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Comment by dreamweapon | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. As if becoming a developer were a matter of learning "to code."

I think this is just one giant strawman that gets thrown around in any discussion on this topic.

No, a few months of coding classes do not make someone a developer. However, it does separate them from other people by demonstrating that they are hard-working, curious and have an interest in the field. In my mind those types of people are the ideal candidates for junior-level positions. Much more so than some CS graduate who went through the motions to earn a degree on theoretical computer science and thinks he's now a software engineer. (I mean, last time I checked, the vast majority of computer science degrees were not terribly relevant to professional software development.)

Your last sentence. So true. ESPECIALLY in Europe. We deal with this all the time, students who did CS degrees and then realize they can't work in the coolest part of the tech industry because they don't actually know how to code. A lot of these guys are brilliant of course and just teach themselves, but a lot of others are brilliant and looking for some accelerated guidance. Bootcamps (in my mind) is perfect for these individuals.

Agree? Disagree?

No, a few months of coding classes does not make someone a developer.

But according to their sales pitch it not only makes you a developer; it makes you a super boffo, immediately hirable developer:

"Learn to Code, Get Hired."

>>But according to their sales pitch

Well, yes. It is a sales pitch! What did you expect exactly? "Learn to code and you might have a better shot at being hired as a junior-level developer, assuming you continue to develop your skills after the bootcamp ends"?

Your profile name is awesome. The end.

Its an article headline, so absolutely intended to be click-happy and instigate two things: 1 - interest from as many people as possible 2 - discussions and disagreements like this!

To be fair, this isn't a sales pitch but a guest post on our blog! ;-)

We present a number of companies and bootcamp angles in the article, to each their own how they "sell" the mission, or as some would call it "the dream". In our case we paint a picture of the ideal but crack down pretty hard when on boarding potential students about their goals and expectations.

I could of course be "just saying that", but we're an education company. Drop outs and sucky results aren't really our thing!

I got to agree with the overall chorus here.

Without wanting to sound like a dick: a bootcamp doesn't make you a full-blown top-notch $150k "software engineer" in 1, 2, 3 or even 6 months. I just doesn't happen. The whole ecosystem today is just to complex to learn this in a short time. Operating systems, version control, protocols, databases, best pratice for security, making maintainable code.

I have been coding for nearly 10 years now and i am still learning every year.

Definitely not, but where else do you start? We're asking this all the time as naturally there are a million pieces to becoming a developer. Code is just one tool in the box, but isn't it the basis? Particularly if you're starting from scratch, until you know you like code and how it works its hard to imagine being able to pursue a dev career.

Oh, learning to code is certainly a great start. But perhaps they should change their pitch to something like "Learn to Code, Get Started on the Long, Difficult Path to One Day, Perhaps, Becoming a Developer."

Hahaha! A little deterrent maybe for what is technically a start up, at least if you're talking about CareerFoundry, but I see what you mean. We're pretty harsh on people when they do their info sessions with us. The commitment is no joke. We loose a lot of students in the first few weeks when they start to realize the scope of what they have to achieve both in the course and outside of it. We try really hard to impress this on people before enrollment, even if on the front end of the site its mostly selling the mission. We don't want to intimidate people if we can help it, at least not before we have a chance to talk to them!

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