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Comment by thegayngler | Hacker News Reader

These bootcamps are too basic for starters. They never take you beyond the basics. Secondly, the industry has changed. You need to know more things than you did previously. Even computer science grads aren't necessarily "ready" for the workforce. Education is behind in general instead of ingrained into the community with which it wishes to operate. They are always lagging behind or even way behind.

On some level I feel as though businesses need to get real and just pick someone for the job even entry level. There is nothing wrong with a business investing in its talent rather than expecting everyone to come in with prepackaged with everything you want them to know. Most of the people hiring these days didn't know how to do any of the stuff people are doing when they come out of bootcamp when they started their careers.

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> Secondly, the industry has changed. You need to know more things than you did previously. Even computer science grads aren't necessarily "ready" for the workforce.

Do you? I certainly wasn't "ready" for the workforce after graduating, but that's because I wasn't taught how to use version control software, how to manage a project, how to do proper estimates. I knew how to do Big-O estimates of algorithms, but in practice, this actually comes up rarely. (Although, admittedly, can bite you right in the ass if you don't understand what's going on.)

I don't know what sort of training bootcamps do, but if they offer practical training, it seems like there's a place for them.

Or do we want plumbers to take advanced hydrodynamics courses, rather than apprenticing?

On the other hand, if they're just teaching people to pump out code, then yeah, that's fairly useless.

I feel the idea of coding "bootcamps" is incomplete. Military training doesn't stop at bootcamp- it's just the beginning. Everyone in the military starts in bootcamp, but move on to more specialized skills and a different level of training.

Coding bootcamps are an incomplete idea. You need a program that takes you from Bootcamp to the coding equivalent of Navy Seals, and everything in between. And just as in the metaphor, for the 100 in bootcamp, maybe 1 makes it to the Seals- through years of training and real world experience.

The bootcamp is followed by years of hands on experience at an actual job. Which, hopefully, has good opportunities learning and mentorship within it's own ecosystem.

(Meanwhile, there are a handful of Stanfords cranking out what are supposed to be the Navy seals, and not meeting demand...)

> These bootcamps are too basic for starters. They never take you beyond the basics. Secondly, the industry has changed. You need to know more things than you did previously. Even computer science grads aren't necessarily "ready" for the workforce. Education is behind in general instead of ingrained into the community with which it wishes to operate. They are always lagging behind or even way behind.

If any educational institution gave you everything you needed to know, we'd all be DaVinci's. Being too basic isn't a problem if people don't expect the learning to stop after graduation, in fact, I think this is the biggest misconception about boot camps. You're going to need to teach yourself as much as they do to be successful. Same with college.

> On some level I feel as though businesses need to get real and just pick someone for the job even entry level. There is nothing wrong with a business investing in its talent rather than expecting everyone to come in with prepackaged with everything you want them to know. Most of the people hiring these days didn't know how to do any of the stuff people are doing when they come out of bootcamp when they started their careers.

Totally agree, great dev teams, have no problem on boarding people regardless of knowledge set.

A few decades ago turnover was much lower and it made more sense for a company to invest in a particular employee. We can debate about whose fault it is that turnover is much higher now and talk about what an individual company can try to do to reduce turnover (be a lot less reluctant to give out big raises for starters) but at the end of the day no individual company can completely negate a nationwide trend.

It simply isn't rational for a company to spend long periods of time on training if it expects that employee to leave not long after he is finally becoming productive.

> Secondly, the industry has changed. You need to know more things than you did previously.

Are you sure about this? I think it's actually the opposite: today you don't need to know anything about digital electronics, information theory, theory of computation, computer architecture, OS design, formal methods, PLT, etc. to be a very successful software developer. You just need to know how to deal with one DBMS, one high-level language, one ``framework'', and after literally a couple of years in the industry you will be making a 6 figures salary.

The industry has definitely changed, but a CS degree has never completely prepared anyone to be a professional software engineer.

There have always been a large set of practical skills that aren't really taught as core CS curriculum, but most professional software engineers are going to need to be comfortable with: the version control software of the day, ways of managing runtime considerations of an application (which has obviously evolved a lot recently), certainly programming languages as well.

We are way past a time of loyalty amongst employees. Not worth a company's time and money to do this for someone that may / may not be around after. And locking someone in because of it just leaves a bad taste in the employees mouth.

I'm curious about this idea. I'm wondering why companies can't invest in employees and why the burden of everything is on the employee to come through the door fully prepared and exactly what a company needs right out of the tin. Often, a previous novice had the role and gradually developed the role and themselves. Then, the company wants to hire some new person at the same salary as the person who left the role with all the developed skill of the previous person. I'm wondering why companies don't do a deal with employees : "we will help you develop skill for free at this job while you get paid, and in return you will work here in some capacity at x salary for x number of years to pay that off. if you leave early, you owe us money" Now, certainly, the employee could really stink and the company could want to fire them, but I think that would be an exception since the employee would have all the positive AND negative motivation to successfully fulfill their contract. This might help solve this pesky student debt problem we have as well.

I would argue the companies pay the price of training anyways via the higher cost of hiring the hard to find specialist.

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