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Comment by flatline3 | Hacker News Reader

9 weeks isn't enough time for anyone to be learning how to write production-quality code, much less take a job as anything more than an engineering intern.

The fact that TapJoy is hiring people straight out of DevBootCamp makes me seriously question the quality of their engineering organization, rather than causing me to think highly of DevBootCamp (which may be an excellent program).

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I wrote the aforementioned article.

Being an intern implies a temporary/part-time position or a student position, however the dictionary term is: "A student or a recent graduate undergoing supervised practical training."

I think that's absolutely what our new engineers from dev bootcamp consider themselves. I've heard that the teachers tell the students that when they graduate from DBC they are "World-class beginners". So in a way, I actually agree with what you just wrote. Not only that, but the attitude of treating yourself like a beginner is so healthy in bay area tech companies.

Another thing to keep in mind is the education is very competitive, more competitive than Harvard. These aren't just anyone, they're the top few percentage of people ready to drop 10 weeks, most move into a new city, and totally change their life in order to devote it to technology.

Luckily we have many projects with work to be done all over the stack. Obviously we're not sticking them into the hairiest of problems right off the bat. We'll start them off easy and let them progress. With their drive and their attitude, I'm confident it'll be impossible to tell who came from dbc and who came from a college in just a few months, if not weeks.

I'm a Dev Bootcamp grad from the summer program. I also just got hired on at Tapjoy. Can I write production-quality code? Probably not just yet. What I do know is that Tapjoy isn't the only company hiring grads. In the last 4 weeks since graduating about 20 people have been hired as Jr Ruby Developers at multiple companies. Every single one of them had to go through technical interviews to get the positions. Many companies have decided the grads have enough real knowledge to be valuable. Average salary has been somewhere around $84,000.

$84k average salary is surprisingly high for non-production-ready engineers who are still in training, especially when compared to the rest of the industry.

I wouldn't have expected there to be so much money in a field that is so approachable. Is there a dearth of quality rails engineers, or is it related to web engineers in general?

To tell you the truth, this makes me wonder whether there's significant opportunity in the web space for senior engineers with traditional software engineering backgrounds. If people are so desperate that they're willing to hire brand-new engineers at an $84k average and spend months/years training them, how much will they pay for people that require no training at all?

You assume that people with traditional software engineering backgrounds need no training to move into web development, which is not what I've observed. In fact, I have personally seen several who either weren't willing or weren't able to acquire the new skills required at all.

How many C++ programmers grok CSS? How many Java programmers understand prototypes? How many enterprise developers are used to shipping code at least weekly? No CS degree I've seen has covered analytics, or even effective logging at scale. As much as CS-oriented coders look down their nose at web devs there are skills involved. If engineers can adapt there are huge payoffs sitting on the table, but they have to actually do so. There aren't very many who have, not nearly enough to meet demand, and so prices rise and companies swap from teaching web development on the job to teaching CS on the job.

The skills you list involve very simple knowledge acquisition. Once you have core CS competency, you can pick those things up very easily, and do a better job by far than the person that lacks the core CS competency.

To use your examples:

* I'd never worked with web CSS, but I built a CSS styling system for iOS, and used the CSS spec for inspiration.

* I've never worked with web analytics, but I ran a team that built a real-time (non-web) custom analytics/logging/querying system for a huge consumer-facing corporation.

* My team had never written any sizable JavaScript, HTML, or CSS, nor had any familiarity with prototype languages, but we were able to bang out a comprehensive HTML/JS XMPP client using BOSH in a couple weeks. We had an external HTML and web design expert on-hand to actually make it look pretty.

I think the real reason the engineers don't adapt is that we'd have to go work in environments that are filled with less skilled people using frustratingly knee-capped technologies. I might be able to stomach HTML/JS/CSS despite their myriad of flaws, but I'm not sure I could do it if I also had to use Rails and Ruby working for one of the existing players.

I have been teaching myself how to code for 1.5 years and also did bloc.io, so I will have about 1,000 of programming under my belt before starting Dev Bootcamp in October. Almost every other student has been coding a lot before getting started. If you start from nothing, I agree that you will not make too much progress in 9 weeks, but this is not the case for most Dev Bootcamp students.

They advertise as being accessible to individuals with no prior experience whatsoever.

If you do have prior experience, can you tell me why you want a $12K bootcamp instead of just learning Rails yourself?

I studied on my own for a year before attending the Summer session of Dev Bootcamp. I found that the available resources for learning Rails are not really that great for beginner. They are more geared toward people who already know how to make sites through other frameworks/languages.

I actually built two Rails apps on my own before attending Dev Bootcamp, but the quality of my code was horrible. I was able to fill in my gaps at knowledge about Rails and Object Oriented design and testing, and can now write nice clean code, versus guessing and putting bandaids on bad code.

Teacher from DBC, here.

Dev Bootcamp is 100% accessible to individuals with no prior experience whatsoever. We think anyone can learn to code, although we don't think anyone can learn what we cover in 9-10 weeks. We select for people with motivation, passion, drive, etc. first and foremost above prior programming experience.

We've found some students with prior experience actually have trouble because it's difficult for them to maintain a beginner's mindset.

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