Dev Bootcamp is the future of our industry | Hacker News Reader

Dev Bootcamp is the future of our industry

dickey.xxx

51 pointsdickeytk19 comments

Disclaimer: I think Dev Bootcamp is awesome. My friend went through it with zero programming background and is in love with programming now, and is as employable as many a fresh 4-year grad.

But this particular line is horrible: "For me, classes like algorithms and compilers were really hard because I just didn't care." And he goes on to characterize those who would be interested in such topics as engaging in "pointless optimization".

God help us if the future of our industry lies in blithe ignorance.

I'm a teacher at DBC and that's not our attitude at all, for what it's worth. :)

As we get better-and-better at optimizing those ten weeks, we'll add more advanced topics. I'd love to have a set of challenges like that later in the 10 weeks.

In fact, one group wrote their own custom query language to query github repositories (e.g., a language to say things like "Give me a list of all github repositories whose primary language is Ruby with more than 1 contributor and 10 outstanding TODOs") as part of their final 9-day project. They might not have had the vocabulary for it, but they were essentially wrestling with problems in compiler design.

The more salient part of his sentence is the last half: he didn't care. At DBC we spend tons of energy on creating situations where the only way to solve a (fun, hopefully) problem is to learn compilers, algorithms, databases, etc.

Definitely! From what I've heard (I was at the graduation on Friday), there's a level of investigation at DBC that goes beyond anything I've seen in other programs like Codeacademy. Which makes sense, I guess, given the much greater time investment and cost.

The thing that strikes me is how negatively a four-year program is seen. It's a matter of pride for some that 1. they got their jobs with a relatively minimal time investment 2. they learned "practical" concepts rather than the "useless" CS theory college grads get.

I'm sorry butI just have to call BS. First of all, CS degrees are not only attainable by those that learned CS at a young age. OK, whatever. Then we dismiss compilers, algorithms, etc as useless optimization ... Right, because the only practical things in this world are more useless blog engines written in RoR? Come on.

Secondly, we're treated to this business how all these RoR bootcamp grads are making $79K or something, OK great ... If you keep pumping out people that simply reach the bar of "can build a Web app from following tutorials on RoR" at such a rate, how do you think that's going affect this salary? You're going to flood the market with people that don't know very much, to just be honest about it and without sugar coating.

Then we get this to "full stack" stuff about how you should want to learn as much as possible .. well except for that nasty CS stuff, yuck! Make sure you only focus Web MV* framework du jour ... Seriously?

Why, oh why, do you have to pit Dev Bootcamp against a CS degree? Nobody is saying that algorithms and compilers should be dismissed, or that CS degrees should be abolished. That's certainly not our position.

Education is a nuanced and rich topic, and shouldn't be reduced to "CS GOOD. DEV BOOTCAMP BAD" or the other way around.

We're in a market right now where companies are willing to take on total beginners who show potential, and pay them to continue learning our craft. What the hell is wrong with that? And are you suggesting that we stop teaching new developers in order to protect people's salaries?

As far as I can tell, there will be high demand for good engineers for the foreseeable future.

And please don't reduce our work to "can build a Web app from following tutorials on RoR". You clearly haven't met any of our graduates. It pisses me off that you dismiss everyone's hard work without knowing anything about us.

Will everybody please get off their fucking high horse (Yes. I realize I'm on one too). Our industry is young, and we're all just figuring this out together. Nobody has all the answers and few things are black and white. Especially when it comes to the mess that is education and vocational training in this country.

</general plea>

But I didn't pit one against the other, did you read the article?

I completed this program earlier this year after burning out working tech support and failing, failing, failing to move up into dev ops, QA or some more satisfying, challenging technical role no matter how hard I tried.

I got hired right out of the program making twice what I've ever made before in my life, doing satisfying work in an in-demand field, learning every day.

Love it, love it, love it. Highly recommended. Full blow-by-blow here: http://douglascalhoun.tumblr.com

Thank you for such a genuine, articulate endorsement of Dev Bootcamp's process. I was one of the students of the Summer 2012 cohort that met with you this past Friday, and can really identify with your thoughts. I was weeded out of my Intro Computer Science in the freshman year of college. I had never been exposed to programming before, and was overwhelmed and intimidated by all my peers who had been coding for years. I've spent the better part of the last year trying to make my way back into the technical world. I'm intelligent, motivated, and passionate about coding. While I lack experience, there is no reason why my liberal arts background should preclude me from gaining a development position. As we prepare to enter the workforce as junior developers, I know that my fellow Boots and I are most excited to keep learning!

I mentored a couple of the students at DevBootcamp in the last class, and I have to say that I've never seen people completely throw themselves into something as much as these guys did. They really jumped head first into it, with a passion.

Tech Bootcamps don't work.

Well, let me rephrase that... they may work now, but not for long. As an industry, we've been down this road. There are limitless dime-a-dozen bootcamps that will get you all kinds of certifications (remember when those mattered?)

When I got my first tech job, doing support for Windows 2000, the training class was about 50% people who had attended various Windows 2000 MCSE "bootcamps" and were all certified. Unfortunately, they didn't know anything about Windows 2000. There was no understanding that people like me had gained from actually USING and WORKING with this stuff. While they were quietly led away to the Word Support team, the rest of us marveled at the hilarity of a "bootcamp" that taught very little real world knowledge.

I think 4-year schools, while mostly being terrible at producing people who can code for a living, do provide a depth and reach of experience that no bootcamp will ever supply. If someone goes into a "Ruby" bootcamp and already knows how to program in Java/PHP/Whatever, then sure, that will be valuable. Otherwise, this is going to be another training bubble similar to the training bubble of the late 90's early 00's.

Are you in the SF Bay Area? If so, stop by our office some day. My email is jesse@devbootcamp.com

MCSE-style certification is the opposite of our mission.

I entered Dev Bootcamp already knowing Java (I worked in the industry for several years on j2ee and j2me). While I felt like I had an advantage at first, once we hit rails and other technologies, everyone was pretty much at the same level. I was amazed at how much everyone learned in such a short period of time. I was also amazed at all the projects we all created over a very short period of time.

The difference between that and bootcamp is that the end-goal used to be to get a certificate that in theory could get a job.

Bootcamp is different because the goal is for the engineers to be bootstrapped to the point they can use google to build any project they want.

"Tech Bootcamps don't work."

Your opinion is based on a small group of people you met briefly 10 years ago who had gone through programs in no way related to what is being discussed here.

I'm sorry if I'm being snarky (I admit I am), but I'm so tired of this negativity. HN has a huge anti-beginner bias. Since before I even started this program people have been telling me it will never work, I'm wasting my money, I'm joining a cult, etc. I'm glad I didn't listen.

I hope that you will take the time to learn a little more about what is going on here. If you'd like the real story see my comment below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4415088

Finster, You have a very good point with the Windows 2000 MCSE bootcamps, though the comparison to Dev Bootcamp is not a perfect analogy. I speak from experience. I spent 10 yrs in the IT Industry. I actually went through the process of getting the Windows 2003 MCSE certification. I did it over a two yr period of working as an IT administrator.

I also just completed the last Dev Bootcamp class last week.

Having an MCSE is supposed to denote a large amount of IT knowledge, if not being an expert. So people that spend a week, get an MCSE and then claim to be experts aren't going to fly very well in a production environment.

At Dev Boot camp we spent 75 hrs a week learning for 10 weeks. The motto here is that we are 'World Class Beginners'. So we spent about 10-15 times longer and then claim to be 'beginners' not experts.

We all spent last Friday meeting 30 companies that want to hire us, being very upfront about our knowledge. In just the last two days I've gotten 8 interviews for companies looking for Jr Developers. I'm going in this week for technical interviews with these companies. They are going to know exactly what I know and what I don't very fast. I'm not alone here, I know many of my classmates are also getting this many interviews.

I've also been told that about 94% of people from the last class got jobs. I've personally met about half of the last class and know they are all working at very respectable places. Actually some are at amazing places.

So with a lot of knowledge on this subject I'm very confident that this program is nothing like an MCSE bootacmp.

No, what he's saying is well known about those certification boot camps. They are notorious. This is not just his experience. It is well known, you could google and find probably a lot of articles about it.

I think DBC is great because of the mindset that it fosters in its students - that you don't need to go through the standard CS program in order to hack, and that anyone with passion for making "cool shit" can do it.

I believe that not having a degree shouldn't deter anyone from going into a programming career. However, it's inaccurate to say that going through DBC will make you successful in the industry. Even with the wide range of topics covered in DBC, in ten weeks there's no way you can acquire the depth or span of knowledge that people have coming out of a 4-year CS program.

Personally I'm having a hard time forming an opinion - DBC motivates you to learn interesting and practical things outside of a CS degree, yet doesn't that defeat the purpose of doing it on your own? Also what constitutes interesting/practical? Some might say compilers, algorithms, and optimizations. DBC trains you for a specific area but that is really a small subset of the whole.

Also, from knowing someone at DBC I'm pretty sure that they did ajax calls with jQuery, not actually creating the XMLHttpRequest object.

Disclaimer: I just graduated last week. I think the stated goal of the program is to make you a well positioned beginner. So you're right in saying that there's no way for DBC to offer the depth or span of knowledge that a 4 year CS degree offers, but that's not its goal. I think the program is designed to teach you how to learn about programming, and give you a huge jumpstart in doing it. Consequently, nobody there is religious about any one topic. Yes, we all learn Ruby, Rails and Javascript, but what we really take away is not the knowledge of how to do things in Rails, but the ability to learn programming concepts, now and in the future.

As for learning on your own, I would respectfully submit that learning often happens in groups. At DBC there was a lot of solo time, but there was a lot of pair/group time, where we continued learning from each other. Group time is arguably more valuable since it not only affords the opportunity to learn form what you're doing, but also what everyone else is doing, to say nothing of the meta-skills gained from working on software in a team. I personally gained a lot being immersed in an environment where 40 other people were learning with me versus trying to do it on my own.

You're right: I think most people used jQuery for ajax. That said, if Marty McFly went back and destroyed jQuery one day, I'm sure it would only take about 5 extra minutes for anyone to implement XMLHttpRequest instead. We all had to figure out how jQuery ajax calls worked, we could figure out XMLHttpRequest as well.

Finally, thank you for keeping an open mind despite your skepticism. So many seem to use any skepticism to completely dismiss the concept. There are also many on here who support it, but it's a pretty open pace so I'd suggest you go check it out for yourself during the Fall cohort if you're curious.

While your Site is SFW I did have some apprehension about visiting dickey.xxx while at work.

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