mgirdley

Founders should choose the correct location that gives them the maximum possible advantage. If you're selling to the oil industry, build in Houston. Finance, NYC. And so on. Sometimes geography doesn't matter, so a small fishing town is just fine.

They'll likely just get a career school designation from the State of CA like other bootcamps.

CS creates computer scientists. It doesn't necessarily make good programmers. You can't compare this to CS.

The model in a year-long bootcamp (which is what this is) is vastly more expensive to operate than classic CS education. Being in this business, I think you'd be surprised by the numbers. They're probably barely breaking even at that tuition amount.

It'll be interesting to see how many of the "Gap Year" people never make it to college.

About 1/3rd of our code school's graduates are fresh out of high school and using it as a complete replacement for college.

Just tonight my father-in-law's new TV required a HDMI cable. He suggested RadioShack. I said "I'm going to Target. At RadioShack you have to talk to people."

The days of high-touch service are over.

Running a coding school (Codeup), I get this email all the time from recruiters:

"Dear xyz,

I've been hired to fill this not-so-great job THIS WEEK and we want this crazy exclusive unicorn skillset that about a dozen people in the world have and, you know, we aren't going to pay much anywhere near going rate and we're going to hire as a contractor so we can fire you any time and we're not really interested in training a person who'd actually want this gig at the rate we're wanting to pay. So, do you know anyone?"

The Seqway had similar amounts of mystery and hype years ago.

Neat. How is this different?

Trueability.com comes to mind.

I recommend people hiring bootcamp grads to sit them next to a senior dev. There's 1-2 times a day that 5 minutes of mentoring will save them hours.

Cool. Come down and see us at Geekdom if you'd like.

In my experience, this works for only a very small minority of people. Most everyone else is lacking self-teaching skills or motivation to teach themselves enough to be hireable.

There's an argument to be made that the vast majority of developers are underpaid in the US.

I agree that CS+English is better than English and a BA in English is better than nothing.

The problem is that the skills from an English degree itself aren't in high demand by employers.

The reality is that most custom web applications aren't more than CRUD. No advanced math concepts are required beyond algebra level stuff.

They want to work things that are used by real people. If they can help the world be better and get to see their work being used, that's a plus.

Many are stuck in what they consider dead-end careers like retail or customer service. They feel like cogs in a machine.

If bootcamp grads are "doing it right", they'll keep developing and evolving their skills.

If you look at the open dev job postings, experienced developers are where the shortage is. Companies hire bootcamp graduates to take workload off of the experienced (3+ yrs) developers plates.

Interestingly enough, if you look at job postings you'll also see that a disproportionate number of job listings want 3-5 yrs experience. Companies want people who someone else has trained for 3 years but don't want to pay the prices that people with 5 or 10 years experience command.

Disclaimer: I run a bootcamp in San Antonio called Codeup.

Disclaimer: I run a bootcamp in San Antonio called Codeup.

While the media paints the camps as "get a great paying job", I see more people wanting a more meaningful life. They've got an expensive degree in English or something similarly un-useful and want to work on things that matter. They see coding as the path to get there.

Click TESS -> Basic:

http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/process/search/

Enter "Sourcery".

Given the name "Sourcery" is already trademarked in IC009 (tech goods and services), it'll be interesting to see if they get to keep using that name.

#0: Put your engineer(s) in the same room as an unhappy customer.

The best thing is to insist your tech employer interview female candidates. Speak out if they don't.

The NFL has the "Rooney Rule" that has been instrumental in generating more african american head coaches. Make your company have the same.

If you go the MS/BS route, you need find time on the side to actually learn to program. It doesn't happen in the coursework.

Disclaimer: I run a bootcamp in San Antonio.

Another route:

Go try to build something. Anything. You'll find things that are broken very quickly and can easily be the seed of a new business.

One route:

What are you most passionate about? What do you see "broken" in the world and want fixed?

(I'm passionate that higher ed is a great idea poorly implemented, so that's my startup's focus.)

Check out the new traction book by Gabe Weinberg et al. Tl;dr: run lots of little cheap experiments and see what works. They also run through the 19-odd ways startups generate awareness.

I disagree on the ^H's. In practice, AWS and SoftLayer spent as much or more time with the 2013 class than the Rackspace people did. I don't know about 2012 though...

I went through a similar experience recently. My solution:

1) Find a place where startup people hang out (in San Antonio, there's a co-working space designed for this called Geekdom). Startup people are rarely found in big companies.

2) Find ways to get involved in the startup community by volunteering or just helping others. You'll determine very quickly who are the quality people and who you'll like working with.

3) Get an idea and go talk to everyone about it. Ask for their advice and get mentored. Even if it's a bad idea, you'll develop relationships and they'll connect you to other startup people who can help or possibly get involved.

Online retail does an amazing job of selling things that people already know they want. It's terrible at helping people discover things they didn't know that wanted (look at AMZN's recommendation engine -- still very dumb.)

There's a possibility for something big here and makes sense for YC.

Notice the pattern of blindness: If something ain't happening in one of big tech hubs (SF, NYC), it's invisible to the media.