SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The New York Times has coverage on the phenomenon of Developer Bootcamps, that claim to do in a matter of a couple of months what used to take at least a couple of years for an associate's degree. These cram courses are apparently getting about a 75% job placement rate.
Have any Soylentils either gone through these programs, or worked with others who have? If so, what are your experiences?
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Developer Bootcamps - Be a Programmer in Two Months!
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 46 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
-- H. L. Mencken
(Score: 2) by velex on Wednesday October 15 2014, @05:40PM
Two months! Wow!
Here's the problem. If you take somebody with no talent, you're not going to get anywhere.
However, I have been blessed with an apprentice who has shown great talent and sort of confirmed a long-standing conjecture I've had. This person is an English major. I've often thought that those who fail at human language are doomed to fail at computer language. Failure to understand the parts of speech, syntax, etymology, and such predicts a failure to appreciate the punctuation in computer languages and why misplacing a comma or using a comma where a semicolon would be appropriate—a common mistake in grammar—will cause compilation to blow up.
I was able to bring this person to a point where she could practice basic programming logic in the space of roughly two months. So, it's possible.
However, it requires disciplined thinking. Perhaps that's what comes from obtaining an English degree. My conclusion is that you can't take a tabula rasa and wind up with a programmer in 2 months. You can, however, take an individual who thinks deep thoughts and has a deep understanding of the logic of language and turn her into a programmer in 2 months.
My other observation from my recent experience is that this person was lightning quick to pick up on the mathematics of programming. Perhaps she should have chosen a different degree, but as I've said before, I'm an individual and so is she. That's the path she choose, but, nonetheless, it clearly didn't hamper her at least.
There's clearly more at work than "all men" and the "patriarchy" when it comes to the reason cisgendered women don't pursue STEM degrees. But that's probably a digression.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 15 2014, @06:46PM
I have had similar experience. However it was with someone who had a phd in nuclear physics.
The problem I ended up with is I ended up with a competent (not great) programmer. But one who had no idea why things went to crap because she had no grounding in picking good algs up front. Why one solution was better than another. That took 2 more years. I have done this 3-4 times now with different people from different backgrounds.
If they can follow simple instructions and make them they can at least be competent. To be great you need to know why a variable is filled in what did it and why. If you do not do that you end up with tons of 'debug' code everywhere. I usually recommend the book debugging by David J. Agans. It lays out how to find issues and how to learn how to fix them.
These days I do not have much opportunity to do it anymore. I have been relegated to writing loops over and over and people who 'are smarter than me' decide what loops to write. I can usually point at their code and find out why it is wrong. They do not even begin to understand why. As they have no concept of what the hardware/compiler/interpreter is doing to their software.
(Score: 2) by strattitarius on Wednesday October 15 2014, @08:02PM
This person is an English major. I've often thought that those who fail at human language are doomed to fail at computer language.
I, disagree completely, because the English language, a kludge it is. Perhaps being able, and knowing when, to ignore errors, in language, that is, is more an indication, at least in my opinion, of programming ability.
But seriously, I am not sure that is necessarily true. English is a kludge. It has so many exceptions that making rules is useless (i before e for example). Not to mention doing well in English means using and/or identifying personification, foreshadowing, and those type of things. I apparently suck at story telling, so I wasn't the best in English classes.
Slashdot Beta Sucks. Soylent Alpha Rules. News at 11.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by strattitarius on Wednesday October 15 2014, @08:32PM
Slashdot Beta Sucks. Soylent Alpha Rules. News at 11.
(Score: 1) by khedoros on Wednesday October 15 2014, @09:39PM
This person is a [language] major. I've often thought that those who fail at human language are doomed to fail at computer language. Failure to understand the parts of speech, syntax, etymology, and such predicts a failure to appreciate the punctuation in computer languages and why misplacing a comma or using a comma where a semicolon would be appropriate—a common mistake in grammar—will cause compilation to blow up.
The point is that every language has a structure, and an appreciation for that structure, and for the history of the language, bodes well for the ability to understand other languages.
As an example, in Lisp, "car" and "cdr" don't make logical sense *unless* you know the history behind them, and the connection to assembly language macros on the IBM 704. One might expect those functions to be called "first" and "rest", or something similar. Similarly, the spelling of "conscience" only makes sense when you look at its history, with its construction in Latin via translation from a Greek phrase, its inclusion in French, and the interactions between France and England that allowed its entry into English.
The point is: programming languages are collections of arbitrary rules of grammar and vocabulary, which must be strictly adhered to to communicate your intentions to a computer. Humans have a heuristics and probability-based "compiler" for understanding language, but we aren't so lucky with computers (since no one has figured out how to program human intuition into one). A person who knows how to communicate clearly by following and understanding established conventions in human language will be well-equipped to do the same thing with machine language, including handling all the arbitrary crap that a lot of languages have. You want inconsistent and arbitrary? Try Perl. Or Javascript. They'll give English a run for its money.
(Score: 2) by strattitarius on Thursday October 16 2014, @01:54AM
What's your take on ability/proficiency of learning foreign languages and programming?
Slashdot Beta Sucks. Soylent Alpha Rules. News at 11.
(Score: 1) by khedoros on Thursday October 16 2014, @03:08AM
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Wednesday October 15 2014, @10:12PM
So you're saying that people who understand English well should also be well suited to picking up Perl?
(Score: 2) by velex on Thursday October 16 2014, @12:24AM
Haha, who knows?
I used a subset of Ruby to teach primary concepts (we did not get into the lambda-specific kind of iteration in Ruby and instead used very non-Ruby-ish iteration by incrementation) and warned her that should she have a problem and decide a regular expression would be the solution, then she'd have two problems!
But then my own documentation is filled with regular expressions to input to Vim to massage data files… lol