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Comment by WWKong | Hacker News Reader

Go to college. Life is long and it is not about passing your first interview. Real world is complex and ever changing. The point of going to college is not to acquire coding skills to pass the interview. It is about facing real world challenges: people, responsibilities, complicated decisions, uncomfortable situations etc. And hopefully at the end of it you are better prepared to take on life. It is a harder path than going to a coder factory. Take the hard path.

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Makes total sense if you're coming out of high school I think. But we can assume that there is a decent amount of people that are switching post college to a programming related field.

And in terms of college being the hard path, I'm not sure that it was. I don't know how college helped me with "responsibilities" or "Uncomfortable Decisions". Not to mention the cost of college is pretty extreme, taking on 7k (usually more) a year at a state school would be expensive and stressful. (Real world challenges lol)

I think the solution would might be to step up the bootcamps to be a little more in-depth, and probably take a little longer, like a year at night, or something like that.

If you are thinking of bootcamps as supplemental education, sure. But the article and title was talking "in lieu of". Always go from general to specialised along with age. So, definitely finish college/univ and then get specialization as needed.

The majority of bootcampers already have an undergraduate degree and years of life experience - enough to drive them to take on more debt and change careers. Pretty sure this is the harder "real world" path to an entry-level coding job.

Then it isn't really a bootcamp vs college discussion, is it?

Agreed, the author should have specified undergrad CS degree.

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