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I really hate to see promotion of bootcamps on HN. I see them as the scourge of the tech industry. Telling people that a 6 week bootcamp is the same as a 4 year CS degree is absurd and offensive.

Throughout the first dot com boom, we struggled against perceptions that software development was something trivial done by teenagers in their spare time. This perception was highly dangerous, not only in terms of professional respect, salaries, and promotion opportunities, but even to businesses themselves and the law, as companies were forced to try to explain in court that achievements such as the Google search algorithm were on par with a major pharmaceutical project not a lemonaid stand.

Imagine a bootcamp for medicine - in 6 weeks they learn the most common procedures: how to prescribe antibiotics, how to remove an appendix, and how to set a broken arm. They're told they can learn the rest as they go, and to go start calling themselves doctors.

I wouldn't want that medical bootcamp 'doctor' to treat me, and I don't want a coding bootcamp 'developer' to be responsible for handling my medical data.

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"Telling people that a 6 week bootcamp is the same as a 4 year CS degree is absurd and offensive."

Any bootcamp telling that to people is obviously lying. Most of them don't make this claim. The ones that do are better at marketing than teaching.

"Imagine a bootcamp for medicine - in 6 weeks they learn the most common procedures: how to prescribe antibiotics, how to remove an appendix, and how to set a broken arm. They're told they can learn the rest as they go, and to go start calling themselves doctors."

If a website goes down, nobody dies, let's be honest here (in the vast majority of cases). Also, you're not thinking about this openly enough - not everyone can teach themselves to learn to code, and bootcamp grads are not expected to become senior software developers in 6 weeks (plus most programs are 10-14 weeks). Instead, they're expected to get a junior level position and keep learning.

I just think that you're view of bootcamps is WAY too black and white. Have a little imagination and understand that while they're not the right thing for everyone, there's a gray area and many people actually benefit from them and get a programming or tech related job, or find out that coding is not for them, both not terrible outcomes. And then there are bootcamps that are actually harmful - but it's kind of wrong to group those in with everyone else.

Just saying not to have a kneejerk reaction about something that's a lot more complicated than you think it is.

The damaging thing most of these websites can do is leak personal information. Sometimes just annoying, but large scale password breaches can escalate to secondary problems for the public.

A 4 year CS degree does not necessarily encapsulate security training as it's usually an elective, but it at least gives the foundational understanding of algorithms to understand why something is secure vs insecure.

While I agree that a 4 year CS degree is superior to a bootcamp in terms of computing knowledge and skill, the notion that knowing anything about algorithms leads to knowing simple web based security, most of which is baked into whatever framework you're using anyway, is silly.

"If a website goes down, nobody dies"

Well...if a major site goes down or many sites go down then companies lose revenue which causes job loss. With every 1% that unemployment increases, 40,000 people die/commit suicide. So...down sites can cause death and vast harm to the economy as a whole ;)

meh...

Job loss and fatal hemorrhaging of money can happen for a million different reasons. Having a few novice folks on board just "learning the ropes" and making some mistakes along the way isn't going to kill any company, let alone damage the industry.

The 4-year CS degree isn't much better as a predictor of successful outcomes in software development.

In fact: the bootcamps themselves might be awful, but if they select for people who are sincerely driven by a desire to do software dvelopment, the bootcamps could be a better predictor than CS programs, which are selected off a menu by 18-19 year olds just arrived at a college that they were raised to expect to have to attend.

There's a debate amongst economists about whether the value of college comes in the form of human capital versus signaling. What you're describing is sort of the signaling theory, i.e. colleges mostly function as a sieve to help employers identify students who are driven and have passed a battery of tests that have no relation to job-relevant skills except that they're hard.

The human capital theory is that education gives students new skills and knowledge that makes them more valuable. In other words, all other things equal a student that learns, say, calculus is more valuable than a student that does not.

I'm not sure what the current economic consensus is, but an interesting thought experiment to test these theories is: the human capital theory implies that you accrue value as you accrue skills/knowledge in school, so if you drop out halfway through college you should still have earned half of your human capital and economically your wages should be higher than someone who didn't go to school at all but lower than someone who graduated. The signaling theory is more discrete, if you drop out halfway you don't get any of the value of signaling because you can't say you're a graduate. The wages of college dropouts should be the same as the wages of someone who never went to college at all if the signaling theory holds true.

I'm not sure what the data says but I suspect it would be muddied by different industries and degrees. My guess would be that software engineering education follows the human capital theory -- engineering hiring managers don't seem to care where you went to school or if you went to school at all. Other industries, typically those with less hard skills like management consulting, might rely more on signaling. That's just my theory though, haven't tried to look up any data to support it.

In general, the data is exactly what you'd expect: people with some college out earn those with none.

But SAT scores correlate to income regardless of schooling.

You don't need a 4 year CS degree to do basic web development. Sure, you don't want a doctor with only 6 weeks of training... but I bet you could get a decent massage to help a sore back from someone with only 6 weeks of training. Lets not pretend that being able to put a form on the web and do basic CRUD to a database is the most advanced coding in the world.

Your CS degree will help you do more advanced work that your average web dev cannot. And I agree that bootcamp graduates are over-hyped. But if you want a head start into coding vs. learning on your own, and are willing to pay money to get it, then bootcamps are fine.

> CRUD to a database

Even this can be deceptively complex, since most CRUD databases sit behind user authentication, for example, which leads down the rabbit hole of properly storing user credentials.

There are simple tasks in software development to be sure, yet I hesitate whenever I feel myself believing "This is going to be so simple!" since that's usually how days or weeks of code-wrangling begin.

Yet, the military boot camp analogy is still shockingly accurate, everyone gets a few weeks of first aid in basic training and that's honestly enough because the platoon has a LT floating around, a couple levels of management higher, to make more difficult decisions.

LTs are handy once in awhile, but you really don't need a platoon composed entirely of LTs.

A better analogy is backhoe operators and civil engineers. We'd probably save a measurable number of lives and capital loss if all backhoe operators were fully qualified civil engineers. However in practice unless you're biting off more than you can chew, having one CE float around and stamp blueprints and write orders is usually a perfectly adequate amount of engineering support. In an ideal world of massive underemployment or over production in the edu sector, I guess all backhoe operators would be extremely bored and frustrated civil engineers.

> Lets not pretend that being able to put a form on the web and do basic CRUD to a database is the most advanced coding in the world.

There's a difference between knowing that this what you're doing when you build a web app and not knowing. The former requires a formal education or years of self-study.

Let me preface this by saying: I do not live in an area such as NY or SF where the top 1% of bootcamps exist and have a good track record. In case you haven't noticed, in 2015 the fast-foodification of code bootcamps happened. Local camps have popped up in almost every city. They are what the majority of the country has immediate access to.

In my experience, The majority of people leave boot camps with a seriously warped view of programming. Some of the graduates I've met come out of bootcamp with inaccurate/harmful/evil perceptions such as "These ruby commands aren't working...", "C++ is sooo outdated, why wouldn't you just use a user-friendly language like ruby", "What's the code for doing x, I can't find it online", "coding in html", "coding is easy", "you can learn everything online", "CS is the theoretical stuff", "I made a functional Twitter 'clone' in 3 days; it's on my github. [never mind the fact it's the nth iteration of the same cookie cutter 'open source project' as everyone else from camp... UGH]"

For iOS, it's not as bad. Out of necessity you need to learn a little bit more about OOP and compilers. However, these are the same folks that think that using getter and setter methods plus storyboard to get a UI up is worthy sample-app (Look, I made my own calculator.app - fork me on GitHub!)

I've seen all these types first hand. I have had the displeasure to work with some of them. None of these people had any clue what's really happening when they fire up MRI/node/whatever. None of these people ever wanted to be "found out" so they lie and bullshit, making them absolutley impossible to deal with.

They've been taught [read: brainwashed] into thinking that it's ok [advantageous, actually] to be cocky and "fake it until you make it." The boot camps I've seen go out of their way to reinforce the idea that you're getting your money's worth. It's difficult to correct them, since they are usually very insecure about their emotional and financial investment in the bootcamp.

IMO these black-box perceptions are extremely harmful for everyone that has to work with these kinds of devs. The worst part is they all circle-jerk about how useless CS degrees are for CS jobs.

After only 6 weeks of coding you are cargo culting. No matter what. You cannot a good web developer out of bootcamp. It's impossible. There are no shortcuts to good fundamentals and hands-on experience. Production-ready skills take years to refine and develop. It does not matter how intensive your "learn2code make 90k now" course was.

Apologies for the double post: for some reason HN locked me out of editing this post after 15 minutes. There are some grammatical errors I would have liked to fix.

> None of these people had any clue what's really happening when they fire up MRI/node/whatever.

This is what people don't understand. No, to add a few input fields or update verbiage doesn't require a genius. Neither does using a loop to programmatically update multiple objects/varibles. There are, however, certain aspects that directly benefit from knowing what happens under the hood or some CS theory. One of the most relevant concepts is callbacks.

Bootcamp graduates learn basic programming concepts and structures plus the syntax of a given language. Or in some unfathomable cases, concepts and syntax to "cover the full stack" in 10 weeks™. After that, every response is just a blank stare.

"I wouldn't want that medical bootcamp 'doctor' to treat me, and I don't want a coding bootcamp 'developer' to be responsible for handling my medical data."

The medical example's a good one - a cursory google search [1] turns up a table that shows the various types medical professionals you might encounter if you, say, break your arm. Perhaps programming needs something similar? We're already segmented in some fuzzy way between "Software Engineering," "Software Architect," and "Software Developer."

[1] http://www.thepalife.com/physician-assistant-vs-nurse-practi...

EMT courses are often ~10 weeks long and CNA courses are ~6 weeks. Obviously not doctors, just like coding bootcamp grads aren't at the highest professional level.

No one is saying that coding bootcamps prepare people for senior level development or architecture. Most people I know who took them were hobbyists looking to transition to a professional (definitely junior) level. It's a quicker starting point, that's all.

This not an uncommon belief. Bootcamps are designed so that people can become employable without having to go to college. Anyone who went to college will understandably dislike that premise.

Most bootcamps are 10-14 weeks, not 6. Most bootcamps are taught by or founded by people from successful tech companies. Most bootcamps work with real companies to design curriculum that teach the equivalent of what the company would have to teach their new hires anyway.

It's healthy to be sceptical, but the reality is that the hiring statisics that most bootcamps put out are Real. Most people get hired. Most people get competitive salaries.

Bootcamps only exist because thousands of bootcamp graduates have been getting jobs at real companies for the past 5 years. There are some that are bad (poor curriculum, poor teaching, poor outcomes), but that's why you can check their statistics and reviews, and make the decision for yourself whether they seem reputable or not.

Telling people that a 6 week bootcamp is the same as a 4 year CS degree is absurd and offensive.

Having met and interviewed many CS graduates I've found that a lot of them simply can't write code. The ones that can tend to be the ones who've learned in their own time, often being able to write software before they even went to university.

If a 6 week course can get someone to be even 50% as good as a 4 year degree then the degree is the thing that has a problem.

> If a 6 week course can get someone to be even 50% as good as a 4 year degree then the degree is the thing that has a problem.

Defining 50% here would be hard. I may not use all of the skills I learned at the university, and one may learn more at the beginning of one's study, but I fear it takes the good part of 2 years to get to 50% of a 4 year CS degree.

Learning is also a kind of Maturation process where ones abilities tends to grow over time. This may be hard to substitute, even by study more intensely.

"Telling people that a 6 week bootcamp is the same as a 4 year CS degree is absurd and offensive."

Absolutely true, and I don't know any that do that. At the same time, I've interviewed many people with CS degrees who were severely lacking in any practical web experience, and didn't even know how to use version control. They both are incredibly different and yield different results/skills. If you've got the 4 years and money, the CS degree is a great idea. Yet, for many people in their mid-20's and 30's, going back to undergrad isn't really an option. I don't think everyone should be stuck with the decisions they made when they were 17/18 as their only career choices.

We do have the concept of "medic training". In the US Army, medics undergo 16 to 68 weeks of training (after basic). Are they doctors after that? Nope, but they've also saved thousands of lives. Same as a doctor? Nope, but still incredibly useful. Civilian EMT programs are ~6 months long if I'm not mistaken.

Do I need someone with a CS degree to do the CSS on the company's homepage? Absolutely not.

I don't have a CS degree. I work for a pretty great startup. I taught myself everything I know over about 2-3 years while transitioning from a business/marketing-centric position to developer at another startup. In many ways, I wish I'd had a bootcamp program (they didn't really exist at the time) to speed me through some of the things. Does it teach you everything? Nope, but it's a pretty damn good start, and would have easily shaved 18 months off that learning curve.

That's just a chain of trust. Who checks their surgeon's credentials before going under the knife? You trust the surgeon's employer and the medical registration board in your jurisdiction.

The field of engineering offers a rough analog.

In Australia there's a society called Engineers Australia, who via the ITEE, evaluate and accredit educational programs before accepting graduates of said programs as members. There are equivalent organisations around the world (just as there are in the fields of law and medicine).

I can also give an example of how it works. My Bachelor of Information Technology states that I majored in Software Engineering. However the degree isn't accredited and therefore I'm not eligible for EA membership. I still refer to myself as a "software engineer" and show a degree from a reputable university, but I can't (and wouldn't) try pass myself off as an accredited Engineer.

A 6-week bootcamp for medicine can teach you First-Aid, CPR, and a lot more. Similarly a 6-week bootcamp for programming can teach you some of the basics good enough so that you can build a project by yourself.

I would argue that both should be required for any college degree. And yes, they are not the same as a 4-year degree. And those that do the 4-year degrees should have enough more knowledge and experience that people want to hire them as well.

I think there is more of a problem with the lack of great 4-year degrees as opposed bad 6-week bootcamps.

> Similarly a 6-week bootcamp for programming can teach you some of the basics good enough so that you can build a project by yourself.

The problem is that's not how they're marketed. They're marketed as qualifying you to be a full time developer, equivalent to a CS degree holder, and advertise 6-figure salaries.

Nobody goes to a First-Aid class expecting to come out with a 6-figure doctor job.

I really hate to see web and app developers comparing to themselves to doctors. That seems far more egregious.

Developers may not be open heart surgeons, but in some cases, it's even worse. The human body can heal on its own, and leaves ambiguous traces of the work done. Bad bits on the other hand continue to infect the system, a "tiny" security hole in the wrong place is as bad as a systemic infection.

I wish bootcamps were something different from what they are. Right now, they seem to be for taking people who are otherwise unemployable up to a level of competence sufficient to pass job interviews.

What I NEED, is a bootcamp that I, and experienced developer, can attend using the 2-3k and and 2 weeks off that my employer is willing to grant me. I'd like to take an advanced, high level course on unix administration aimed at people who don't do it full time, but are expected to be able to put out fires if needed.

Or a course in advanced jquery magic. Or a course that teaches me how to optimize a massive and archaic codebase. Or a variety of other things that I'm struggling to slowly learn on my own time.

I'm not a bootcamp advocate. Yet, I think the doctor analogy is flawed, a navy corpsman is probably closer. Bootcamps might provide first aid and triage. Small businesses probably don't need someone with a four year degree to build their website.

That said, a small business might do better with someone bootcamped in sysops than Rails...and programs providing IT education have been around for decades.

Anyway, ask an average US licensed architect about IT's appropriation of the term, or a PE about software engineers with no documented training, engineering education, or competency testing about the long term benefits of being offended by the standards of the software industry.

I'm seriously thinking about taking a boot camp for iOS development to rapidly ramp up and maybe gain a few contacts. I've been developing professional for almost 20 years, was a hobbyist through middle and high school, and have a degree in comp. sci.

A 4 year degree is overrated. Nothing I learned in 96 is relevant today except for my algorithms class and maybe my C class. My career and knowledge wouldn't have been any different if I had skipped college and learned everything on my own (which I did anyway). But hiring managers want a college degree so I am glad I have one.

Disagree. For me the proof is in the pudding. There are already so many shitty developers crowding the ranks of the tech world I fail to see regulation making it better.

I'm the cofounder of an online coding bootcamp called Bloc, I actually agree with the gist of what you're saying but it's a little more nuanced than that.

Even in medicine, you have many different types of degrees and certifications of varying depth and expertise. On the low end of the spectrum, you have medical assistants that can and do get certifications in less than a year and are seemingly qualified to do things like administer medicine. On the other end, you have MDs that require nearly a decade of training and are qualified to prescribe medication and do surgery. In between, you have roles like RNs and PAs.[1]

I don't think any coding bootcamp is claiming you can learn just as much as a CS grad in 12 weeks [2], but you can learn enough to be a junior web developer building modestly complex CRUD apps. Speaking as a CS grad myself, there's a surprisingly large amount of inefficiency in traditional CS curriculum and you'd be surprised how much you can learn in a short period of time. You're not going to work on Google's search algorithm or Stripe's ACH gateway after 12 weeks no matter how efficient the curriculum is, but for a lot of employers a junior dev is more than enough.

In software, the analogy to nurses and doctors is that there are: web admins that mostly set up Wordpress or another CMS for small businesses, web developers that can build modest to advanced CRUD apps, and software engineers that can work on architectural software problems like GitHub's RPC filesystem or Heroku's app router. Again, different employers have different needs and not everyone needs to be working on architectural problems: there are plenty of jobs for people who can hack Wordpress and build Rails apps, the employers who hire bootcamp grads for those needs are usually pretty happy based on our research.

Bloc is online so it's a little easier for us to experiment with different program lengths than an in-person bootcamp, we have three different programs that are 18, 36, and 72 weeks respectively and roughly line up with the role definitions I'm proposing here. We just launched the longest program, called the Software Engineering Track, exactly because we thought there was an opportunity to build something with the pragmatism of a bootcamp but the robustness of a CS degree. But, we still think there's a place for the shorter programs even if they're not a substitute for a CS degree.

[1] http://www.thepalife.com/physician-assistant-vs-nurse-practi...

[2] I haven't heard of any coding bootcamps that are 6 weeks long, I think most of the in-person programs are closer to 12 weeks.

Something I've been wondering for a while: are you considering opening up physical bootcamps as well?

We don't have any plans to, a well designed online program can be better than an offline program. It has different challenges, but also some unique strengths, i.e.

- We can scale 1-on-1 instructor to student ratios. Tech allows us to handle the logistics of tracking and coordinating students so that our instructors can work with each of their students individually and on their own pace.

- Everything is quantitive by default. We have a robust set of analytics about our students individually, as cohorts, by instructor, by course, etc. We're only now getting to the volume of students where you can see trends in the data, but it's exciting to see how we can improve the program based on what we see.

- The curriculum is higher quality. We use the flipped classroom model popularized by Sal Kahn: instead of listening to your teacher lecture for an hour and going off on your own to do homework, you watch video lectures on your own and spend time with your instructor working on problems. It's a smart way to use tech to automate lectures and allow instructors to do what human beings are best at: working with individuals and helping them work through their blockers and misconceptions. We've essentially started a video production team within Bloc to record videos and screencasts for our curriculum, our curriculum started out pretty terrible when I first wrote it four years ago but today it's the highest quality material I've seen online.

I do think there should be an in-person component to Bloc, but we don't want it to be a strict requirement for the courses. We're starting to organize meetups and events in the cities with our largest student concentrations so they can meet each other and attend Bloc events but it would be supplementary to the courses for students who can't or don't want to attend but still want to learn.

Some "bootcamps" are more like 6-7 months long, not 6 weeks.

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