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bunnymancer

Bootcamper here,

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

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

> 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.

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

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.

Absolutely. I'm glad to have been hired by a company who had experience with bootcampers before.

They gave me a smooth and solid ramp-up to the mid/senior I am now.

Being thrown in on the deep end with the expectations that the guy with 3 months experience is somehow wellrounded with the basics of CS is just foolish.

Also, of course, not all bootcamps are equal, nor are all students.

We have some Node projects and we have a couple of bootcampers on our team who were hired for those projects. We also have a CS graduate who had no Node experience coming on. After a couple of months the CS grad just totally took over and led contributions on the projects. They could do more advanced things that the bootcampers have never had experience with. (Things like writing modular code and data traversing/parsing == algorithms and design).

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

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.

It looks like Triplebyte has candidates take a bunch of tests, and then figures out what YC companies they would be a good match for.

We don't expect every applicant to be good in all those areas, and we let them pick in which area to spend the majority of the interview. I totally agree with you that no one has all those skills (except of course our esteemed interview teem!). We explicitly look in all those areas so that we can find people who are great in all sorts of ways.

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