IBM’s School Could Fix Education and Tech’s Diversity Gap | Hacker News Reader

IBM’s School Could Fix Education and Tech’s Diversity Gap

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30 pointspen2l17 comments

This not bad. I see a lot of "Oh they should have gone to a 4 year college". Well for many applicants here it might not be a choice between 4 a year college and this. It might be a choice between no college and this.

And no matter what the startup world tells you IBM is still a respected name in the real IT world (banks, finance, large retail stores, etc).

And I am saying even though I don't like the likes of University of Phoenix and friends. However IBM is an established technology not in the primary business of sucking down fat student loans from the government.

It's almost like defunding and closing all the vocational schools and programs in the 80s and 90s wasn't as good of an idea as it seemed...

This approach troubles me deeply. A graduate of IBM's program who doesn't get picked up by IBM is probably SOL. As opposed to a graduate of a traditional four-year BS in CS program.

People are already hiring out of "bootcamp"-style programming education programs that have far less repute. Why is IBM doing it going to be worse than what's already the best way to transition your career?

Here's my main concern:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/09/for-profit-unive...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julia-meszaros/for-profit-coll...

Other than the rare exceptions like MIT, I'm very suspicious when anyone suggests a school that's not a CSU/UC or wellknown-general-accredited-community-college for solving diversity issues in America unless the school is completely free or something. And even then I still see it as wasted time. I agree with OP. I don't see an IBM school being valued in the same way traditional colleges/universities are. It's like the MCSE all over again. My general advice, don't waste time/money on any kind of certification/degree that is provided by a for-profit company unless you _really_ know what you're doing. e.g., SAP Certification when you're already working as an SAP consultant/employee making 6 figures.

I have similar concerns about bootcamps. None of the ones I know about seem to be equipping their students for careers instead of jobs.

Which is to say it may not be worse, but I also don't see where it's better.

Most programming is about experience these days ("make this webapp and connect it to a DB"). If someone can demonstrate the basics in a bootcamp, don't see how they couldn't learn on the job and after work by stackoverflowing what they haven't learned yet.

The difference between having a job in programming and having a career in programming is your grasp of the fundamentals of computing. This is because the ability of a person to learn new technologies and techniques is largely a function of their grasp of fundamentals. Fundamentals that bootcamps uniformly skip over in the interests of getting to experience faster.

In the abstract, it is of course fully, completely, and totally possible for a person to learn this independently or on the job. In practice, that is sufficiently rare as to not be worth discussing. Jobs where relational calculus is taught in the office are, I suspect, similarly rare.

Bootcamp skills are only useful so long as the person never needs to learn a different paradigm, learn significantly different technologies that require thinking differently, move into a different type of programming, or desires significant technical career advancement. Those things require a mix of fundamental knowledge and experience.

Does that make sense?

>> possible for a person to learn this independently or on the job. In practice, that is sufficiently rare as to not be worth discussing.

Is this because people don't really feel a strong need to learn this, because they manage to find their next job ? or because it's impossible to learn alone(even with the help of mooc's and the like) ?

I suspect both, as well as time constraints and lack of an educational environment, are at work.

It's not impossible to learn, say, discrete math on your own. But it is sufficiently difficult that many who attempt will either fail or quit in frustration.

I feel like you're taking an elitist position... I've heard this applied to professionals at every level of education. A quick find-and-replace applied to your comment follows.

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Fundamentals that Undergraduate Computer Science Programs uniformly skip over in the interests of getting to experience faster.

In the abstract, it is of course fully, completely, and totally possible for a person to learn this independently or on the job. In practice, that is sufficiently rare as to not be worth discussing. Jobs where Recent Developments in Deep Learning at Stanford are taught in the office are, I suspect, similarly rare.

Undergraduate Computer Science skills are only useful so long as the person never needs to learn a different paradigm, learn significantly different technologies that require thinking differently, move into a different type of programming, or desires significant technical career advancement. Those things require a mix of fundamental knowledge and experience.

Does that make sense?

I've been accused of elitism before on this subject.

Let me tell you about a person who did so. This person wanted to help the team design database schemas. This person did not have a background with strong computer science fundamentals and did not understand relational calculus. The person struggled to contribute, ultimately becoming a drag on the schema design process. When offered educational materials on the subject of relational calculus that would have addressed this lack of knowledge, using them was quickly given up as too difficult. This person was thus sharply limited, and extremely frustrated, by their lack of Undergraduate Computer Science fundamentals.

Your find-and-replace is only meaningful if you treat "Undergraduate Computer Science" as a string literal with no semantic meaning.

Elitist is not the same as wrong. Medical education is pretty elitist too. That doesn't mean I want to designate everyone who owns a knife as a surgeon. Should I find-and-replace your comment to the tune of s/elitist/populist/, on the assumption that elitism == bad and populism == good?

And before you say that we're just programmers and thus not dealing with life-critical things like doctors are, I refer you to the case of Therac-25.

Disclaimer: I co-founded Dev Bootcamp and still spend my time in this "space."

I assume @Kalium is talking less about technical expertise and more about signaling, like a VC who invests in a company but then won't invest in a follow-on round. This fails the "raised eyebrow" test and, while it might not be an automatic disqualification, it will invite extra scrutiny.

See http://blog.ycombinator.com/pro-rata for how YC handles this.

A hypothetical interviewer or recruiting manager might be thinking things like...

"If IBM won't extend an offer to a gradate of this program, why should I? Doesn't IBM know these students better than any other possible employer? Do they know something about this candidate that I don't?"

I think it's easy to overstate the impact of this signaling, but students of this program should definitely be aware of it. Fair or unfair, rational or irrational, this context will be present in every interview.

In fact, if I were a student, I might avoid interviewing at IBM entirely so that I could answer "Do you have an offer from IBM?" with "No, because I've decided not to interview there." and keep a straight face. This is a very easy story to tell unless you're interviewing at companies similar to IBM, e.g., HP.

Conversely, it would be smart of IBM to create some kind of firewall to address these issues preemptively. I'm not 100% what that would look like, though.

There's a signaling component, but I'm also thinking about content. A company like IBM controlling the curriculum will tend to lead to the program being geared for IBMs needs. The needs or desires of other companies won't be weighted as heavily, if at all. If all someone knows is IBMs internal technologies, they can be expected to have a difficult time outside the IBM-o-sphere.

IBM stands to benefit significantly from this kind of curriculum shaping. It gets them a pool of talent they can skim the cream from cheaply. Neither the schools nor the students will be positioned well to resist this, either. It's a terrible position for the students, because many of them will have done this school for lack of other options.

If they don't get picked up by IBM, they're still very young with highly sought after skills that they could either use at another job or go onto a 4 year program.

It didn't sound like this is meant to totally replace college but instead to offer them more options. Some of these students might not have gone to college anyways so to give them the opportunity finish high school with solid internship experience and skills that could lead to a decent job sounds like a pretty great deal to me.

> If they don't get picked up by IBM, they're still very young with highly sought after skills that they could either use at another job or go onto a 4 year program.

I think that may be assuming quite a bit about what skills they have acquired. This puts IBM in a position to teach the students IBM-specific technologies, making them more valuable to IBM while not adding to their value to non-IBM players.

Compared to nothing, it's a decent deal. Compared to the prospect of an education not controlled by a single company, it's perhaps not such a great deal.

Q has IBM changed and be going to hire these kids. I went to interview at IBM a while back and they very quickly lost interest when they found I did not have a BSC.

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