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Comment by jeremymcanally | Hacker News Reader

That's because that's what a lot of these bootcamps sell. I've interviewed several grads, and while it's not universal, many of them literally tell their graduates they're going to be better prepared for the Real World™ than their college educated counterparts. Almost like, "You'll be better than a CS grad. All they can do is explain and apply the fundamental thinking process behind all this 'engineering' crap. You, on the other hand, will be able to select elements based on their CSS class. Way more useful."

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Looks like this author fell for it.

I also don't mean to typecast anyone, but the author's profile on that site reads, "Full-stack dev @Radius, ex i-banker, @HackReactor grad, @UCBerkeley," so perhaps he thought his prior experience in an unrelated field or his alma mater should've helped him get a leg up over other entry-level devs.

Again, I don't mean to judge since my path to software development was also non-standard, but my first gig paid about $30k/year and I was grateful to even be given the opportunity with my inexperience.

"UCBerkeley" and "can program" seems likely to help people assume a Berkeley CS background without actually having to claim one.

To be fair, for 99% of web development being able to select elements based on their CSS class is seriously way more useful than being able to explain and apply "engineering crap". Pretty much until you get to the point where you need to scale infrastructure you won't use any of your CS degree when working on most web applications.

Also to be fair, learning how to select elements by CSS class is so trivial that it doesn't effectively separate levels of developers. Whether you choose the basic JavaScript version or one from a popular framework, it should take less than a minute to look up if you don't already know it. I imagine that seasoned developers (and possibly recent CS grads, depending on school) are much, much less likely to waste time wondering why $(".myClass") is giving them a "$ is undefined" error in their Angular/React/etc... project.

I might be wrong, I don't have any direct experience with boot camps, but stripping dev skills down to just the minimal, core, practical skills needed to build a working prototype in the language-of-the-month seems like just the latest version of the same short-sightedness that has been plaguing businesses for years. Low-risk, long-term success will always come from building on experience, not "hacks" and short cuts. There will be exceptions/outliers, but they're just lucky, not a model to be copied.

CSS is not only selecting elements (like JS is not only "defining functions"). Creating complex CSS layout can be hard the same way complex JavaScript system is.

It worked for a lot of COBOL programmers.

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