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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

> New devs - especially those coming from bootcamps (I say this without judgement) - mostly start with practical skills.

I wouldn't say that it's "especially those coming from bootcamps". Those coming from uni are no better IME.

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Depends on the uni. Mine focused on fundamentals, almost to a fault; we learned algorithmic complexity and relational normal-forms but never touched eg. JavaScript, Python, or - ironically - git. Practical skills were very much not the entrypoint; I had to learn most of that myself.

Yeah I had to learn Assembly in college. We also had to physically print out our C++ code and turn it in to the professor. Did it make me a better programmer? Maybe but to this day I still haven't had to use it. Most of my practical skills I picked up on the job.

P.S. I've seen the professor grading the printed out programs and he'd do it by flipping to the last page which was supposed to have the result output, and then fold the corner of the papers so it looked like he read the whole thing and then put a grade on the top. It was pretty funny.

Did we go to the same school? Halfway through the semester he gave up on even that pretense and started throwing them out in front of us and giving everyone a C-

Never saw him do that but given his personality I wouldn't put it past him lol. He also cemented in me that there would be virtually no collaboration at a company and that we'd be given problems to solve/features to build and if we had trouble we'd get the can. I think most of his work experience might have been in a pretty hostile work environment. Or at least a good while before pair programming became the hot ticket item.

My C class had weekly written programming tests.

Not multiple choice tests. We had to write a program by hand and hope to god it would compile without any errors.

Horrible way to teach C imho.

If they also made you do all the calculations the program would, by hand, and record the output, then penalized you if you made any errors on that... it'd be math class.

thats how they teach programming in a lot of places where I am

this was my high school curriculum. did python without classes, matplotlib without numpy and django without understanding mvc. Just memorise it xD

When I had it it was primarily for logical problems. So it was more boolean logic than true math

Same here, only if you wrote in pencil, you were not allowed to appeal grading. So you had to write C from memory _in pen only_ while learning the language. There were students who pointed out the grading was wrong on their code, the TA and professor agreed, and the mark was not changed. Had to take it to the dean, don't think I learned if it was ever fixed. It wasn't even a CS degree...

Hey we had that too! Good ol pen and paper. It was thankfully generally for simple algorithms

Not sure I'd agree, every CS student at my school had to take a class where one of the projects was implementing a mini version of git from scratch. And even before that class there was at least one lecture dedicated to git in the intro class.

In my experience, bootcamps and uni produce polar opposites. You either end up with devs who can do several practical things, but have no clue about fundamentals, or devs who know all the academic terms but have no idea how to apply them practically.

the only significant difference I've seen in brand-new devs from bootcamps vs CS programs is the devs from bootcamps are somewhat aware that they have a lot of learning to do

Not my experience. I found a lot of hubris in the few last batches of bootcamp devs I interviewed or worked with.

I suppose it depends on what one considers practical.

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