Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

> people who have grown up around how to learn

Neither of these phrases makes any sense.

When it comes to those "who don't make it very far"; how do you handle tuition and possible refunds?

I'm not really advocating that they deserve or should get a full refund; I'm just skeptical that an open enrollment type thing where anyone can join (like I've experienced with a MOOC)-- you'll have a lot of students starting out, and end up with very few. The one's who couldn't make it should have been screened out, as they're both spending a lot of their own money on this, spending a lot of their own time on this, and potentially taking time away from others with remediation or tutoring-- at the very least, there could be various levels of classes for them to work things out before being introduced into the subjects where they might tend to fail.

From the perspective of someone who has been taught and who has taught, in both cases I prefer small group sizes of people I have some confidence in being relatively adept at what's going on-- the need to reiterate and reintroduce certain core concepts on things goes down a bit as well.

Do you mean that the program should be made available to anyone who wants to take it? What if there just isn't enough capacity to take that many people?

After I finished I was at the point to know enough to know I don't really know much of anything, and got hired into an apprenticeship program a local company was running, even though the majority of the stack I learned at GA isn't even used. He hired me with the knowledge that I am teachable and willing to learn.

Everyone but one person from our cohort now also has a development job. General Assembly at least does a ton to make sure you are prepared to fight your way into the job market. The only thing I am worried about is what the market will look like for people coming from bootcamps 5 to 10 years down the line. Is this going to start to bring out the people opening ma and pops bootcamp to get a quick buck?

These skills can be taught but aren't in most modern universities.

Mostly, there is argument that university is not vocational training. At the same time, most people implicitly feel the need to go to university to get a job.

These developer boot camps create a new path. It's a good thing.

To be fair it seems like the people that go to the "top" bootcamps are not like this. I mean, App Academy has graduated Googlers, but a lot already had degrees or some industry experience.

Just look at the job statistics for anyone of the top ones, like Hack Reactor, Flatiron School, ect.

They graduate people who get 80-100k salary jobs, within 6 months of graduating.

People go to these bootcamps for the singular goal of getting a high paying job, and these programs are wildly successful at achieving this goal.

I'm from Dev Bootcamp and barely knew anything before participating. I had multiple good job offers a week after "graduating" and have always been performing well, obviously according to what was expected when I finished. I was able to do useful stuff in our rails app since the first week, and although I needed a lot of mentorship I still think I was useful.

I think what's important is to be realistic on expectations you have on bootcamp. You won't understand how things work after 3 months, but you will definitely know enough to get a job as a junior, and be able to continue learning.

After I landed my first job, I continued to take some online classes to know more CS stuff, learn basic algorithms, etc. and now that I've been working for almost 3 years (really hard) I feel like I know better than a new grad getting out of school. I didn't when I started working obviously, but I think that those past 3 years were way more valuable in every single aspect than if I had spent 3 years in College studying CS.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say you shouldn't go to school or anything, but there is definitely a value in bootcamps, especially for people (like me) who already spent 3-4 years in College but want to make a change. I would have never been able to become an engineer without a bootcamp, because I couldn't afford another bachelor's (and tbh, didn't have the motivation for it anyways).

A developer and a computer scientist are two different things.

There are awesome developers who are terrible computer scientists. They can build a great website/small web application in RoR or Django, fast and get the job done. The site will never scale tho.

There are awesome computer scientists who can't build a great web app but can scale the hell out of it.

Most companies want developers, not computer scientist. You might get asked all sorts of questions about algorithms ^& data structures, but in reality day to day problem is CRUD.

Now, I would imagine Google would want more of those CS types than developer types...

In a sense I feel like we do things backwards. You should work in industry for a couple years, then learn the theory you learn when getting a CS degree. The software development career path isn't setup like this now, but if it were, I feel like we would all be better off.

Now, three years later, I am taking online classes to learn about those issues. The more advanced I got, the more I needed those "basics."

Looking back at myself at 18, there is no way I would have made it through a CS course. I had no motivation for school. Now, I am doing really well and learning a ton.

Saying they are a scam ignores that the students are getting a marketable skill. None of the camps say you will be an expert with understandings of how the language works but you will have enough skill to be useful.

A 12 week program is certainly enough to prepare someone for real, practical applications in development, especially if the student has done self study before and after and has ambition.

From what I've seen, often times a CS degree does the exact opposite.

I interview developers pretty often for my company and I've come across about a handful of people whose only education in development was one of these bootcamps; none of them were anywhere close to being ready for even an entry level position.

So I become super skeptical when people are being asked to pay $13k for a 3 month program that may not actually land them a job. That's a LOT of money.

I'd like to see GA's historical track record - how many of their graduates have received offers within 6 months? Within a year? What were the average starting salaries they received?

Based on my limited exposure to the graduates of these types of bootcamps, I don't think I'd recommend this type of program to anyone, despite having Google's name attached to it.

I do know of many CS grads that were woefully unprepared to write production code until they had a few weeks of real learning.

Myself, I have no CS degree, and have been a professional developer since 1999, in multiple languages, and have had the opportunity to run user groups, speak at conferences, serve as technical editors in many big name programming books, and more. I'm FAR from exceptional; I'd say I'm only mildly above average in terms of intellect and skill. My point is that a great career can come by many paths.

You're flat out wrong and you're doing a disservice to yourself and the industry by dismissing them out of hand.

I've talked to quite a few people who have gone through bootcamps or hired people from bootcamps. Many come out completely capable of filling a junior dev role.

We hired a junior dev straight out of a bootcamp and she has been great. Not only is she competent but she adds a different perspective to the team which is valuable.

One caveat though. Not everyone is suitable for a bootcamp. You have to be an intelligent, fast learner who wants to continue learning and is aware of your limitations.

Employers have to have reasonable expectations too. You can't expect someone from a bootcamp to be committing code on their first day, first week, or possibly even first month (depending on the complexity of your code base). At first they will take much longer on tasks than a CS major or someone with experience. But they've clearly shown a willingness to learn and learn quickly so it doesn't last.

For more info see my other comment on the main thread.

Admission gripes and crappy students aside, the rest of the learning environment was great. The teachers were always willing to give more outside work if we wanted more. It was invaluable having classes overlapping and students at different learning stages sitting next to each other in the community workspace. Most people were happy to provide help. I even had the dumb luck of sitting next to Ryan Dahl while I was learning node (I had no idea who he was at the time); now I use node all day every day.

Google, and most larger tech companies, optimize their hiring process to aggressively deny candidates if they aren't a slam dunk. The negatives that come from hiring a bad engineer far outweigh the positives that come from hiring a good engineer.

Not saying there isn't an age bias, just not an obvious one I noticed.

Perhaps Google is worried about declining developer attention focus on developing for the Android platform. Network effects make markets like the app store a winner take all (more or less)

Latest article: iOS App Store Revenue Now 80 Percent Higher Than Google Play, Thanks To China http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/15/ios-app-store-revenue-now-8...

It's a weird catch-22 as folks just end up going iOS only first as a result.

I completed half of an android MOOC course and for the most part it was just Java + mobile design patterns. The android specific stuff (build tools/IDE, configuration, version partitioning, etc) can be learned on the fly I assume.

Demand for mobile developers in general is off the charts, and still climbing. It's kind of absurd, really - the going rate for mobile devs has increased 200-300% over the past 3 years amongst colleagues I know, which I think is almost entirely attributable to the demand growth in this sector and the relatively slow growth of the talent pool.

Looking at Android vs. iOS devs, both are in high demand but Android especially so. Overall demand for Android doesn't feel particularly pronounced, but the talent pool of experienced, competent Android devs is dramatically smaller than the counterpart in iOS-land.

The key here is experienced, competent devs. We've interviewed a lot of Java people with minimal Android experience trying to make the leap over - it rarely goes well. Mobile development is substantially more complex than "knows Java and can work Android Studio".

There are a few posts replying to yours that I want to respond to, but I'll just do it in one shot instead of littering a bunch of replies everywhere:

RE: simply hiring experienced Java devs. This doesn't usually work - good mobile devs are also at least partially UX people - we spend a lot of time knee-deep in UI, and consumer expectations for the fit and finish of apps are high. Someone who has completed the "Hello World" equivalent of Android learning has done exactly that - finished "Hello World". It in no way implies the ability to build apps that aren't an embarrassment to the Play Store. There is a vast amount of domain knowledge here, and the gap between an app built by someone who merely knows the API vs. someone who knows mobile apps is pretty darned wide.

RE: iOS gaining a larger share of revenue. This is true, but relatively inconsequential to most mobile devs. Outside of gaming the number of businesses directly monetizing apps is dropping. The bulk of attention for non-game apps go towards service-oriented apps (see: Uber, AirBnb, Facebook) for whom "app store revenue" is a nonsensical concept. There is lots, and lots* of work for companies that don't rely on direct monetization (i.e., app sales and in-app purchases) to live (and increasingly so).

RE: the market balancing itself according to supply/demand. Yes, this is happening, but it's happening more slowly than the demand is rising, so overall wages are still rising. Much of this is because it's non-trivial to learn the domain knowledge necessary to really do this well, and consumer expectations on app quality is high enough that (to be charitable) the value of beginner-level devs vs. experienced devs is non-linear.

Of course, then you can pay them less.

If I were you I'd save the 5 figure fees and go through the python (learnpythonthehardway.org) and Django (learnpythonthehardway.org/book/next.html) tutorials.