You Can Now Use Federal Money to Pay for Unaccredited Coding Boot Camps | Hacker News Reader

You Can Now Use Federal Money to Pay for Unaccredited Coding Boot Camps

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19 pointslxm17 comments

My post will sound cynical or judgmental, but I really don't understand the real value in these coding boot camps.

Programming is so easy to learn on your own. Books, blogs, meetups, tutorials, why would someone spend thousands of dollars to attend a 4 weeks boot camp and learn essentially the same thing?

Bootcamp founder here.

There's a big difference between learning enough to tinker with code and enough to work professionally at it.

The vast majority of people don't have the network, self-motivation or ability to get to a level where they can work professionally as a dev.

What is the added value of the bootcamp compared to a good set of books, a couple of meetups where you can meet great mentors and some tutorials online?

I've interviewed candidates whose single "experience" was a code bootcamp and they were terrible. I think that propagating the myth that a couple week bootcamp can teach you how to be a professional developer is insulting to developers.

I think there's a wide spectrum of bootcamps. Some are elite and some aren't.

It's important to recognize bootcamp grads for what they are: people who've been coding for 3-4 months max. Many folks expect them to be seasoned devs with 5 yrs experience but they truly are entry-level.

Most people, as I said, are missing motivation, structure, connections and auto-didactic skills to even get to the point of doing Hello World.

[Oh, and if you interviewed someone who'd been to a 4-week (?) bootcamp, that explains why they couldn't do much. Nothing great in life is accomplished by working for 4-weeks.]

I had to look up "didactic" to remember what it meant, and I learned that it has a negative connotation (according to this one dictionary, at least)

http://i.word.com/idictionary/didactic

"autodidactic" is "autodidact" + "-ic" rather than "auto-" + "didactic"; this is not a pedantic distinction because "autodidact" has mostly positive connotations, whereas "didactic", as you note, often has connotations of unwanted moralising.

English drives me crazy and it's my native tongue

the same features make it a wonderfully fun language though :) my favourite example of how building up a word differently changes its meaning is inflammable (inflame + -able, rather than in- + flammable)

Can I ask what bootcamp?

I'm a technical recruiter in Chicago and see a lot of Bootcamp resumes come across my desk. I placed a dev bootcamp developer once but other then that I haven't been able to get them interviews because of the stigma behind bootcamps.

My theory has been that people with a math or science degree that join a bootcamp are much more likely to get a job than those from other walks of life. Do you see this as well?

The question isn't bootcamp vs STEM Bachelors. It is STEM bootcsmp vs English Bachelors or No Bachelors.

Boot camp is essentially equivalent to one good semester of college. The most calale first-year college students are ready for a internship, not professional programming job.

I used to be in the "eff college do bootcamp" side of things. I think that's wrong now. Young people need some of what college gives you and also what bootcamps provide -- if they want a coding career.

Codeup in Texas. A tiny percentage of our grads are placed by recruiters -- and that's OK.

We don't really see that. The grads who can build a real portfolio of work and are likable get hired the quickest.

I think it can fill a valuable niche telling you the "right way" to do things. Such as using an ide/linters, testing, a code repo, virtual servers, etc. When you first try to learn to program you often hack things together to get them working and that's good enough.

A good boot camp has the opportunity to instill good taste in a new programmer before they learn bad habits.

Boot camps are great for learning a specific technology.

But you can't learn to program in 2-4 weeks. I mean, you can copy paste some stuff and make it nearly work, but not tackle real problems. CRUD is ok for a bootcamp.

Programming is easy for you to learn, because it is interesting. But now that "coding" is "important for everyone" there are millions of humans who thought nothing of programming -- besides that it's something smart people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg do that made them rich -- who suddenly have to learn it, or think they have to, to better their fortunes. They need to be taught; they haven't the motivation to grovel through man pages, howtos, or books like you and I. And they need to get up to speed fast.

Enter bootcamps.

enforced structure.

Yup, excellent correction. Thanks.

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