techcrunch.com
I wish people would stop these boot camps with ridiculous claims. We've had a couple of victims of these schemes apply to us and we've had to rather sadly tell them 'no way' and explain why.
A lot of them have come from business and arts backgrounds and think it's an easy way to make quick cash (hint: it isn't - writing software is hard and laborious and pays crap for the first couple of years, if you can stomach it that long).
My latest learning exercise was postgresql. I've done a proper engineering evaluation on it which has taken a whole year, but i tell you, i know it inside out now. I am confident i can handle any edge case or problem. Can your 10 week old developers even handle a simple edge case failure efficiently? That's where the skills are important or there is a roadblock every 30 minutes in this industry.
When I reliably can answer most stackoverflow questions on the subject, I am then confident that I know what I'm doing and then will sell my skills.
Even in areas where failure has high costs (say, medicine, or war), you don't go off and try to master a specific skill before doing anything -- you master some basic skills, practice using those (in increasingly realistic environments), then learn more advanced skills. For one thing, you don't even know beforehand where you may have particular strength, and you also don't know what opportunities will arise.
Even a junior developer with basic knowledge can make meaningful (and thus compensated) contributions during the learning process. I'd rather spend 10 weeks or 6 months or whatever building some skills, then get a job and learn while being paid, vs. spending my whole life in isolation trying to become a zen master and write the one perfect line of code.
Breadth first, then depth.
For "deep" areas such as mathematics, medicine, and theoretical computer science one needs an extensive theoretical background before being able to advance the field. A depth-first approach may be the only way of learning a useful subset. This may also apply to something like "database theory in general".
However for "product skills" (such as learning a specific database package or API) there's something to be said for a breadth-first approach. Especially nowadays, where today's hot skill can be neigh useless tomorrow. If you spend years only perfecting some skill you may be too late to profit from it! Also as the field is moving so fast, by the time you learned the PostgresSQL manual from beginning to end, there has been a new major release that invalidates many of the best practices that you spent so much time learning...
You don't even need to be able to "advance the field" to contribute meaningfully.
Take medicine. It's possible to teach someone some specific skills quite quickly (I probably have 200 hours of first aid training, essentially much of EMT-B plus lots of specific training in trauma, specifically dealing with massive hemorrhage from traumatic amputations, dealing with GSW, tension pneumothorax, etc., and various diving related issues, and some extremely basic radiology knowledge to assist technicians and rads in debugging a PACS.) With that level of training, or even 4 hours of really basic first aid training, you know enough to help. I won't be writing any dissertations on the best way to deal with a specific kind of trauma, but I can do a pretty good job of stopping bleeding in most cases. You're not going to have a top-flight trauma surgeon in every car. The 200-hour tech isn't going to be operating on his own (ideally), but can be a part of the solution. For some fields, like datacenter operations, experience is worth more than formal training, too.
Plus, there actually are a surprising number of cases where a relative newcomer to a field actually does end up advancing the theoretical limits. Maybe it's due to not knowing and accepting the limits of the field at the time, or maybe it's because that moderately passable junior programmer also happens to be a world-class expert in some other domain which just happens to be similar to the problem at hand, but it's not all that uncommon.
I'd still prefer any pending neurosurgery on me be done by someone with a good amount of experience, credentialing, and expertise, but it's a rare Django app which requires that level of caution :)
Given that was first year university with a bunch of other courses on my plate, I would say 10 weeks is ample.
EDIT: Just to add to that, in the following year I learned to program the Motorola 68HC11 microcontroller in a single semester well enough to build a 48 note midi controller (with Hyperterminal text based interface!) and the year after that learned PIC assembly language in a single semester well enough to build a miniature device to track an object in 3d space using sonar and infrared, including an integrated user interface with buttons and a little LCD screen. All of these projects were only a single university semester which is about 13 weeks, and with normal course load outside of that. I'd say the amount you can accomplish in 10 weeks if you focus solely on that in terms of programming experience would be enough to make you useful in many entry level positions.
EDIT AGAIN: I should also note that I taught a course in database design to students in Ghana with skills ranging from never have seen a computer before, to those who had used word and excel before. Most of them didn't own a computer. In 4 weeks, using only the mysql command line client and notepad, all of them were able to design and implement a basic database. A couple of them would have been useful as juniors writing SQL for reporting purposes or learning DBA stuff on the job (depending on the size of the company of course...) but they showed incredible progress in just 4 weeks.
Progress is good but if you throw someone into industry too early, then you're going to hurt the reputation of the education methodology (which in this case deserves it) and the company who is employing them.
The other examples were there to give credence to the fact that you can learn vast amounts in a semester.
Also you missed the bit where I trained people in 4 weeks who had never programmed before how to hand write SQL queries on the linux command line.
There were 2 out of a class of 16 whom I would be comfortable recommending as junior DBA or reporting type folks.
"Too early" depends on the industry. In neurosurgery you need an undergrad degree, then a postgrad degree in medicine, then 4 years as an intern, and blah blah (it's been a while since I watched "Scrubs" :) but for programming, particularly writing web based C.R.U.D apps, deploying Wordpress sites, maintaining existing projects, or writing internal tools for business automation, you can basically start as soon as you understand the basics of programming.
Not every company in the world is a 4 person startup looking for "full stack unicorns" - there is a huge industry out there that can make use of people with a solid grounding in the principles of programming to product "merchantable" work with real value.
What? So, all of the military training methods don't exist? Military bootcamps are 6-8 weeks and you learn a massive fuck-ton of skills.
Hell, college courses are less than this in hours spent and people learn crazy amounts of stuff.
So how can you conclude that it's not possible to learn any skill despite a fairly huge amount of available evidence to the exact contrary proving you wrong?
(ex British territorial army)
I'm not saying it's not possible, but the marketed result versus the actual result here is disparate.
It also doesn't answer my direct criticism of your comment. You claimed you can't learn any skill in 10 weeks, which is complete bullshit. People learn quite a lot of things in less time, so saying that is stupid.
Maybe you meant to say something less hyperbolic like, "I doubt that someone could master programming in 10 weeks." This is true, but then they don't claim to create master programmers, they claim to create junior programmers, which I (as someone who actually does train people for a living) can say is entirely possible.
I'm saying that you cannot learn any skill to a reasonably merchantable level in 10 weeks.
Regarding hyperbole, we haven't forgotten "Rails Is a Ghetto" yet...
[1] My background is EE, particularly RF comms. I took the technical lead on a project and had to write training guides for the US military to use certain communications equipment. The mantra amongst the specifications was "dumb it down so a brain damaged monkey could operate it".
Let me guess, you aren't very good at this whole logical argument thing which why you're just wrong here.
Again, merchantable skill is subjective and based on the free market, so no, I could learn a "merchantable" skill in 2 hours. Cleaning toilets comes to mind as one very such skill.
You're just wrong. It's possible to learn skills in 10 weeks of 8-10 hour days, and learn them well. It's possible to become a junior programmer in that time. It's possible to learn a ton of different skill in that time. You actually meant mastering these skills, and just refuse to admit it.
I think it was a logical and concise argument.
Perhaps a better statement is: "any semi technical skill takes way more than 10 weeks to become productive and not a risk".
Are you happy now?
Risk management is up to the employer.
For those destined to be more than cannon fodder, the skills training comes in advanced courses that last months or occasionally years (e.g. nuclear sub courses).
Unless you're in the Navy, then it's about keeping clean so you don't piss off everyone else on the ship. :-)
It's not like they're taking random people off the street and claiming that they'll be competent programmers at the end of 10 weeks.
They are almost assuredly selecting people with the aptitude, interest, and determination to become a programmer, because, well, in the end, these programs are setup to turn out programmers who companies can hire. For example, I would be rather surprised if most the folks entering the program had never dabbled in programming.
If you aren't accepting candidates, won't it be better to explain(if you do explain) what you needed which they lack instead of profiling(Victims of these schemes). You haven't run into comp sci graduates who aren't suitable for the job?
> A lot of them have come from business and arts backgrounds and think it's an easy way to make quick cash
Most of the programming jobs aren't very involved. I will bet my life on at least 70% of working programmers unable to explain dynamic programming, let alone actually use it. In fact, it's very rare that I run into someone who can reduce a problem to a recurrence and solve it.
In an ideal world, that would be unacceptable. In the not-so-ideal world which we live in, programming jobs tend to vary a lot and there are a lot of jobs which do just fine with Django/Python knowledge.
Most programming jobs are very involved. Most vocal positions that are promoted on the Internet aren't. There are a hell of a lot of people churning out masses of code that runs things behind the scenes without so much as a though to expose it on TechCrunch or whatever nor follow any fashion or fad.
You are responding to arguments I didn't make. I don't know where are you getting the idea that my "programming jobs aren't very involved" is somehow related to Techcrunch or fads.
As for programming jobs being involved, true that I don't have any empirical data, but neither do you. You are going to continue arguing most of the programming jobs are involved, and I am going to continue arguing that 10 weeks of training is more than enough for most of the programming jobs. I would rather not discuss this "he said, she said" situation any further since nothing is going to come out of it.
I learnt bass guitar well enough to play 4 Guns N Roses covers at an open mic night and go through to the regional stage, in 8 weeks.
I learnt to pogostick in less than 4 weeks - bouncing 1 mile for sports relief without stopping.
I learnt to cook well enough in 1 week that I could could cook at least 21 different meals with a decent success rate.
I learnt Java/Android in 8 weeks and released my first app (721 downloads so far!).
I learnt to ride a bike in a weekend.
I learnt to drive in 1 week.
I learnt how to work behind a bar in one evening.
In fact I'd go as far as to say that (to the nearest whole percent) 10 weeks is long enough to learn any skill to a competent level.
I agree with most of your post. Learning Java in 10 weeks(5 days/week with about 5 hours/day) is more than enough. You sure aren't going to learn all nooks and corners, but you can learn a lot of general purpose programming and Java programming.
But "10 weeks is long enough to learn any skill" is as invalid as "10 weeks is not long enough to learn any skill".
I come from an arts background, and I am glad. A couple of years ago, I realized that though I was interested in technology and analyzing autobiographical internet writing, I was more interested in making the magic happen, but I didn't have the tools to do that and I was floundering. It's actually pretty awesome that we with "business and arts backgrounds" have been able to hack it with such different experiences.
I cannot even begin to describe how flustered I am by your silly comment that "it's an easy way to make quick cash":
1. I don't think it's easy at all. 2. Quick cash with San Francisco housing costs? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. 3. I had no idea how much programmers make going in. It wasn't the money that motivated me; it was learning something that truly interested me out of which I could hopefully make a career. 4. It pays better "crap" than the crap I was getting paid before. With a Master's degree, managing experience, language skills, international experience, a project management internship, editing knowledge, and a boatload of other very valuable skills, I was making around $24,000 a year with no benefits whatsoever, and that was after about a year and a half of searching for a job. Try doing any kind of thriving on that. So even though money wasn't the motivating factor, I think we can easily agree that I have tripled or quadrupled my value as an employee. That doesn't sound like it "pays crap" to me.
I won't know anything about how the market will get better, but please don't count on your employers for your personal growth. If the employer does that for you, that's an added advantage. Also, the way your employer shapes you very rarely aligns with your optimal growth. An ideal employer is a facilitator viz. RailsConf will be paid by the company, buy whatever books you want etc.
> but I have a wonderfully firm basis that will help me build an amazing career I never dreamed of.
It will help you eventually, but unless Hackbright has arranged interviews for you, be prepared for not hearing back from the employers. People who have formal education for at least 4 years in computer science secure an interview once in a while, and a desirable job takes many such secured interviews. From the employers perspective, if many such formally educated people turn out below par, a 10 week training program doesn't really excite anyone.
My unsolicited advice is start building things - small tractable things which you can build in less than 3 weeks. Build it and put it on github. It might not work for big companies, but small companies are more likely to give you a chance if they can see your code and verify that you can build things.
Before the first program was half over, these two students won 2nd place: http://www.women2.com/two-student-programmers-build-their-1s...
Another example is the ESPNW event that took place before the second program was over: http://www.twilio.com/blog/2012/11/female-hackers-represent-...
Hackbright Academy Turns Men Into Developers In 10 Weeks
Hackbright Academy Turns Blacks Into Developers In 10 Weeks
Hackbright Academy Turns Whites Into Developers In 10 Weeks
Can anybody explain?
I honestly hope the girls will get the skills they're looking for in 10 weeks, and I support that, but I truly don't get why do they have to discriminate against. Maybe so they get media coverage?
Yes, historically, some groups have been discriminated at and put at a social and economic disadvantage on the basis of intrinsic factors.
Putting right an unequal playing field looks unfair only if you don't see that it is an unequal playing field.
I don't see why this is unequal nowadays for women or other minorities but it IS unequal to men (don't think anyone can't see that fact). Equality should be the goal, not being treated differently depending on your gender.
In the United States, women's median income is still 77% of men's median income. (And, yes, before you bring up all the various stupid talking points, that figure accounts for all the various factors like taking time out of a career to raise kids etc. etc. US government statistics account for all those kinds of differences and still show a gender pay gap that is closing very, very slowly.)
According to a 2003 study, white workers earn approximately 14% more than black workers in the United States across all sectors.
Only six of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are black, only 20 are women.
Prisons in the United States hold six million people, a 772% increase from 1970 to 2009. The War on Drugs has heavily targeted minority black communities. 40% of the prison population is black despite only making up 12% of the national population. We've seen the story countless times before: shitty schools, no economic opportunities, so crime becomes the only option and prison the only solution. If you don't think there is a heavily racialized component to how the prison system works in the United States, you don't understand the prison system in the United States.
And despite all the stories about "the pink dollar", gay men get paid less than their heterosexual counterparts.
In the United Kingdom, according to figures by the Office of National Statistics, women are paid 14.9% less than men.
Tell me again how men and women are equal and how we are living in a post-racial, post-discriminatory society where we are all equal.
This may not be equal access, but it certainly is equal opportunity. Something has to do be done about the millions of brilliant women who are turning away from tech.
Assuming you're a white male, do you feel out of place when you're in an area where everyone is a woman? How about when everyone is black? Have you walked through a neighborhood where everyone is Latino?
Being in an ovewhelming minority sucks in an irrational way. There's no logical explanation other than, "we want to feel like we belong." There are some psychological explanations for this, but you're not going to be able to give people a sense of belonging just by pretending the problem doesn't exist.
So yes, we need to do our best to make people more comfortable, and if it involves creating a female-only class where women can interact with each other, does it really harm you at all?
It doesn't harm me, again, I hope these women become outstanding programmers, it's just I don't fully grasp how this is socially acceptable. The Swedish guy who posted here made a good point. I understand the causes, but as we develop as a society, these kind of things become less and less affirmative action and rather become more discrimination. If you ask me, I would understand something like this in Arabia Saudi and I'd even be involved if I lived in there.
As a bi-racial male of the darker persuasion (which in America is basically "not-white"), I find myself much more comfortable around predominantly "white" groups because that has been the most common environment for myself throughout my life.
Now what you're seeing is companies meeting the demand from these new groups because the education techniques for teaching computer science are changing. At first it's going to be classes like this focusing on these groups demanding these kinds of environments, but soon it will just spread to how all CS is taught.
Incidentally, Harvey Mudd university is basically demonstrating that simply changing the education model so that it works for people without prior programming experience accomplishes the same thing:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/giving-women-the-a...
Quote:
> To reduce the intimidation factor, the course was divided into two sections — “gold,” for those with no prior experience, and “black” for everyone else. Java, a notoriously opaque programming language, was replaced by a more accessible language called Python. And the focus of the course changed to computational approaches to solving problems across science.
So I predict most of these "for women only classes" will fall away and be replaced with better introductory material.
I understand that poorer people have no opportunity to learn programming and other less-immediately applicable topics outside of class, but I don't see what's stopping women from learning how to code. Most middle class people today spend their entire days on facebook--why is it "harder" for a woman to take some time to learn how her computer works when countless men begin learning in their late teens/early adult years?
I think exclusion, implicit or explicit, is bad. Especially when the course doesn't demand for any prerequisites still punishes those who don't meet the criteria. But I also think rewarding self-starters and not punishing them for being self-starters is a worthy goal. We really need two different courses for different groups.
Do the programmers at Hackbright have any particular traits? Ambition, drive, or a ridiculous work ethic? Surrounding themselves with the help of coworkers, or something else?
I'm somewhat incredulous at the short time span, but maybe that's enough because of the small class size and perhaps the involved teaching style. And if that's enough to let graduates intern at a company... well.
This program definitely looks exciting.
http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-Minutes-2nd/dp/067...
"Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes" - http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-Minutes-Edition/dp...
"Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 10 Minutes" - http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-PHP-Minutes/dp/067...
"Sams Teach Yourself UNIX in 10 Minutes" - http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-Minutes-Yourself/d...
"Sams Teach Yourself AJAX in 10 Minutes" - http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-AJAX-Minutes/dp/06...
"Sams Teach Yourself HTML in 10 Minutes" - http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-Minutes-Edition/dp...
"Sams Teach Yourself CSS in 10 Minutes" - http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-CSS-Minutes/dp/067...
"Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes" - http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Yourself-Regular-Expressions-Min...
"Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft SQL Server T-SQL in 10 Minutes" - http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Yourself-Microsoft-Server-Minute...
No need for 5 year at the university to get a computer science master.
It helps that Hackbright students usually aren’t starting from scratch, but have instead developed their initial skills using Codecademy or by attending development workshops. After all, Phillips said, Hackbright is for people who are serious about programming as a profession, and you can’t decide that you’re serious until you’ve tried it out.
So as I see it's for somebody who knows some basic programming but wants to get some skills that would get her hired.
She has a physics degree from Duke, and back when we were freshmen together, was considering majoring in CS, among other technical majors. I'm not sure how representative she is of the batch, but for people with existing technical skills/background, 10 weeks of focused coding practice + feedback could be a pretty big help.
My understanding from the article at techcrunch and the hackbright about page suggests hackbright is charging tuition ($7500) for participation in the program.
It's late for me, so maybe I am forgetting something, but what is the legal basis for being able to discriminate on the basis of sex for an educational program, especially from an organization that doesn't appear to be a non-profit, or accredited in any manner.
Seems like a great program. I know some young men that would benefit from such a program, the intensive environment, the location within the heart of the SF Bay hiring region, the networking, etc.
Perhaps a better comparison would be to women only gyms. If you google "are women only gyms legal" you'll come up with a slew of articles suggesting women only gyms are probably not legal, up until the various state legislatures pass specific laws making them legal.
I am not a lawyer, I have no good idea if hackbright is operating legally or not, but I wouldn't be surprised to find what they are doing is not legal.
Okey, this is from a Swedish perspective, as that is the only perspective I got. Anyway, the Swedish state educational overseeing body has made several attempts to improve equality in education, normally marked at getting more women and colored people in white men dominated areas. The biggest attempt, which was started in the 1990s, were a rather simple rule. It said "If a student applying for a class would be a minority in a the class thanks to race or sex, that student shall receive a small bonus in the application". No judgment call was used in the applying of the bonus, but in 2007 it ended, and the primary reason it ended was because the target group (women and colored people) was not in the group actually normally receiving the bonus. Rather, 95% of the time, it was a white male, applying to a class where he would be a minority in.
This is actually not that extremely surprising if one consider that 2/3 of the students in Sweden are women. It also not that surprising given that every areas of education except engineering and one form of math (abstract-math past 3rd year university), have women as the dominating group. Classes are rather clustered in women and men density. The state overseeing body for education did suggest after reviewing the program that maybe they should start some men-only courses in areas which are highly dominated by women students. That suggestion however got turn down rather immediately, as it was viewed ludicrously impossible.
Maybe there is some pedagogical value of women-only and men-only classes. There clearly are anecdotal evidence on it, and the numbers do tell that men are more willing to attempt entering a woman dominated class, than a women trying to enter a men dominated class. But as a method to get more equality in education and encouraging a 50/50 setup, based on the Swedish attempts I must say it does not work as intended. To reach that goal, I think further studies of what actually work is needed. Something great this academy could do is to create a research study on the effects, with an control group, and maybe even a men-only class to match.
I remember visiting your classroom when the Summer cohort was just starting to take those first uncertain steps. Seeing them now, successfully working and growing in their first dev jobs is truly inspiring!
From one dev training program to another, keep up the good work!
doug at catalystclass.com
With all these things, I would argue, that you through a kind of 3rd order polynomial experience of time vs. your confidence in your own knowledge. At first you know nothing, and you're aware you know nothing. After some short amount of time you've learnt a huge amount, relative to what you did know, so you feel like you have a good grasp on the topic. But, over more time, you begin to realize how much you actually don't know (which may reflect everyone, or just reflect yourself, the latter meaning you can learn from others, the former meaning you better get your thinking cap on). Hopefully then over EVEN more time you begin to slowly increase your knowledge base, but this time from a more informed perspective.
The point is, I guess, that it's hard to assess your own knowledge of a topic at this very moment in time unless you've spent a decent amount of time getting your head around it's true complexities (where both, "a decent amount of time" and the true complexity of the topic will vary HUGELY from case to case).
Why Hackbright may not be for everyone? So far what you explained is certainly for everyone - everyone would want high quality instruction in a positive environment and a supportive community. So what is different?