from the ♫♩♫♩♩♬-in-the-first-week-of-boot-camp-my-true-love-gave-to-me... dept.
According to NPR, Coder Boot Camp "...arose as an elegant solution to a problem of supply and demand."
The author of the article, Anya Kamenetz, states:
This is one of the fastest-growing areas of the job market, and average salaries are high: from $62,500 for a web developer to $93,350 for a software developer. ... At the same time, in just the past five years, the nature of coding itself has changed. Programming languages like JavaScript and Ruby, essential for websites and web browser-based applications, are evolving to be increasingly powerful, even for novices.
She goes on to explain:
The application process for Dev Bootcamp is similar to a job application, and people complete a 9-week, part-time introduction online before they come to campus. And, Dev Bootcamp says, about 95 percent complete the program — that includes those who repeat the first six weeks, which you can do for free.
And she concludes:
All this helps explain their stellar reported job-placement rates.
No job-placement numbers were given in the article, other than stating that "the top programs say they are placing the vast majority of their graduates into jobs earning just under six figures in a rapidly expanding field."
So, 12 weeks to become a web developer, with coding thrown in to "boot"?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Monday December 22 2014, @04:37PM
The joke writes itself...
This stuff cannot be "bootcamped" into people. There will be a lot of code that functions as it is supposed to - and does much of what it should not.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 3, Informative) by davester666 on Monday December 22 2014, @06:36PM
The original article was an advertisement for the 'boot camp'. It is just another "higher-learning" scam to separate people from their money.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Monday December 22 2014, @06:43PM
"Columbia School of Broadcasting (not affiliated with CBS incorporated)..."
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday December 22 2014, @07:13PM
You might want to expound upon why it can't be "bootcamped" into people.
12 weeks is ridiculous, until you start the class with people such as myself. Meaning, unless you have experience with the concepts of top-down coding (maybe even bottom-top), it will *not* be a 5 minute conversation about *anything*. Can you take a farmer who's life experience with a computer is IE and some Excel spreadsheets and give him the working experience with core programming concepts in just 3 months of online study? Exceedingly doubtful. I'm a decent programmer only, and I have reservations about taking on new languages and platforms in compressed time frames like 90 days. Especially, when a corporation would be paying me like that.
Just like MCSE's are wholly worthless because the classes suck (they didn't teach command line, resource kit, *nothing* according to friends), these courses will be worthless when the student doesn't even understand recursive functions and scalable design. This bootcamp might work for somebody in IT that has a lot of general experience, and at least adequate skill with some other programming language (scripted or compiled). Otherwise, too much of the foundation is missing. MCSE courses don't create the MCSE's, they only test them. Unless you want a very poor MCSE.
Hell, her example is a 25 year old Hispanic man (marketing in of itself there) who came to her from MARKETING. My rants about marketers and advertising aside (it's been epic and acerbic), what skill sets and knowledge in marketing translate to computer science again? Studying the art of deception doesn't allow you to magically understand how to program truth into a computer. I applaud him for his efforts in obtaining his dreams, but I'm also empathetic with him because I know that 90 days is simply not enough. He's going to face a tough uphill battle, and she is being not very honest about his chances IMO. Personally, I want him to prove us all wrong, but realistically, I know that he needed at least a year and several other completed 90 day courses on the basics that make up the foundation in which Javascript, the tools, and those frameworks exist on.
It's this kind of bullshit that helps convince the suits that IT is even more replaceable and less important than before. After all, it can take only 12 weeks to pump out an IT worker that will get paid six-figures!!! (meaning they are actually worth that) If it were possible, it's far more likely that it would result in non-living wages since we are now pumping out these superstars three times per year.
I've seen the results of these courses. Copied and pasted javascript in a single file with everything else, ready to go, for a MVC platform. The javascript wasn't even modified to work with the page yet (selectors untouched). It was just pasted and thought to "work" once on the site. Students who pass that course are nothing but amateur chefs who grab off the shelf code (from real programmers) and try to create a working recipe that accomplishes something, but is often wildly inefficient, not secure, and barely working. Good enough perhaps for a regular Mom & Pop type website, but nothing that survives the six-figures daily reality of enterprise use cases.
P.P.S - I would pay for her courses, if it was more like Ray Liotta's No Escape and I could banish suits or marketers to the island. If they can build a working website, they can come back to the mainland, and their offices. Partly I would do this to make them better able to deal with us. Partly I would do it just because I would also house several institutions for the criminally insane on the same island (teaches MBAs). This way they can feel the appropriate amount of stress and importance while building that prototype website to meet their insane deadlines :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @04:43PM
If I wanted someone with 12 weeks of experience...why would I pay them 6 figures again?
Spoiler:
I wouldn't.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by OglinTatas on Monday December 22 2014, @06:13PM
Where is the decimal on those six figures? They don't say.
(Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Monday December 22 2014, @04:51PM
and that might work.
look - i was a web dev in the 90's and 9 weeks for JUST front end would give you a pretty well trained for that. Once you start looking at today's web; and all the crap that goes into "typical" websites (Drupal? HTML5 with interactive content?, Cloud crap? and good luck if you have a site using Javascript or managing ads)
at best you'll have someone who's incompetent; and doesnt realize it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @04:57PM
"at best you'll have someone who's incompetent; and doesnt (sic) realize it."
Pretty much explains crap like Yahoo and Media News Group.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @05:27PM
and systemd
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @09:37PM
and systemd
+1 for comedic timing!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mechanicjay on Monday December 22 2014, @04:54PM
This is how I end up with shitty web apps dumping 1 million errors /day into my web server logs. When I go in to see what's up, it's undefined variables and inconsistent quoting galore. Also, the guy who wrote it apparently missed they day they covered loops -- the 7 column display on the page was build by copy/pasting the same code block 7 times. I fixed it as he has moved on already.
This is how I end up with people breaking production websites on a regular basis, because they haven't been taught how to properly use source control and managed deployments. When you try to move them in that direction, you're told it's too much extra work for them....never mind the scramble they engage in every couple of weeks when they brake something
This is how I end up with people doing horrifically over complex in code to build a result set from a database, taking 2+ minutes to come back with a couple thousand results. Fixed by defining a Database view for them, query now takes 4 seconds
And these are things from people who have years of experience behind them and are otherwise respected and competent people, doing absolutely boneheaded things. I've done quite a few boneheaded things myself over the years. Seeing the things that actual professionals do, who get paid for their experience and expertise, I have a very hard time buying into these "teach anyone to code" type programs, and this extends right on up to the code.org folks who try to convince the world that they are empowering the masses to program computers. It's all a crock of shit, a bad get rich quick scheme.
Computer Science and Software Engineering is hard. Yes the tools are very accessible and tutorials and guides are all over the place; anyone who can follow instructions can write a hello world program in almost any language in under an hour, this includes setting up the environment, which is great! The barrier to entry has never been lower. The problem is that the learning curve from that point is pretty damn steep, people work hard to get a good understanding of the basic logic and data structures. Once they understand what an if/else blocks, loops and arrays are, give them a trivial problem to solve with those tools. Guess what, more people fall down flat at this point -- applying this stuff in a reasonable way to solve a problem, is actually harder than understanding the basic concepts. Can you teach everyone in the world what a loops, recursion and hash tables are? Of Course. Can you teach every one in the world how to use those to solve problems? Not a chance in hell. Computer Science, above all else is applied problem solving which requires precision of though and action to arrive at a correct result, some people are very adept at this and others are not.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @05:06PM
Did you write your own speech recognition software?
(Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Monday December 22 2014, @05:16PM
You should have seen it *before* I proof read it!
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Monday December 22 2014, @06:41PM
Some capabilities are not scoped aptitude or mental firepower, but rather by a peculiar turn of personality. Writing software will never be an "engineering science" like structural engineering - anymore than writing of good English prose.
All the smarts in the world do not mean that one can write good marketing copy - much less the great novel.
And so it is with software. Training is necessary but not sufficient. There is then "enculturation" which comes with exposure and experience. Yet there are most people, who may get to a point that they can deliver serviceable code - after many failures. These bootcamps are shortcuts around real failures, where all the learning ACTUALLY HAPPENS!
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by dcollins on Monday December 22 2014, @08:12PM
"Can you teach everyone in the world what a loops, recursion and hash tables are? Of Course."
Absolutely not. Do keep in mind that 80% of the community college students across the U.S. cannot pass a 7th-grade algebra course (even on multiple attempts). There's a shocking proportion of the population who will never be able to distinguish between adding and multiplying negative numbers, or read/write a statement with a variable properly.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday December 22 2014, @05:08PM
12 weeks sounds about right. You'll have your "near six figure job" (probably $30-40k in reality) for a few months, and then get terminated when the industry moves on and your skills are obsolete and unnecessary. Right now it's JavaScript. Last year it was big data. Before that the cloud. Before that it was mobile development. Before that it was the web. Before that it was client/server.
You always lose chasing hot skills, because by the time you get them the industry has moved on to the next hot skill, and you're left behind with obsolete skills no one wants.
The obsession with "skills" rather than ability is part of the problem in the software world today. People need to have a functioning knowledge of the body of computer science that's available, and then they can apply that to almost anything.
Instead, people get "skills" and they're obsolete. There's always a "shortage" because people only want these skills when no one has them. By the time people have "skills" the industry has moved on to something else, and there's a shortage of that new thing. It never ends.
So, yeah, if you want to chase the fastest-growing job segments, don't waste more than 12 weeks doing it because those segments will be gone next year.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @06:54PM
Eh, right now it's " functional programming " (e.g. Scala, Haskell, et c...), the part where you say it was "the web" was actually the period of JavaScript, since Web 2.0 relied heavily on JavaScript, and that was the period that birthed some of the, now stadard, libraries like jQuery.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by ghost on Monday December 22 2014, @05:36PM
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Monday December 22 2014, @06:13PM
I thought someone was being paid 6 figures for a 12-week programming job.
But anyhow, programming bootcamps with the promise of high paying jobs? Has the dot-com bubble returned already?
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 1) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday December 22 2014, @09:49PM
After completing my physics degree, and having - at the time - fourteen years experience working as a coder, including - again at the time - three years experience as a self-employed consultant.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday December 24 2014, @09:58PM
I presume one or more of the figures was a scientist [wikia.com] or programmer minifig [wikia.com].
1702845791×2
(Score: 3, Informative) by tibman on Monday December 22 2014, @06:21PM
So far this article has attracted nothing but naysayers. So, i'll throw my personal experience in. I knew exactly zero javascript and was paid 50k (in the mid-west) on the condition that i teach myself and become productive within three months. There are plenty of programmers who say it is beneath them and not worth learning. That type of thinking is why so many people are in disbelief that someone could get paid 60-100k after 12 weeks of training. I was getting paid 50k with zero weeks of training. So i believe it. Now that i know the language very well it is nothing but amusing to hear people bash on it. People hating on javascript is scaring away developers and leaving less supply to meet the demand. So web dev salary is pretty good right now. It is extremely difficult to hire people who actually know javascript. Not just copy/paste javascript but can actually understand and write it. Explain prototypal inheritance, closures, and this.
12 weeks won't turn someone into a programmer. But it is certainly long enough to teach an existing C++/C#/Java developer a new language. If your local Java market is saturated and there are lots of layoffs/out-sourcing then JS is a good addition to your skillset.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Monday December 22 2014, @06:39PM
12 weeks won't turn someone into a programmer. But it is certainly long enough to teach an existing C++/C#/Java developer a new language. If your local Java market is saturated and there are lots of layoffs/out-sourcing then JS is a good addition to your skillset.
I think this is the "gotcha" with a setup like the one in the article. Take some random person with zero coding experience, throw them into a course like this, and somehow find them a 50K/year job at the other end. Unless they are an undiscovered natural at programming and can leapfrog off of what they learned in the course, they'll crash and burn quickly. I know I would. On the other hand, take a seasoned C or Java programmer and run them through the same course, and they can ignore the beginner's theory parts and just focus on the syntax and idiosyncrasies of the new language. They will get and keep that five or six figure job, and advance in it.
I once read somewhere that anyone, literally anyone, could learn to program, but only a very small percentage of the population has an innate grasp of the deepest concepts involved. That one must basically be a mathematician of sorts, to be a truly great programmer. I don't know if that is true, but I know that I don't have a head for it beyond the basics. A course like this probably wouldn't help me get and keep a job as a programmer.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Monday December 22 2014, @06:48PM
Perhaps not a mathematician - but certainly a kind of aptitude and enthusiasm for a particular domain of problem solving.
Like people who are naturals with crosswords or sorting puzzles.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 1) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday December 23 2014, @01:37AM
It's the Javascript coders that I hate on.
Folks who are completely unaware there is a console, who have never heard of a debugger, who don't clue in to that Javascript errors fail silently, whose pages take a solid hour to load over Mom's dialup.
Consider Michele Bachman's web "developer" who was hitting a Subversion repository at code.google.com absolutely every time anyone loaded her page. I had the idea that, were I to learn Javascript well enough to become a committer for that particular project, I could plant goatse all over Michele's site, but no, it was not to be. Her domain now redirects to a gay rights organization.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday December 23 2014, @02:07AM
I agree with you on most javascript developers. I have worked with some who use alert boxes as their debugging system. There is only one other group of people that fall into the same generalization. PHP developers. There is something about dynamic languages with low barriers to entry that allow people to dabble and give the entire language a bad name. Like you said, the failures are silent. A terrible C++ developer wouldn't even get a functioning build. But some terrible javascript/php will at least attempt to run and output something. The fact that it works at all could be purely chance and the interpreter being very kind.
That being said, i really enjoy writing javascript and php : ) C# and Java is meh. Good luck to all your future defacement efforts! (as long as it isn't SN)
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday December 24 2014, @09:36PM
Interpreted languages have the shortest cycle between code modification and execution. This provides the most opportunity to inadvertently introduce implementation-specific and version-specific dependencies. Unfortunately, the process the minimize such dependencies is batch compilation via punch cards or somesuch inconvenience. Although this workflow causes people to think more carefully about their actions, it is generally less productive.
1702845791×2
(Score: 1) by Doctor on Monday December 22 2014, @06:34PM
I guess I qualify as an old geezer in terms of programming -- I have done Fortran on punch cards, BASIC on a dial-up mainframe, COBOL, programmed on a VAX, learned actual 8086 assembler and programmed with it. But with those basics behind me on programming I will tell people that I can pick up and start programming in pretty much any language in 3 days. Currently I am programming C#, HTML/CSS/Javascript, PHP as my main languages for different projects I am working on. C# I learned by downloading Learn C# in 24 hours and a lot of Google when I started. Web programming I don't even think I started with a book -- mostly learned by example.
So, if someone like me were to go through a 12 week "bootcamp", I could see becoming competent in a new skill set. Take someone who has not done any programming or not very much programming and you are going to end up with someone who isn't competent. You can't make a new programmer in 12 weeks. But you can take an existing programmer and teach him a new language or set of tools in 12 weeks. So it is a question of target audience for the training.
"Anybody remotely interesting is mad in some way." - The Doctor
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @09:33PM
Industry employers want cheap labor. Zero experience boot camp devs are not pulling in six figures. More like 12,000 or less on a part-time basis. After all, H1-Bs can come in at that rate, or less if you outsource to India or China.
The programming labor market is bifurcated. A few superstars on mission-critical, revenue center apps will earn six figures or higher. Core iOS, Android, Redhat developers plus likely a few superstars at Microsoft and Oracle earn that. Everyone else is competing with H1-B and outsourced Indian/Chinese programmers for what amounts to $12 an hour or less.
The whole thing is PC platitude cover "teaching" non-Asian Minorities and women to code (which takes by the way years to learn to do so properly) for increased H1-B limits and hires. Purging older, Whiter, male workforces that cost more in favor of people who are essentially helot labor, sort of serfs, with the cover of PC "Diversity" humbug.
Rule of thumb -- anyone talking about diversity is a scam artist looking to lower labor costs by eliminating the White Male workforce in favor of H1-Bs.
As a side note, this is why software today is worse than yesterday's. Most of the code is written by poorly trained, poorly paid, poorly motivated Indian guys with no long term investment in the code. A cheap labor force produces cheap code quality. You could probably argue that the code quality if not the user interface is HIGHER in Open Source vs. Commercial software as Open Source at least is produced by much higher quality coders who have their reputations built on it. Lennart Poettering being the exception of course.
(Score: 1) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday December 22 2014, @09:47PM
I expect the people who operate those bootcamps, and who teach them, really do mean well.
However one requires a lot more than twelve weeks to learn how to write code that isn't full of bugs.
Consider that I started working as a coder after dropping out of the third year of my Physics degree. I figured all the folks with Computer Science degrees would eat my lunch, as they had actually graduated. I was a dropout, and wasn't even studying CS.
However it was not long at all before I realized I was quite a lot better coder than most of them.
That wasn't because I learned my chops in school; rather I was so concerned about losing my job that I devoted a great deal of effort to learning how to debug code, for example by reading Robert Ward's excellent "Debugging C", learning various assembly codes, reading Scott Knaster's book about Macintosh Debugging, which explains what the disassembly of compiled Pascal source looks like (O those were the days!).
My boss bought a $5,000 floating point accellerator for one of our Sun workstations because it was said to speed up floating point code by a factor of two. Before the FPA, we required 90 seconds to calibrate an image. With the FPA, we only required five seconds! Quite a lot more than a factor of two, eh?
"Hey Mike. Can you tell me why our other workstation now calibrates images in ten seconds?" That is, the workstation WITHOUT an FPA.
"Last night I learned about profilers."
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @01:55AM
...is just syntax.
I grew up during the heyday of arcade video games in the late 1970s.
It was a fun way to pass time until PAC-MAN (1980) came along.
Playing that game became highly addictive--playing it WELL required Ken Uston's [wikipedia.org] book on the game that contained patterns to use to 'beat the game'.
Playing PAC-MAN then was like shooting fish in a barrel.
Then TRON and BURGERTIME came out in 1982 and I was able to (eventually) beat them without outside help just by close observation while I played the games. Both of these games were just as pattern-driven as PAC-MAN. When I beat BURGERTIME after quite some time, the light turned on and I realized that I was I wasn't competing against a videogame, I was competing against the team of people who programmed the videogame. I read somewhere that the creators of PAC-MAN had the basic game prototyped rather quickly. They spent about A YEAR getting the ghost monster AI perfected. It paid off and the game became a worldwide hit that is remembered to this day. The game is SO difficult to play perfectly, that it took 19 years from 1980 to 1999 for someone to accomplish this amazing feat--all the more awesome in that it was done WITHOUT 'RUNNING PATTERNS' and took about six hours as a clear demonstration of staying one step ahead of the ghost monster AI. Someone managed to duplicate this feat in about half that time and was surely 'running patterns' the entire time!
Anyway, about that time I got my first home computer system that used a TV set for a display monitor and began to write software in BASIC. Some time after that, I learned how to program it in assembly language. Once I managed to do that, computer programming became second nature to me. When I moved to IBM PC and compatibles, all I needed were the CPU instruction lists and DOS interrupt information. On a lark I programmed a crude full screen text editor in under 700 bytes after using another polished one that was about 5 times larger.
Anyone who can program at this level of detail and closeness to the machine hardware is a 'real programmer' like Mel [catb.org] who were able to do all of that at the machine code level through painstaking 'hand assembly' which I could do as well.
However, since then I see assembly language as a 'last resort' to boost performance in a software program coded in a high-level programming language like C, C++, and C# which I find more productive to write software in.
Sadly, imbedding assembler or actual machine code seems to be limited to C and C++. This feature was taken out of C# to make the language easier and safer to write software in. Thankfully, in return, C# allows programmers to write less code to complete tasks as most I/O and math computation code has been turned into convenient function calls.
The programming stack I use from a giant software company in the U.S. state of Washington contains A LOT of stuff I never use but what I do use, I use to the best of my ability. When writing software, I strive for this goal:
A standard mousetrap is a perfect example of this. It only has 3 components:
1) A 'spring bar' that snaps onto the mouse and kills it.
2) A wooden platform to hold the 'spring bar' and
3) A baited 'latch' to hold open the spring bar until the mouse triggers it and dies when the 'spring bar' snaps on it.
Take any one of these components away and you don't have a working mousetrap.
I accomplish this kind of programming by finding simple algorithms, coding them in a fast correct manner, and carefully copying/pasting/editing them as needed into other new programming projects as needed.
Basically, If you can't think like the CPU in a PC, you can't really be a 'real programmer' and such code written will be bloated, confusing to follow/understand, and likely contain subtle logic errors. Sadly, some real programmers deliberately write bug-free code like this as a form of DRM [wikipedia.org] or 'job security' which goes against the simple, 'less is more' approach I use.
Over time, I accumulated a swipe file [wikipedia.org] of debugged bits of code I copy and paste as needed into new programs I write. I do this so much at times I feel I'm not writing software but assembling it out of building blocks [wikipedia.org] which isn't as fun or challenging.
Because the real (hardware) programmers did all the 'heavy lifting' at the dawn of the computer age by creating computers and the operating systems, assemblers, compilers, and interpreters for real (software) programmers to build upon and make their fortunes, we arrive to today where just about everything is abstracted away into function calls inside various software stacks, programs are assembled out of predefined building blocks, and business now see programmers as glorified typists and pay them accordingly then lay them off (or fire them?) when no longer needed.... [everything2.com]
(Score: 1) by Tangaroa on Tuesday December 23 2014, @02:29AM
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday December 24 2014, @09:38PM
... which didn't exist three years ago...
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