
Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies - tarheeljason
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/coding-boot-camps-attract-tech-companies-1470945503-lMyQjAxMTE2ODE2MTUxMzE4Wj
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dbla
I used to work for a coding bootcamp (not Flatiron) and made good money with a
month off in between each of the three classes I taught each year. I
eventually left because it felt like I was complicit in selling a lie. I
totally agree with the article. Students graduating from a bootcamp are
definitely not "job ready" without additional training / mentorship. Three
months is just not a lot of time to acquire all of the good instincts that you
naturally learn over years of doing development. Also the number of junior
developers coming out of these bootcamps, combined with graduates from
traditional CS programs is way more than the Bureau of Labor statistics
suggests that the job market can bear and I saw these effects in action. Each
class I taught had a harder time finding jobs than the one before, despite
being _more_ qualified on average.

That's not to say bootcamps are not worth it for anyone. There are some really
good ones out there that honestly want to help improve peoples lives. The
catch is that the students that have the most success are not the ones who
come in knowing nothing. The most successful students have spent months (if
not years) of dedicated self study. The bootcamp acts as a way to fill in some
gaps and provide confidence in the job hunt.

~~~
partycoder
I used to work for the admissions department of a private university (not in
the US). Private universities were mostly focused in enrolling as many people
as possible, while not being particularly worried about the market needs at
all. Back then, our educational system produced an excessive number of
attorneys and kinesiologists, leaving many of them in disadvantage at the
moment of looking for jobs. Many of them switched to other occupations for
very low wages, something that did not release them from the obligation of
paying student loans.

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skewart
> Flatiron, a for-profit school, has seized on a clear need in the economy
> that some academic experts say reveals a failing among traditional
> universities.

Teaching highly specialized skills currently in demand has not traditionally
been the mission of universities. In professions like architecture and
medicine there is an expectation that new graduates won't have much in the way
of practical knowledge about current practices, and so apprenticeships are
more or less built in to the transition from student to practitioner.

Is a disinterest in teaching current professional practice really a failing of
universities?

It seems more likely that bootcamps are simply a way for software firms to
outsource part of the apprenticeship process. Most of the people who go to
good bootcamps already have strong university educations and would likely have
been able to be hired into junior dev roles anyway without the bootcamp.

~~~
twblalock
> Most of the people who go to good bootcamps already have strong university
> educations and would likely have been able to be hired into junior dev roles
> anyway without the bootcamp.

That depends on how much programming experience they have. Many boot camp
attendees have college degrees in non-technical majors and have no coding
experience at all.

A boot camp is a way to get coding experience in a structured environment that
has credibility with employers. In the view of many companies, self-taught
coders don't have that level of credibility, even when they have decent Github
portfolios or other proof that they can program.

~~~
skewart
Interesting. I wonder if that necessity for lending credibility is a somewhat
recent thing. Perhaps the popularity of bootcamps makes people who recently
got into coding and didn't attend one look worse - companies might assume they
couldn't get in to a decent one?

I'm a developer who didn't study CS in undergrad, and I didn't have a problem
getting job offers when I was starting out several years ago, self taught and
unproven. But bootcamps weren't really a thing back then.

~~~
bdcravens
I'm self-educated as well, but back then (starting around 1999) there was no
Github (so less visibility into a prospect's activity) and no frameworks (so
problem solving was more valuable than structure)

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JustUhThought
Another instance of tech thinking it did it first. In the rest of the economy,
we call these "trade schools".

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Animats
_" The Flatiron School’s 12-week course costs $15,000, but earns students no
degree and no certificate."_

Over $1000 a week per student, and their classes look big. Somebody is making
lots of money off this. What do they pay their instructors?

~~~
argonaut
A semester of tuition at a top-50 private university is $20-25k. Seems
reasonable.

~~~
gaius
NEITHER of them "seem reasonable"!

~~~
argonaut
It's reasonable from several different angles. Economics: The goods are priced
lower than the competition. You don't negotiate prices _against yourself_.
ROI: as aianus mentions. Affordability: it's about the same cost as a car, and
lots of people own cars.

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gaius
_When Apple Inc., for example, announced in 2014 a new programming language
for its products, Swift, Flatiron adjusted its curriculum within days_

I don't see how this is possible, who is teaching this course? How do you go
from 0 to instructor-level expert in "days"?

~~~
adamnemecek
You know already know the frameworks, a third of swift is ObjC with better and
more concise syntax. And it's not like Swift didn't get inspiration from other
languages. Even though the combination was novel, the single ingredients were
usually from somewhere. (Don't take it as a jab at Swift, it's probably my fav
language + environment for app development).

You might not be writing idiomatic Swift from the get go but no one is at that
point.

~~~
tschwimmer
> You might not be writing idiomatic Swift from the get go but no one is at
> that point.

I think that's kind of the point the parent comment is making. How can a
school acting in good faith open Swift classes if it's impossible for anyone
to actually be an expert on it?

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HeyLaughingBoy
Relax. All they need to do is teach, not be experts.

I asked the same of a MechE friend who used to teach AutoCAD at a community
college despite not having known it before. His answer? I just need to stay a
week ahead of the class.

~~~
gaius
$1000/week seems alot to be taught by such a guy, IMHO. A student could do
that for free, from Apple's website, and be only one week behind where they
would be. So Flatiron is charging $15k for a one week head start!

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
People pay for value. If they see value in doing X over Y, then they'll pay
for X.

------
partycoder
A coding camp graduate can be considered with respect to a computer science
graduate what a paralegal is to a lawyer, or what a nurse is to a doctor.

They can perform some procedures, but not all of them, and at some point there
might be supervision.

Now to be fair, paralegal and nursing programs take much longer than 12 weeks,
are very strict and are regulated occupations that require a license that you
can actually lose under certain circumstances.

Their purpose is to provide extra productivity and cost efficiency, but at
some point they might require supervision and some procedures might exceed the
skills learned during their training.

~~~
twblalock
Some of the best engineers I have worked with did not learn CS in college, or
even in a boot camp. They learned on the job.

Some programmers want to believe that computer science is harder than it
really is, because it inflates their egos. CS is not as difficult to learn as
law, or medicine, or electrical engineering, or many other disciplines for
which self-taught practitioners are exceedingly rare.

Furthermore, I've seen new hires with graduate degrees in CS fail interviews
horribly, or get hired and produce horrible crap, while new self-taught hires
have outperformed them significantly. A degree is no guarantee of any skill
level, which is unfortunate.

~~~
partycoder
An abridged definition of engineering is "applying science to create
technology". A software engineer applies computer science to create software
based technologies. Under that definition you worked with programmers not
engineers.

Then, true. You might have worked with programmers that seemed productive and
learned on the job. But much of that learning happened at the expense of
exposing the company and the customers to great risk.

For instance, if you are manipulating financial information, and you don't
know what a floating point number is, you are eventually going to have a bad
time. If you don't understand concurrency and parallelism, you might end up
corrupting important data, if you are suffering networking issues and
everything you know is HTTP at a high level... you are going to have a bad
time. And the list goes on and on and on.

Friendly software development technologies were created to augment
productivity, not to release people from the responsibility of knowing what is
going on with them.

Now to your point, it is clear that not all computer science programs focus in
producing highly-qualified software engineers. But that doesn't mean that you
can simply skip the fundamentals.

~~~
superswordfish
Not all software requires the same degree of rigor in design and
implementation. Software has bugs, but it sounds like you'd prefer if such
software were never written in the first place. Regarding risk, it's as likely
that the super-educated "engineer" drops unfiltered input directly into a SQL
query as it is that Joe Programmer has the chance to corrupt data with a
concurrency bug.

~~~
partycoder
Bugs and defects will happen at the time of implementing functional and non-
functional requirements no matter how strong your preparation and problem
solving skills are. But they differ since assumptions would differ in nature.

Many people would work on a problem until it works (or stops being an
obstacle). But it takes some preparation to understand if an implementation is
acceptable from a non-functional requirement standpoint.

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pmorici
"Average starting salary: $74,447."

So they are paying them less than they would a recent college grad by
something like 25%? no wonder they love hiring people out of these things.

~~~
ghaff
I think you have a somewhat distorted view of the average starting salary of a
college graduate:

[http://www.naceweb.org/s11182015/starting-salary-
class-2015....](http://www.naceweb.org/s11182015/starting-salary-
class-2015.aspx)

~~~
pmorici
Sure, but in the sentence right before that it talks about the companies
hiring the graduates that are based in SF and NYC and these camps are put on
in those cities so I'm assuming you don't go to these boot camps and then take
a job in Kansas.

~~~
chamakits
For what it's worth, when I started working in NYC in 2011 in a prominent
company, I started at 65K, having graduated from a traditional college with a
Computer Engineering degree.

Not saying it was a good salary, but not all college graduates start at the
ludicrously high salary people keep seeing posted online.

~~~
JustUhThought
2nd this. Grad degrees provide a substantial boost, but not everyone can
afford the debt and opportunity costs associated with a masters. Sadly, most
of those that can, are in a better financial situation (family) to begin with.

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meeper16
The title to this is excruciatingly obvious...

