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Comment by the_duck | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I read about coding bootcamps I feel a tinge of worry that they might mean the end of the "good old days" for software developers. Do we expect that they'll have any tangible impact on the labor market by pumping out so many graduates with basic coding skills?

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I made my exit this year.

I just couldn't endure the attempts to turn programming into the new accounting. So, this summer, I switched from a developer to a security admin.

I can't imagine that adding thousands of new, minimally skilled programmers to the labor pool is going to do anything but make the situation worse.

Don't get me wrong, I think that programming being more accessible to anyone who is interested is a good thing. I am just concerned that we're going to have a bunch of people who want to get into it because they think it's the next hot thing. Like "Web Development" was 16-20 years ago.

From the comments: "Look on the bright side. It's like being a professional mechanic in a town full of klutzy amateurs. The more they mess up, the more work we get. True, it's horrible work, but it's work!"

c.f. http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html

I think they will put some downward pressure on the lowest of entry level jobs in languages/frameworks that are becoming a commodity (rails in particular), but wont affect jobs outside of that too much. Many people switch careers (moving over to software sales, for example, or getting out of IT all together) after an entry level job, or become more specialized in different a subset of skills.

If bootcamp grads are "doing it right", they'll keep developing and evolving their skills.

This is probably unfair, but I think that most of them are going to lack the math background to advance their skills very far from implementing simple CRUD apps in common frameworks.

I don't know that STEM people are going to code schools; I think they probably just google the manual, read a few tutorials and have at it.

The reality is that most custom web applications aren't more than CRUD. No advanced math concepts are required beyond algebra level stuff.

Scalability requires mathematical reasoning. From implementing 'you may also like' in an ecommerce store to pulling up a combined list of your friend's pets, I'm reminded over and over again of the gulf between non-mathematical programmers and ones with a basic undergrad math education.

edit: ...along with spending months doing homework on algorithms and big/little-* notation, and learning automata theory, of course. I don't mean to oversimplify.

The math can be learnt, just like coding can be learnt. The only difference between someone with STEM background who codes and someone without, is the order they choose to learn it in.

mgridley is right in that the vast majority of business applications require almost no math, and those that do are usually so specialized that an advisor figures out those equations first as they require a specialized domain knowledge.

Want to build tools that developers build upon? You may need the math, but you can usually already find the algorithms in research papers.

The only exception to this rule (that I can think of) are very specialized niches of development, which ultimately become commoditized and consumed by developers without the math anyways.

The math generally cannot be learnt quickly, or else I'm particularly stupid. For me it took years and tears and a full time courseload.

People who made fun of me in high school for being interested in programming are now trying to get programming jobs. People I know who flunked out of college or were expelled for cheating are now programmers. I'm now the only programmer at my company with a math or CS degree. (The others have degrees, but in biology, history, etc. -- they were all career switchers.)

That's how pervasive it's becoming. If there's any sort of contraction in the industry, the situation will be bad.

What do you work on?

I'm at a bootstrapped company that was profitable since inception, so we're relatively safe in the event of a collapse in VC funding.

My concern is that, as far as I can tell, almost all bootcamp-trained coders are going to VC-funded startups, many of which are fairly early stage. Those jobs could all disappear overnight, so to speak, if a bunch of VCs decided they wanted to invest their money in something other than technology.

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