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Comment by Enginerrrd | Hacker News Reader

As someone outside the software development industry, but with experience programming for various reasons... I'm dumbfounded by this. Is this the result of hiring code bootcamp graduates instead of those with bonafied CS degrees or what?

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Don't see how an academic background would help you avoid this it's a skill you're far more likely to learn through practical experience. I don't see bootcampers as being particularly vulnerable to these gaps in knowledge.

My experience in learning computing in school was going through large months long projects where later stages built on early stages but the entire project was throughly documented and paint by Numbers so long as you followed the directions exactly. If you came up with a valid but undocumented solution you would break the assumptions of the documentation and forever be hacking the program to get it to work which was still possible just time consuming and nobody knew how to help you. The end result is students who can follow docs without fucking up but who also don't know how to fix things other than by rolling back to a known good version.

I've found these sorts of problems to be very difficult to solve in academics due to the need to standardize assignments and grading yet a few months doing an original project will infuse you with troubleshooting mojo.

Completely not my experience at Georgia Tech. You were left to your own devices, had to learn sensible debugging and logging in order to complete most tasks in a time efficient manner, and your time was crunched. It probably depends, but I don't see how you can get that experience in a web dev bootcamp

> Don't see how an academic background would help you avoid this it's a skill you're far more likely to learn through practical experience. I don't see bootcampers as being particularly vulnerable to these gaps in knowledge.

Agreed. I was told, and later had to tell others something to the effect of "okay, so what did the error message say? did you search that?"

Another reality check is that fixing build I broke is typically quick while fixing build broken by somebody else takes a lot of time. Those errors are rarely as exact ad to allow you to fix issue in 5 minutes. Occasionally, stack trace leads to quick null pointer fix, but it is tricky as real cause can be deeper (null should not even happen) and quick fix is just hiding larger problem.

Moreover, having person who made bug is just good practice. Feedback, basically. When people know about own errors and have to fix them, they learn more about errors they make.

That's a bad bias you have. I could handle coredumps before I started CS. Also CS does not teach you efficient programming - that's a different course.

I'm actually generally in favor of boot camps since I myself have a self taught CS background with a civil engineering degree, and I actually know quite a lot of computer science. However, there's something to be said for the additional time in and critical thinking that you might get from a CS degree. However, some people on here seem to be indicating that their degree didn't made allowances for struggling through things or was "too academic" in nature.

It perplexes me that you could get through a 4 year degree without learning how to read a compiler error message though. I'd be less perplexed at this happening in a super condensed and streamlined boot camp though.

My experience: through the whole masters degree I had to write ~6 working programs. Only 2 were of non-trivial size. (a compiler and pseudo-physics stimulation) Some were group effort where someone else could easily pick up the debugging if needed. My 5 year degree definitely didn't care about debugging and I think people could do it with next to no programming skills.

I don't know, I'm self-taught and I know how to read stack traces and use a debugger.

I would guess autodidactic learners are more likely to pick this up than those who mainly learn through formal education. I don't think stack traces or debuggers were ever really covered in my CS program.

Then again, neither was version control...

Then again neither were the languages you were expected to do your homework in. I think there was one "Pascal language" class no one in the Major took. The faculty cared about the Computer Science (Math) underpinnings; the language dejour was just a speed bump to help separate the wheat from the chaff.

My program had a pretty good layout as far as languages. I think the standard was 1.5 classes of C, 1.5 classes of Java, then pretty much everything after was in one of those languages.

Only time I felt students got shafted was a Web Dev elective. People who weren't already pretty experienced with JS had a really hard time (we were on the quarter system, an HTML/CSS/JS+React/Redux+Node is pretty ridiculous to cover in one quarter).

Probably because no one was spoon feeding you or holding your hand. Plus the fact that people who can teach themselves are probably a little more driven or competent to start with.

No it's human nature. Do people write code that will make error messages meaningful or not? That's something you see in type and variable names, filenames, warning hygenics, etc.

If the expected cost of decoding the error messages includes a lot of reverse engineering of crap code, people won't bother.

It was a major, major issue in early C++ template metaprogramming. You couldn't give good names to some of your constraints so the errors were nightmares.

That's a curious insinuation. If anything I would expect boot camp grads to be overly dependent on Google.

The oil and gas developers I worked with who were some of the most incompetent people I've ever known had fancy masters degrees (at a minimum) in computer science.

Those skills are not taught in CS degree programs (nor should they be).

It's not so much that they'd be directly taught in a CS program, but more that I'm surprised you'd never have bothered to pick up that skill set, even accidentally during a four year degree.

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