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Comment by mothsonasloth | Hacker News Reader

Completely agree, I would like to blame it on this dichotomy of "frontend and backend development".

Most of the bootcampers did three months of "frontend" work and are oblivious to what goes underneath in the murky world of business logic and services.

Until they have been able to demonstrate they are confident in:

* Presenting data to a user

* Validating inputs

* Making correct requests and understanding the interactions of an API (whether its REST, RPC, programmatic, internal)

* Processing requests

* Persistance and access of data

* Basic security

* Be able to document and explain all areas to a basic level.

* Debug and provide a root cause analysis.

Then they will remain a junior developer and I think that will be many of these bootcampers fate, as they are either unwilling or incapable of doing work outside their comfort zone.

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> Then they will remain a junior developer and I think that will be many of these bootcampers fate

This is a fair assessment - not just of boot camp developers but of all developers. I don't think I agree that it is a problem that some people working as a junior developer today will never become a Technical Fellow, however.

I've personally found (especially in the "enterprise") that many senior developers do not actually have fifteen years of experience - but one year of experience fifteen times, and are functionally junior developers with the wrong title. Educational background does not tend to be an indicator of this.

I think it's worth bearing in mind that people who sign up for bootcamps generally expect to have a normal career trajectory. They do not expect to spend their careers as effectively junior developers. They genuinely believe they will become Technical Fellows, and expect that a bootcamp will get them started.

Few bootcamps seem to do a good job of teaching students what to expect in a career path or what they'll need to do to advance in it.

I think our industry is headed for a collective reckoning, though I would not begin to speculate on a timeline. We're going to have to square seniority as a measure of skill with seniority as a measure of time, and no matter how it happens a number of people are going to be unpleasantly surprised.

I'm reading job posts for "sr foo engineer" and requirements are typically "4 years of foo", and no other experience level mentioned.

Yes, we all know someone who's done something for 2 years and is amazing, a true genius/savant who redefines what's possible. They're the exceptions.

I've been in professional software around 25 years, and was recently talking with a colleague (roughly same years of experience). He's just started a new job, and is working with people coming out of a bootcamp, and is frustrated because they're both currently being put on the same tasks - some basic FE JS work - and the bootcampers are actually slightly more productive than him. It's because that's literally all they know - they happen to know the same versions of everything the company is using, because it's what the bootcamp used. They can't do anything else, but both parties are being judged by this one ability right now, and he's questioning his own value now. It's giving the junior folks sort of a weird view of what 'old people' are capable of (which, as an old person, bothers me some!)

I think frontend has such a low barrier to entry and such a high degree of fault tolerance that it makes sense that people misjudge their capability.

> Then they will remain a junior developer

Isn't the point that they _are_ junior developers after completing a bootcamp? Juniors can be some of the best people in your organization if your org is willing to take them on and teach them things.

I'm not disagreeing, but I think the implication is that the bootcamps tend to leave their students without the fundamental knowledge to progress further in their career.

Not saying you need a full 4 year program and a CS degree. I don't have a CS degree, but 2 degrees in electrical engineering and computer engineering. That gave me a very solid and low level concept of computing that most CS grads dont get. Programming languages are a dime a dozen. Some are better suited for certain tasks than others.

Someone going to a Ruby on Rails or Node/JS boot camp isn't going to get that exposure to multuple languages. They're not going to know that, say Python is a better language/ecosystem than JavaScript for scientific analysis. They're not going to be exposed to C, C++, C#, Java, Rust or Go. Personally, I wouldnt even interview someone that's taken a boot camp in C or C++. The languages are too nuanced and complex to even get a foothold in 3 months.

Sorry this ended up very rantish, and I didn't mean for it to be so. I'm trying to make the point that while, yes, boot camps serve a purpose and may be useful to some folks, they will not and are not designed to give you enough knowledge to truly excel in the industry with the knowledge gleaned from the boot camp alone. It will take an extremely passionate and aggressive self learner to be more than a junior after a boot camp.

I also don't have a CS degree, but I tend to agree with you that something quite serious in terms of scale and scope is missing in most bootcamps. For instance, it doesn't make sense to expose people who have never written a program before to RoR or Node if they haven't yet learned how to do basic tasks like command line functionality, learning the *NIX file system, text and data manipulation, etc, let alone if/then statements.

You have an engineering degree, so.... The joke was, when I was an undergrad, that CS students were the last people you'd ever hire because they couldn't design a system at all (or program properly). The first you'd hire were the computer engineers, aka you and me (of course). Engineers are born, for the most part, not made.

Over the past 20 years, this general principle has been validated, at least in my experience - a good boss I had once said only the top 10-15% of people in IT know what they're doing. The next 20-30% have some idea, but they're sort of useless. The bottom half, you do not hire if you can help it...

Juniors are great when their inexperience is correlated with youth, fresh outlook on the world, a burning passion for the subject, lack of fear with new ideas that seem controversial to the old guard, and frankly fewer family commitments such that succeeding at their job and learning and growing is their number one priority.

Very little of this applies to people on their second career doing bootcamps for a leg up.

Hello culture of age discrimination in tech. Didn't expect to see you here.

I genuinely expected you to pivot to something interesting or novel halfway through your post and was very disappointed when I got to the end. This comment eloquently depicts everything that is wrong with corporate culture in general, occasionally magnified in IT.

Why? If someone can just do FE development, that is not a problem, and they can get a job as a junior.

It annoys me that front-end is sold as "easier". Getting started is "easy", building front-end applications at scale is a completely different ballgame.

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