That’s disappointing. I remember I was very supportive of coding as trade education when I first heard of it but it hasn’t really panned out. I can’t quite decide if it’s because we’re bad at teaching (the example in the article seems like an execution failure) or if it’s fundamentally infeasible (programming is hard and unintuitive for most people).
I think there's a few things going on. I think it's reasonable to assume that not all people who want to be able to program at a sufficient level to derive a living salary on will be able to. I don't know what the percentage is, but something exists, and we need to be aware of that. (I personally assume that 75% of people with a GED or equivalent can be eventually coached into some sort of useful position. I have no evidence for this, but that's just how I view the world. My office-mates like to call me an optimist).
The other is that ya, coaching and training is hard. There's a post somewhere else in thread about some guy hating his job cause he needs to coach up new bootcamp hires for like a year or something to get fully up to speed.
Let's not lie to ourselves about how long "eventually" (in eventually get good) is. I just took a quick look at my province's college of trades, and they quote 6000 hours (5280 hours on work and 720 hours in school) of apprenticeship/training before being considered "competent" at welding. If you go look at a bunch of the more technical "blue collar" jobs or trades (like mechanical draftsman, HVAC technician, etc), you all see numbers around that mark. Now, there's surely some fudgery going on. Very likely by the last year of their apprenticeships, you'll have many apprentices that are infact ready to just be done and are just logging hours for the book... but still, I think its a relevant guide. Even at half the length, you're talking roughly a year to a year and a half (which matches up well with other poster's experience coincidentally...) to train up.
Seems like the bootcamps might be a good subsitute for the "in class" portion of these apprenticeship programs, but nothing more.
16 weeks is just unrealistic though. Credible auto mechanic trade schools are a year or so. And once you graduate, there's plenty of low end work for you to earn your keep while you continue to skill up.
This is correct. Actual trade approach to coding basically doesn't exist because people are sold on learning to code in a couple of months versus year or two, which I think would easily land people some jobs in web or junior devs.
It’s weird. No one says anyone can be a basketball pro, here’s a play basketball boot camp to get you into the NBA.
But clearly there is demand for a lot more programmers than NBA players. The kind of people who make good programmers are competing with people going into law and finance. More programmers means less lawyers and less business people. Which I guess is fine, but it is weird to just assume anyone can do it.
The NBA is a bad analogy. That would be closer to saying that anyone can get a job at Google. Most programming jobs are not Google, and more akin to rec league basketball. With desire and practice many people can be effective rec league players.
Bootcamps aren't really a full "trade education", are they? You'd be looking more at an apprenticeship model, which is quite rare for coding (I know some examples here in Germany), or something else practical to follow up on the basics from the bootcamp.
