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Comment by nfoz | Hacker News Reader

Different people have different learning styles. And many people do not have an effective or appropriate learning environment where they can learn new tech through free resources. So I think direct-mentorship can be very helpful to some people; even it can help wade through what's out there to understand what's important to learn, how long you should spend learning x, etc.

But until this article, I had never thought much about bootcamps requiring accreditation, or the dangers of this type of training. Yikes!!

Thanks very much to the author for sharing this experience.

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"So I think direct-mentorship can be very helpful to some people"

Something to think about is when my father was still alive and retired/contracting he charged about $200/hr for very specialized database work in a very specific financial field. I've heard thats not totally out of line today. Anyway my point is some of these bootcamps cost $16K and for $16K you could hire "most specialized programming consultants" for 1:1 time for a rather amazing 80 hours. Obviously you'd be better off with a modest amount of hours across many consultants unless you've already found a specialty or someone you work very well with.

Now most tutors aren't going to charge $200/hr for some easy noob questions, then again the middleman (and they'll be middlemen) are going to want an unacceptably large cut.

Its just something to think about, throwing out the advice, that if you've got questions and $16K burning a hole in your pocket there's already a strong and established ecosystem of consultants willing to take your dough in exchange for some answers.

As a point of comparison, music teachers and flight instructors don't really make that much per hour, although much like programming the pros at the top of those fields do clear $100K/yr.

It seems like a rational alternative.

I get that not everyone can sit down and start grepping how a kernel works, how to architect database solutions, or get what it means to be reentrant in the context of parallel programming. Not everyone can be efficient successful autodidacts; however we have places to learn, like colleges. I would rather see community colleges or university start offering more individual courses to help you get up to speed. There is probably some room for just emerging people in technology completely for a period of time, like some bootcamps seem to do, but these sort of operations reek the same way for-profit universities do, feeling very strongly like whoever is teaching is in it for the money and that the whole operation is a fly-by-night. Beyond that, I wouldn't hire someone out of a bootcamp to do much more than maintain my generic off the shelf CMS, as I'm not sure 6-12 weeks is enough to truly gain the experience and knowledge to avoid anything but the most superficial problems when attempting to build and maintain effective codebases.

One of the big "problems" with learning at college is the sequential nature of Computer Science.

You have to take CS1 your first semester, then CS2 your second semester, and then you finally have the prerequisites to take multiple classes at once.

Coding bootcamps have a semester's worth of material, so it would be cool if colleges had a one-semester full-time class that covers Intro CS, Data Structures, Web Development, and Intro to Software Engineering.

Because that basically is a coding bootcamp (except coding bootcamps have class all day in lieu of giving out homework).

This was a big reason for me to do a coding bootcamp. I was switching majors out of engineering and into CS. I didn't want to spend 2 years slowly learning CS to find out if I liked it. It was faster and cheaper for me to do one of these schools to see if I really did want to do this for a living. Now I'm employed and do do it for a living and love it. I still push myself everyday to learn and do more learning outside of work. Unfortunately this style of teaching just doesn't fit the mould of traditional universities, but I think it's a great way to find out if you really want to pursue a career in this field.

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