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Comment by edmundsauto | Hacker News Reader

This is funny because Facebook was famous for adopting this attitude early on. Hire people with potential instead of credentials.

If you have a good perf review system and don’t mind false positives it can work. Maybe it worked better before boot camps.

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What changed with boot camps?

It’s the shift of perception from technology being “geek stuff” to a lucrative field on par with finance, medicine and law. Before, someone who knew a bit of programming was likely to be passionate and with high potential. Now they may still be, but also they may just a way to get rich quick.

But the vast majority of people who go to programming bootcamps don't get rich quickly, or rich at all. Same with most people in the world who practice medicine or law

Or did you mean to convey that people who go to boot camps think it's a way to get rich quick? Your wording is a bit confusing toward the end there

I think he means that ‶guy who knows to code″ used to be a statistically strong marker of ‶tinkering guys with a potential″, which is less true now that IT is now socially internationally perceived as a high-reward career, hence a one where people may go either because they like it, or just because they want to make stacks.

The problem with this theory is people have been saying it for 25 years. At least as long as I’ve been in the profession. And it’s not historically accurate in the past either. Programming was a clerical job for much of it’s history.

Have to agree, the 'dot com bust' was around 25 years ago, bubble started somewhere 1998-1999.

Boot camps take the “seems to be passionate about coding in their free time” signals and help their students try to fit those signals by encouraging them to build personal projects on GitHub etc. This somewhat dilutes the ability of recruiters to check off “has some GitHub projects” as a heuristic, however useful that was to begin with.

>But the vast majority of people who go to programming bootcamps don't get rich quickly, or rich at all. Same with most people in the world who practice medicine or law

but they do get a reasonable shot at a middle class lifestyle with potential to do really well at some point.

That's better than a lot of career paths give you nowadays.

> But the vast majority of people who go to programming bootcamps don't get rich quickly, or rich at all.

Of course not, but that's the sales pitch, isn't it?

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