They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia

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

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).

> 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.

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 learned programming at 12 years old. I think its funny that people think you need a engineering degree. It does help to get a higher paycheck though.

>almost impossible to find developer with Scala experience around here 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.

This has been my experience, and I'll add I have noticed there is a massive disconnect from the reality of just how complicated modern software is. I remember beginning my career what I think used to be a quite common experience of being quite a bit overwhelmed by how much I had to learn, very aware that I didn't even know what I didn't know and this definitely motivated me. This awareness is completely absent from 100% of the boot camp grads I've encountered, who have been sold and apparently internalized the idea that "everything is easy" and are quite resistant to the suggestion that they might not fully grasp the scope and difficulty of the situation. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I also suspect these people would have found their way into software development without going to a boot camp.

Many of the things you said sound pretty representative of new CS graduates as well. It'll take them at least a year, and a lot of mentoring, to learn the best practices and get their hands dirty. I get the impression the problem at your company isn't with bootcamp-vs-CS-graduates. I suspect the problem is that your company is hiring too many inexperienced developers at once (to save money), and isn't doing a good job of hiring the best bootcamp graduates (probably also to save money).

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.

Honestly, I agree with you. I don't mean to discourage anyone trying to learn software engineering but: IMO its something that takes years to learn the fundamentals. There are so many small details that aren't what you expect them to be that I see no way bootcamps could prepare you.

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.

I've shared this experience of being a mentor and babysitter for people who seek all the things you listed, although in my case it's inexperienced coworkers who are "self taught" (no boot camp even). Their charisma and our shallow interviewing process usually lands them a job and leaves me cleaning up after the messes they perpetually make. You would think proper communication would prevent these things, but often they are so alack of experience it goes right over their head, and other times they're overconfident or just disinterested in improving themselves. If you try and give them too much constructive criticism, then you quickly become the office asshole.

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 .

You're describing an unfortunate situation, but it feels like you may have mis-identified the issue.

> 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 look at it the other way around. I get paid 115k$ in a very cheap area to do code reviews and go to a few meetings.

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.

What is really disheartening is for those of us who went to camps.... we're painted with the same brush after people have experiences with our bad classmates.

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.

> 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.

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).

The key to handling such environments is to not care about the result more than the others. So socialize with the newbies, maybe go have some beers, be a pleasant person and absolutely don't give a damn that they are utterly completely useless. It wasn't your decision to hire them and you shouldn't be wasting your passion and energy on rectifying it. If you care about what you're doing, it consider starting a side project and growing it into a fully-fledged business instead.

I don’t see how any of those things you listed are “wrong” reasons to go into software development. All of them are true or roughly true, so, if that’s important to someone, then great. Believe me, given a choice between software development and service work or factory work, I would always choose development for the “easy life,” too.

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.

To a lesser extent, the same can be said for those who get an "IT" degree from a no name school from the college of business. I've spent a lot of my time training people who graduate from local small colleges instead of say, Georgia Tech or UGA (I'm in Atlanta) because management at my big corp is throwing cheap bodies at the solution.

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!

Why did your company fall for this?

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

They could still administer a coding test to the bootcamp certificate holders. Just because you have a CS degree does not mean we hire you without a coding test. Some of the least productive coders I have worked with have had degrees. Most degrees only prove that you have some ability to memorize things, practical application is a very different skill.

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

Why exactly is that the wrong reason?

I'm currently in a bootcamp in SF after several years in product/analytics type roles in tech. I decided to finally go for it after considering it for a few years because structured learning/accountability helps me learn a lot faster.

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.

So here's the thing. What do those people do?

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?

> who have been showing off their "pioneering" and "visionary" strategy to focus recruitment from code boot-camps.

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.

I always think the we should send CS graduates to a bootcamp to get some coding skills. Or send old-time devs so they get up to speed with newer tech. But starting from zero in 12 weeks seems almost impossible except for a few.

Do these bootcamps charge what a real uni charges? I recently went back to school (a well known one here in the UK) to get a MSc in Data Science (have gotten interested in research now) so I ended up doing a research dissertation. I already had a MSc (CS) and B.Sc (CpE) and 20 years experience, so it was not too difficult. It was a bit less math heavy than I expected, but ok.

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...

> I will be leaving my company very soon to go to a place where there is a coding test

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.

Given how little UK pays developers in general, is there any reason good devs shouldn't move away from there anyway?

This isn't a soul-crushing job babysitting (only outdone in horror by being in a chicken suit waving a sign for a fried chicken restaurant). This is an opportunity for you to study various psyches and all the gory "this is how sausage is made! details. Also exposure to abnormal psyches.

The Chinese word for disaster is opportunity.

> very soon go to a place where there is a coding test

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.

That doesn't sound like a problem with the people you're hiring. It's perfectly normal to train new hires. The problem is that you were not hired for a training job, but they're making you do a training job.

Haha. There is a lot of this happening in data science as well for software engineers and with exactly similar kind of results. I hate mentoring tons of new people who just learned to throw tensorflow at pandas dataframes.

Bootcamps don’t provide an adequate training to become an engineer, yes, but believe it or not there are plenty of very good engineers who have things besides work at the top of their value list. Your post reflects narrow mindedness and a lack of empathy.

.

To sum up:

* 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.

It sounds uncomfortably close to a cynic's view of aid projects in poor countries. The customers aren't the students, but rather the Commission, and they were apparently sufficiently impressed with the TED talks to part with $1.5 million to start this thing. Maybe someone trying to get re-elected got to cut a ribbon on TV too. And I bet this also made a great story for the founders to tell in their law school applications.

Won't happen. Unless some WV politician makes a crusade out of it nobody is going to get prosecuted for ripping off poor people.

I would be interested to know (again, assuming the article is fair) if Laucher will actually get admitted to a bar after law school. This is the sort of thing that could easily raise issues in a character and fitness examination for bar admission.

You can learn it in a few months in your spare time if you're cut out for it, which the vast majority are not. CS education for programming jobs is mostly a very expensive formality to convince hiring managers you know what you already knew before enrolling, or at least it was in my case.

Its both - programming is bimodal and becoming more so as we automate. A ton of programming is not really difficult, and cloud/SaaS keeps getting better to make those simple tasks trivial - eg setting up a small ecommerce store or a blog.

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.

> But of course, programming is hard. Most people don’t have the analytical/mathematical mindset necessary to be even competent programmers. All of these coding boot camps and public programs just capitalize on this misconception and wishful thinking.

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.

Some do care about people left behind but they usually don't care about a big social media boost to their ego so you don't really hear about their work

Just because it "comes from somewhere" doesn't mean it is valid. The rural they would already be disinclined to trust those from without - their mechanisms of trust are based upon personal knowledge and history which outsiders lack.

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

To adapt a quote from one of my favorite movies: "Not everyone can become a great coder; but a great coder can come from anywhere." That's what (in my opinion) you should take away from "everybody can code."

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.

> where did this idea that "anyone can learn to code" come from?

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.

I've no idea why coding should be anymore special than basic reading/writing skills.

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.

> Coding requires a certain drive and curiosity

> 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.

I disagree. I think with the right levels of exposure at the early stages of education “coding” can become a proficiency just as common as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Of course, just like those skills, people will pursue programming to varying depths, some will determine to study advanced topics while others will remain “coders at the 6th grade level”.

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.

I think your last line goes to far in the other direction. You do not need to able to self-teach from zero to become a useful programmer, teaching can be very useful (but, as you rightly say, is no guarantee of success. Especially if done incredibly badly like the article suggests)

> where did this idea that "anyone can learn to code" come from?

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...)

I don't get it either. A lot of people also would find coding as very tedious and boring. You have to be cut out for it.

Because if you define "to code" as knowing the correct syntax for a given language, just about anyone can "learn to code." That does not mean they can write a program that solves a problem. That's a different skill set. It requires you to think and not simply look at a quick-reference card.

This right here. "Everyone can learn to do x" is a thing but when applied to coding the marketing is strong (compared to say mathematics or writing or dancing or construction).

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).

The idea came about when media pitched it as a solution to blue-collar jobs disappearing. This was particularly the case when some asked what would happen to coal miners when environmental regulations were enacted: they were told to learn to code. It was supposed to be a panacea for job loss.

> but where did this idea that "anyone can learn to code" come from?

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.

They absolutely are the victims but it's also a students responsibility to do due diligence on the bootcamps just like you would (should?) research an employer before signing the job offer.

It might be worth considering that the underlying question - does this model even work at the scale it was sold as? - goes unanswered.

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.

I went to a bootcamp. I won't say which one. It was in a major city, and it was a residential program (anybody who was in the bootcamp but not local lived together in apartments included in the cost of the program). The program was structured beginning with a quick review of language basics (you were expected to know JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to a reasonable degree before the course began) and layouts, then moved on to Angular (this was a few years ago during MEAN stack hyper) and its associated patterns and best practices, then Node.js APIs and Mongo (the program has since shifted to PostgreSQL instead). Along the way, students were given assignments to augment these areas, such as reimplementing popular javascript libraries (like Underscore) against a test suite. The mid-point of the course culminated with presenting a solo project to the class, which was a good indicator of who was and who wasn't excelling. By this point, several students had dropped out and returned home or just stopped attending. After this, students were funneled into groups, with the higher performing students clustering together. The groups were given suggestions for projects to work on, typical web applications built on a combination of your own backend and third-party APIs. My group's project, for example, was a hybrid mobile budgeting application using Plaid and APN/GCM for push notifications. We had an exploratory phase where we tested the limits of the Plaid API (response times, features, webhooks, etc.) and determined user stories and requirements, then had stand-up meetings every morning and worked off of wireframes and ERD diagrams that we had designed. We were required to use git versioning so that we would inevitably experience merge conflicts and integration issues. There was about a week towards the end of the program that was focused on practice interviews (though these were admittedly somewhat half-assed) and resumes, in addition to the daily toy problems. At the end of the program, recruiters and local businesses were invited to see group and individual projects at a showcase day and this led to interviews for most of the students.

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.

As a counter-point, I would like to point out India's IT industry.

When the IT outsourcing industry was booming and there was a serious programmer shortage, outsourcing firms such as Infosys, Cognizant, Tata would hire college graduates en-masse regardless of major (like, entire batch of 20XX would get a job offer). They would then spend 6 months actually training them and weeding out poor performers. The ones who get through would be placed on actual projects for their clients. I do not know if this still happens today due to the sheer number IT majors on offer in India.

Now you can rightly argue with regards to the overall quality of products they created and the culture they proliferated but for their clients it appeared to suffice to achieve their business objectives. Sure most of them won't be FAANG grade but might be totally adequate for making some CRUD app or maintaining some system.

IMO, I don't think one needs a four year degree to code, two years at the max would suffice (obviously not for cutting edge work) . In fact, I would go as far to say beginners can be trained on a good declarative low-code (not low code) guardrails-type DSL incorporating best practices to create simple CRUD or reporting web apps. There have been many attempts but I don't know if this is solved yet.

> It really seems boot camps are in reality is a very expensive filtering system to separate those with some ability to teach themselves coding from those who can’t.

One could say the same about college in general.

I totally agree about the 16 weeks = 4 months being insufficient:

I think we can all agree that most of the coal miners went to school in a different era, and so probably never had much of a high school education, and even if they did we can all agree that half a career in the coal mines (combined with the prospect of working there until retirement) would pretty much obliterate the motivation to keep up your high school knowledge.

So essentially (without pointing fingers) if the goal is to end up with a programming job, we can say that at entering this course they are pretty much at the level of midway highschool.

The problem is not re-educating these people to become programmers (which I believe could work). The problem is the claim it can be done in 4 months without proof or trials. It's unethical to trial and thus social experiment this on people who may be giving up their current status and jobs believing it is already proven.

If the technology was available today to achieve such a feat in 4 months, why are people going to colleges and universities? Why isn't this already being done in high schools, so that they can always become a programmer as a backup job? Because the feat has not been achieved yet.

4 months seems very short, but I do believe such a feat is certainly possible in a few years. Perhaps even within a year if it's really intensive and education technology would become so advanced that software recognizes your mistakes in thinking, can answer why questions, etc...

But that is not today.

This was just a fig leaf proposal to abdicate social responsibility...

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.

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.

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.

A lot of them do. This one seems like an outright scam, but for example well known boot camps like Lamba School put you through some tutorials and tests before hand. When you look at these tutorials it really seems to be a filter for “can you teach yourself coding”. IMO making the bootcamps fairly useless given the huge amount of online courseware and free tutorials available now.

The problem is there's no incentive to fail out a paying customer. And this isn't isolated to bootcamps -- I've noticed many universities babying CS majors by dumbing down CS101 and offering enough soft-skill electives that you can basically get a degree without knowing how to code.

Have you looked at the line ups of Build Stuff in Vilnius? It has many of the same speakers as QCon, historically at a fraction of the price, and attendees from across Western Europe and the US.

I have priced it out several years running, and with flights from major US cities or (especially) Europe, a hotel and expenses it is substantially cheaper than attending a US conference in the same tier.

Disclaimer: I have worked on the CFP for that conference several times over there last few years, but have no financial interest in the conference.

Apparently the co-founders met while in Lithuania: https://money.cnn.com/2016/04/22/news/economy/coal-workers-c.... Given the overall tone of this article I’m guessing it was a vacation dressed up as a business trip.

My highest level of education is trade school (electronics). Trade school doesn't take 4 months, it's usually 2-3 years with multiple internships and apprenticeships.

A "start-up". :-)

But... You really don't need a degree for most programming work I've seen at my day job?

It's basically just creating various APIs in order to wrap them into some service you can sell. You can do most of that with maybe 1 year of coding at home. Though code review should be done at least in the beginning to make sure the produced code is maintainable

I’ve seen many super-talented self-taught programmers who never received any formal education, and I’ve seen college graduates who can’t get FizzBuzz working. Of course the code camps are scams, but a degree isn’t much better for many people who have very little internal motivation to learn.