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Comment by dreaminvm | Hacker News Reader

While the demand is real, I am just not sure it will last with the level of skills being pumped out of these bootcamps. I recently interviewed a few candidates from a coding bootcamp mentioned in the article and while they can write basic rails code, they all lacked problem solving skills. Most candidates were hung up on basic performance related questions.

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Even "experienced" developers who haven't had formal computer science training can run into performance problems. At my last job, our application was running slower and slower as we added clients. None of the Ruby devs could figure it out, the code was "fine", all of the tests passed and ran quickly (with a stubbed 10 item customer table), and everything ran great until we grew beyond a hundred or so customers so it fell on me to optimize the database which was clearly the problem. I finally took a look at the code and found the problem -- it was a loop within a loop within a loop doing a full scan across the entire customer table disguised by the two inner loops being inside separate Gems. The application had O(n^3) performance. None of the developers knew what that meant so I gave a "lunch-and-learn" presentation on big-O notation and what it means for performance.

I've seen this happen with experienced developer with a CS degree. They say, it's "not my job" to test with large data. B.S., it is your job so sit down, shut up and do it. The job of QA isn't to find all your bugs, it's to ensure you don't have any.

Long ago, I was asked to fix a bug about a user interface hanging when too many items were added. After poking around, I discovered that there was an algorithm, whose run time was an exponential function of the number of items, that was taking several minutes to run (after which the UI would be responsive again). The punch line was that this algorithm was actually computing a value that was never used by the rest of the code, so I just deleted it. That was in C++ code written by an experienced developer.

I don't begrudge anyone getting into this field. I just hope that salaries don't drop because management thinks a waiter can do what I do.

Note: I'm not trying to disparage waiters. I'm just saying we all have our skill sets. I could never be a surgeon or a welder or a lawyer or a race car driver, for examples. My skills are problem solving and development.

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