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Coding Bootcamps Presented As "College Alternative" 226

Posted by samzenpus from the pop-goes-the-bubble dept.
ErichTheRed writes Perhaps this is the sign that the Web 2.0 bubble is finally at its peak. CNN produced a piece on DevBootcamp, a 19-week intensive coding academy designed to turn out Web developers at a rapid pace. I remember Microsoft and Cisco certification bootcamps from the peak of the last tech bubble, and the flood of under-qualified "IT professionals" they produced. Now that developer bootcamps are in the mainsteam media, can the end of the bubble be far away?
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Coding Bootcamps Presented As "College Alternative" More

Coding Bootcamps Presented As "College Alternative"

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  • College isn't for everyone, but if I just change the title a little bit, does this seem like more of a bad idea?

    Employers always love to get the least qualified individual with the least options and marketability to do the job, that is still able to do the job. That doesn't mean you should serve yourself up to them on a platter...

    • Well, a slight decrease in starting pay vs not having $100k in student loans sounds a bit better. And 10 years out it will be about ability, not what degree you have.

      • 10 years out it will be about not having a family, being able to relocate on your dime cheaply, and using what free time you have to have learned the latest Web x.0 technologies. If you want out of that rat race, you will have to acquire the $100k in income to get the college degree so you can land a mgmt position to support a more balanced lifestyle.

        So perhaps you can save some on interest?

        • Please. I'm here to tell you first hand you're scenario isn't true. Might have been (will be) for you, but it isn't the only path, nor the only one to give you that "more balanced lifestyle". Whatever that is.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tomhath ( 637240 )
        Where do you get $100k? The average is more like $28k [projectonstudentdebt.org]

        , you get that back within a couple of years with a STEM degree.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by plopez ( 54068 )

        Right on. 8 pct interest doubles principle every 9 to 10 years. I challenge you to find a good investment that can out perform that, i.e. not insanely risky and speculative. You would need to fast track your career for 10 to 15 years to make a dent in $100k in principle.

        1 year + $10 in loans for a cert followed by hand's on experience and more side class work for certs and degrees is starting to make more and more sense as time goes on.

        BS degree + experience in 10 years with much lower debt, or no debt. Tha

        • The real problem is there's less and less opportunity to have a lifetime career. So accumulating debt to get one, then finding that career is now dying, and you have to accumulate more debt to get another one, is the way it is for many people.

          This applies just as much to boot camps. You get a very limited knowledge base, and because they're pumping them out so fast, more competition for each position. You're even more fungible than someone who did a 4-year program. So be ready to change careers every

  • yaaaaaaay... (Score:3)

    by Pinhedd ( 1661735 ) on Monday November 17, 2014 @04:15PM (#48405031)

    We'll end up with more brainless "web developers" who will be able to copy and paste code snippets in Javascript and Python without having any clue about how anything else actually works.

    • Re:yaaaaaaay... (Score:5, Funny)

      by houstonbofh ( 602064 ) on Monday November 17, 2014 @04:20PM (#48405073)

      We'll end up with more brainless "web developers" who will be able to copy and paste code snippets in Javascript and Python without having any clue about how anything else actually works.

      Well, that replaces outsourcing. Now what do we do for coders?

    • We already have those. They're called JQuery, framework and template users.

    • I'm all for it and I'm looking forward to total job security.

      For the rest of you, it's never too late to get into security consulting...

    • Actually, we're a serious thick-client shop with a single-page all-Javascript application powered by Backbone, and we've had great success hiring a Boot Camp graduate. She definitely does *not* just copy/paste code snippets without understanding how things work. To the contrary, she knows far more about the language and basic theory than most other applicants we've seen (including ones with CS degrees), and we've in fact had so much success with her that we're planning to hire another boot camp graduate s

    • I think you mean cut and paste code that they don't know how it works

  • 19-week intensive coding academy designed to turn out Web developers at a rapid pace

    Like we need still more web monkeys? Hey, maybe DICE can hire you to fix the smart quotes crap on slashdot ... not likely.

    • Re:Like the world needs more web monkeys ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by machineghost ( 622031 ) on Monday November 17, 2014 @05:39PM (#48405825)

      You're assuming such boot camps only produce "monkeys", which is false. These people work twelve hour days, seven days a week, for three months: compare that to your typical CS graduate who's maybe had a month total of relevant programming experience.

      In fact, we hired a boot camp graduate about half a year ago, and she's been awesome. WAY more knowledgeable about programming than other candidates we considered, including CS graduates.

      • See, anybody who has a CS degree will be motivated to HATE boot camp guys. Employers who want more (cheaper) labor will be motivated to LOVE any force that lets them hire more people at less cost.

        As a self-taught programmer myself managing a 10+ year project that's highly profitable, you'll probably guess which side of that divide you'll tend to see me on.

  • Gulags for people who can't code their way out of "hello world" ?
    YES.

  • Community college bubble... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Monday November 17, 2014 @04:21PM (#48405089)
    When I went back to school, all my programming classes was in Java because the school couldn't afford a site license for Microsoft Visual Studio to teach C/C++. When the site license was renewed, most of the computers couldn't run VS .net when it came out. I graduated as a Java programmer, couldn't find a job and stayed in help desk support. I recently read that Python is the new teaching language and the community colleges are pumping out Python programmers.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by innocent_white_lamb ( 151825 )

      Since when do you need Microsoft Visual Studio to write or teach C and C++ programming?

      I've been writing C for years and I have never actually seen Microsoft Visual Studio anywhere in the wild. (I take the maid's approach to computers: I don't do Windows.)

      • Since when do you need Microsoft Visual Studio to write or teach C and C++ programming?

        The preferred textbook showed only how to use Microsoft Visual Studio. Otherwise, the part-time instructor coudln't teach it. The only exposure I got to C/C++ was a few assignments in my Linux admin classes.

        • Your college chose a preferred textbook that required a piece of software that it (the college, not the book) didn't have?

          Tell me where this is so I never accidentally hire anyone from there.

          Second thoughts, don't bother. It's DeVry, right?

      • As a Math major I had to take Fortan and C (was quite some time ago obviously) and we never had Windows, let alone "Visual Studio" or Visual C for that matter. It was not until a semester of C was complete that I went and bought Bordland Turbo C/C++. Then Delphi came out, and what a dream that was! Fortran, Pascal and C all available for the back end coding, and GUI builders in C++ for the front end where I did not need to know much about graphics programming.

        Then, as with all good competing products Mic

    • So you are not a CS major then? Because CS major usually uses any language that could help you understand the class concept. The major does not focus on any language. When I was in school, they were teaching C++. Now they changed it to Python. However, that's the faculty decision and it is NOT from the current market but because they said the language seems to be more verbose to beginners. Not sure it is in my opinion...

      • Not at the community college level. I was learning programming to get a job as a white box tester after being a black box tester at a video game company for six years. I wanted to learn a variety of languages while in school. All I got was too much Java, a piece of VB6 (before the site license expired), and a few C/C++ assignments in my Linux administration classes.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jedidiah ( 1196 )

        Universities are also careful not to use languages that will do too much of the work for the student.

        You forgot that part.

        "Sorry you can't use language X for this assignment. There would be no point."

    • Re:Community college bubble... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday November 17, 2014 @04:46PM (#48405303)

      Odd. During my university years, Modula2 was the language for our coding introduction course, C was used in system programming, Pascal/Delphi was it for Software Engineering classes...

      In other words: The right tool for the right objective. Language does not matter. There's exactly two kinds of languages: Imperative and declarative. The rest is mostly dialect. Whether you write your code in Java or C++, in Python or Perl, from a purely educational point of view it doesn't really matter.

    • A huge number of the jobs out there are in Java. In any case, as a new grad, no one should have really cared what language you knew from college.

      • If you're applying for a Java job, you need to know Java. If you're applying for a C++ job, you need to know C++. If you're for a job using a new technology that came out just six months ago, you need five years of experience.

        What they don't teach in school is how to find a programming job after graduating. Since I was already successfully employed in help desk support, I wasn't desperate to get a programming job. I didn't learn the fine art of looking for a job until the Great Recession put me out of work

    • For what it's worth, I was in a large community college Math/CS department meeting last week where it was proposed to form committee to investigate whether we should switch from C to Java in the future.

  • Web 2.0 is just a meaningless marketing phrase, that "bubble" never existed

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by plopez ( 54068 )

      It is in the nature of bubbles to not exists. The bubble which has substance is not the true bubble.....

    • Of course it's a meaningless phrase, but how else do you sum up the last few years? The smartphone bubble? Not really, that leaves out cloud computing, big data and IoT. The social bubble? Also leaves out too much.

      Even before the financial meltdown and the low interest rates that drove another stock bubble, there were parallels to the dotcom boom:
      - Trendy startups in San Francisco, SV and New York, just like last time
      - Media falling all over themselves to report on this, fueling more interest.
      - Plenty of wa

      • - Plenty of wacky revenue-free, shaky business model companies generating huge VC investments and crazy valuations

        During the dotcom bubble, because I was reading fuckedcompany.com each today. That site did an amazing job of documenting the stupid business models in vogue back then.

        Is there a site today that is documenting the current bubble? My guess is if there is, it's either a reddit forum or a twitter feed.

    • A bubble is a thin, shiny, colorful film, surrounding mostly hot air.

      So by definition it IS a marketing phrase.

    • Hey now, while certainly a buzz word, it wasn't meaningless.
      Where before you had sites that delivered content to the masses, the web 2.0 craze was to allow user input. Accounts, logins, uploaded content and data. Like wikipedia, right? That interaction with the users, and content created by the users was the basis of the whole shindig. It was a neat and exciting change, and the talking heads and venture capitalists nearly had an stroke raving about it and certainly talked it up.

      But it was a real thing.

      Now a

  • I think after 19 weeks, you'd have at best, someone who can write spaghetti code for an application that may or may not work properly.

    • I think after 19 weeks, you'd have at best, someone who can write spaghetti code for an application that may or may not work properly.

      Sounds like the typical web programmer, so I guess they're "just meeting business's expectations."

      A man was standing at the curb with a dog on a leash.
      Passer-by says "Is your dog friendly?"
      "Oh yes, my dog is the friendliest dog in the world!"
      Passerby goes to pet dog, dog takes a chunk out of him.
      "I thought you said your dog was friendly."
      "He is. But this ain't my dog"

      Applied to webmonkey:

      "Can you code in php?" "Yes"
      "Perl, Java, C, and python?" "Yes"
      "Okay, you're hired."
      ... 6 weeks later

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by plopez ( 54068 )

      Sounds like a typical college graduate to me....

    • You would think that Coding Bootcamps would produce coders and programmers. Instead, they invariably produces a monkey (which most people find unpleasant) that is "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a coder or programmer".

      • If DevBootcamp can really produce a 90% hire rate at the end, with an average $80K/year salary, then they could call me whatever animal they want to.

      • Except right now, this kind of works.

        The people going to those bootcamps already have college degrees and may have worked for years in unrelated industries (or non-coding functions in related industries). So when you hire someone out of one of the bootcamps, you may only be hiring someone with "Junior Developer" level coding skills, but they aren't going to behave the same way as the 22 year old brogrammer you are also interviewing for the same position. They have experience working in a business enviro

    • After 19 weeks you have, essentially, someone who may or may not have grasped the very basics of the topic (provided he has any kind of mathematics or logic background, else it's "may not" for sure). Unless he has some sort of prior knowledge, it's quite useless.

      I see the whole mess as some sort of fast track "look, I have some sheet of paper that makes me something" crap to fool gullible HR departments.

  • I don’t recall seeing boot camps for Electrical Engineers or boot Camps for Medical Doctors. I remember back in the late 70s when I first started coding on an Apple ][ people regarded me with awe for being able to write a print statement in a for loop. In those days everyone probably could learn to code simple text based game and recipe organizers, but they didn’t. Now that we need stable object oriented code that actually takes some discipline to write we’ve decided everyone should do

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Animats ( 122034 )

      I don't recall seeing boot camps for Electrical Engineers or boot Camps for Medical Doctors.

      The military has run short courses for electronic technicians and paramedics for decades. Paramedic boot camp is about 14 weeks.

    • I don’t recall seeing boot camps for Electrical Engineers or boot Camps for Medical Doctors.

      Electrical Engineers don't get taken seriously when they say "wiring faults are no big deal."
      Programmers do get taken seriously when they say "bugs are no big deal." [google.com]

      That's why coding bootcamps have a chance, because our field is full of crappy programmers, adding a few more could be an improvement.

    • I don’t recall seeing boot camps for Electrical Engineers or boot Camps for Medical Doctors.

      . . . maybe that would be a good idea? Why do you need to go to a dentist . . . ? All you need is a Black & Decker drill from Lowe's and a can of spacthel . . . right?

      My teeth are kinda sorta important to me, and I would like for them to be handled by a professional.

      Oh? Computer systems that are handling my money . . . ? Ditto!

    • From what I've read in the past, it's mostly about being able to scam your way through the HR hiring process at some joint. In most organizations it's a long, hard slog to fire anyone after that point, no matter how clueless.

      • In all fairness, it doesn't sound like they're trying to churn out geniuses. From the linked site:

        Can you really become a programmer in 19 weeks?

        Software engineering is a craft that takes years of deliberate practice and learning to master. Our goal is to graduate world-class beginners, and jumpstart your journey towards becoming an elite coder. Having said that, we are betting that in 18 weeks you can learn enough programming to start contributing value to an engineering team as an entry level develop

        • Given how insanely important this particular statement is to the whole conversation, I'm surprised I had to scroll almost all the way down to the bottom before someone brought it up.

          This bit is why I personally think it's an excellent idea...they aren't trying to produce fully fledged senior developers ready to lead a team of developers in building/maintaining/re-purposing a fortune 500 company's mission critical systems.

          They're trying to jumpstart the beginnings of that...the mindset that will, one da

  • Or better yet, offshore the job.

    No wonder US born developers are becoming an endangered species. This is spite of the non-stop shortage shouting.

    Look at the job ads. Employers are looking for college degrees, and five years of recent, professional, verifiable experience. And employers will settle for nothing less, even as wages stagnate.

  • Parallels to the MCSE Bootcamp (Score:3)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Monday November 17, 2014 @05:11PM (#48405553)

    When I first saw this article this morning, my immediate reaction was, "Oh no, here we go again." I'm not a developer -- I do systems integration work, and a lot of my job is getting software written by "developers" working on a real system within reasonable parameters.

    The parallel I drew from this was the MCSE and CCNA bootcamps that popped up towards the end of the last bubble and continued for quite a while after. Training companies still offer them, but they're no longer touted as the "change your life in 2 weeks!" miracle workers they once were. I entered IT with a science education, but not CS, so I have used certifications throughout my career to check the HR box, and I actually did take an MCSE bootcamp back in the day when I was upgrading my self-taught Windows NT 4.0 certification to Windows 2000. Done right, they are a very good way to review concepts you already know and gain insight from instructors who teach the official classes and know what Microsoft is looking for on the exams. It saves you tons of time not having to review every single thing again looking for changes that are testable. However, in my experience, the greedy training companies also tried to cash in on desperate unemployed people, much the same way for-profit colleges and trade schools are doing now. Remember the old advertisements claiming they could turn a plumber or truck driver into a highly-paid IT administrator in 2 weeks for $10K or whatever? I had a couple of those students in that bootcamp class I took. In 1999, I'm sure they got jobs instantly. But all through the end of the dotcom boom, we were working through this huge glut of underqualified people who went this route.

    The DevBootcamp thing actually sounds good on the surface, but the fact of the matter is that unless you have some grasp of machine fundamentals (how TCP works, how HTTP requests work, how to code a database call efficiently, etc.) you will only get someone who knows Ruby on Rails, a couple database tricks, and JavaScript. This is fine if you just want someone who is cranking out maintenance tasks for some small company web application, but it's disingenuous to present it as a true college alternative. There are plenty of college grads who don't have practical experience either, but at least a proper CS curriculum will expose them to the fundamentals that make all this upper-layer stuff work. Plus, maybe, you will have been exposed to something other than web development. I would much rather work with someone who is a little more well rounded than an absolute genius who can't talk about anything outside of their small area of focus. It just seems to me that these companies see a market -- bubbly, frothy VC-funded startups looking for an army of cheap young Ruby coders -- and are taking advantage of it while they can. I just wouldn't want to be one of these people who only know a Web framework or two when the bubble pops and businesses once again demand people with the capability to solve a wider set of problems.

  • People can't afford to go to school anymore, so they can all just go to bootcamps. They'll eventually learn to write good code.

    • When I went back to school to learn computer programming at the community college after the dot com bust to change careers, Uncle Sam picked up the tab with a $3,000 USD tax credit. There are several back-to-school tax credits [irs.gov] still available today.
  • In my opinion of course.

    Having attended one ( Cisco ) I think the term boot-camp should be renamed to something like " Re-Certification Prep " or something similar.

    The sheer amount of material they present ( notice I said present and not teach ) in these things is nigh impossible for anyone to absorb in such a short period of time. I would think they are great ( albeit expensive ) for refresher courses for those who need to get back up to speed to pass a re-certification test, ( Assuming you haven't let it
    • I did the approved cisco course as an evening class for fun semesters at 3 hours a week a was a pretty good grounding in tcp/ip networking I recon a 19 week 5 days a week could get some one bright enough up to the ccnp level no problem.

  • 19-25 weeks is completely reasonable (Score:4, Interesting)

    by quietwalker ( 969769 ) <pdughi@gmail.com> on Monday November 17, 2014 @05:24PM (#48405667)

    I've written about this several times prior, so I'll just summarize those arguments here:

    College is not meant to provide job skills : http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
    The majority of what developers do does not require advanced skills: http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
    You don't need much training to get to a point where you're employable: http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]

    There's other points too;
          - Once you have learned some language to a given degree of proficiency, you notice that the rest of the languages are little more than different syntactical sugar and different naming for built in functions/libraries.
          - Learning how to learn is more important, as our development environments change so often that it's expected we'd pick up new technologies after very little exposure to them, days usually, rather than weeks or months.

    I've added up the hours spent in a CS degree program on purely CS classes; it's around 650 hours total. That's it. If it were back to back 8 hour days, it'd only take about 16 weeks of 8 hour days 5 days a week. Obviously that'd be a rough sell, but it's not impossible.

    This is 19-25 weeks, I'm guessing 1 or 2 hour 'days', which is around 100 to 250 hours of 'training'. That's just under half - about the equivalent of a 2 year college. More than enough time to fit in the basics of theories as well as actual application, though they may not get some of the higher level specifics like graphics or compiler design.

    So it seems reasonable to me, and I've been doing this for 2 decades now with my fancy college learning.

  • promising 6 digit careers, these scam artists trick muggles into believing they'll become code wizards. NBL - not bloody likely.

  • I've gotten one hell of a return from my BSc. EE. Thankfully it's not being devalued, and as far as ROI goes, wow. Was it easy for me? F--k no. Things that are worthwhile rarely are easy.

    Anyone who thinks these bootcamps are a substitute for theory training is a fool. They can make a great way to leverage that core knowledge, though. They're also great for churning out code monkeys. I don't want to be a monkey.

    You know what's a substitute, though? -Free- books and training online on those academic topics. M

  • Didn't people USED to go to college for the educational purpose of building a broad understanding of human knowledge -- history, literature, humanities, science, foreign languages, etc?

    Most people now seem to go to college to obtain some kind of vocational certification and get a "career", usually in business, an engineering speciality or if they really apply themselves, in a medical field or law. General learning is a bunch of requirements students don't care about and the instructors mainly view them as

    • Didn't people USED to go to college for the educational purpose of building a broad understanding of human knowledge -- history, literature, humanities, science, foreign languages, etc?

      That's so old school these days. Most people go to school to qualify for a career that makes them boatloads of money with the least amount of effort. When I went back to school to learn computer programming after the dot com bust, computers were out and health care was the new money major. Computer classes got cancelled, health care classes had waiting lists.

      The best I see these bootcamps is replacing some trade schools or community college technical programs. They might have value for people with an IT background but employed and looking for a new skill to market.

      Bootcamps are wonderful if you have the time to learn a lot of material in a short time. I don't think it should replace community college classes. I e

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by swb ( 14022 )

        That's so old school these days. Most people go to school to qualify for a career that makes them boatloads of money with the least amount of effort.

        I think this is kind of the point -- people don't WANT to be educated, they want what economists call the "signalling effect" of a college degree in some employment field.

        And I think we're poorer for it as a culture -- no one recognizes the same political tricks and gimcrackery employed by the Roman elite getting recycled today, just as an example.

        But then again, I have heard a counter-argument that classical education even in its heyday was also usurped by non-educational agendas, such as regional elites s

  • Wow (Score:2)

    by drolli ( 522659 )

    Being a web programmer is the same as brein able to enter University?

    I mean dont get me wrong, i appreciate people who early in their life know what to to and do that well, even if there is is no academic education involved.

    But somehow i dount that such people will be the main participants in such "bootcamps".

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