> What, they bred the capacity for abstract thought into you in college?

> I've had to deal with this kind of idiotic commentary

Please edit this sort of name-calling and abrasiveness out of your comments to HN. It breaks the site rules, degrades the discussion, and provokes worse. Your comment would be much better without it.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11732185.

It's not that four years of study guarantees capability, but four years of study does mean far more exposure to far more technology and methodologies than a 12-week bootcamp can offer.

In my experience, boot-camp and self-taught developers have a different set of skills from a CS graduate. The former could well be very effective at lots of development tasks - but I have found that knowledge is often shallow, in that while they may practically know about, say, implementing a web application in Rails, they would struggle with a different toolset.

This is obviously not always the case, and there are many talented self-learners out there, in part because they aren't as lazy as the somewhat more entitled CS graduate. But contrary to the popular trope, I have rarely if ever encountered a CS graduate who can't code.

Even so, given the top 10% of their respective classes i'd easily take the CS grads over the bootcampers. Mid tier could go either way. Bottom tier i'd take the bootcampers.

Of course, it may well be that much of what you learn in all that extra time in a CS department is not that important to the typical working programmer. And many people pick up a knack for abstract thought somewhere other than a CS program.

I'm sure it's also true that a CS education often fails in instilling the deep knowledge of the topic that it is designed to. Lots of students are just not that bright, or don't do the work. And sure, selection bias surely has some effect. But it doesn't change the basic fact that you can learn more stuff in four years than you can in three months.

The fact that you consider yourself to be superior to most of the CS grads you've met is just the worst kind of anecdotal evidence. (Did you also do a lot better than the bootcamp grads you worked alongside? How do you know you aren't just more competent than the average student in either program? How do you know that the CS grads you've worked with are representative.) Meanwhile, the very post you're commenting on presents real data to suggest that, whole bootcamp students are just as good as CS students for most practical purposes, they typically lag far behind on knowledge/understanding of algorithms and data structures.

I really don't mean any of this as an insult. I have no doubt that you really are more talented than most CS grads. And in your case (and perhaps in many other cases!) perhaps it really was a smart move to save your money and skip college. But you've given the rest of us very little reason to think that your experience generalizes.

And by the way...

> Four years of school + the associated debt creates a big incentive to believe that you got a square deal out of college.

You could say the same thing about not going to college.

(I myself do not have a CS degree.)

> I've spent my career (no CS degree!) working alongside CS grads. I've gone further, faster, than most of them.

So we should replace selection bias for confirmation bias?

It's hard to read your reply as anything but reactionary and defensive, given that you paint the stance of the original comment as far more pro-college than it comes off as to me, only to knock it down with an anecdote about yourself. The original comment was about boot camps vs colleges, not colleges vs work experience and self-taught people. A twelve week course is not a substitute for four years, even if it is intensive. There's just not enough time to reflect on what you've done or be exposed to enough different concepts in depth to be equivalent.

That's not to say that experience doesn't trump both. You have experience. which accounts for your skill level. College and boot camps both try to impart experience at an accelerated pace, college just attempts to be broader and deeper over a longer period, while boot camps must necessarily by very narrow due to their length, any increase in the breadth of topics will necessarily reduce depth.

> CS grads are always surprised that I never got a degree

Then I imagine you are referring to fresh graduates. From my experience, there's quite a high percentage of non-CS people who do software engineering, you quickly learn to drop your preconceptions lest you be continually shown ignorant. I don't blame college graduates for this, they've yet to experience most of the world.

Will Hunting was right about a library card, but many -- I think most -- people require the discipline imposed on them by a university setting to actually do the work. Obviously -- obviously! -- you can learn this stuff on your own. But I doubt there are many self-taught programmers who've actually spent hours drawing out trees and solving recurrences and so on. To the extent that you've done that, then hooray for you!

I'd like to believe there's a trend where CS grads think that because they got their degree, they're done learning. I have a handful of friends — with their CS degree — who did exactly this.

But when you're self-taught, it's often out of a mix of passion and curiosity, and sometimes desperation ("man if I could just automate this, I'd have a killer startup!").

While I've spent only a few minutes in a post-secondary classroom, I think it'd be hard to find those qualities in the minds of students.

I consider myself self-taught, I just happened to do a lot of it during a 4-year period. I'm pretty grateful to my school, whose premise is basically: "we're just going to set you up on some smart teams in some difficult situations. Learn your way out of it."

There's nothing inherently wrong with CS degrees, since you can basically learn whatever you want while getting one, but they don't mean anything either.

Not that spending four years at college is a guarantee you understand it, plenty of people don't. But all else being equal, it's a higher probability.

I studied history and philosophy in college/grad school.

my first job in computers was 13 at a local college and I got so much crap from the it team there for being too young and not having enough experience even though I was hired because nobody there could write code well enough to parse dirty data from spreadsheets to pass into spss.

most of my family has a degree and some even teach, but I found it tedious and uninformative and always ended up the teachers pet, helping fellow students, which was fun, but I wanted answers to My questions.

I found the best way for me to learn is complete immersion in a subject, 24/7, read about it, write about it, if it's a language write in it, if it's a technology use it for everything possible and potentially possible. at the outset if you can get answers to the starting questions then that is useful (like training), but once you move out of the basics, in my experience, you will only progress to higher levels by answering your own hard to answer questions, and if it's easy to find answers to your questions, you're not there yet.

break things all day long and then fix them has been my learning mantra for many many years and like the parent poster, I've surpassed pretty much everyone who I've known with a degree in CS.

// The ELK stack is pretty sweet.

1. Bootcamps can be selective over a range of non-academic criteria such as interview skills, personal hygene, and prior work experience. Or to put it another way, unlike a public university, a boot camp can select for culture fit both in its internal cohorts and in the workplaces it targets.

2. Bootcamps tend to attract people with previous work experience: someone more likely to have several years of working to keep a roof over their head than a recent CS grad. There's a difference between a junior programmer with their first real job and a junior programmer who has spent six years working crappy jobs [or good ones].

3. Bootcamps have much more latitude to train for employment and employability. Listening to Jeff Meyerson's hours of bootcamp love songs, those interviews have left me with the distinct impression that doing so is common.

4. Bootcamp grads may come out with a stronger alumni network that can provide recent feedback about interview processes like Triplebyte's. Going in with some idea of what's coming is likely to produce better results.

5. Bootcamps don't have to report their "failures". There's no independent oversight or accountability of the sort common in university education. A "C student" may simply find it impossible to graduate a bootcamp. The bootcamps are free to shape their "graduate" pool however they wish.

I think one key aspect that is missing is that boot camp graduates aren't straight off the barista lineup. I took one at age 28 after having worked in a technical role in finance since undergrad. The average age of my class was probably 29. Beyond just time in the workforce, I had a double major in math and economics with a minor in applied statistics. Had I dropped "Behavioral Economics" and taken "Data Structures" along with some other random course, I could have switched my Econ major to a minor in CS. Many people in my class were of a similar background.

Sure, bootcamp grads can write a web application just fine; after all, it's usually only CRUD. But what value are they bringing to an organization? Why would I pay them the same amount as a college graduate who undoubtedly has more total knowledge not only in CS, but in other areas as well? Ideally, a college should expose students to a diverse range of knowledge, each tidbit providing additional value to an organization. If I just wanted an application constructed, I could offshore the job and get it done cheaper.

Yes, a well-run bootcamp might be a better __coding__ education than a computer science degree, but coding is the easy part. There are other valuable skills that aren't being taught (i.e. the ability to communicate clearly, how to do research, how to learn independently) that make an organization strong.

We aren't in the coding business, we're in the building business. Code is simply a means to an end.

If both of these screened avenues of entry to software development are as promising as these metrics indicate (each with their pros and cons) here are some potential larger takeaways for companies:

1) Invest in the continuous development of your employees, regardless of their background and seniority

2) Hire for teams, and diversify teams with both CS and BC grads

3) Hire more people in general (maybe on a probationary period)

Fit to small teams with the goal of cultivating experientially diverse teams, and spend significant time developing employees - junior and senior.

Any intellectual work should involve continuous learning and development. If the company's focus is restricted to current projects, or on the bottom line, or if managers enforce strict division of labor, an organization will warp to optimize for those metrics and become less adaptable to inevitable changes in the market (or within the company) and the company will fail to compete - or at minimum incur major opportunity costs.

What these metrics suggest is that if you take relatively successful candidates and invest in their individual development, both in depth and breadth, that investment will pay off. You'll create engineers who find better solutions to problems and - more importantly - who find better problems to solve.

1) One candidate had no idea what the terms "Class" or "OOP" even meant. I'm FINE with them not understanding stuff like sorts/advanced data structures, but he ACTUALLY had 0 idea what an int was. No lie!

2) I wish there wasn't such a heavy reliance on MongoDB in most of these programs. Some do have SQL as well, but I feel like 80% of workplaces will be dealing with SQL, so I'm not sure what the focus on Mongo is all about if the purpose of these programs is to make you hireable. I think it's that it's an easier concept to relay since you're working with JSON everywhere already, but I've seen a bunch of people have a very strong bias towards Mongo to the point where they seem to not understand why you even would use SQL.

3) This part might get me in trouble here, but we are a small company in NJ and budgeting 50k for the junior 0 experience position. Most of these bootcamps in Brooklyn or Manhattan instill that you minimum should be making 60k and not to even look for anything else. I disagree with that personally, but I realize it is possible for grads to make this (especially in NYC). I've just come across a few that scoff at us for the pay we have, and I do understand it, but some of my higher ups who don't really feel comfortable with the bootcamp concept don't think they are worth it.

Obviously there are a lot of pros with hiring them as well. I think typically they are the more qualified candidates skill wise. None of the ones we've come across have been a great fit so far though, but I think it's because of how close to NYC we are. These programs are based there, and we have trouble competing with the salaries there. That's why we have been having more luck finding college grads from the NJ area though, they don't have these kind of higher expectations.

I think there's a strong argument to make that university programs are too focused on theory, when the vast majority of their students are going to go out and get practical engineering jobs. I don't want the pendulum to swing too far to the practical side, though, because then you lose the long-term benefits of getting a CS degree. Although, schools can certainly buff up their practical material.

Anecdotally; when I participate in hiring, I tend to discount the bootcamp grads. Maybe it's unfair, but my experience hiring them has been that they know how to interview well, and know their tools well, but when you compare them a year in, they're pretty far behind their university counterparts. I see a plateau, where it's hard for a lot of bootcamp grads to move from doing generic web development to designing more challenging systems. Obviously it depends on the individual, but this seems to be a categorical struggle for bootcamp grads with little technical background. A lot of companies really just need more people doing web development, so being open to the bootcamp pool is essential, and ruling out bootcamp grads is silly.

There is value in being balanced and diversity, but this applies to teams, not necessarily individuals. Not everyone on your engineering team needs to be an architect. After your globally distributed, fault tolerant, realtime, highly available system is designed, somebody’s got to build it. And most startups or software teams have no business even trying to design such a system in the first place.

In the US, my generation was told we all needed four year degrees. We don’t. Some jobs and some roles certainly but the entire population of future adults?

There is an engineering shortage in the US because everyone was too busy getting four year degrees in more well rounded fields. Meanwhile Apple needs tens of thousands of engineers that could have been trained by two year vocational programs that the US was apparently above for our children, and thus cannot meet their business needs.

And yet this data from Triplebyte is incredibly encouraging because while we screwed up the educational policy, it may not be so difficult to fix.

Specifically, the average engineer out of either a bootcamp or college is pretty mediocre. But the top 10% of engineers are mostly college graduates and are definitely not bootcampers. This is because the best developers are overwhelmingly passionate about development and have been doing it since high school. If you love programming, you might go to college to get a firmer academic standing. You definitely won't go to a bootcamp—if you've been programming for 5 years, a 3 week bootcamp makes no sense.

On the other hand, when it comes to the bottom tier I suspect bootcampers are a lot better. This is mostly because the bottom tier of CS graduates are atrociously bad. Regrettably, it is possible to graduate with a degree in CS without ever having written a single program by yourself. They slink by mostly through cramming for exams and "collaborating" with peers. My impression is that bootcamps are actually less tolerant of this behavior: you won't make it through a bootcamp without ever programming autonomously.

The "practical programming" bit is a little more depressing, though it does ring somewhat true based on what I've seen in real life. How people can spend 4 years programming and still consistently fail at building decent abstractions, I have no idea.

Also, where is the "neither" category? There are dozens of us... dozens!

Of course 3 months is going to get you running with a solid basic knowledge of your stuff.

In what world would low-level, algorithms and data structures be doable in 3 months?

Point is, I don't think Bootcamps and Colleges are comparable.

It's like being a woodworker and a forester..

There's a place for each and it's not the same positions...

Now, here's my big question:

If your interview includes Practical programming, Web system Design, Algorithms and Low level system design...

What in the nine hells are you hiring for?

Had it been for a trucker position you'd be asking for "driving license, laws and regulations, engine design and car physics"..

For reference: https://i.imgur.com/sh7LJgj.jpg

I did the WDI bootcamp through GA, and loved the experience. My motivations weren't to become a full-time web dev, but to become a much better, more well-rounded product manager. It's paid off 5x over so far.

There's a ton of garbage bootcamps out there, and it's unfair to lump them all together -- it's unfair that these exist. period. While, you can't replace the deep technical and theoretical understanding you get with a classic CS degree, if your goal is to build web apps, do you really need the formal experience, or can you learn that on the job?

College is largely about transitioning children to adults (we can argue that separately) the personal and professional development that students go through over 4 years is vast. They are becoming adults in many frames, including understand the world and technology as systems. They aren't just learning to code, they are learning how to think.

To the extent that I know (warning: anecdata) Bootcamps presume a lot more worldly knowledge, attract and expect more grown up students, get students with direct interest in web/software/apps, and are much more likely to get career transitioning students (from the people I know who have bootcamp'ed). They have a much broader knowledge base to build on which will help them in some areas and hurt them in others. I would be curious if Triplebyte has any data they can touch at all looking at that.

Simply said...a 22 year old college student with a CS degree and a 35 year old BC grad may look similar on metrics but function entirely differently as employees in both the short and the long term...caveat emptor, figure out what you need.

Good luck.

I dropped out of high school because I was making good money by 18... kept working, saw my own limitations, and did a BS degree in 3 years, graduating at 26. That was 5 years ago today, actually :)

I see this same distinction in practice, thanks Triplebyte for quantifying it. If I were staffing an engineering team, I'd absolutely take junior engineers from bootcamps and senior engineers with university backgrounds. I like the surgical model from The Mythical Man Month, and have seen elements of it working by hiring junior test engineers of varying technical backgrounds and training them.

I think a BS degree in CS makes a lot more sense when you're hitting the edge of your capability as an independent contributor--many may never need it, some will love going on a few year sabbatical and earning their 'piece of paper' (as I did).

Biggest factor that gave me an edge was I had lots and lots of context for all the content of classes, and I took notes every single day, Beginner's Mind style and didn't try to test past intro classes... even CS 101 with Scheme. I was also able to work on my mentoring/leadership skills with classmates.

Ideal bootcamp:

-css/html/javascript

-angular or any mvvc data mirroring framework

-OOP and ntier patterns

-Stored Procs/ORM/SQL training

-Algos

-Webservices SOAP/REST

The college grads I work with tend to have written a couple shitty programs that don't really do anything, and their "final project" was hooking up a database to a business logic layer.

source: I have taught in bootcamps before and work with lots of new college comp sci grads now.

This was the most interesting part to me. I'd love to see more on this.

I've always found it silly to ask algorithm questions of senior engineers. There seems to be an exponential falloff of that knowledge as one gets further from graduation.

- A multithreaded UNIX-like operating system with user programs, system calls, and a filesystem, with reasonable (if not entirely optimal) caching strategies.

- A TCP/IP stack for that operating system.

- An authenticated encrypted channel over my TCP/IP stack with forward secrecy by building a pseudrandom function up to a stream cipher, RSA with OAEP, Diffie-Helman, etc.

- Network services from the RFCs in C (we did a router and IRC).

- A high-level programming language with support for both functional and OO idioms based on the typed lambda calculus with recursion, lists, records, tuples, ref cells, subtyping, etc.

- A lexer, typechecker, and interpreter for that language using parser generator tools, a recursive descent parser, or a shift-reduce parser in a pushdown automata model.

- A formal specification of the evaluation and typing rules and a type soundness proof for that lanugage.

- A distributed KV store with Paxos, Raft, or Byzantine Generals running on my encrypted channel and written in my language (we used 0MQ and were given a 0MQ broker that could be told to drop messages for testing purposes).

- Greedy, dynamic programming, network flow, and ILP algorithms with proofs of correctness and efficiency.

My class work repositories put me about three quarters of the way there.

I'm sure bootcamps can teach people enough to tread water in a dynamic language web framework, and that meets real business needs and adds real value. But college is a chance to go deeper.

I know nobody is paying us to build our own lightsabers. But - and call me old fashioned if you'd like - I think a professional ought to be able to build his own lightsaber anyway.

For the sake of my ego, I'd love to hear that these bootcamp graduates have shallow, fragile knowledge in a narrowly focused area.

Algorithms are commoditized into libraries. Web design has been commoditized with templates.

Open-ended programming is still more complicated, but putting apps on the web today is easier than static HTML just 5 years ago. Parts of programming will continue being commoditized.

So if it's easy to create something and put it out there, the great and all-important challenge that faces developers today is making it matter.

This class is an elective, which means that students aren't expected to know HTML/CSS/JS before taking it, though the core CS classes (Java, C) are prereqs. This also means that students who don't take 142 could quite graduate without having any practical knowledge about web development.

That said, it's not because the CS students couldn't actually learn practical web dev, and as others have said here, the best bootcampers are often folks who have a STEM background already.

[0] http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs142/

[1] http://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/cs142-winter14/index...

College is not just about learning to code. You also learn to deal with professors and how to get the best grades out of them. You figure out how much you can drink without the glaring hangout that interferes with your morning philosophy class. You sign those forms to get credit cards that haunt you till you have a job. If you're smart, chose a good college and get really lucky, you might actually learn something and get a job after graduation.

Boot camps are about learning to code, creating networks and passing interviews for tech jobs. You can't pledge, or hang out with the furries, paint your face with your college colors for the football game at the weekend, or struggle figure out if your summer course fulfills the requirement for your social science elective.

These two places of learning can peacefully co-exist and each one has its purpose.

I even think that it would be good for some CS Degrees to walk into a bootcamp to explore something new and expand their knowledge.

Bootcamp replacing college? I don't think so. Not till bootcamps have long lines of students trying to change their course selections at the registrar's office.

There are some options that lie somewhere in the middle...

I feel as though you are attempting to lower the bar of what is acceptable in order to sell something :). The word 'practical' is thrown around in this article without much of a definition. Are we talking about making simple web pages?

I've just finished conducting a round of interviews for a junior level position, and based on this experience I highly doubt I will be considering bootcamp graduates in the future. As an example, for a question which involved sorting an integer array, and providing a method GetElementAt(index)....95% of the bootcamp applicants implemented sort within the GetElementAt method so that the entire array is sorted with every single call. A handful of CS grads made the same mistake, but most of them did not. Is this sort of oversight excused in the idea of 'practical' programming? Or in your definition, is this considered deep knowledge?

The problem is, there was no easy way -- for someone like me wanting to go into software -- to (convincingly) say, "Hey, I can code and think abstractly. Give me a chance?"

(If you're going to say, "just contribute to an open source project", there's actually a big gap between being able to code and being able to debug the zillion things that can go wrong in just setting up the builds for a given project. The Open Hatch project c. 2011 was specifically dedicated to helping people contribute, and yet following their instructions would still dump you in a an unnamed text editor with no way to exit.)

[1] Frustratingly, the instructors were very unhelpful at the stuff I needed help with the most -- forming a mental model of how and why Rails works.

So to me I have to question the ROI of walking away from 5+ years of professional advancement and jump into software development again - by way of an in-person bootcamp. I'm not going back to a Uni or interested in online learning settings. However, I do recall the concepts and am certainly excited by the developments in languages and technology since watching some of the roots take hold.

Being a "creative" person who can speak "engineering" is one of my strongest, and often the most unusual of my professional strengths.

In addition to being able to contribute in a non-development capacity, even in terms of software being good at coding is probably at most 20% of what makes a good developer.

It seems like everyone is forgetting this.

Since coding is becoming important for a tech driven World, no matter what our backgrounds are. We come in with whatever skills we've gathered from our personal journeys and then learn to code.

These people ARE college grads. I'm not sure where this seemingly pervasive view is coming from. My class had 1 person without an undgraduate degree, and several with masters.

> i.e. the ability to communicate clearly, how to do research, how to learn independently

The average age of my class was 29. 6-10 years in the workforce tends to demonstrate an existing ability to do this.

Here's why: I've taken English courses and Music theory courses, but I am not a writer or a composer by any sense of the word. Sure, I can write a blog post or a comment, and I know how to compose a harmony, but I still lack the sort of knowledge necessary to fully embody the full enormity of these titles. Great composers and writers aren't always necessarily thinking "theoretically, I should do X given that I have Y." But a musician that lacks sufficient knowledge regarding music theory will generally lack the ability to compose truly great works.

Yes, most web applications can be completed by just about anyone if you train them a couple of months. But generally that's all that person is capable of. They won't be able to evaluate a technology critically because they fundamentally do not understand how or why it works. I can also create a movie script -- that doesn't mean it will be any good!

From my point of view, the non-hacker community doesn't understand that software and technology can be as aesthetically beautiful as the Sistine chapel. It takes real craftsmanship and deep theoretical knowledge to get there; you can't just wake up and produce that.

I'd like to thank the other commenters who pointed out that there are a lot of Bootcamp grads who did attend college -- I had no idea. It would be interesting to see the actual stats on that.

(Of course I acknowledge a college degree doesn't necessarily imply the level of craftsmanship I'm talking about here, but generally the theoretical knowledge obtained coupled with working in a meaningful way lead to this sort of craftsmanship. Also, just as art is subjective, beautiful software is as well.)

I do way more than just CRUD apps - I basically own all of the business logic/processes here at my company. My bosses on a regular basis make it clear that I'm invaluable to the organization.

I think this view is fairly myopic and basically credentialism. As someone who has to interview and make hiring decisions, I swing way in the other direction -- credentials make up maybe 5% of my opinion of a candidate. At best.

Doing a CRUD web application is a good way to get a candidate into the door so that you can observe, first-hand, their response to learning that body of knowledge. Your business's competitive advantage may be based upon proprietary algorithms and deep domain knowledge, but sometimes you just need a webserver done. And the person who goes and builds that webserver will learn a lot about the domain knowledge needed to interface with it, and you'll learn a lot about how they approach challenges and seek out the information that they need but don't have.

All of this is independent of whether they learned to build that webserver in college or a bootcamp.

(I do agree that the college experience is more than vocational education and valuable in itself, though)

I strongly question the notion that these are taught in college. I went to school for hospitality and would argue that they didn't do a very good job either. In my experience you learn those things on your own, just like you learn to learn independently..independently.

Data structures & algorithm knowledge is practically meaningless for this kind of work. Knowledge of the various APIs and frameworks, although maybe less "sexy", is actually much more important when it comes to actually getting stuff done. If you're building out a RoR/Node.js/React.js/Angular app, somebody with deep experience with those technologies is going to be able to get a lot more done and be willing to do more bitch work (which let's be real, is most work) than a CS major who loves thinking about complex algorithms.

Sure if you're Google hiring a search engineer, go find yourself an algorithms expert. But for the other 99% of us, most of us are getting paid to solve business problems, not technical ones.

If we're comparing the two head to head, I suspect we'll run into a more general nature vs. nurture problem: the ones who want to learn will succeed regardless of whether their means of learning programming was a CS degree or a bootcamp. The ones who aren't taking it seriously will have problems regardless. The interesting part is maybe the degrees of quality within those camps.

I agree with your point about colleges and other skills though.

The bootcamp I attended focused heavily on this aspect. All sprints were pair-programmed, and there were 3 group projects. They lectured repeatedly on team dynamics, feedback methods, agile workflows, etc. Furthermore, applicants with extremely poor soft skills wouldn't make it into the program.

2) LAMP stack is still probably the safest bet (substitute PHP for Python maybe), but yeah, just because it's the current hotness for a few startups doesn't mean it'll get you hired to know the most hyped tech.

3) Stop looking for candidates from Manhattan, or only hire those looking to move who have done just a little bit of research? CNN's COL calculator shows $100K in NYC is equal to about $54K in NJ so you don't seem too far off base for what you're looking for (http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/). From personal experience their calculations were accurate when I made my move from the midwest to SF. Regardless, again that doesn't sound like a "bootcamp" issue so much as "candidates who can't be bothered to do basic googling/research issue."

I'm graduating from a Manhattan college Saturday and I would never take less than $60k for a programming job. In fact, I see most people recommending minimum $70k (and that matches my experience based on jobs offered to me). Most of my peers range from $70k-90k based on experience.

IDK where in NJ you are, but I trust that in your area, $50k is a comfortable salary to live on. In my hometown I'd also expect that much because it's a cheap place. You need to make this clear to your applicants (tell them the cost of living). Since you live near NYC then, sorry, most people will take $60-70k and live in the city with maybe a roommate than $50k in NJ even if they end up making less in NYC.

That said there's a lot of people eager to get some experience in their resume, so you'll find someone eventually.

The monetary worth as a junior developer is also very dependent on the bootcamp. A decent App Academy or Dev Bootcamp grad in NYC? 60k is a reasonable minimum IMO and a wage below that in NY isn't really livable. On the other hand, bootcamps like GA? Sure, hiring them is more of a crapshoot. None of the NYC bootcamp grads I know are looking in Jersey though.

I was still learning Ruby at the time and didn't know how to access an object's member (instance) variables. I asked one of the mentors how to do it (I couldn't find the answer quickly from the documentation). He was stumped and had to hit the docs.

That's like a professional C programmer being stumped at how you refer to a variable's memory location.

Funny how far people can get when knowing little.

Can you discuss how you might test for bootcamps overfitting their curriculums to interviews? They definitely would seem financially incentivized to do just that. From a personal anecdote, someone I interviewed was able to code a solution for a problem, but then couldn't discuss how or why they did it that way at all, or solve a closely related problem, which made me strongly suspect that they just memorized an answer. How would you test for this?

I would also be curious to see if there was any way to breakdown bootcamp grads with previous programming experience vs. without and by what they studied in undergrad if they went to undergrad.

I agree that not all jobs require this skills, but then suddenly you get a divided workforce with designers and implementers.

Were you able to see any patterns in the backgrounds of the bootcamp students?

It doesn't seem too surprising that someone with a physics or finance or mechanical engineering background can learn enough programming skills in three months to be productive. But do students without as much prior experience in quantitative and analytical thinking have as much success?

I get asked about how to break into the industry every now and then--it would be nice to be able to point those people to a quality bootcamp.

Is there? I found practical programming knowledge to be very easy to pick up due to having piles of theory that back up why it's a good idea, why it makes sense to do so, etc. You just need someone or something to tell you to do it. It's why side projects are such a good idea, you get a great wealth of knowledge just from your own mistakes/failures that will occur naturally as you map theory to reality. But you can learn so much more so much more easily when you have that theory to start with.

What would you see dropped and replaced?

I am fortunate enough to have found Holberton School, which has a two-year software engineering program that emphasizes project-based and peer-learning methods. I appreciate the balance of theory and practical work that I have to complete but most importantly, the flexibility with which I can learn.

The evolution of tech will continue to span out and eventually, these shortages will be felt outside the US.

Would you want graduates of such programs working on the software that goes into your operating system, your car, or other such systems? I doubt you'll find people graduating from these programs working at places like SpaceX or the JPL (unless they're doing some CRUD/web dev work), or even at Apple designing compilers or iphone processors.

Just as an anecdote, my current company hired a couple of graduates of these programs, and they didn't fair well.

> What in the nine hells are you hiring for?

Someone who can solve a business problem effectively.

It's not too difficult to shove data into a database, pull it out, and render it to a screen. Nor is it too difficult to pull data out of the db and send it in JSON format.

What do you do when your the performance of your API server doesn't meet customer demands, or you get written up by re//code and get a 1000x spike in traffic?

Let me turn the question around: if you can only hire one person, why would you choose a bootcamp graduate over a CS graduate?

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Personally, I think the idea of bootcamps are great, and I root pretty hard for anyone who wants to better their situation by going back and learning a new set of skills.

But I have to be skeptical and look at the bootcamp craze, like the outsourcing craze from a decade ago--a way for companies to hire cheap programmers, and a way for bootcamp operators to cash in on the unmet demand.

This is the key takeaway here. I'm working with a bootcamper now and the experience has been pretty bad. But it is a fairly large app, I think it's difficult for him to grasp all the parts, how they connect, and how his changes impact everything else. He can code and make things work, but that's it, we have to make big changes to almost everything he does.

A bootcamper who can focus on HTML, CSS, and some simple code would be fine, until they get some more real world experience. In my opinion college vs. bootcamp education are probably the same after a few years of experience if the person is a motivated learner.

There nothing wrong with a trucker just knowing "driving license, laws and regulations", ... as long as they don't mind being laid off when there's no longer a need for that skill.

You're essentially arguing that it's okay to be a one-trick pony. It's not.

1) IT and the software industry change too fast for that to be anything other than career suicide. What do you do when your tricks become out of date?

2) You're competing with all the other one-trick ponies out there. There are a whole lot of them and that makes one-trick ponies an easily replaceable commodity. Yes, yes, everyone's replaceable in theory but its best to minimize that as much as possible.

"Just teach algorithms." Do you have two years to spare to do so? Because I'm a platform engineer and I regularly use the extent of my CS mathematics education to write better code--you'd think this'd just be Ruby slinging, "what sort of math do you need to automate systems", but it ends up being remarkably more than that! But you know what else I use, while doing my day job? I use the lessons from my economics courses. I use the lessons from my sociology courses. I use the lessons from my political science courses. Are you gonna bootcamp those, too? Or are you going to turn out a marginally skilled worker with a worse educational foundation?

The only thing a civil engineer has over a carpenter is physics knowledge. Obviously.

Don't get me wrong: bootcamps are fine for some purposes, but in my experience they (and there are certainly exceptions in that experience, though rare--I'm thinking of a couple mid-career switches here) turn out mostly-employable workers with a shallower improvement curve and a relatively low ceiling by comparison. There are definitely roles for which I'd hire most of the folks I know who've gone into tech via boot camp classes. But, in my experience, those roles tend to be ones that are more junior than I'd other expect for their tenure and unless I need immediate productivity (and why would I be building a pipeline where I need that, but not the wisdom that comes with experience?), I will prefer somebody who is educated and not merely trained. Code and "coding" are stump-dumb simple and filtering for those minor applicative skills would be a disaster. Because I can teach skills, even if it requires an investment of effort on my part (heaven forfend!). I can't, practically, teach how to think.

If you're hiring junior developers without expecting to be hands-on in their work and with plan to train them, then you aren't really hiring junior developers, you're just trying to pay at junior rates. It's not doing them or your business a service to hire them.

There are plenty of CS grads out there with all sorts of algo skills but no practical and will take 3 months + to build anything in your stack. This is basically the same problem with different symptoms: You don't have the resources to hire a junior developer.

It's just way easier to blame the hire than your company.

I think the point is not to base the "goodness" of the developer on the person themselves - of course there will be people who 'get it' and excel at programming whether they go to bootcamp or college (or are self-taught for that matter), just as there will be people who don't get it, and they can just squeak through either program.

The point is to recognize that they are taught different (but overlapping) skill sets; skills that are hard to differentiate and could - from a business perspective - yield the same final product (user clicks button, correct things happen).

Of course. I know someone that would fit that description, and I don't think he's unusual.

> Do you think it's possible that developers who are not good could graduate from college with CS degrees?

Of course. I graduated with some and work with some. Strictly speaking, learning to write software is just a side-effect of learning how algorithms, data structures, and all that work. Some people never get very good at writing software.

I think you're missing the point, though. College vs boot camp isn't a matter of the skill of the resulting developers. It's more of a focus on different skills. Suppose a technician and an engineer are writing a program together. Maybe the engineer works on the "deep dive" aspects of the design (tough algorithms. the critical path of the program). Maybe the technician works on the overall architecture, wiring things up cleanly and producing an artful design. They're different focuses, and it's a division that doesn't currently really exist in SW dev, but does in some other fields (electrical engineers vs electricians, mech eng's vs various technicians, etc).

The bootcamp thing may work out to equalize load on university CS programs. where us weirdos who were attracted to the discipline for abstract reasons can do what we do, and industry demand for talent can continue to be met through other means.

But!

I rather object strenously to the implied "status" differences between a software technician and a "scientist" but that's probably inevitable. If anything, "shallower" people with good organization skills offer more business value than somebody like me. All I can do is figure out what's really gone wrong, or not make things go wrong to start with. See, even I am using "shallower". I work for people like that all the time, and I admire them greatly.

An analogy is hardware engineers and hardware techs. You need both.

Yes.

> Do you think it's possible that developers who are not good could graduate from college with CS degrees?

Absolutely.

The difference is that the boot camp experience seems to provide a different skill set from a full-time degree (see the article that started this conversation).