Hacker News Reader

Comment by charmides | Hacker News Reader

Note that this piece is from 2013. I think that should be indicated parenthetically in the title.

Title should also use all caps for STEM.

It was a myth much longer ago than 2013 yet the article is no less valid today. In fact with the rise of bootcamps and so on it has gotten even worse in software particularly. There should be laws against bootcamps ripping off hopefuls with false promises.

What false promises? Many of them graduate and are getting real jobs. One of the fastest growing new boot camps even lets people attend for free and makes back their money as a percentage of future salaries earned. Nothing could be further from ripping students off with false promises of jobs.

You must have seen the ads... “average salary in data science/cyber security/whatever is $$$” with the clear implication that taking their $$$ 8-week course will let you sail into one of these jobs.

What’s wrong with bootcamps? I know a few success stories, and I firmly believe that if somebody wants to learn programming, it is doable almost for everyone. It is hard, like learning a foreign language, but as nearly everybody can learn e.g. Spanish, so nearly everybody can learn how to program.

"Another reason for the current problems with bootcamp job placement is that employer expectations, and their attitudes towards bootcamp grads, have changed since the early days. A lot of employers who did hire from bootcamps found that although many of these bootcamp grads did well at interview, they had trouble being immediately productive once in post. The underlying issue was that these new hires lacked the fundamental programming knowledge and other skills (such as problem-solving and technical communication) that they needed to work effectively without lots of additional support or guidance."

https://medium.com/launch-school/why-do-programming-bootcamp... (By someone selling a bootcamp, of course.)

"“Our experience has found that most graduates from these programs are not quite prepared for software engineering roles at Google without additional training or previous programming roles in the industry,” said Maggie Johnson, Google’s director of education and university relations, in a statement. “We generally don’t hire from coding schools,” said Robyn Blum, a spokeswoman for Cisco. “Coding schools haven’t been much of a focus for Autodesk,” said Raymond Deplazes, a spokesman."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-06/want-a-jo...

I find that many 4-year CS grads have a problem with problem-solving and technical communication. Bootcamp grads average worse, but it's not something that I'd use to exclude all of them.

I've worked at two companies that have hired both experienced developers and people fresh out of a bootcamp.

Bootcampers tend to have roughly the same level of programming skill as someone fresh out of a CS degree course who has brushed up on the tech we use. Additionally, many have backgrounds in other fields (everything from working in a small business to line cook to psychology to sales).

If your company isn't prepared for the mentoring and training needed to deal with junior developers, hiring someone fresh out of a boot camp is a bad idea, especially for someone like Google or Cisco that does a ton of programming at much lower levels than web development and doesn't treat it as a primary focus (where more resources are likely to be spent in mentoring).

Well, it is somewhat unrealistic to hope to secure a software engineer position in FAANG immediately after a bootcamp. A well-paid position of a (junior to mid) software engineer in a smaller company is quite achievable, though. After 2-3 years of real-world experience there one could try their hand at FAANG interviews.

A very practical consequence being that many links within the article are dead, which makes it hard to dig into any references.

It only got worse since.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com