- Most of them have engineering background: electrical engineering, civil engineering, petroleum engineering.

- Since they lack formal education in IT, they have to train twice as hard, which our company encourages (2 months of probation = 2 months of training, it's almost impossible to find developer with Scala experience around here anyway).

- We work with the Bootcamp to improve their program: giving reference to 'hard', 'theoretical' books such as Algorithms & Datastructure or Database Design and cutting down some unnecessary parts.

- Most importantly, we strongly prefer people who switched to IT because they actually love programming, not just looking for higher wage.*

* It may sound weird but actually many people here didn't picked their university by themselves but by the guidance of their parent, so they might study something else than their favourite.

That's great, but what about the people who come from a non-engineering background? I feel like people with a technical background will be able to pick up coding a lot quicker than people who don't have a lot of engineering aptitude.

>We work with the Bootcamp to improve their program: giving reference to 'hard', 'theoretical' books such as Algorithms & Datastructure or Database Design and cutting down some unnecessary parts.

That's great that you guys do this. I'm a real big proponent of this private/public model since it benefits both businesses (they get people who are trained in key business areas) and colleges/bootcamps (they can brag about knowledgeable grads whose job placement boosts their numbers).

You're almost certainly correct. It's perhaps possible that the bootcamp model, which can work well for people with solid technical backgrounds, might not work equally well for others.

That's fine. Not every tool is a fit for every job. A hammer is very useful, but it makes a poor saw.

However, she certainly had formal training in CS, just not at the undergrad level.

(Best, they should take as long as they need to until the student demonstrates competence, but that would break the "pay up-front, train a fixed amount of time, get a nice job" business model / marketing strategy.)

Unfortunately, those things aren't fripperies to be tossed away lightly.

Hello! This was me. Studied music because it’s what my parents wanted me to do, and kept finding ways to shoehorn “computer stuff” into any music I was doing: making digital synths, making music analysis programs, and coding up generative music machines.

That path worked well enough, so it took me awhile to realize I ought to give up the pretense of music and just do the thing I was interested in full-time. The pay difference was indeed the incentive to re-tool, however.

I used a boot camp, where I learned the current faddish tools of frontend, to get connected into the industry, and have since happily transitioned to backend work. I’m not sure the boot camp itself was necessary, and 20 years ago I probably would have found an enthusiast group at a city library or something, but it was a short term functional community that worked for me.

I honestly don't know how people can sit through so many classes that are nearly a complete waste of time. Potentially wasting up to four years of life. I tried, was really motivated in the beginning despite it, then slowly burnt out on classes I absolutely didn't need. I left for a job even though I only need a handful more classes.

Also, because I know it coming, not wanting to waste four years of life absolutely does not imply that anyone lacks "grit." I could refer to a dozen current and former coworkers who I am certain will say I don't lack it. Give me an interesting and hard problem to solve and I'll be on it until it is solved. If you don't have one then I don't want to work for you anyway.

I feel you.

I think there is no pool more shallow than the one of C programmers that can work on embedded in my area.

Regardless of what your background is, I’ve already had to commit to 6 months of training for anyone I hire.

Not for employees but for contractors or consultants they better be able to hit the ground running. That’s why they get paid 3x and up what employees get. If you need someone right now you can pay the premium for it and get it.

they are also more resistant to change than a fresh hire, or may be a bit more convincing when they want things to move their way (to the team's detriment).

if you want to incorporate new cultural elements into your team, especially if your team has already strong, well-developed culture, you have to be aware of what is good and what is bad within your existing team, what to keep and what to give up, and be quick to nip any unintended side effects of a cultural/workflow change in the bud.

Google broadly believes it takes 6-12 months for a new hire to become completely productive, so I doubt that particular aspect of your experience is due to shallowness of the embedded (straight) C (not C++) talent pool in your area.

I was pleased to see Cloud Spanner hit the market, and trying to nudge the industry towards hermetic builds with Bazel.

https://cloud.google.com/files/storage_architecture_and_chal...

Maybe if Embedded gigs wouldn't be paid a fraction of what a web dev kiddie would make, the pool would be larger.

I am currently working for a big corporate in the UK, who have been showing off their "pioneering" and "visionary" strategy to focus recruitment from code boot-camps.

All I can say is that as a senior developer, it has made my life misery. I've gone from writing code and producing features, to a full-time mentor and babysitter. Half of the boot-camp graduates I believe have become coders for the wrong reasons like:

* developers have an easy life, getting into work whenever they choose

* they get to wear t-shirts and baggy jeans

* they get all the latest toys to play around with and shiny MacBooks

* I hated my last job, looking at developers on TV in these Silicon valley places looks like the dream life

* I am a single mother who was given the course for free

The others, have aptitude but are so inexperienced from their 3 month session that it will take them atleast two years before they can be fully independant engineers.

These codecamps are licenses to print money it seems, they charge the students a hefty fee for the course and companies then pay a recruitment fee at the end.

Needless to say, I will be leaving my company very soon to go to a place where there is a coding test and filtering to prevent most of these bootcampers from getting in.

Yes its snobby, but I didn't study and spend my student loan on my passion just so I can train up a bunch of people looking for the "easy life".

Most of the bootcampers did three months of "frontend" work and are oblivious to what goes underneath in the murky world of business logic and services.

Until they have been able to demonstrate they are confident in:

* Presenting data to a user

* Validating inputs

* Making correct requests and understanding the interactions of an API (whether its REST, RPC, programmatic, internal)

* Processing requests

* Persistance and access of data

* Basic security

* Be able to document and explain all areas to a basic level.

* Debug and provide a root cause analysis.

Then they will remain a junior developer and I think that will be many of these bootcampers fate, as they are either unwilling or incapable of doing work outside their comfort zone.

This is a fair assessment - not just of boot camp developers but of all developers. I don't think I agree that it is a problem that some people working as a junior developer today will never become a Technical Fellow, however.

I've personally found (especially in the "enterprise") that many senior developers do not actually have fifteen years of experience - but one year of experience fifteen times, and are functionally junior developers with the wrong title. Educational background does not tend to be an indicator of this.

Few bootcamps seem to do a good job of teaching students what to expect in a career path or what they'll need to do to advance in it.

I think our industry is headed for a collective reckoning, though I would not begin to speculate on a timeline. We're going to have to square seniority as a measure of skill with seniority as a measure of time, and no matter how it happens a number of people are going to be unpleasantly surprised.

Yes, we all know someone who's done something for 2 years and is amazing, a true genius/savant who redefines what's possible. They're the exceptions.

I've been in professional software around 25 years, and was recently talking with a colleague (roughly same years of experience). He's just started a new job, and is working with people coming out of a bootcamp, and is frustrated because they're both currently being put on the same tasks - some basic FE JS work - and the bootcampers are actually slightly more productive than him. It's because that's literally all they know - they happen to know the same versions of everything the company is using, because it's what the bootcamp used. They can't do anything else, but both parties are being judged by this one ability right now, and he's questioning his own value now. It's giving the junior folks sort of a weird view of what 'old people' are capable of (which, as an old person, bothers me some!)

Isn't the point that they _are_ junior developers after completing a bootcamp? Juniors can be some of the best people in your organization if your org is willing to take them on and teach them things.

Not saying you need a full 4 year program and a CS degree. I don't have a CS degree, but 2 degrees in electrical engineering and computer engineering. That gave me a very solid and low level concept of computing that most CS grads dont get. Programming languages are a dime a dozen. Some are better suited for certain tasks than others.

Someone going to a Ruby on Rails or Node/JS boot camp isn't going to get that exposure to multuple languages. They're not going to know that, say Python is a better language/ecosystem than JavaScript for scientific analysis. They're not going to be exposed to C, C++, C#, Java, Rust or Go. Personally, I wouldnt even interview someone that's taken a boot camp in C or C++. The languages are too nuanced and complex to even get a foothold in 3 months.

Sorry this ended up very rantish, and I didn't mean for it to be so. I'm trying to make the point that while, yes, boot camps serve a purpose and may be useful to some folks, they will not and are not designed to give you enough knowledge to truly excel in the industry with the knowledge gleaned from the boot camp alone. It will take an extremely passionate and aggressive self learner to be more than a junior after a boot camp.

Over the past 20 years, this general principle has been validated, at least in my experience - a good boss I had once said only the top 10-15% of people in IT know what they're doing. The next 20-30% have some idea, but they're sort of useless. The bottom half, you do not hire if you can help it...

There's also a massive disconnect from the reality of just how complicated modern software needs (not) to be.

That said I agree that some 3-month bootcamp probably isn't enough time to really internalize the basics of programming (unless you're really smart or have prior exposure), let alone learn to design and write nontrivial programs.

Consider a typical front-end developer setup - with IDE/smart editor, linters, transpilers, packers, package managers, project generators. These are all useful tools, but to be even a marginally competent developers, you have to know what they do and why. Otherwise, you'll be completely lost when some default changes. You'll be flabbergasted when you discover that the project structure you're used to isn't "how the web is made", but just an opinionated pattern that was sort-of fashionable at the time you were learning.

I've seen this problem happen with code camps teaching people RoR some years ago; I believe it now happens with Node/React.

I was running a group of recent(-ish) hires through a training course recently. Part of it is penetrating-testing a dockerized application on their machines. One of the things the application is vulnerable to is various forms of form tampering attacks.

One of my students just stared helplessly at this. They were absolutely stuck. I had no idea why. I came to find out that one of my students had managed to make it through a bootcamp, and an interview process, and be on the job for several months all without learning a Chrome or Firefox developer console could be used to edit a page's HTML. Or that a page could be saved and edited that way.

I hadn't even considered the possibility that a professional engineer in a web development role might be ignorant of how to edit an HTML form by hand. It implies a shocking ignorance of how the whole thing works.

The insight is this: a browser is a program that reads text that it gets from files or servers, and that text tells it what to put on the screen, how it looks and what can be done with it. When you're learning the basics of a (backend) programming language, you first learn how to put text on screen. The same way, you can put text into a file, or (with some more tricks) into a network connection. So if you write a program that prints HTML to stdout and make browser read from it, you get a client-server web page. Boom, that's pretty much all. Everything else you'll ever learn is just managing complexity. Modules, MVC, database connections, etc. - it's all serving the goal of generating the right text that gets shipped to browser.

I was surprised by the ways people (sometimes junior programmers with little web experience) didn't get that. Some didn't know that browser simply reads text (happens when you're exposed to frameworks instead of raw HTML). Others thought MVC is something fundamental to web apps, instead of just being a way to keep your "print HTML to stdout" code from very quickly getting out of hand. So whenever I teach something the basics of web development, I always start with this - raw HTML as text, the connection to "your program can print text to stdout, so it can print HTML to stdout too", and we build up from there.

We’d explain it the way you described. We’d have them start with Sinatra apps after 3 weeks of modeling problems in CLI apps.

After their 10th hand-written form with error handling, they’d see the value of Rails form helpers immediately once they hit the last few weeks.

Similarly, they’d write lots of SQL queries by hand in their CLI apps. We’d push them to separate it behind method boundaries then class boundaries then build a mini-ORM.

When ActiveRecord came along it was no problem because they had a model of the problems it was invented to solve.

A bit of the flavor: http://bit.ly/dbc_activerecord

It’s always sad to hear that the bootcamps that followed us didn’t try to give students the right mental models, but I believe you!

I read the whole excerpt you linked, and holy cows if you did not just significantly improve my base opinion about boot camps. The way you introduced AR is exactly the way I would do it, with the same digressions to hammer down things like "AR is ultimately just writing SQL for you", and "AR is ORM, there are many ORMs with different approaches", and "where does a concept live?", and "map is not the territory".

Here's a thread I posted the other day, though, that might be interesting to you: https://twitter.com/jfarmer/status/1127324440469970944

BTW, the evolution of your feelings is pretty normal and it brings back memories. Haha. People would always be like, "Uh, yeah, ok, so you're churning out code monkeys, right?"

Then we'd bring them in, show them what we were teaching and how we were teaching it, and they'd go "Oh man, I wish I had been taught like this!"

That happened to me at Google for someone who didn't come in as a software engineer. I didn't handle it well and it's one of the things I most regret.

In this particular case, my student was hired directly into a software engineering role from outside the company within the past few months. This, to my mind, suggests a whole sequence of failures starting with the contents of the bootcamp.

Programming is a profession. As you say, learning on the job is normal and expected.

--

[0] - https://www.xkcd.com/1053/

Ah, bullshit. No you don't. Most people only understand a small subset of what they use. They are junior devs.

I went to a coding camp. I sat in a group working with my classmates on our group project and I noted that what we were learning was "just enough so that we can learn reasonably well on our own.... so that maybe later we will be good at this".

They looked horrified...

Most boot camp students really do not know at all the level of complexity involved, how much you need to just go figure out yourself / learn about ... learning, and etc.

Yes I’m aware of the differences in capability and no I’m not complaining. I’m just saying it was easier back then.

Many of the comments here have focused around the skills and personality traits of coders. I agree with most: problem solving, some level of aptitude and curiosity are all important parts of the basic mix for success. Most of the discussion around motivation either has circled around economic benefits or some self-driven desire to learn.

Again, while not invalid motivators - I think a BIG one that's not been discussed is the general allure to the raw transformational power enabled by software (automation). With only a few lines of code, disruption can be created to make things easier, make things faster, make things safer, make things better - with immediacy and impact. In my case, I used it to disrupt inefficiencies and accelerate solving problems. As a factory process engineer, that kinda power was way too intoxicating to look away from. But manufacturing wasn't quite ready to embrace software quite yet - so I made the career jump. For me, I wish coding camps or other channels would have been accessible in small remote towns in the Midwestern part of the U.S. back then, it would have accelerated my confidence and given me a channel to seek a career. Instead the luck of the dotcom boom opened doors in job fairs where I had plenty to offer in the technical realm but little to show in terms of code at the time. Nevertheless, 15+ years and going in software has been a great ride thus far and one that I couldn't have predicted.

[1] https://medium.com/@boilerupnc/ten-lines-9a8403984bbf?source...

I might be biased since I have an engineering degree, but no CS degree. Self-taught myself a bunch of stuff, made the switch to software, and have now worked for 2 of the FAANGs. My very first software employer certainly had to mentor me quite a bit for the first 4 months, but I certainly justified the investment over the following year.

Like you, I learned a lot of beat practices on the job. SCM? Was SourceSafe (Yeah. I know, cringe, but also 2000). But also practices about how to release, when, notification of releases, post mortem of incidents, none of that was mentioned in school. All on the job.

I landed in finance, and any single fuck up can land you on the wrong side of the door. But if you accept you screwed up, most people I've worked with will give you a second chance as long as you don't repeat your mistake.

The problem with these camps is they help those who don't need it.

Bootcamps are the opposite. Quick compressed learning certified by a brand. Good for experienced developers learning a new language but lacking for the type who haven't used a computer before.

Things like how file systems work, what system calls do -- how write() works -- does it write data or not? How do blocking / non-blocking calls differ? What concurrency models are there in programming? How does parallel execution really work? How do you (properly) handle I/O, networking, and other events? How do you evaluate and compare the efficiency of algorithms? What kinds of security threats lie in different types of code? Practically, how do you prevent them? How do databases work? How do you design applications to avoid corruption? What are the different isolation levels in a database? What parts of the database are 'locked' for a given query, what 'order' are transactions executed in? How does the OS allows multiple programs to run?

Cryptography. Sessions, encryption, hashing, salting, peppers, verifiable delay functions, public keys, symmetric vs asymmetric crypto. Signatures. Mutual authentication. Message integrity. I guarantee you most developers have screwed up their handling of I/O, security, db use, or concurrent code at at least once in their career. These are deep concepts that can be "learned" in 10 minutes from a tutorial, but have tons of weird, undefined behavior that only shows up if you don't completely understand what you're doing.

IMO, what seems to have changed recently is there's now more ways to shoot yourself in the foot. I.e- more open source libraries that are usable right off the bat as black-box-plugabble, square-peg-in-circular-hole type deals. Kind of like how people trick themselves into feeling like experts from reading wikipedia -- a little knowledge can be just as dangerous as no knowledge at all.

If the future is software, then there will be places for PhDs & bachelors, but also for associates and even bootcamps/certs. Even people who are not deeply passionate about software can make a useful contribution. Putting men on the moon took a lot more than just rocket scientists.

That's not my experience at all. I've on-boarded many bootcamp graduates and I've never seen one that was doing anything that I would call "productive" a week out of bootcamp.

I could see that maybe if they had a good bit of experience before bootcamp.

Other engineering industries have to take rigorous exams to achieve any forward momentum in their job (civil engineering had the PE, for example). This is something I think I could get behind for our industry .

Honestly, it might be easier to adjust the hiring process. If the hiring process were able to easily select driven individuals who retain "software engineer" as part of their identity, and people that take pride in their work, seek constructive criticism and want to learn, then that would be good enough.

I should also clarify that being self taught isn't necessarily a bad thing (one of the best coworkers I had was self taught), lacking any of the above traits is.

I'd argue that if a test could select good SEs then companies would be giving tests (or outsourcing such tests) as part of their interview process. It's not like a lot of thought, effort and experimentation hasn't gone into figuring out how to hire software engineers.

>Honestly, it might be easier to adjust the hiring process. If the hiring process were able to easily select driven individuals who retain "software engineer" as part of their identity, and people that take pride in their work, seek constructive criticism and want to learn, then that would be good enough.

I'd like to note that a test would not select for any of those things except the ability to study hard.

Also maybe a lot of people are self conscious about no formal education as well? That wasn't an issue for me but I imagine it is for some.

TL;DR: The transition from learning the hard way always, to allowing someone to try to prevent it is tough.

For example, get them to explain a model they would use to represent user login. Then get them to explain how that would link to their use info. Then how they would display that on a login screen. Then how they would save that into the database. Anything to watch out for? Any security concerns?

> I am currently working for a big corporate in the UK, who have been showing off their "pioneering" and "visionary" strategy to focus recruitment from code boot-camps.

Your employer is trying out a new HR strategy to cut costs and boost productivity. Is that strategy working for them? It doesn't sound like it's working for them if they're hiring bad coders and driving away experienced staff. Do they think it's working? Is your management aware of your concerns?

Because honestly, this sounds a lot like "my management team is doing something dumb, and it's all the fault of the new junior devs we hired". That sounds unlikely.

Also:

> I didn't study and spend my student loan on my passion just so I can train up a bunch of people

Mentoring is a key part of the job. If your HR department is hiring poor candidates for that, that's an issue, but if you don't want to mentor people at all, is this really your passion?

I make things at home now. I don't want to go back to the stress of rapid fire "three parallel orthogonal lines for Miss Business" development. The baby-devs are a cudgel of tender emotions with which to push back against the exploitative wiles of business.

I fondly imagine I'll actually have the time to strike out on my own any day now, but the reality is that my life is already better.

About half my coding camp class was unemployable by my estimation. At one interview I'm fairly sure they had interviewed a classmate or two before me and the questions they asked were painfully simple to start.... if they felt they had to ask that, I can't imagine they'd ever want to hire someone at that level. Obviously I showed them otherwise and the interview went well, but I felt like their perception was so poor to start, there was no chance.

At least I'm working now so it's not just "coding camp" on my resume as far as coding goes (I had another technical career previous to this one). I"m hesitant to mention the coding camp when I meet other people who are in the same industry. I really enjoyed my coding camp experience (going back to school was a surprisingly wonderful experience as I was a poor student earlier in life) and yet I'm inclined to say "self taught" and that isn't exactly true although much of what I know now would fall into that category.

This seems to be the huge differentiator.

I've had really good experiences with boot camp grads who had a previous technical career or came from a STEM phd. Camps are great for getting already well-educated people up to speed on how to hack together a website, which is an enormous value add to an existing skill set.

I went to a bootcamp, and the first hour of every day was spent learning to solve the types of coding tests that companies use in interviews. So, when companies look at the graduates of these bootcamps, it's really hard to differentiate between people who perform really well on the interview but will require significant investment before they're useful (this was me) and people who have been programming and working with computers for years and simply lacked a little bit of polish & training (like some other people in my program).

All that's to say -- traditional coding tests & filtering doesn't necessarily work that well when you have people training for the test (rather than training for the ability to do the work that the test is supposed to be a proxy for).

I'd instead try to pair with people on solving a problem that translates well to the problem domain that you're trying to hire for. Anybody who's new to the industry is going to need a decent amount of support & mentorship starting out before they're able to contribute meaningfully to a team and working with someone for a day is a good way to figure out how much support they're going to need and what it's going to be like to mentor them. Bootcamp graduates would likely be open to a day of paid pairing to figure out if a job would be a good fit.

If you did want to go with the more traditional coding test route, I'd try and do something relatively concrete:

- download a set of log files & group them based on a search

- hit an API route & use that to render and update a list of items

- connect to a database, figure out what schema migrations are necessary to support a new feature, and then talk through how to do the migration

- figure out why a test is occasionally failing on a CI server

- add metrics, logs, tests, and alerts to a service with two routes (/healthcheck and /doSomethingImportant)

Like all interviews, the closer the interview maps to the day-to-day of what your needs actually are, the better it will be. There's something beguiling about questions about dynamic programming or red-black trees, but being good at answering those questions has almost no relationship to day-to-day work. (Unless you're at a place where deeper knowledge of data-structures and computer science really matters... and in that case, you're not going to have much with recent bootcamp graduates anyways)

OTOH, you’re right about boot camp grads not being ready to operate independently, but that’s your employer’s fault for hiring too many of them. You’re totally free to leave and go somewhere that doesn’t hire boot camp grads if you don’t like it.

Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed mentoring but done kids graduate with no clue and the wrong expectations.

I've mentioned to management these kids don't graduate with the proper foundation... And I'm told it's my job to give it to them....sure, I'd love to if they give me their college tuition!

This really only applies for CS, but I wouldn't hire people with "IT" degrees for programming jobs no matter where they went (not based on their degree anyway).

GSU is much larger than either GaTech or UGA, and it just received an award for being the 2nd best teaching institution in the US. Kennesaw is about the same size now that they merged with Southern Poly, and their CS program is also ABET accredited.

I've taken CS classes at both GSU and Tech, depending on the classes the person takes at GSU, there isn't a big teaching disparity. The type of person who makes it into Tech changes things, but if you look at their transcripts when hiring you can quickly see who took the easy classes and scraped by with Cs and who really took it seriously

What do you think is an acceptable ratio?

I can only speak for my team. In big corp, your work experience is based on your team. We have 4 senior dev, 7 college hires who have been with us between 0-4 years. The experience/aptitude varies. i.e. there are some who have been with us for 2 years that is not as good as the one hired. We've had some come on our team and move onto other teams. I have one who's been with us for 4 years, and at 3 years I felt is like a competent senior dev. He's moved to another team and runs laps around his new teammates.

Because I have the most patience in the group...I end up being the person most of them come to for help. I'm technically the architect on the team (manager gave me the title recently, too modest to accept it...) and the senior devs even come to me with questions...but of course I don't truely mentor them. But to give continuing education to the team, I've implemented a "Tech talk Friday" where I book a 1.5 hour of our time on Friday and watch and discuss various conference talks on YouTube that I feel are applicable for us. It's a nice way to end a Friday, too :)

There's no defined ratio. A grad who has a good foundation, is a go-getter and can learn on their own only needs to be guided. While others need to be handheld. Mentors' should not be bogged down to the point they are not able to do their real work - otherwise they'd get burned out and would just dismiss mentees.

The only logical reasons I’ve seen are an inability to hire otherwise, and staff moonlighting at the boot camps. Both are bad reasons.

* The local management are non-technical and have a rudimentary equation that 1 developer = 1 productivity unit

* The bootcamp has some really great salespeople

* Hiring is generally difficult for great dev talent, so their logic is just to hire anyone for the numbers, otherwise their budget gets constrained by kafkaesque finance practice from the companies HQ.

* Local political and PR reasons, the company is "hiring local talent", "equal opportunities" etc.

That's why I am interested in someone's portfolio, if they don't have a portfolio, then why?

My degree put very little focus on memorization. Individual and group projects certainly had nothing to do with memorization. My experience hiring and working people from other schools indicates that their degrees were similar. I'm not sure where this degree == memorization thing comes from.

I truly believe that almost anyone could spend 6 months studying interview questions and go from zero coding experience to getting a job at Google.

Is this person going to be a good engineer? Almost certainly not. But by God's will they be good at programming tests and Google interview questions.

Why exactly is that the wrong reason?

By the parent’s criteria, I am “not serious”. My record on OSS and early work at companies which were acquired or have outsized valuations suggests the parent is 100% wrong, however.

Tell me, when you typed your first line of "Hello world" in C, Python etc. Was your motivation to have an easy life?

Our perceptions of programmers are shaped by the PC revolution of the 1980s. A lot of people got exposed to programming because there was a PC in the house. Kids and teens so exposed tended to be the ones who went into programming as a career, just because they had a head start and because they were more familiar with it. The result is that many of the best programmers in the profession in the 90s and 00s were the ones who started as kids. But many of the mediocre and bad ones were too!

Passion and early starts are overrated. As long as a person is smart in the right way and reasonably enjoys the stuff, they can be a great programmer. (And I say this as someone who started programming at the age of 6 and did it for free for many years.)

If you don't have intellectual curiosity, then I think your career prospects in software engineering will be limited.

Perhaps I should have articulated it better above.

What I meant is that many of these bootcampers don't have that curiosity or drive to have touched code before their course. Even after getting a job, I've asked them about coding outside of work etc. they're not interested.

This part I fully agree with.

Do not equate "boot camp" and "would rather sit at a computer than mine coal" for a lack of intellectual curiousity though. I have personally met grads _from the boot camp in question in this article_ who clearly do have it - while spending their work days writing Ruby for web apps, they were spending evenings learning C, assembler and the operating system fundamentals that their particular route into the industry meant they missed out on.

I should add I don't have a CS degree, yet I'm doing the homework for the "dedicated" "curious" "high aptitude" etc. CS grads you'll be hiring later. Ha.

I’ve blended in pretty well all through upper management

but arbitrary screening questions for interviews and silly coding exercises have no bearing on that

Don't get me wrong, I'm the biggest fan of getting in at 10:00 or 11:00, but I also try very hard to get things done. If you come out of your boot camp without understanding that you still have a shit-ton to learn and you aren't willing to put in the effort to learn it and do the actual work (which isn't easy), and, yes, put in the time required, then you are a liability.

It's also problematic in a world wherein people have to work together, which is why most jobs don't allow one to 'work when one chooses' although that is obviously the case in some scenarios.

I just finished my first final project using React/Redux/PostgreSQL/Rails/S3 -> http://www.orangemusic.xyz I don't think I could have learned what I've learned in that amount of time with self-study alone.

tech people have been automating jobs away and insisting the future is code for a long time now. Now all of a sudden we get "coding is hard" and the non-traditional bootcamp education they pitched only really works for highly motivated self-starters, often with preexisting engineering or science backgrounds.

So what do they do? What exactly are they going to train into?

We're commenting on an article about a coding camp founded by a professional TED talker who's now in law school.

The "they" pitching bootcamps and the "they" automating jobs away are two different "theys".

People who have been doing software for the last 20 years have always been saying "coding is hard" and "a few months in a coding bootcamp isn't sufficient preparation for a career in tech, especially when the winds of the market shift".

But no one wants to hear "high-paying jobs require spending years getting good at doing hard things".

Seems like the kind of company which would be relying on interns and juniors (that need training too) instead of hiring seniors engineers, they just found a way to make it look good.

In my career, I've taught myself how to make complex CLIs. Then CGI-based web apps. Then Java desktop apps. Then MVC frameworks. Then JS frameworks. Etc. Ditto for changes in development and deployment processes. Ditto for changes in DB technology. etc.

My employer rightfully expected that, for a six figure salary, I should be a professional who is able to keep up with best practices. That's why they pay me well. They let me attend conferences and I negotiate for some "experimentation" time whenever there's a big shift in the tech landscape, but it's not like I'm disappearing for months at a time every 5 years. That'd be insane.

I'm not very old.

Hell, I don't even work in web development.

It's just one of those skills I need to keep fresh because it comes in handy every once in a while.

The changes in my actual domain of expertise have been even larger and much more difficult to keep up with.

Coding bootcamps are expensive -- they often cost on the order of a single year of college. If you're going to need to go through a few of them in your career just to keep up with a single skill set -- building UIs -- that's more of a baseline competence than a real specialty, why not front-load and just get a good-quality degree that prepares you to teach yourself the easy stuff? Double major while you're at it.

But the MSc in CS course for this uni... it really is less than a proper B.S. in CS course - it was nothing but the very basics. Aka a fairly expensive bootcamp, albeit with a "dissertation" at the end. The uni is making serious ££££ churning out "MSc graduates" and now I know where the trope of people with MSc who can't program comes from. My MSc course was a real course, from a much better school, but that was 15 years ago...

Not all the MSc in CS students were bad, mind you - the ones who could have been engineers did well. But they still only got the very basics of what you need to know coming into industry now (or what a BSc student would get) and if I was in charge, I'd re-label the degree to something other than a MSc. But degree inflation is here to stay...

Maybe that's your problem right there? I'm in SV and know someone who successfully did a bootcamp, but they certainly didn't get a special route through job interviews. They had to compete with graduates and pass regular technical interviews with algorithm questions (and they could do fairly hard ones that certainly many college graduates fail). BTW the bootcamp only charged on successful job placement, so it's hard to see how they could stay in business if it was just a scam.

> and filtering to prevent bootcampers from getting in

> its snobby, but I didn't study and spend my student loan on my passion just so I can train up a bunch of people

Why should the interview be for anything other than to determine technical competence and organizational fit? I'm sorry if you've had difficulty with your student loans but I don't see why it is relevant here.

There's plenty of mediocre programmers that managed to pass a CS program somewhere. Maybe their course material covered a broad range of topics but certainly not everyone retains it or can even answer basic questions. Assuming two people with no experience, I would strongly prefer to work with whoever performs better on coding challenges and computer architecture questions even if they went to a bootcamp. Probably especially if they went to a bootcamp. If someone has 4x as much time to study and still does worse, that's hardly encouraging is it?

To me it sounds like the hiring process at your company is what is at fault, and it would be better to fix that than to rely on expensive credentials (that can only set a low minimum bar anyway) as some sort of proxy. Maybe if you are overwhelmed with applicants you could filter by individual school, bootcamp, github portfolio, etc. But this seems to be painting with an overly broad brush.

The Chinese word for disaster is opportunity.

That's a well-known false trope. See:

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1212

and links therein.

Sadly, I fear that will be like “going to a place that doesn’t require unpaid overtime” or “going to a place that doesn’t have a noisy airplane hangar ‘open office’” - once it catches on, it will spread everywhere.

Which are the tenets of big corporate, which is why I am getting the hell outta there to a smaller, more "organic" company.

* Your job is no longer easy

* ----

* You have to help people, no longer get to play with your toys all day

* You hate your current job

* ----

I'm seeing a pattern of 3/5 but only because I'm assuming you aren't a mother. If I was wrong, Happy Mother's Day!

Have you ever been in a company where senior people were responsible for helping new people? Or, are you searching for that company where everyone comes in magically perfect and at exactly the same level of competence? I've never been at that company, when you find it, please share it here so we can all go work there.

Instructors with little tech experience, high rate of firing and stuff turnover, students being told to "google it", operating without licenses, all while the founder has fancy offices in Chicago with rapacious and alcoholic parties.

Amanda Laucher, the founder, essentially stole funds from governments and made false promises and is now going to Law School in Chicago. Meanwhile, these people quit their jobs on false hope and now are unemployed or have to rejoin at the bottom of the rung.

Assuming the article is fair, this is a sad situation and Laucher should be prosecuted.

The same applies to programming.

I'd say there are tons of hidden dependencies you have to learn in writing programs. Stuff that the tutorials and books often leave out. And that most developers take a few years to learn these dependencies, because there currently is no widely-known easy way to learn all this "tribal knowledge".

And when universities try to systematize ways to learn this tribal knowledge, they come up with a curriculum that takes most people 4 years to get through. (Yes there are many smart developers who could learn the curriculum faster.)

In what programming job?! Junior frontend dev churning out React components? Even there you're dealing with a dizzying array of HTML, CSS, and ever-changing JavaScript/Babel/Webpack/etc. insanity. In a few months you can barely produce some simple, low-quality code. It takes a lot longer for the concepts of good quality code to sink in.

it's always very costly, because it requires a very involved supervisor.

Learning large volumes of case law is analogous to learning the details of low level programming; both fields require years to master. But those details are not required for a lot of work in either field.

Meanwhile the hard stuff is out there, but increasingly being done by a few companies that sell it to the rest of the world.

So programming is becoming more bimodal and if you’re not on the hard curve it is going to become a lot less lucrative and a lot more competitive.

It works both ways too; When bootcamps first popped up, I was dismissive of them until I realized that there was (to be fair, relatively new) high demand for people who could even do the bare minimum of stringing together CRUD apps, forming a labor market that had nothing to do with me, despite nominally being an "engineer". I think a lot of the pathologies of eng hiring stem from the broadness of the role "engineer", which just ends up causing credentialism and the metaphorical ghetto-ization wrt talent of parts of the stack, like frontend.

Also the latter is clearly bidirectional. I haven't heard of the urban calling the rural "not real Americans" for one.

By all means subsidize a laptop and point them at some great online (free) resources, but beyond that if they won't/can't help themselves...

I think it's obvious that not every single person in the world has the external characteristics to be a great software developer. But those with passion and curiosity will be able to make a great career for themselves.

Could the school have instead focused on more boring general job skills with a special focus on using software effectively? I think so. I think it would have been more successful than teaching "the LAMP stack" or whatever it was they did. Not that software development is rocket science, but it's true that it's not for everybody, and neither is accounting, nursing, engineering, teaching or plumbing.

But these initiatives that try to promise high paying jobs to everyone who applies, it's just not going to work out for everyone who goes through the mill. And yeah, I think to have a long career as a software developer, you need a little more than "meets expectations." You need the drive to improve and grow after you leave the program and even once you land your job. So, I think when you get a newbie who has passion, is personable, and who submits themselves to iterative improvement, I really do think that makes a great developer.

A better question, perhaps, is why this is assumed to equate to coding-based jobs.

Anyone can learn to cook. This shouldn't be equated to everyone being equipped to become a chef de cuisine.

In the same way most chefs don't work at Michelin star restaurants, most developers don't work at FAANG companies like Google. They work at other types of companies, whether those are large company in house development teams, small agencies, outsourcing companies, government agencies or as freelancers.

And in those locations, you don't really need to be some super smart genius to get the job done. Coding themes and plugins for systems like WordPress doesn't require a computer science background or an analytical mindset. Building a percectly usable site or app for a local business doesn't require that either. Enterprise or government work often doesn't require it either.

So there are plenty of jobs available for people who know only a bit of code, or who struggle with the theory side of things. They're just not jobs making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in Silicon Valley.

The disconnect here, I suspect, is that bootcamps tend to promise that their grads will become the rockstars making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in Silicon Valley. Not that they'll be able to set up WordPress or do reporting with SQL queries. Some make this very, very explicit - I've seen ads that literally read "GET A SIX FIGURE JOB".

I've worked as a freelancer. I've worked at big-name tech. I've worked on in-house development teams and outsourcing companies. In every one of those scenarios, I had to understand the fundamentals of how computers work and apply analytical abilities to be effective. So I could deliver features on time, on budget, and as specified. I'm not going to claim to be some super smart genius, but I often found myself dealing with shrapnel from colleagues who possessed wonderful opportunities to improve their grasp of fundamentals.

It's not that there aren't jobs for line cooks or people turning out cookie-cutter blog sites. But when you run a training program promising everyone who signs up that they'll be a chef de cuisine while knowing that you're just training line cooks...

The theme in this comment thread seems to be something like, "Only rockstars should learn to code, it's pointless for normal people".

Perhaps it could be read slightly more charitably? Anyone can learn to code. At the same time, most people should not assume this will automatically lead them into a lucrative career in software engineering.

As you say, it's by no means pointless for normal people to learn. A great many people derive much value and satisfaction from homecooked meals and Excel macros. However, just as basic competency in a home kitchen does not automatically qualify one for a career as a chef, neither does basic competency with a programming language automatically qualify one for a career as a highly compensated software engineer.

By all means learn to code and make programs for yourself. No issue in occasionally helping other projects or programs or doing some small scale work. But don't try to directly jump into big things before getting trained correctly.

Cooking and coding aren't amalgamous. Cooking is necessary life skill, unless your only sources of sustenance are prepackaged foods or food from restaurants (which would include fast food).

The same cannot be said for coding. You needn't know or even understand technology or software to use a cell phone or browse the internet or what-have-you.

A more apt comparison would've probably been driving but even that is limited in scope, dependent on the public services available (which is, in and of itself, a byproduct of urban life versus rural life - at least in the states).

Also, I think Hanlon's Razor applies here.

The idea that everyone can make a stellar income from being a developer is oft touted as one of the points of these boot-camps. In other words, the argument is that those people can do it, it's just that they've never been afforded the opportunity.

Whilst this might be true for a small percentage of the group, as a whole, it isn't - implicitly - true that all of them will find jobs being programmers the day after they graduate these camps.

So, it isn't pointless for them to learn it, by far (and I'm only speaking for me, here), but it shouldn't be touted as the get-rich-quick-scheme that it's being pushed as because, then, yes, it's pointless for people to think it's possible to become a rockstar overnight; which I would like to point out is precisely what this business has capitalised on...

To continue with the analogy of music, even rockstars had to play gigs and sell records/tapes as up & comers (negating the pop genre) before they became big. People only hear the songs on the radio, they don't want to hear about the years it took before those stars were even given spins on the radio (see: Jewel living out of her van).

Code is a way to express solution to the problem which a computer can execute.

If you can learn any language, you can learn coding too.

Sure, not everyone can understand intricacies of the algorithm design and data structure gotchas but some of that can come as experience and curiousity.

Question worth asking is that, does everyone need this special knowledge? And the answer is even many today working in the field know lot less than you would like them to know.

Many websites have vunerabilities which can easily be solved by following some good practise. But still they are getting paid for that kind of work, which means there is a market for less knowledgeable developers who get the stuff done what's assigned to them even if they do not know how memory and processor works on the basic level.

Today, it's lot easier to code with stackoverflow and GitHub at your disposal than ever.

Besides, have you tried to learn a new natural language in adulthood? A bootcamp won’t get you far. And natural languages are really forgiving in comparison because you’re communicating with a human-level intelligence that’s used to inferring meaning from low-bandwidth ambiguous datastream.

Yes, most definitely.

Is it reasonable to assume some people will land on the far lefthand side of certain bell-curve-fitting measurables, or unmeasurables, that lends them to being not particularly well suited for certain kinds of activities?

As long as people can practically attract a mate while lacking this sort of abstract reasoning ability, the majority of the population won't have it.

I've read that people tend to be intimately attracted to people of roughly the same intelligence and socioeconomic background, for whatever definition of intelligence was used.

Having said that, some people do turn out to become engineers fabricators artists and build amazing things. You're probably right though, the majority of the population probably don't have it.

Ok - maybe 'learning to write a few lines of code' - i.e. basic algorithms, should be 'no harder than reading or writing' ... or using Excel ...

But writing software, on the whole is a fairly intellectual exercise. It requires legit curiosity, intelligence, conscientiousness, etc..

"Code is a way to express solution to the problem which a computer can execute."

No, only in it's rudimentary form.

If every program was only 20 lines of code, I would agree fully, but since that's not the case, I don't agree at all.

Despite this, a lot of people just don't get math. Being able to go from an abstract problem to a concrete solution isn't just "write code until it works".

Writing a program is like a very detailed story that has to hang together. There can't be any loose ends in the plot or surprising twists that make no logical sense.

More than requiring language, programming requires thought.

The faculty of language doesn't confirm thought.

Those lose ends are called bugs and they often appear in the code. Coding a collaborative task in most companies, even if you've obvious holes in your plot, someone will see and fix them if they are not obvious to you.

> By all means subsidize a laptop

If you have a certain drive and curiosity for coding the price of a used low-end laptop is unlikely to be a significant barrier, when adequate new ones are available from Walmart for $159. I just found a 3 year old Chromebook on ebay for $57, or around 10 hours work at the federal minimum wage after taxes. And there's a salutary pride of ownership in earning it. I earned my first computer by working the grill at Burger King. Dreaming of what I'd buy with my wages made finally getting it particularly sweet.

Not everyone will go into CS and develop new data structures, algorithms, or programming paradigms—but most people can and should be able to code solutions to well understood problems—just like mathematics this doesn’t mean everyone will know how to apply it in novel business situations, but just as most people can perform easy calculations they should be able to write straightforward programs.

It’s all a matter of the appropriate cultural and educational scaffolding. Programming is still in its infancy and hasn’t permeated through the education system deeply enough yet to enshrine it as a core proficiency, but we can and should head in this directon.

As someone else in the thread said " Anyone can learn to cook. This shouldn't be equated to everyone being equipped to become a chef de cuisine." The fact that anyone can learn to cook only magnifies the detectable skill differential between a professional and an amateur, and I see no reason to see anything but the same pattern emerge with software construction.

Right, but that doesn't help today's adults trying to switch careers, as they're past that stage.

"just as most people can perform easy calculations"

That's true by definition, i.e. you would only count a calculation as 'easy' if most people can perform it.

But, based on the results of surveys like the 2015 FINRA financial capability survey, I guess that if you're talking about calculations that >50% of US adults can perform, you're excluding things that most readers of this site would consider 'easy', e.g.:

"What happens if you start with 950, and it grows by 20% each year for 2 years?"

Edit: No, really, I'm serious! There is literally nothing different between gluing APIs together, or whatever you think you are doing, and building the snazziest large-scale distributed statistical model of whatevers. Literally.

From VC and business owner "thought leaders" who have an economic incentive to flood the market with programmers and drive down salaries.

(Oops, I forgot we're not supposed to say that out loud...)

Yes, everyone can do it. No, not everyone can do it.

These statements are funnily enough not mutually exclusive, they just apply different meanings to the words "can" (potential vs actual aptitude) and "do" (future vs presence).

As a wild guess, it may partially be inspired by the idea that coding is done in languages, and, hey, people from all walks of life use language.

Bootcamps use absolutely disgusting marketing techniques to appeal to people with little ability outside of being able to pay tuition. Their grads are closer to victims.

“But Tori and her mother, Stephanie, 45, stayed. Every weekday morning, Tori would wake up early, her mother would feed the chickens and together they would head down the serpentine mountain road to Beckley. Nights and weekends they spent in the glow of their laptops — bought from a website on credit — learning the rudiments of Ruby, the programming language.”

To steal a shitty term from mainstream media, let’s unpack this. Tori [Frame] used to be an assistant manager in a Family Dollar location. She decided to take a bootcamp with her mom so she quit her job. And, the family bought laptops on credit from a website. I’m pretty sure we can all guess what kind of website that is.

With all due respect to the Frames, I don’t buy that either of them were qualified to assess whether the bootcamp was any good. Instead, they sound a lot like desperate people caught up by predatory marketing.

if they are the kind of people described in the article, then they have no means with which to evaluate the school.

as a programmer, i can judge if a potential employer is doing proper software development, and if i am already in the field, i can judge whether the next class/school will teach me something that relates to what i am doing, but as a student completely new to the field i don't even know yet what and how i can best learn.

so i can't necessarily judge the quality of the school. i can look at statistics for past students, but those can be faked, so short of actually talking to a number of past students, evaluation of a school is hard.

Perhaps some free remote tutoring?

Some interview coaching?

Resume review?

A whole lot of bagging on coding boot camps, the founders of Mined Minds & people looking for an easier life. I’m game to help myself!

If anyone knows those folks & they want some help - I’m happy to connect & spend time doing any of the above!

With that in mind, it sounds like what might be needed is the education they were looking for in the first place. Resume review, remote tutoring, and coaching are great ideas, born of a genuine blossoming of kindness and compassion. It may be possible that these well-meant ideas could be of perhaps slightly limited value for people who, based on the contents of the article, seem to have roughly as much marketable knowledge of Ruby as they did before they started the program.

So many responses in this thread are written from a middle/upper-middle class context. Folks who had reasonably good schools, access to computers at a young age, a stable home environment in which to work with them, a culture (parents and/or peers) that supported them, an expectation and pathway to higher education at a young age. Maybe not all of those boxes are ticked for every successful software engineer but I bet a good number of them are.

The people in this article didn’t have as many of these factors. Maybe they had none of them. That doesn’t mean that they’re dumb, untrainable or not cut out to be coders. I think what it means is that an appropriate approach to training needs to be taken.

That approach is probably something akin to a gateway aptitude test to demonstrate ability and commitment followed by a significant period of apprenticeship combined with some formal classes at the community college level.

This is the way that people enter the skilled trades, and also seems similar to military occupational training. I don’t see why it couldn’t produce competent entry-level folks who are capable of working on 95% of business systems/websites/etc at the end of their training.

At any point in these camps was there a section on interviewing and job seeking?

I'm asking as both a hiring manager who has seen a very fair share of...sorry, BAD resumes coming from people who finished a local code school, who struggled through the interview (only one made it to a technical assessment, he struggled on the syntax but seemed to grok the concepts. He ultimately did not get hired)and as a friend of someone who went through a code school and has absolutely zero interview skills,.

Their resume-upon reading-would have you wondering if they've applied for a "Junior React Developer" by mistake (restaurants, service industry jobs, stints at hotels, and at the very bottom: "React Bootcamp, Chicago - 2017-2018"). The generic cover letter this friend had me read jumped from topic to topic and was at least 5 paragraphs and two pages long, their only portfolio item was a single page "Hi I'm Bob" they made in the class.

It just makes me wonder what else these schools are doing to help their students actually succeed.

A "Hi I'm Bob" page seems like it would not be the product of an actual full-time bootcamp, but maybe a short part-time bootcamp? Even the relatively lower achievers were capable of hooking up some sort of front end for a public API by the mid-point of the course, putting it on github and getting it up on Heroku.

That said, many of the people I attended with had higher education or experience. My group was a former QA engineer, a bioengineering bachelor, an MBA, another biologist, and myself (Masters in Information Systems). By the end, we were relying more on the members of our group for disbursing useful information than on the instructional infrastructure of the bootcamp. I think subsequent jobs came mostly through networking between the groups of whoever was left by the end rather than the bootcamp itself.