Hacker News Reader

Yes, but then I would argue that a mid-career switcher like me (bootcamp here - now employed full time as a programmer for 2+ years) brings a TON of value to your organization. Rather than a fresh-out-of-college person, I have a Master's Degree in my first field, tons of experience working with diverse stakeholders, meeting deadlines, dealing with people I may not get along with, getting to consensus, etc etc -- as well as a hell of a lot of domain knowledge in at least one large field. (In my case I have a Master's Degree in Social Work with a focus on policy research and statistics, but it could be ANY other field than just a CS degree). It's up to your organization to know what they need -- but sometimes what they need very well could be adequate coders that have a ton of other skills rather than people that know more algorithms but don't have any of those soft skills yet.

I think you'd be right in this assessment, especially for those in a position somewhat related to their previous occupation.

(Also, I had been doing HTML/CSS/Wordpress for a decade on the side before wanting to get into backend programming, many of my classmates had similar technical backgrounds with something...)

> Why would I pay them the same amount as a college graduate

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.

Echoing this - my girlfriend, 29, just went through one and the average age was similar. Everyone (but her) had a STEM background / college degree. Abstract thought isn't exclusively taught in CS.

This was a full time iOS program in Totonto.

It's a reaction to the question, "can bootcamps replace a CS degree?", to which these people would say, "no."

On the question, "are bootcamps good or bad?" I think most people would tend towards good, though exactly how good is another matter of debate.

> It's a reaction to the question, "can bootcamps replace a CS degree?"

If someone is posing this question, it's not one based in reality. The question is 4 years of a CS degree vs a bootcamp, not 4 years of college vs no college. As I clearly stated, only one classmate didn't have an undergraduate degree. That question is a strawman at best.

I think it depends on the bootcamp. Some bootcamps do market themselves as college alternatives. I spoke with a bootcamp requiter recently and he attempted to convince me that pursuing a CS degree was a waste of time.

I think of bootcamp in the same terms of the finance bootcamp I took coming out of college. It was a 1 month program mandated by my employer as focused learning. Both have been supplements to my undergrad, not replacements. The ones you mention I see more as a trade school, which I think is a different and potentially viable career path. The reason I say viable is because:

"Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity"

It's my favorite terminology from undergrad. It's from time series analysis. My job coming out of college was as an equities trader. It's hard to get much more time series analytical than that, and yet I never used it even once. Had I gone into quantitative finance, I'm sure I'd use it constantly. 95% of us just use our undergrad as a permission slip to join the real world, CS included. They hand out those permission slips like candy. Most people end up as accountants, not mathematicians. You don't need to know parametric equations to calculate EBIDTA.

It's not a waste of time if it's something you're interested in and you're intelligent enough to use it. It IS a waste of time getting an engineering degree if you think it will give you a leg up on competing for a welding job.

I agree! In my class (I go to Holberton School) the average age is 29 as well.

I wonder if this says something more about how life is lived now, and the choices we get to make because of opportunity.

Most of us are college grads, and our school is not a 12 week bootcamp. We spend 2 years learning, doing internships and coding, and there is a heavy emphasis on soft skills.

I hesitate to add this lest I be accused of moving the goalposts, but I'd like to add that the algorithmic and other low-level knowledge is vital to bringing technological value.

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 have a doctorate in music from one of the top conservatories, but excellence in music (or anything else) is only about putting the hours in. There's nothing I learned in school that isn't widely available in books, or attainable by transcribing records and studying scores. A good teacher is pretty important but doesn't require the formality of school enrollment.

I'm quite sure the same is true in programming. So what if a bootcamp grad can only make CRUD apps a few months into their dev career? What can they do five years after that? At a certain point individual dedication and passion is what matters. There are a million books about algorithms and many bootcamp grads have library cards.

I hate to nitpick but I think music is a particularly bad example here. The vast majority of music as we know it is outsider art. The people I went to music conservatory with are largely not the same people who produce either music that you've heard or great works.

Sure, the self-taught pop star isn't going to write Rite of Spring anytime soon, but the music business does just fine while being flooded by people with limited theory skill...and I say this while holding the view that most people should just be performers and not compose.

Nope, you're just being a snob. Plenty of "outsider pop stars" (and their songwriters and producers) know music theory just fine and many even went to Berklee/Juilliard/whatever conservatory you're thinking of.

I guess.

I'm actually saying pretty clearly that it doesn't take deep theory knowledge to write great music, which I think counter's the parent poster's point pretty well. And there's a big gap in the amount of theory required to build your career on playing 12 bar blues and on composing for an orchestra. Most conservatory students aren't rigorously studying composition enough to do the latter anyway. In fact, most just want to eke out a living on dull music that hasn't changed in 400 years.

Berklee is not a conservatory. People actually get practical skills there and aren't treated like shit. Nothing wrong with going there. You are much better off doing that vs New England Conservatory, Julliard, Peabody, etc. (Actually the jury may be out after the Boston Conservatory merger, but we'll wait a few years and see)

Wait, he's the snob for suggesting that you don't need to have gone to a prestigious music school to be a well accomplished or well known musician?

Are you illiterate? He's sniffing at pop stars who haven't gone to the right conservatories.

You've got it flipped. I'm saying that having a deep knowledge of theory isn't what enables you to make great music. I am also saying that most working musicians' knowledge is extremely limited and that absolutely makes their work outsider art. That's not saying that anyone should go to conservatory (anything but - if you want music ruined for you by all means go), but yes probably every musician _writing music_ should improve the knowledge of their craft.

I used to work in the music industry. I think your beliefs about writers' knowledge of music theory are way off.

That's cool, don't really need your validation.

A large percentage of the people in my bootcamp already had STEM or law degrees or many years of experience in another technical field (like myself)...and in a few cases both.

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.

The people I seeing decrying degrees as credentialism are invariably those out of bootcamps. I get that people may be satisfied with the level of education they received, but why do they attempt to cheapen others' experiences?

People always talk about how they're concerned with a candidate's ability to see something through, work hard on something with deadlines, know how to learn new things/not just knowing one thing. In my eyes, this, if NOTHING else, is something that a degree shows.

And yet, even though you decry the usefulness of degrees, you're sure to mention that your bootcampers mostly hold them. If they don't matter at all, why even bother mentioning it?

A lot of people flat out say "I don't even consider bootcamp grads" when my experience looking at hundreds of my peers is that it's a rare few that have _just_ their bootcamp on their resume. A few in my cohort even had actual CS degrees but wanted practical skill to make themselves marketable. To overlook advanced degrees + bootcamp (+ experience) because they don't have that precious CS degree absolutely is credentialism.

I'm not "satisfied" with my bootcamp education. I had already been programming for 25 years before my bootcamp, but only as a hobbyist, not in collaboration with others and not in a modern stack. I also have a completely self-taught CS background (that I'm constantly filling the gaps in) and find at my jobs I'm the one most interested in the field and the concepts among my peers.

Not at all trying to cheapen the CS degree here.

I agree with you -- it seems totally inappropriate to invalidate a candidate instantaneously due to a lack of a CS degree. That being said, I think a CS degree is, and should be, a competitive advantage.

This is really interesting! I have to admit that I am probably guilty of stereotyping at times (in my own internal thought processes) graduates of bootcamps as individuals from non-STEM backgrounds (e.g. arts degrees, or no formal post-secondary education).

I wonder if there are any studies showing the degrees held by bootcamp graduates?

A bootcamp probably makes a ton of sense for say a mechanical engineer looking to switch professions, instead of going back to university and doing an additional +2 years of courses for a second Bachelors degree or a Masters in CS.

I think certain bootcamps attract certain types, so the circumstances I experienced likely aren't universal across bootcamps.

Usually doing innovative independent work requires a whole lot of domain knowledge that can only be learned once you're in the business. (If not, I'd question the defensibility of the business...) Both a bootcamp grad and a recent CS college grad are completely unsuited for that. That's why they're junior developers; they need mentoring to understand the context of their work, the factors that need to enter into decisions, and the body of proprietary knowledge that the industry is built upon.

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.

From resumes I've seen, bootcamp participants often have some college experience, just not in CS/STEM.

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

> the ability to communicate clearly ... how to learn independently

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.

The far majority of paid dev work these days is boring CRUD web work at a very high level of abstraction. Bootcamps (in my experience interviewing some of the grads) prepare you much better for this work than a CS degree.

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.

The issue you might run into is that colleges will teach this in theory, but only the good students will internalize all of those things from their education. Same with bootcamps.

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.

Yea, their analysis only measures the employee value at interview time. It doesn't attempt to measure the lifetime value of the employee.

>The ability to communicate

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.