
California Cracks Down on Hacker Boot Camps - ahmadss
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/01/california-hacker-bootcamps
======
Camillo
> They’re usually staffed by professional coders, not licensed teachers. Many
> of the teachers are volunteers — even though the schools are usually private
> companies, not non-profit organizations. And many schools are backed by
> investments from big-name Silicon Valley venture capital firms.

I was very surprised to read this. Volunteering can be appropriate if you're
helping the less fortunate, or if you're sharing with your peers; but if you
volunteer for a for-profit organization, you're devaluing your own skills
while enriching those who are already rich. It's not just self-damaging, but
socially regressive too.

~~~
mquander
The difference between running your own tutoring business and volunteering for
a hacker school is that N dollars go into the school's pocket, instead of
yours. Why would society care about that difference?

~~~
maaku
Because it becomes harder for potential teachers/tutors to compete with free?

~~~
snitko
There must be a reason why people volunteer to do something. People wouldn't
volunteer unless they thought it's good for them too. If it makes harder for
someone to compete - great. Compete better.

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mschuster91
> He says the only exemptions are for courses than cost less than $2,500,
> programs affiliated with accredited schools, and certain religious education
> programs.

Well then, problem solved: turn the buildings into Pastafarian temples and the
act of coding into religious service - should be more or less the same as
Scientology is doing already.

~~~
archgoon
> turn the buildings into Pastafarian temples and the act of coding into
> religious service

I'd recommend against embracing Pastafarianism for this. The last thing that
the industry needs is legions of spaghetti coders.

~~~
zigger
Hahaha! Brilliant.

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pavs
Anyone actually successfully attended this boot camps and got a job offer for
their coding skills? Specially for someone who never had any prior coding
knowledge.

I don't know why but this just smells like scam to me.

Why would a company hire you, who just finished a boot camp, as opposed to
someone who have years of coding experience and knowledge?

~~~
fremn
I just completed a dev camp in november and the answer is yes. 80% of my class
had positions as devs within two months of finishing. Our best student (who
had taught himself a little code before) was hired within a week.

Not saying all the schools are good. (some look slightly sketchy to me)

"Why would a company hire you, who just finished a boot camp, as opposed to
someone who have years of coding experience and knowledge?"

An odd premise, its like asking why a company would hire someone straight out
of college.

Companies hire from devcamps because the good ones are taught by people who
work in the industry and know what they would want a colleague to know,
furthermore they ask the potential employers what they are looking for and
teach that in a hands-on environment.

~~~
pavs
A person who came straight out of college is likely to have at-least 2-4 years
worth of programming experience as opposed to someone who attended a bootcamp
for a few months.

I am still not convinced that this is anything more than a scam. Unless you
are exceptionally brilliant at learning new language, no matter how much you
push yourself, you will be barely good enough to even know the rudimentary
concept of programming in 2-3 months.

To me the best way to learning programming is to make fuckton worth of crude
programs and then make insanely silly and sometimes good mistakes in the
process and then try to figure out how to fix those mistakes by yourself (or
at least with some help).

2-3 months is barely enough time to understand _WELL_ rudimentary concepts of
programming let alone learn from your mistakes.

If you already have prior programming knowledge and know at least one
programming language, joining this camp is silly and it doesn't prove anything
one way or another. If you already know one programming language, learning a
new language should be fairly easier than for someone who have never
programmed in his life.

~~~
jkimmel
>If you already have prior programming knowledge and know at least one
programming language, joining this camp is silly

As someone in this group, I'd have to disagree with you.

I work in a life sci research setting, and am usually the only person with
_any_ programming knowledge or experience whatsoever. In research, "it works,"
is generally the only quality control placed on bespoke software. I'm capable
of writing working programs to perform simple tasks & do on a regular basis,
but I could not begin to write a large web application using best industry
practices. I've also never spoken at length with other programmers regarding
the problems I'm facing, and as such, I would have a significant degree of
difficulty discussing conceptual frameworks with a team.

Having spoken to a few people who attended these schools, it seems that they
have a thing or two to teach someone like me.

Perhaps it's not worth $10k, but I think that's a separate argument.

~~~
BWStearns
Yes. I taught myself initially and was writing lots of small utility scripts.
Towards the end of the bootcamp I attended I got a call to update one of the
things I had written before. The difference between before and after was
enormous. When you're teaching yourself for practical purposes it is very easy
to achieve "working" code that would be totally unacceptable in an environment
where the code was the primary driver of value. Additionally, if you're the
only programmer in your office/program, it is very hard to progress since you
must be the creator of your own curriculum. It's a good exercise and self-
education is an important skill, but it's hardly the most effective way to
learn.

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ivanca
I'm also wary of boot camps but this is definitely not the way; if you want to
pay for something you pay for something. They are not pretending to be a
college, they are not pretending to be a substitute for it.

The only scam here is this part of the USA law, is scamming people into
believing that everything needs to be regulated or otherwise it's evil.

~~~
wpietri
Modest regulation of the education industry is entirely necessary. It has a
long history of trouble, from low-quality schools to out-and-out scams.
Students by definition aren't able to directly evaluate the educational
experience up front; if they could, they wouldn't need the classes. Plus, with
high prices and long feedback cycles, there's a large amount of value at risk,
and market mechanisms don't work particularly well.

Even if the current crop of boot camps is all awesome, it's an ideal model for
a scam. With new ones popping up all the time, anybody with more greed than
sense could open up a well-marketed school, make some great promises, collect
a couple hundred thousand dollars, give some half-assed classes, and shut it
all down again before the first bad Yelp reviews come in. And then they could
do it again with a different name instantly.

~~~
ivanca
Yes, in theory. Here the only ones with more greed than sense are the ones
behind the enforcement of bankrupting-expensive-regulations.

If you really care that much you just need someone that knows the subject to
go the classes and see for themselves if everything is being taught good
enough. You don't need to inject a bureaucratic debt in their finances in the
name of "regulations".

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anateus
When the story first hit Venture Beat I stuck to reading what the BPPE
actually said, and then I checked out the website to try and dig up the
regulations.

Unless someone has information I haven't been able to dig up "crack down" just
means that they've been requested to comply. BPPE decided that these sorts of
programs are under their purview and so they need to cough up some amount of
cash and submit some paperwork.

Quotations in the Venture Beat article very clearly state BPPE are not going
after them, just notifying them of their need to comply under California law.

So much polemic either on government regulation or on the merits of these
programs. BPPE places schools into either "approved" or "accredited"
categories. These programs need only be approved. As far as I can tell BPPE is
fairly minimal in its requirements basically ensuring the schools are real
things and not diploma mills.

This isn't anywhere as much of a crackdown as CPUC making it harder for ride-
shares (for a bit). Discussion of the programs makes sense, but in the context
of an imagined witch hunt it just seems strange.

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verteu
This is terrible news. California is full of people who are structurally
unemployed due to technological incompetence. The vast majority of "licensed
teachers" know nothing about coding. Why obstruct hackers who teach valuable
skills to others?

~~~
djur
> California is full of people who are structurally unemployed

Do you have a cite for that? Nationwide there's very little evidence of
structural unemployment, and I'd be surprised to find that California (which
is a state people tend to be interested in living in) has an unusual problem
with finding skilled workers.

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codezero
What exactly are they trying to license these bootcamps as? They are basically
job placement agencies with training included, right?

This is a bit off topic, but the prices that they command seem ludicrous. $1k
a week or so, for most of them. I know that a person attending stands to get a
high paying job, but 10k seems like a lot.

~~~
jonursenbach
I don't know, 10k compared to 100k+ at a proper four year college seems fair
to me

~~~
navyrain
If you are truly paying 100k for a 4 year (120 weeks) university education,
then it works out to be $833 per week. My education at an in-state university
cost far less than that. Claiming that "bootcamps" are superior in value or
rigor is mendacious.

~~~
gareim
Except you don't have to attend bootcamp for 120 weeks.

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welder
"it would be relatively easy for a fly-by-night operation to advertise a
developer bootcamp, collect tuition, and then provide low-quality education —
or skip town before the courses were even set to begin"

These bootcamps don't charge students until after they complete the course and
get an industry job.

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wyclif
So I suppose this thread is just as good a place as any to ask the following
question, which I've been curious about for a while now:

What, in your opinion, is the highest quality coding boot camp and why?
Follow-up: what should a person who qualifies for one of these schools be
looking for?

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bowlofpetunias
> _many of these companies charge upwards of $10,000 and make bold claims
> about alumni making six figure salaries upon graduation_

I think the word "scam" applies here.

~~~
djur
There's a program like that here in Portland that makes claims on its website
about Rails developers being able to immediately earn upwards of $80k a year.
Maybe in the Bay Area, but definitely not in Portland. And they charge up
front, no placement guarantees.

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dschiptsov
So there will be rise of "traditional" underground ones.)

In some sense "legal" hacker conferences sponsored by MS and Cisco is utter
nonsense. Strong disliking of cargo cults, bandwagon and peer effects of
brainwashed mediocrity is a part of so-called hacker culture.)

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freemanindia
This isn't going to help the industry. The Internet is changing the way we
learn and software development is at the edge of the trend. Software lends
itself to this in part because its a meritocracy in which competence is easy
to recognize independent of accredited degrees, and because the tools change
so fast traditional institutions have trouble keeping up.

Its extremely unlikely regulation can do as good a job as the default market
forces in identifying quality programs, and it will likely put a huge damper
on people trying to do innovative things with technical education in the
state.

disclaimer: I run a one year 'developer bootcamp' in rural india -
[http://jaaga.in/study](http://jaaga.in/study)

