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Comment by wolco | Hacker News Reader

Because those who can learn under those conditions can easily learn the material for free and many have before attending. What they use a bootcamp for is a bridge into a career. People are finding other less costly ways into the job market.

The bootcamps of the future will focus on either the experienced developers wanting to learn a new language/skill quickly. The structure will be like an extended conference where everyone attends presentations and gets excited for a few days and then everyone goes home. This will be followed up with an online course teaching the basics that will allow everyone to work at there own pace. A few tests and assignments will assign grades. A hackton will be planned where everyone will build a product using there new skills. Teams will be assigned based on grades to make things fair.

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I think people underestimate how difficult it is to teach yourself, especially when there are so many different ways to learn and a million different paths to take. One of the most important parts of bootcamps, in my mind, is that all of the curriculum is there, in the right order, and on a set schedule. When I taught myself to program I probably spent 80% of my time finding the right resources and understanding what I should be learning and 20% of my time learning. I think it takes a pretty special person to self-teach when you don't know what you don't know.

It's difficult to make an argument for bootcamps, though, when they won't teach you most of what you'd need to know either. The curriculum is typically focused around a single tech stack (many teach Mongo for unfathomable reasons), leaving students ill prepared for the workforce. Debugging? How to sort a lidt efficiently? What is a hash? All of these are arguably critical to understanding simple, common code; you'd be lucky to make it through a year as a junior dev without being fired if all the skills you have come from a bootcamp.

Of course, Galvanize et all just hire their own grads to inflate the post-graduation job placement stat. So maybe it's not necessary to know anything outside the course to get a job!

You have a point. Here's the problem the bootcamps will start to run into:

They're teaching as much as they can in twelve weeks, but lengthening the program increases the cost dramatically. Why Mongo? Because they're already using JS so they don't have to teach two languages (no time), and mongo is super easy to pick up. They'll learn other stuff on the job. Why aren't they teaching how to debug and what a hash is? Well we have to choose between that and understanding what a database is, so you take your pick.

They would love to have classes be six months or a year, but then they'd have to double their prices (eliminating a lot of the demand) and people would have to support themselves with no pay for twice as long (eliminating most of the rest of it). It's hard enough finding people to take 12 weeks off and pay $10k, and now we need to charge $20k for six months? No one can afford that, what we have now works well enough.

In order to do something longer and more thorough/in-depth you'd probably have to start with a fundamentally different business model.

Longer programs would also compete with flexible programs from traditional institutions. For example, Mills College's MA in Interdisciplinary Computer Science [0]. The traditional institutions arguably have large advantages in accreditation, financial aid, quality control, social status, signaling, and branding.

[0] https://www.mills.edu/academics/graduate-programs/computer-s...

Very true

>In order to do something longer and more thorough/in-depth you'd probably have to start with a fundamentally different business model.

Interesting point. Maybe something in between bootcamps and full-fledged 4-year CS or Software Engineering degrees? Say a 2-year course, with some of each of: tech stack topics, algorithms, data structures, and other CS-y topics, and software engineering topics. That would make for more well-rounded junior devs than the trend of just teaching the hot tech stack du jour plus git plus some DB (and all at very basic level, as many of them seem to do).

Some Indian software training institutes (such as Aptech and NIIT) already did have long courses (with corresponding high fees), but to the best of my knowledge, they may not have had much in the way of the higher-level topics in those courses, i.e. CS and s/w engg. ones - AFAIK they mainly had the hot language and DB of the season, like Java and Oracle some time ago, now probably something else like JS and Mongo, etc.

Ya, I think so. I'm a co-founder of https://LambdaSchool.com/computer-science and that's part of our goal

Classic internet.

The argument for bootcamps is easy! It costs a FRACTION of a college degree, takes a fraction of the time, and almost guarantees you a job.

"you'd be lucky to make it through a year as a junior dev without being fired if all the skills you have come from a bootcamp" LOL.

I know literally hundreds of people who have done just that, and it aint luck.

There is tons in a comp sci degree that you don't need to know right away to be an effective working programmer. And lots of bootcamps do teach "How to sort a lidt(sic) efficiently". It's a little hard to generalise because bootcamps vary in quality - like anything - but they give you a good structured introduction to lots of relevant material and the tools to keep learning as you go.

>how to sort a list efficiently

list.sort(comparator)

>The curriculum is typically focused around a single tech stack (many teach Mongo for unfathomable reasons)

Could be because many startups used to use Mongo. Not sure about current state of affairs, but somewhat recently, plenty of them did. One of the stated reasons was "schemaless", and other might have been scaling. I don't necessarily agree with either, because it can depend on a lot of factors, and scaling may not be the first thing that a startup should plan for. Just saying what I've heard/read.

>I think people underestimate how difficult it is to teach yourself,

I wanted to give some counterpoint to that. The point is not to argue with you because you clearly felt that it was "difficult" so by extension, it makes sense to project the learning obstacles out the world so we know they are there. You felt there were hurdles and that's all in the past so we can't argue with what you felt.

(Hopefully, the above was said with enough empathy to not sound critical because one has to be open-minded about the following observation...)

There are others[1] who think that the discipline for self-teaching is the baseline skill for average computer programmers and that attending "coding bootcamps" is a negative signal. I believe the thinking is... if one requires coding bootcamps to learn Javascript/Ruby/Mongo, it doesn't instill confidence in the hiring manager that the person will be able to learn new topics on-the-job that will be more difficult, with an undefined curriculum, under tighter deadlines.

If people still want to say "fuck off" to the types of people that look down on coding bootcamps, that's fine as long you're aware that the hiring prejudices are out there and you have consciously chosen to ignore those companies.

[1] examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7600307

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940314

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11732885

My point was not that the material itself was difficult to learn, but that knowing which direction to go in, or knowing what material to learn, was the more difficult part.

>, but that knowing which direction to go in

But the coding bootcamp's curriculum and sequencing isn't necessarily superior. It could be as arbitrary or suboptimal as any low-rated 1-star book on Amazon.

A curious programmer would actually be skeptical that the bootcamp has the proven syllabus for learning.

Therefore, find a 5-star book on Javascript/Ruby on Amazon, and start with Ch 1. What evidence (not marketing materials) would the novice programmer see that makes the coding bootcamp's sequencing superior to that?

It's not that it's superior, it's that it exists. Now I could easily go back and burn through what I learned in 1/10 the time, but in the beginning I didn't know where to start or what I needed to learn, and spent an insane amount of time flailing and jumping around. Imagine not knowing Java from JavaScript.

You get caught up in all the arguments about which language/framework/tech of the day is the best because you don't know any better. For example, my initial Google search led me to learn Haskell because it's "the best language", using Vim because it's "the best editor." Looking back that's silly and absurd, and most people would agree that's not a wise way to start (inb4 'Haskell is actually...') but I didn't know that then. You're flying completely blind.

Plus you are ignoring the social aspects of learning.

Straight book-learning is not a fit for everyone.

I hire junior engineers. When I am looking at a resume, I am looking for something that indicates success possibilities.

Many times I see the only programming experience as the bootcamp.

A 4 year CS degree means that the candidate had to stick with the CS for 4 years: 12x longer than the bootcamp. (I am assuming summer internships as well)

This time allows concepts to sink in, be reenforced by later classes, implications of choices to all be seen.

Human beings require a certain amount of time. Its not just the 10000 hours (or whatever) of training. I feel that it is the duration of time that the learning takes place that is also important.

Bootcamps are too short for the deep, deep learning needed.

I haven't yet interviewed a bootcamper (only) candidate that can answer questions beyond the basic phone screen. My only guess is that they have had all this knowledge thrown at them, and their brain hasn't yet sort things out.

Why take a candidate like this if I can get a BSCS candidate? And if I can't get a CS grad? I rather trim the work. I am not in the business of giving a 4year CS education.

You're comparing apples to oranges - of course 4 yrs is better than 3 months. Consider the same person at some point in the future, and it would be bootcamp grad + 3 years experience vs CS grad.

You could make a case for both at that point, but I'd guess many would be inclined to opt for a bootcamp grad + experience, all things being equal.

But you're suggesting that the employer should be paying for the remaining 3.75 years of experience. I'm certainly not going to hire someone who's going to require that sort of investment in comparison to a fresh college grad. You may as well just grab seemingly clever people off of the street.

Yup, that's one of the flaws of bootcamps. But that said, there's lots a bootcamp grad can do with relatively little training, and some of that are things that CS grads may struggle to do day one. A college grad, of course, will require some training too. Just a different level of it.

While a bootcamp graduate would require more investment than a college grad, it wouldn't be anywhere as high as 3.75 years, because college teaches you a lot of skills that aren't directly useful (Turing machines) or not in your domain (compilers or image processing) or not for several years. Training customised for your needs will be much more time-efficient.

What era was it when you are learning?

Now we have excellent community-developed free and open resources like https://www.theodinproject.com .

Years ago. It probably has changed to some degree.

But for example, what you just linked - that's a great resource, but it still doesn't get you very far; you'd have to jump from there to somewhere else to learn what a bootcamp would teach.

There will always be some types that are naturally inclined towards development. I learned on my own, no college degree, in the late 90's, when there was no Stack Overflow or Github. I lived in a tiny town, so there wasn't a local Barnes and Noble or the like.

I would say that someone who needs a curriculum won't succeed as a developer. They may remain hired, an eternal junior programmer, and as long as they're surrounded by seniors they'll make commits on a daily basis. They'll become the "one year of experience ten times" as they get on in their career. Succeeding as a developer really requires a knack of learning to learn and independent problem solving.

It's okay to not be at the upper level; we always need assembly line programmers. However, all of the marketing on bootcamps lumps everyone together, and doesn't tell the true story: there may not be enough assembly line programming jobs to go around.

Hmmm.....

> I would say that someone who needs a curriculum won't succeed as a developer.

I disagree.

Lets try this shall we:

"I would say that someone who needs a curriculum won't succeed as a "

... doctor

... pilot

... nurse

... electrician

... architect

I am not willing to accept a self-taught brain surgeon.

Nor would I. There's a reason why we're talking about this on HACKER News.

Every field you mentioned is a licensed profession, in an industry surrounded by regulations and inspections. Every one of those fields involves the health or safety of other people. Programming is a pretty wide open field, without regulation and highly prescribed ways of performing the work. It feels extremely disingenuous to compare a brain surgeon to someone building Uber for Skateboards and deciding whether to use Redux or observables.

Programming flaws kill people. WannaCry shut 20% of britian's hospitals. ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/13/nhs-cyber-attack-... )

Seems like programming DOES involve the health and safety of others.

Are you really comparing brain surgery with "let's write another CRUD app"? Every field you mentioned is licensed for a reason. Your Angular app isn't going to kill anyone, and 99% of devs will never touch anything safety critical.

I learned by picking up a book on development. Its curriculum was right there, laid out in the correct order and I could work on it at my own pace.

These books still exist. But today there are also guided sites like code academy that do a great job at providing elementary resources for learning to program (though, I generally find the pace to be a bit glacial).

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