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Comment by erentz | Hacker News Reader

The “anyone can code” and “just learn to code” phenomena needs to die in a fire. This reminds me of many other scams in our education system, it’s disgusting how much money is being leeched out of people on private “schools”.

This “anyone can code” idea is actually an easy thing to test if we were serious and honest about it. But we are not. And I believe boot camps give a false sense that more people are successful at it than aren’t. 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.

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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 doesn’t sound strictly like a counter-point? More like we agree. As you say they weeded out those who had the capability from those who didn’t. Which in my experience is what bootcamps do, very expensively.

Watching someone go through one of the more “legit” bootcamps: they first filter for candidates that can largely grok it and self teach by putting through a few hours of basic tutorial and quizzes. But a fair amount of ground is covered quickly in this which when you look at the people going through it (in chat rooms etc) means it’s very much a lot of googling and self teaching to understand what they’re saying in the videos. So after this point you selected people who can get basic programming and teach themselves. And the rest don’t go into the course and so don’t pollute their success rate statistics.

Graduates from a decent college is already a huge filter. “Weeding out poor performers” is another one.

So no, this isn’t evidence that “anyone can code”. It’s evidence that “most smart people can code”, a completely different statement.

That’s not really a counterpoint. As I understand it, the Infosys folks in India are a much more select portion of the population than “displaced former miners in Appalachia.” Well under 10% of Indians even have a college degree, and 80% of those are unemployed at graduation. The folks getting job offers from Infosys, etc., are in a fairly elite set to begin with.

> They would then spend 6 months actually training them and weeding out poor performers.

The critical aspect there is "weeding out the poor performers". Many "coding boot-camps" seem to be presented with an almost pyramid scheme level /sell/ of "come here equals 100% guaranteed success".

Yeah, this is not a bad thing though.

Taking good students, with good educations and putting them through 6 months applied training ... and getting rid of the fluff ...

My gosh man this would result in better developers than we get out of 'good schools' today! (As I think there's a gap between academia and the applied world of software).

That's not a counterpoint. That essentially corroborates their statement. As you say, they weeded out the poor performers, and still the worst coders I've ever met have all been from Indian outsourcing agencies. Granted, I've met great coders from the same agencies, too, but the fact remains that even when you weed out the worst offenders, you still get people who should never be anywhere near production code.

> 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.

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