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Comment by marcelluspye | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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