The Coding Bootcamp That Wants To Be The CS Degree Of The Future | Hacker News Reader

The Coding Bootcamp That Wants To Be The CS Degree Of The Future

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13 pointsxiaoma25 comments

I don't think a programming bootcamp can ever be comparable to a Computer Science degree.

I very recently graduated with a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science here in the UK. Course length was three years and i'd say only the first year was hands on coding most of the time to get everyone up to speed. The two years that followed were all theoretical courses on fields in Computer Science (Natural Language Processing, Computational Vision, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning etc.). Of course there was a coding requirement for each module but it was a lot more of a theory and research oriented approach. I feel i've gotten the most worth from my degree from this theory side of things. The real worth from a computer science degree is having access to cutting edge researchers and lecturers and having them teach you their interests and generating discussions.

What these bootcamps look like are just the basics where they teach you how to create a basic REST app in <insert hot language here>. Sure it'll get you a job at a place where REST developers are necessary but it won't prepare you for jobs beyond that whereas a proper computer science degree would. A computer science degree has a very large scope of topics covered beyond just programming.

I think a heavy theory focus is very less likely to be useful. In my CS degree, we learned some cool theory. Eg I learned what big O was, which these guys probably won't. But I think for most people it's much more important to learn to make things than to learn advanced theory that only a very select group of programmers use (eg compiler writers). And I know how to learn any theory I need to learn or any language I need to learn. my CS degree never taught me to teach myself, though, I had to do that.

Hey Xiaoma,

how many of the people who were admitted to your cohort were kicked out before graduation? This may be unfair to Hackreactor but it appears some of the dev bootcamps would look less attractive if they included everyone who started with them[0].

[0]http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/18/floor-employment/

Ctrf + F "A warning: some friends here mention that these companies’ claims of “90+% job placement rate” are misleading, as halfway through they expel anyone who they don’t think will get a job in order to keep their numbers up."

Most schools seem to keep up their placement numbers not by dropping students but by counting any job they get as a job in their field. Oh you got a job at mcdonalds? Well they have computers so that counts.

In the OP video, Hack Reactor claims an attrition rate of 10% and a placement rate (as software engineers) of 100%.

From what I know, my cohort had to worst attrition of any in history but no students were kicked out. A total of two dropped. One of those two left in the first or second week and the other had some medical issues, left and then returned to join a later cohort.

As far as I know, students who have left have all left in the first half of class and generally because they don't enjoy spending all their waking hours coding and realize they don't want to pursue that career.

Even counting those students against HR (which is ridiculous since post graduation employment stats never count dropouts), the hiring rate would be over 90%. The salary figure (110k avg.) is also depressed by the fact that the school itself hires the strongest students from many cohorts.

Isn't it a bit pretentious to call a bootcamp that will teach you how to build modern web apps: "The CS Degree for the 21st Century."?

What do you mean? What is there to CS besides node.js and Ruby?

you forgot mongodb

konstantintin, there in no need to be MEAN.

cross-browser compatibility

They won't be the same quality as a CS degree, but the thing is, it will be enough. See, it was the same with the industrial revolution.

For example, in the times before we had factories for making things, everything was done by hand and you had to become an apprentice and go through years of training before becoming a true craftsman. But after much of the process was automated, factories could afford to hire lower-skilled workers for lower pay and operate with greater efficiency.

I'm seeing the same pattern in the world of programming. There was a time when the task of programming required more skill from the programmer, but the programming languages, tools and development environments have evolved since then, and now a lot of things can be accomplished by people with little amount of training.

So we recently spoke with a bunch of Hack Reactor graduates and were very impressed with several of them.

What I took away from the experience is that the Hack Reactor approach is excellent for retraining within the industry. Several of the graduates were not new programmers, but had instead been programming largely in an entirely different part of the industry and had attended Hack Reactor to get up to speed in the JavaScript and web technologies community.

I personally think it would be awesome to be able to leave not only a job but an entire section of the industry and go explore some completely different part of the industry via a highly specialized bootcamp. I would love to take full stack web programming skills and spend 3-6 months in an accelerated program to get in depth in a specific area that is interesting today and likely to be very in demand for the foreseeable future like machine learning, cryptography or distributed systems.

Programming != CS

This is very true, but what most employers want is programmers, not computer scientists. In the same way people used to have to buy the whole album full of songs to get the one song they really wanted, employers are often forced to buy CS grads to get people who could program.

Just as a la carte songs eventually became available, significantly reducing but not eliminating demand for entire albums, reliable programming certification could eventually reduce but not eliminate demand for CS degrees.

I highly doubt you could call yourself a programmer if you don't have the basic knowledge of induction proof, recursion, dynamic programming and greedy algorithms. If you write code for a program with a running time of O(2^n) do you know (after a 12-week course) how to leverage memoization to bring it down to polynomial time? Do you even know what polynomial time means?

what % of developers regularly make use of such knowledge? what prevents non-cs graduates from opening a book on algorithms?

Everyone serious enough about his work to care about efficiency. And no one prevents a self-taught programmer to learn algorithms techniques (or anything at all, really) but the chance of one doing so are really low, especially considering that people opting for a 12-week course instead of a 4+ years-long route aren't the kind you would think of as particularly dedicated to something.

That's a great question. Maybe the fact that they don't even think to look for such a thing?

I spent at least 10 years doing development on my own before university and it never once occurred to me to read an algorithms book. Funny enough, that turned out to be one of the best courses I ever took.

I think with the rise of MOOCs though and the offering of algorithms courses for free online, such as at Coursera, there are going to be a lot more developers without formal education who are familiar with algorithms.

> Hack Reactor claims that 100 percent of its graduates are now employed as software engineers, with an average salary in the six figures

Oh come on!

Hard to be a decent software engineer without learning discrete math, proofs, algorithms & data structures. These boot camps unfortunately don't teach these topics with any depth. They might be a good fit depending on your goals, but I am skeptical that they are a replacement for a traditional CS degree.

Companies posting about their interview processes dropping all those kinds of tests say they aren't using advanced algorithms and data structures to solve their problems. There's a difference between some fitness app or a web front end, and being an OS or database developer

I admit I had some edge due to being a math prodigy long, long ago, but HR did teach us data structures and algorithms. We re-implimented underscore from scratch, we built our own hash tables, did recursive descent, etc...

While I won't claim to have been taught everything about data structures, I made it through 5 hour in person "implement a prefix tree on a whiteboard"-style SV tech company interviews. I have also been able to jump into grad-level CS courses afterwards.

I feel that it was a way better investment for me than spending three months or even three years working on a CS degree would have been. In many ways it reminds me of the difference between studying Japanese at a university vs learning Chinese at an intense language school in Taiwan. Intensity brings outsized returns.

Luckily there are a lot more jobs for coders than for computer scientists. Thank you computer scientists for making that possible.

Is hiring so insane out west that companies are hiring people with 12 weeks of vocational experience 6 figures?

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