Do Code Bootcamps Work? (inc.com) 139
"Computer programming is highly specialized work; it can't be effectively taught in an intensive program," writes Inc. magazine's contributing editor:
Last month, two of the country's largest and most well-regarded coding bootcamps closed. While there are still over 90 such camps in the U.S. and Canada, these for-profit intensive software engineering schools aren't successfully preparing their students for programming jobs. According to a recent Bloomberg article, the Silicon Valley recruiter Mark Dinan characterized the bootcamps as "a freaking joke," while representatives of Google and Autodesk said respectively that "most graduates from these programs are not quite prepared" and "coding schools haven't been much of a focus for [us]."
In one sense, the failure of coding bootcamps reflects the near-universal failure of for-profit universities, colleges, and charter schools to provide a usable education. In another sense, though, coding bootcamps represent a profound misunderstanding of what computer programming is all about... Coding at the professional level is highly specialized and requires years of practice to master... the idea of a bootcamp for coding is just as practical as the idea of a bootcamp for surgery.
In one sense, the failure of coding bootcamps reflects the near-universal failure of for-profit universities, colleges, and charter schools to provide a usable education. In another sense, though, coding bootcamps represent a profound misunderstanding of what computer programming is all about... Coding at the professional level is highly specialized and requires years of practice to master... the idea of a bootcamp for coding is just as practical as the idea of a bootcamp for surgery.
Sorry, employers (Score:1)
You'll have to use the free market and actually offer HIGHER WAGES instead of complaining about some mythical "shortage".
Re:Sorry, employers (Score:4, Interesting)
What is the truth here?
Are wages so low that people would rather be unemployed, allowing employers to go the H1B route? I also hear that there is a lot of H1B fraud, in which case higher wages won't help.
People say there are lots of skilled workers, but also that all the young workers are idiots with no clue and low ability levels.
Women are apparently clever for avoiding tech jobs, but for some reason men are desperate for them and unable to do the jobs women are doing instead.
I just want to know the truth. I don't live in the US so it's hard to know based on Slashdot and crappy "news" articles.
The truth? (Score:2, Insightful)
The truth is that businesses have been lying for over 20 years about shortages of workers.
And then policy makers believe it or are paid off to believe it and they then start to push STEM education when the fact is that there is a glut of STEM workers. Our stagnant pay is proof.
Everything else; women in tech, lack of education or what the excuse du jour is, is just PR horseshit to cover their asses in getting more cheap H1-b workers.
During my MGT days, we budgeted 45 cents on the dollar for Indians compared
Re: Sorry, employers (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't live in the US
The fact that I'm less likely to have to interact with you in real life is the best news I've gotten all month.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I came here for an argument, but seem to have stumbled into abuse. At least it's not getting hit over the head.
Since I'm here... How much to call me a malodorous bastard?
Re: Sorry, employers (Score:4, Funny)
Since I'm here... How much to call me a malodorous bastard?
We used to have some people here that would do it for $40 an hour, but they got replaced by some H-1B workers willing to do the job for only $22.50 an hour. They also had to lie on their CV about having 25 years experience abusing people on Slashdot, even though the site has only been around for about 20.
Re:Sorry, employers (Score:4, Insightful)
There are a lot of skilled workers, but there aren't a lot of companies that want to pay the rates those workers feel that they're worth when they can get some wet behind the ears college graduate for perhaps half the salary. I don't know if that's always the best economic decision for the company, and some of that may come from companies not having a good way to measure productivity differences which is difficult to do in software engineering without creating some kind of metrics based hell that the smart employees will figure out how to game quite easily.
The truth isn't something that's always easy to completely understand and something like the global economy has so many moving parts that even if you understand some of the fundamental causes (e.g. higher demand for software engineers will increase wages, which ultimately leads to more people majoring in CS and increasing the available labor pool which reduces wages until an equilibrium is reached where the number of people capable and interested in being developers matches the demand) it's really hard to factor everything in. Think of it another way. If you could easily answer that question, centrally planned economies would be easy to pull off and the Soviet Union probably would have won the cold war instead of collapsing like it did.
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That's similar to the UK. There are "senior" jobs in London offering as low as £50,000/year, which means you can barely afford a shoe box to live in or face a long commute. So the only people who take those jobs are the young and desperate who quickly burn out or people from Eastern Europe who will accept the shoe box.
The difference is that in the UK if you are unemployed you have meagre but survivable benefits to fall back on. The government will pay the interest on your mortgage, for example,
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Are wages so low that people would rather be unemployed, allowing employers to go the H1B route? I also hear that there is a lot of H1B fraud, in which case higher wages won't help.
Some people may be better off unemployed. Married women with children may find that the cost of child care make work not worth it financially. Low skilled middle age people may try to go on disability rather than take a low wage job, etc.
People say there are lots
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I thought it was common knowledge, but here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Otherwise Google something like "H1 lawyer gaming system".
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Relatively, yes. Consider Silicon Valley. It stretches 40 miles between San Francisco and San Jose, and is about 7 miles wide. San Francisco is the most desirable part of the area, because it has a large walkable downtown area with lots of shops and public transport. Start going down further down and you are into suburbs where you need a car. The central parts of the towns like Menlo Park, Palo Alto (close to Stanford University) are very desirable because they too have walkable down town areas. Then you ar
Re:Sorry, employers (Score:5, Insightful)
Are wages so low that people would rather be unemployed, allowing employers to go the H1B route?
You have the causality backwards.
Companies fraudulently get H1B visas to drive wages down. To keep up the charade, they have to claim it is impossible to find US workers for their jobs.
To keep the fraud going, companies deliberately sabotage their recruiting process. I get 2-3 emails a day from recruiters offering me jobs in cities I do not live in. The jobs require 1/4 the experience I have, with appropriate pay for that level of experience. Since I do not live there and do not want to take a massive pay cut, I do not apply to those positions. The company uses my lack of response, as well as the other people they spam, to pretend there are no US people for that job.
If I did apply for the position, first they would demand I travel at my own expense to multiple in-person interviews, scheduled at the last minute in order to maximize the expense to me. And if I did pay for that travel and show up for the interviews, I would be rejected as unqualified or "not a good fit for their team" or any other reason they could come up with.
Since the job is a massive pay cut, it would be difficult for me to show I was harmed and thus it is harder to sue them for rejecting me. Plus suing an employer, prospective or not, ends your career. Your lawsuit is a public record, so any future employers will see it and refuse to hire you.
Why would the company bother with all this fraud effort? Because they aren't actually looking for someone with 4 years experience. They will "miraculously" find an H1B employee with 10 years experience who will just happen to take the job at the pay rate for 4 years experience. Then proceed to have them to work commiserate with 10 years experience.
Basically, everything you hear that blames this problem on the worker side of this situation is a lie designed to perpetuate H1B visas.
I just want to know the truth. I don't live in the US so it's hard to know based on Slashdot and crappy "news" articles.
All evidence points towards you not being interested in knowing the truth, and far more interested in shitting on workers. But that's OK, we'll drag down your wages too.
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Thanks, that explains the mechanism. A genuinely useful explanation.
All evidence points towards you not being interested in knowing the truth, and far more interested in shitting on workers. But that's OK, we'll drag down your wages too.
Oh, well, fuck you then.
Why can't people be nice and assume a tiny amount of good faith any more? Don't say it's because it's amimojo, I have repeatedly stuck up for workers' rights and strongly favour employment laws protecting them.
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Why can't people be nice and assume a tiny amount of good faith
Try re-reading your post, and this time notice all the bad faith arguments in it. You will not be nearly so puzzled.
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> If I did apply for the position, first they would demand I travel at my own expense to multiple in-person interviews, scheduled at the last minute in order to maximize the expense to me.
Those are crappy companies. Every company I have interviewed at paid my hotel + flight expenses.
Not every company is evil -- but I will admit there definitely seems to be a lot of bad ones who want their cake and to eat it too.
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The companies offering boot camps don't care about whether companies have a greater selection of potential employees to choose from, same as they don't care if their students succeed or fail after graduating. All they give a shit about is being able to pump bodies through a quick course for money. Quality? Fees and loan repayments tied to future performance? Ha. As far as they're concerned, if you end up with a part-time "do you want fries with that" job after graduation, you still count as a graduate who w
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What is the truth here?
Are wages so low that people would rather be unemployed, allowing employers to go the H1B route? I also hear that there is a lot of H1B fraud, in which case higher wages won't help.
People say there are lots of skilled workers, but also that all the young workers are idiots with no clue and low ability levels.
Women are apparently clever for avoiding tech jobs, but for some reason men are desperate for them and unable to do the jobs women are doing instead.
I just want to know the truth. I don't live in the US so it's hard to know based on Slashdot and crappy "news" articles.
Here is the deal to meet the endless list of MUST HAVE's your demand as an employee goes higher than what they want to pay.
So let's say they want someone with 7 years experience working with Android and 5 years working with HTML 5 as an example? Let's say you started playing with HTML 5 when your employer still had IE 6 5 years ago and written some game in Android SDK when you were the first kid on teh block with an Android phone what do you think you could get offer wise today? My guess is people would be
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If there was a shortage wages would go up. That is the 'invisible hand' of the market.
The "market" is being grossly manipulated. Both supply (a huge over-supply of under-qualified n00bs - including the idiots that fall for boot camps and "take a 6 month course at our institute at huge expense with predatory loans", and of course the lies surrounding H1Bs.
Additionally, there's the whole "bad money drives out good money" thing. Crazy money chasing quick bux has seriously distorted the job market, so that everyone is looking for web code monkeys, and since monkeys are cheap and easily replac
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Well I am sure you weren't awesome at your first programming job were you?
You have to start somewhere and yes there is a shortage. I am in the I.T. field now struggling as a senior desktop support guy. I realized it doesn't take a ginuse to plug in a monitor and learn active directory. Education or not I have head hunters calling me for $15/hr jobs. WHAT! I would kill to make more than $55,000 again.
Sorry but I have no sympathy. Most kids today who are college educated make $15/hr or around $35,000 a year.
Re:Sorry, employers (Score:5, Informative)
Women leave CS courses for the same reason they leave all hard science courses.
You can't bullshit and blather your way through it.
Sure you can. Men do it all the time. Or have you never worked with men who are incompetent?
Women have incredibly fragile egos (in case you were wondering, that's why feminists bang on about 'male ego' virtually everything they say is projection)... and they are exposed in hard science courses.
Opinion, with no data to back it up. And yes, the fragile male ego thing is real. Go look at how a guy reacts to being turned down by a woman. "She's probably a lesbian." Stalking. Saying it was really him that gave her the brush-off. The simple fact is that women recover better from break-ups than men [binghamton.edu]. And let's face it - it's usually the woman calling the shots as to when it's over, not the men. Just look at which sex files for divorce more often.
Actual maths courses are particularly brutal - you can't hide, you can't hamster away the fact that there are people better than you, you can't skip sections of the work (it all builds on the previous bit) and neat handwriting/platitudes get you nowhere.
Again, opinion with no proof.
We all know it, but we all dance around the subject to... as we always do... protect women's feelings.
They drop out and go do courses that reward waffling and woolly thinking.
That "reward waffling and woolly thinking" is very much a male thing, everywhere from managers bullshitting and shouting their way through meetings, not to mention pissing contests, to the current occupant of the White House.
If they are particularly bitter about it, they'll start blaming men and claim it's male competitiveness or that the system was stacked against them.
Not male competitiveness - male incompetence. The inability of men in a group to act professionally when women are around in small quantities that they see as being safe to harass, ignore, sabotage, and claim that the work the women did is irrelevant, wrong, or worse - appropriating it as their own work instead of giving credit where it's due.
Ignore it, like all women, they will do/say anything to avoid facing reality.
Says the anonymous coward, who hides behind his anonymity to avoid taking any responsibility for his foolish fact-free words.
You cant teach logic (Score:2)
You can teach the basics of a language in a boot camp, if someone already has math and logic skills. You can't teach coding as a naked skill, and certainly not from the ground up.
VBA jockeys who want to be more formal might benefit, and people who need a structured introduction. But 10% success rate seems about right given the lack of an incoming filter.
It all depends on expectations... (Score:2)
Coding at the professional level is highly specialized and requires years of practice to master... the idea of a bootcamp for coding is just as practical as the idea of a bootcamp for surgery.
I guess it all depends. If the output expected is participants being able to manipulate visually [screen] displayed objects or familiarize themselves with a particular language, then they work.
If however, the output expected is of folks who can do heavy serious coding (read coding closer to the metal), then such camps are a pipe dream.
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Surely the name "bootcamp" implies that it's just an introduction.
Re:It all depends on expectations... (Score:4, Insightful)
If however, the output expected is of folks who can do heavy serious coding (read coding closer to the metal), then such camps are a pipe dream.
As you point out, it is all about expectations. However, I think that in general there is a wrong assumption about the skill level of a new graduate. Take surgery as a comparison, for instance. A new medical doctor just graduated from school will not be put into an operating room unsupervised. In fact, every medical specialty requires that new graduates complete a residency. It very similar to what new plumbers and electricians go through, though a doctor will spend a great deal more money to get there.
To me, a new graduate with a computer engineering, computer science, or perhaps even a management information systems (depending on the school) degree has achieved the level of "now I am ready to apprentice under an experienced senior developer." I find it humorous how start ups will load up their staffs with all new graduates for developers and later wonder why their apps and infrastructure have problems. It would be like hiring all apprentice bricklayers, plumbers, and electricians to build you a building. You are likely to encounter problems down the road.
I know that some folks think of coding as an art more than as a trade or skill. However, coding has enough of the skilled trade flavor to it, in particular developing the understanding for how decisions you make in one place will have long lasting effects throughout an application and the things that interact with it (which a new graduate or junior developer is not likely to understand), that the only really sensible way to look at it is as something that requires a pseudo-apprenticeship.
Granted, some people have a natural talent, but even then they benefit from being under the guidance of good experienced developers.
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It can be both an art and a trade. Both the guy working in the design studio building prototypes at a big auto and the guy at the restoration shop down the street are metal fabricators. Both might be highly skilled. One is an artist the other is a tradesman. Which is not to say the tradesman can go make art doing something totally custom but its not bulk of what he does.
The software world is the same. Building that CRUD app for marketing (trade work). Building that library for writing CRUD apps could
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If however, the output expected is of folks who can do heavy serious coding (read coding closer to the metal), then such camps are a pipe dream.
Long ago I did a high school summer program put on by a nearby university. It was 8 weeks long, and in it I learned Fortran and assembler (for the old IBM 1620, that's how long ago this was). Definitely coding close to the metal, and I wrote a significant game-playing program as my required project.
I don't know how the boot camps are run today, but I can certainly say that the 8 week summer program I participated in taught me to code, and code reasonably well. It also gave me an understanding of architecture. Was I then an expert? No, of course not, but I was at least reasonably competent, and I was well on my way.
Re: Sham (Score:2)
What has gender to do with mental capacity? Women in western countries do not go into tech (but into math). However, in other countries they do have a preference for tech. Looks like this is just a cultural thing.
Bootcamps work for some people (Score:3, Interesting)
You have to be bright and highly motivated to find success at a boot camp. When the camps first opened there were far more people interested in attending the boot camps than there were available seats. This meant that they could be very selective in admissions leading to better results.
When the boot camps decided to scale up to be very large, they could not find the same caliber of students to fill the classrooms. This lead to a lowering of standards to keep the business viable. The result was that many students coming out of the boot camps were ill-prepared to work as developers.
The concept can work but not to the scale that the large for-profit training companies want it to. It would be tragic if the good boot camps were put out of business by the bad ones.
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They could do that. Or they could jack the price up and trouser all the wonga.
Slow done cowboy! (Score:4, Insightful)
In one sense, the failure of coding bootcamps reflects the near-universal failure of for-profit universities, colleges, and charter schools to provide a usable education.
News to me, one I take my kids to seems perfectly fine. Plus they did Hour of Code thing... and it teaches kids to code! What, do you expect to become an expert in anything - foreign language, electrical work, skiing - in 90 days? Doesn't work like that. It gives you an introduction on where to look, they you can try writting tiny apps for your own use / tinker with stuff on github. Maybe works as an apprentice for your friend working on their own thing for some beers. Do this for a year or two and you should be good to use your new skills for fun and profit.
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Isn't that what these bootcamps are promising?
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That is because elementary schools are cheap to run plus you get parents to buy $100 worth of supplies per kid per year. This allows the CEO of the Charter Management Company to make a CEO level salary. A charter school in Northern Michigan was recently run into the ground by a Charter School (sic) management company. [record-eagle.com]
This public charter school was paying $900,000 per year for business office services like printing paychecks.
The founder of the charter school is in jail for $600,000 in federal tax fraud. [record-eagle.com]
Ch
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Meanwhile, charter schools are pushing to bypass state teacher certification standards, and certify their own teachers after only 30 hours of training. I wonder why that is?
NYSUT slams 'fake' certification plan for charter school teachers [nysut.org]
Practice, practice, practice (Score:3)
There's very little time to practice and what I've learned is mostly how much I don't know. And that I'm a shitty programmer.
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You *might* just be able to learn one of those 3 in sufficient depth on a 3 month course. But all 3? No chance. Sounds to me like one of those courses that is designed simply to seperate people from their money.
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Re:Practice, practice, practice (Score:4, Informative)
Congratulations. Most junior developers take a good couple of years to realise that they're shitty developers. That might sound like a troll, but seriously, there's a point (well, several actually) in every good software devs career that they realise they actually suck at software. That's when they can start to really get better.
Nose to grindstone. :) (Score:3)
Frankly, you're more likely to become a good programmer than the people who come out of such things thinking they're all that and a bag of chips.
I've been writing code for well ver 40 years and there's tons of stuff I still don't know about the craft. I did - and continue to do - well because I specialize narrowly enough that inside my boundaries, I know (relatively speaking) a lot. But it took a lot of time, and anyone seri
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I've been coding for 30 and I know less every year. When PCs first came out, one reasonably bright and curious person could get a pretty good grasp on everything important there was to know about them -- hardware, operating systems, programming languages, networking, and major applications. But with every passing year, no matter how hard you try to keep up, everything you know is a shrinking proporti
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I,T, is like the medical field. Employers love someone who can do it all but you do not see a hospital hire a doctor who can do cardiac surgey, treat renal patients, and also know all about nuclear medicine for cancer patients, etc.
You specialize. Medical school teaches the basics but to know something in depth you got to pick a specialty with networking you have many layers of hardware, software, and networking. Some are techs, admins, consultants, architects, and coders.
Do football bootcamps work? (Score:3)
Few people can become a professional athlete with a couple of weeks training. Bootcamps (for pretty much any hard skill) can be effective to learn certain things, but they are no substitute for the talent and level of commitment and effort required to work at the top level of a coveted field.
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Few people can become a professional athlete with a couple of weeks training. Bootcamps (for pretty much any hard skill) can be effective to learn certain things, but they are no substitute for the talent and level of commitment and effort required to work at the top level of a coveted field.
We do not need only a few dozen elite programmers. Just someone who can code at a junior level position. Remember you were a n00b too as well back in your day.
I do wonder as an I.T. professional who does not code but did in college and know the basics of structures, data types, and object oriented programming if I should do it myself as I hit the end of my path currently. I can learn and put something basic together right now if you hand me documentation
Almost anyone can learn to code... (Score:2)
... just as almost anyone can learn to drive. But it passing your driving test doesn't make you Schumacher. Like excelling at most things in life, becoming a good programmer takes innate talent plus years of practice. If you don't have either of those then you'll only ever be the guy driving the Prius to the supermarket, not the one lapping in a Porsche at Le Mans.
recycling (Score:3, Insightful)
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
And no they don't.
Programming is not a task. It is a way of viewing the world. It’s a way of thinking that mingles creativity and logic. Almost like physical poetry. Many of us (yes, I’m a coder and have been a long time) have a burning curiosity and always ask “what if, how did that happen, where did that come from..” and a myriad of other questions indicating a need for constant learning. My wife is very successful in medicine. She’s much more “feeling” driven in her decisions whereas mine are logical. At times call me “cold”, and says “who thinks like that?” We balance, in a good way – most of the time – anyway, I digress As for programmers, not everyone is built that way, and a “boot camp” won’t change you if you don’t. This mantra “Everyone can and should learn to code” is one of those tag lines that need to finally die.
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Yes, but those skills don't go out of date; running, jungle survival, desert survival, weapon maintainance, hand-to-hand combat, urban combat. basic medicine, vehicle repair, communications.
With computer technology, is programming with Modula-2, Turbo Pascal, Borland C++, 6502/Z80/6809/68xxx/MIPS/Sparc assembly language still relevant? There are still niche jobs in ADA/Cobol/Fortran but those usually require domain knowledge as well.
You can't just learn C++ by itself, you need to learn STL/Boost as well as
You gotta want it (Score:2)
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"and from searching Stack Overflow"
I was with you up until this point. No way is stack overflow a good place to learn to code. Half the answers to questions are either plain wrong or answer a different question. And while a lot of the rest just give an answer , they don't explain the logic behind it. Similarly with the code examples - cutting and pasting code is easy, understanding WHY it works is something else entirely.
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Indeed.
A code monkey knows what things work.
A developer knows how things work.
A programmer knows why things work.
Without a drive to find out how and why, you'll never be more than someone who assembles a puzzle. You will be stuck when a piece is missing, not realising that you can create your own piece, or create a better puzzle.
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Sure. Why use Stack Overflow when you can get poorly thought out answers at Slashdot? Should Stack Overflow be a programmer's only tool? Of course not. But it's a part of many perfectly competent programmer's toolkits. It's great for quickly finding forgotten syntax, showing alternative solutions, possibly identifying problems with "obvious" solutions and for identifying the vocabulary needed to dig deeper.
A qualified yes (Score:3)
I went to a RAILS boot camp and did an Android boot camp as well. Both of which I did because my boss was willing to pay. I could have grabbed some books and taught myself just fine. It was a nice way to spend a week away from other distractions though and get instantly familiar with all the basic machinery so I could than hit the ground running on projects. I say that as someone with a computer science degree (BS) and years of experience in LOB software development.
What I needed out of those camps was freedom form other things like e-mail and people asking me questions about legacy projects my team supported and a chance to walk thru some structured exercises to learn the basic libraries, name spaces, and paradigms used, and parlance ("dictionary" vs "hash" vs "frame" etc) people working primarily in those technologies use.
There were many people at both camps (HOTT) like myself, however there were also people who had clearly never done any development before, outside a shell script or two in their mothers basement, if that. They were not doing much other than key punching the samples in and not understanding at all what was going on, you could tell by the questions they were and were not asking. Its hard for me to imagine they really got much out of the courses. I don't think they could go home and make even a simple CRUD type app/service pair without a lot of hand holding.
Re: A qualified yes (Score:2)
Bootcamps can be useful for getting programmers who already have expertise in one area to quickly gain a solid grounding in another, by ushering them through the awkward "clueless n00b" phase so they at least know what to search for on Google & Stack Overflow.
I know that I'm *personally* vulnerable to falling into "X-Y Problems" when learning something radically new (getting stumped trying to solve problem X, concluding that solving Y will at least put me on the path to solving X, then getting so caught
Define "working" (Score:4, Informative)
If you want to define "working" as:
Do the bootcamps attract tiger mom/dad parents who will pay anything to get their kids into Stanford/Berkeley including make their kids learning programming even when they don't have any interest in it so they can brag to their peers that their kid(s) have an app on the Apple/Google store.
Then yes. These things are in every strip mall in the SF bay area.
These bootcamps aren't about turning kids in successful programmers or software engineers any more than petting zoos are making zoologists out of kids. It's a way to make money, pure and simple.
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There's definitely one. I believe they call it "Britain".
Re: There's no reason a bootcamp can't work. (Score:2)
CS without GenEd would produce grads who *might* be able to get decently-paying jobs right after graduation, but the moment they got laid off after the next recession or merger/acquisition/bankruptcy/outsourcing-fetish, they'd be totally fucked unless they had the resources to spend another year or two taking classes on whatever's hot today.
CS isn't about "learning to code" -- it's about learning HOW to learn, and gaining the background knowledge that might save your ass someday and help you to remain relev
Maybe if the person already as the aptitude (Score:2)
But if they do, they probably already taught themselves to code and are making 6 figures.
It works for natural languages (Score:1)
If you can teach someone to speak, read and write a natural language (such as French, German, Arabic, etc.) in an intensive course lasting a few weeks - which is well known to be possible - why shouldn't you be able to teach someone to write code at a fairly basic level?
The advantages of focus and intensity are great, although to stay with such a schedule the students must of course be highly motivated.
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Starting from not speaking or writing any language at all?
In any case, such a short course is barely going to teach you the rudiments.
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Starting from not speaking or writing any language at all?
Good point! However, I think that knowing a natural language (such as English) is an essential prerequisite for anyone to learn a programming language. They aren't called "languages" for nothing, you know. Certainly programming languages are very different from natural languages, but they have a common core. How could you understand, let alone say, "Add the number in Register One to the number in Register Two and place the result in Register Three" without knowing what a number, a register, or addition are?
The term as such is bollocks (Score:2)
Boot camp may refer to basic military training or a cruel method of punishment. Why do you use a military term for something which is more like education and training? I hope you do not punish the wannaby coders when they code wrong.
Also programming requires practice and a good theoretical background. Nothing you can get in a short and intensive training program. However, it might help to learn something new.
Most certainly not (Score:2)
In my experience code camp and competitive coders need to be heavily coached to remove bad habits. Those promote absolutely the wrong habits to be effective members of agile development teams.
remember the bubble and the one trick ponies? (Score:2)
Remember during the bubble when a certain country created 300,000 "air quote" "engineers" seemingly overnight? When people here did not understand the difference between a college and University from that country. We have a short fucking memory. Because many of those one trick ponies went to the equivalent of coding boot camps. Now can it work, yes, if you are an engineer. Good engineers are born, not created. You will grow and become a good software engineer, something you would have been no matter w
Our bootcamp grads are great (Score:1)
We have a handful of bootcamp/codeschool graduates at my work alongside our formally trained (CS graduates) and a few folks like me, who are self-taught and have just been working forever. They're all self-motivated and eager to learn, good at asking for help, and good at their work.
I think the feelings about code school holds a lot of ire amongst those who went to school for computer science. They feel like someone took the short cut and is now reaping the rewards that they had to spend 5 years and tens of
They might work for existing professionals (Score:2)
Learning a whole profession in a matter of weeks sounds pretty tough, might be why there are no "engineering boot camps" or "accounting boot camps". But I can imagine an "accounting for engineers" boot camp that gave an engineer enough mental tools to talk productively with their accountant, do simple accounting if they run a 1-man consulting firm, that sort of thing.
Accounting is one thing that engineers, doctors, dentists and lawyers and many other professionals could all stand several weeks of. Progr
What could you learn in a few weeks/months? (Score:2)
The MCSE bootcamps of 1999 have returned. It's just the usual crowd of technical training/education folks trying to squeeze a few bucks out of this bubble before it pops. You're always going to get people trying to take a shortcut to the big money whenever there's a "shortage" of qualified people. Back in the 90s, the MCSE camps were taking people off the streets who'd barely
My opinion is that these bootcamps are only good if they actually teach the fundamentals, but I'm sure they skip most of that and teac
Just like the rest... (Score:1)
Anyone have a positive experience? (Score:2)
Ok folks. Here is my background. I have 16 credits of programming in college but changed majors to Business Administration as Slashdot told me all I.T. jobs would be gone by now ... WORST ADVICE EVER! I know the basics of object oriented programming, structures, and doing basic programs. I have around 6 recent years doing I.T. support and gradually worked my way up to Senior Desktop Support Tech. I am at the time of my worth.
My options are either to update my MCSE to get into System Administration as I have
ofcourse they work (Score:2)
didn't we all do something like that when we were young? ofcourse they don't make a full coder out of you, but it just gives you a taste which is good enough to know if you want to digg further into it or not.