to have been taught _everything_ about data structures, I
made it through 5 hour in person "implement a prefix tree on a
whiteboard"-style SV tech company interviews. I have also been able to jump
into grad-level CS courses afterwards.

I feel that it was a way better investment for me than spending three months
or even three years working on a CS degree would have been. In many ways it
reminds me of the difference between studying Japanese at a university vs
learning Chinese at an intense language school in Taiwan. Intensity brings
outsized returns.

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pymatty
Luckily there are a lot more jobs for coders than for computer scientists.
Thank you computer scientists for making that possible.

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felix
Is hiring so insane out west that companies are hiring people with 12 weeks of
vocational experience 6 figures?

