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Comment by pkage | Hacker News Reader

I question the depth of education you can receive from a six-month course set as opposed to a full four-year undergraduate experience. This feels like the same kind of marketing you saw from Flatiron School or one of those other coding bootcamps, but with a larger name attached.

Cynically, I'd say that Google is just trying to increase the number of qualified individuals to fill grunt-work positions so they can pay each employee less.

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While much of the full four-year undergrad experience is full of other priorities (ex. socialization, networking), there is usually a lot slow learning and almost traumatic adaptation that happens that I'm convinced can't happen on a shorter time frame. Being in a competitive learning environment with colleagues and resources specialized to help learning is hard to replicate. Many of the biggest and most interesting ideas require you to sort of soak your brain in them.

Unrelated to the four year undergrad experience, coding bootcamps and the like that are 3 month and 6 month courses do not work for building deep knowledge for complete beginners -- IIRC their most common usage was for people already in tech to make a change to different specializations. I think the claims that Flatiron School or a bunch of other coding bootcamps sold is basically fraudulent -- it would take over 6 months of high quality practice just to get a handle on HTML, CSS and Javascript, but they throw random new programmers into HTML, CSS, then JS by way of React (and sometimes even rails/backend stuff). Deep, stable knowledge is not built that way.

> Cynically, I'd say that Google is just trying to increase the number of qualified individuals to fill grunt-work positions so they can pay each employee less.

This is exactly what they're trying to do. I guess I could think about it as trying to vertically integrate employee education. This is also what Flatiron School and those other coding bootcamps were trying to do as well IMO, as well as getting at some of the funding that was made available for those efforts.

I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing though -- while people in those positions might see a drop in salary (or rather a slowing of growth in salary), more people with those kinds of skills is probably a net positive.

That's a smart way to skimp on training costs and to produce employees that are very dependent on google and the affiliate corporations. Sure, some people may benefit from this especially the ones who'd otherwise get indebted with education costs and not have any job prospects once they graduate. But this is not real education, it's some kind of limited training with a certificate. Yes, it seems to me that they want to fill grunt-work positions and they'd get the higher level workers with degrees from real universities. What's not clear is whether this training is free of cost and what kind of classes they intend offer.

Maybe enough to get a jr position and to demonstrate dedication? You can learn everything else on the job.

I found my studies were largely useless and a lot of it was just filler, fee justification material.

One of the mandatory elective credits was a course with a title “Role of a car in a North American society”.

There is not much to question here. If you look at the list the positions listed are not rocket science type and basics of each can be squeezed into 6 month. Problem is that the result is most likely very narrow skilled individual with not much future unless of course they keep learning.

>>...individual with not much future unless of course they keep learning

This is now true no matter what level of education. Just need to start somewhere, and this is a great option for those without access to funds or the desire to take on the crippling debt increasingly associated with a 4 year degree.

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