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Comment by kbigdelysh | Hacker News Reader

I was one of the coding instructors at Make School which was similar to Lambda School and was bankrupt couple years ago. Our major issue? It was damn hard to find enough students for our school who were talented enough to understand computer science and had enough grit to finish the program and get a job. Why? Because those students were already absorbed by the established traditional universities.

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I have a similar view and am skeptical of bootcamp claims that they can get anybody a job with X weeks of training. I'm reminded of the ending of Ratatouille when the critic figures out that the motto "Anyone can cook" means "Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist can come from anywhere".

I'm personally biased, but I feel like one bootcamp program that got this right (for a while) was Insight Data Science. For a few years at the start of the 'data boom' there was a market inefficiency where tech needed more people that understood stats and ML and there were a ton of STEM postdocs that wanted to leave academia. The program worked because it wasn't really about teaching any new skills, it was mostly about being able to market the skills you have in a different sector. But after a few years, the market corrected itself and there was no shortage of data/stats people in tech anymore and there were enough resources for those academics to manage the transition on their own. I don't know if the program still exists, but if they do I'm not sure what they could do now to make themselves relevant.

Apparently when the pandemic hit Insight pivoted into a remote model with ISAs, then stopped accepting new cohorts.

https://www.teamblind.com/post/Insight-data-science-scam-dur...

https://www.reddit.com/r/datascience/s/sdKVWBP2GJ

Not surprised that they didn’t make it, but it’s too bad that had to do that bit of a heel turn right at the end

I feel like Big Nerd Ranch[0] did well. They had more of a seminar model, although they called their classes "bootcamps."

Unfortunately, they couldn't make enough at it, and have had to pivot away from it. There was a post, hereabouts, recently, that spoke to that.

[0] https://bignerdranch.com

Interesting to hear more about Insight and the market conditions that impacted them. I’ve a friend who did the program and it worked out well for them - but they were fresh out of an Ivy League PhD so presumably had strong backing however they chose to direct their non-academic career. Always thought it was a good model to focus on academics since the candidate Pool would likely be better by default. Your post mirrors my experience, though, as someone with a non-cs engineering background doing a coding intensive course. The bar is relatively low and only about half my cohort found “success” in software engineering directly. It’s fickle

I used to mentor for a south-eastern group, Iron Yard.

All the good candidates had proven themselves in other disciplines. Our top candidates my first year mentoring were a master carpenter and a PhD in Jazz.

The typical Bachelor’s in Communications-to-Coder just never panned out at a real-world level.

The market is very different than when I entered the field over two decades ago.

In the late 90s it made sense for people to switch to software from e.g. HR or accounting or whatever because the field was exploding in a way they couldn't have predicted when picking a field in the 80s or 70s. But why would somebody in their 30s or 40s do this today? They've lived in a world where software was always hot, and if they had the chops and wanted "in" on software they could've done it long ago.

So who is left who plausibly could do the job who isn't already in the industry? Mostly people who couldn't handle or get into college (for whatever reason), but also aren't talented enough to learn on their own. I'm sure there are some people like this, but now you have to wonder: if college wasn't "right" for these people, what pedagogical "secret sauce" can boot camps add to actually get to them?

Yeah my impression is that there are a decent number of people who are probably smart enough to learn to program, at least in an "easy" language like Python, but it's just too boring for the average person.

I think law is similar. Do you really need to be super smart to be a lawyer? Probably not. But you do have to be vaguely interested in reading legal texts and... Jesus no thanks.

Most people are smart enough to program, I think. The biggest hurdle is being able to sit down and work on a program for 8 hours a day. All the other skills can be learned.

"Most people" as in "most people jayd16 interacts with", "most people who hold a white-collar job", "most people who hold any job at all", "most working-age adults", or "if you randomly selected a big enough group of people, more than half of them could become professional programmers"?

I suspect we're in a bubble. Consider the charts at the end of https://users.ssc.wisc.edu/~hauser/merit_01_081502_complete...., specifically the "Computer occs." results. I don't think most people are smart enough to become professional programmers if they have to compete with existing professional programmers for jobs. I do think that if you look around the average office which employs programmers, most of the people in non-technical roles could have become a professional programmer, but that's a biased sample.

My conjecture was whether most people have the mental acuity to write a program and I stand by that. I really don't think you need to be especially "smart". I specifically mention that many do not have the capacity to succeed in the office setting we picture when we think of professional programmers.

And I make no mention of professional success especially in the face of a competitive market and no definition of success so I'm not sure where you're pulling any of this from.

I think you're reading past jayd16's point. Just about anybody can figure out how to program x86 assembly, if they put in the effort. Saying this as a mom of a child who very much cannot program. It's one thing to want to be a successful programmer; and another thing entirely to want to program.

If that's the point, then in the context of bootcamps preparing people to be professional programmers it's a bit...well, pointless. Writing a program of any sort is something anyone who can use a keyboard to write "print(10)" can do, but that doesn't suggest the only thing separating that group from professional programmers is the inclination to spend time on it.

In a past life, I tutored probably hundreds of kids in math and computer science. Yes, the separator is inclination to spend time on it -- because that's what it takes to get through to the other side of a challenge. Programming skill builds with time; they won't be pros but I'll take a risk on a keener from any background.

Kids who aren't capable of learning to program well aren't going to be inclined to spend time on it, so I'm not sure how this tells us anything.

Counter point, I have worked with a company we’ll call “C” and they have been able to build a pipeline of folks who have been incredibly effective (>50).

That being said the program is a bit more than ~3 months and the students go all in, they’re not doing it part time.

The students come from different backgrounds, some have not graduated highschool, and they come hungry for better opportunities. We’ve tried this with a few companies and that was the only one that has been successful.

That being said, I think it has been difficult for them to scale profitably as it is just a lot of work to find the candidates and provide effective instruction.

Teaching is a really time-consuming task, if you want to do it right.

I'm in the middle of creating a series on implementing Universal Links and URL Schemes, for iOS. May be a while, before it's ready. I spend a lot of time, testing the supporting materials, and making sure that I'm giving good info.

That’s wonderful. Good luck!

This is it: https://littlegreenviper.com/series/universal-links/

I think expecting it to scale is really the main problem. There's clearly more than zero people for whom a coding bootcamp is a great fit, but it shouldn't come as a great surprise that maybe that pool of people isn't huge.

100%

The reality for the program we use is also that these individuals have a very strong support network of people who can help them while they’re not working for X months. And that is with a stipend.

In addition to drive and aptitude, there is a very large situational aspect to this approach that further refines the funnel.

I think going all in is an important part of it. Cramming a whole CS degree in a few months does require full-time commitment. It can't be a part-time thing while working other jobs.

Preferably the boot camp is in person not online, because physically relocating to the place of instruction is a big part of going all in.

To be fair, they definitely do not cram an entire CS degree into the boot camp. But when the students come out they are able to develop a full stack web app and do some Java (I believe, but do not use so have never checked) and most importantly the people who come through the program are generally do-ers who learn quickly.

Everything else they need, we will teach them. We think of our company as a university. They will never need a college degree unless it’s a compliance requirement for some reason.

I worked at a bootcamp 10 years ago called MakerSquare (we ultimately were acquired by HackReactor) and that was our problem as well.

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