I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning that some of the TA's at Lambda are hired to help with teaching as little as two months into the program as students[0]. I guess that counts toward their "placement" stats!
Not only that, but Lambda seems so desperate that they will offer a fresh grad at no cost to any company for a 4 week trial period. [1]
I don't think I've seen a single hire out of a bootcamp work out in the end. Except a few cases where the person actually came from a STEM degree from a good school (and more crucially, already had some exposure to programming during the degree) but it's unclear to me that they actually needed the bootcamp and not just a good primer on modern software development and something like the Missing Semester [2] or a few classes at their school covering software engineering.
> I don't think I've seen a single hire out of a bootcamp work out in the end. Except a few cases where the person actually came from a STEM degree from a good school (and more crucially, already had some exposure to programming during the degree) but it's unclear to me that they actually needed the bootcamp and not just a good primer on modern software development and something like the Missing Semester [2] or a few classes at their school covering software engineering.
What do you prescribe for the person who has no interest in going to college, then?
Not everyone is going to have the money, or the desire, to spend four years at MIT or Stanford or anywhere in-between, above, or below. What fundamentals does a relatively smart and tech savvy person need in order to go from zero to 60 and get a job developing software? Not every person is going to work at a FAANG, and even then, lots of the developers at FAANGs don't even need top-tier college degrees in software engineering to do what they're asked to do.
People are clamoring for a middle-ground solution that can be completed in 1-2 years and provides enough of a basis for someone to hit the ground running.
If bootcamps aren't the solution, what could be? Seems like industry should be trying to answer this question.
If it helps I was a lawyer and did a masters in 1-2 years to become a programmer. I had 0 background in STEM. I'm in Australia though so it's actually cheaper than a boot camp. Can't Americans do associate degrees at community college? At least that's accredited
You don’t need to go to MIT or Stanford… assuming you’d get in. Boot camps are extremely expensive per hour. Some are 12k! I can go to school for 12 terms at 9 credits per term with that money. It’s almost all the credits you need for a bachelor. Yes it’s a cheap in state school, not MIT, but it’s easier to sell a “Bachelor degree” than “did a boot camp” no matter where they come from when trying to get your foot in the door.
Now time is a different thing, but I don’t know if dumping 12k in a bootcamp gets you there in better shape than quitting your job and building your own plan of study.
Please don't do this, it's literally the second sentence of the rules.
>Be kind. Don't be snarky.
None the less, my experience with both medicine and the law is that unless you are quite wealthy, you are best off learning the stuff that applies to you (whether directly or indirectly) and then using lawyers and doctors for things that you either can't handle yourself or would be much better off having someone else do, and basically tell them precisely what to do. I particularly find doctors to be a complete joke, as I've only ever got any use at all from specialists, and think its infuriating that we require prescriptions for most drugs.
I agree. First time consulting a tax lawyer, I was quite surprised that they doubled down on being wrong about an aspect of tax law that I investigated for 30 minutes.
Lambda’s deferred tuition model is life-changing for the people who can make it through. Many of their students come from backgrounds and life situations where no other option is really possible. That alone makes me want to root for the whole approach.
It’s true that the teaching and curriculum are uneven, and i wish they were less so, but you could say the same about many colleges.
The idea of bootcamps (or short degrees) is not bad in on itself. There are plenty of other professions where people complete similar length programs and do well at an average job - they are not the best in the world, but provide enough value to get a reasonable pay.
The problems are specifically with Lambda. They are simply bad at education (and other things) from whatever reports we have seen. Education is difficult. Thinking you can "agile" a curriculum is ridiculous. I would recommend they hire a complete board of profs and industry experts from a variety of institutions and give them months to work out the structure of the program.
Anecdata, but I have known quite a few excellent developers from bootcamp/self-taught backgrounds. I'm a bootcamp grad myself, and have done very well.
I'm curious what skills engineers use on the job that are taught well in university but are hard to pick up from experience?
> Anecdata, but I have known quite a few excellent developers from bootcamp/self-taught backgrounds. I'm a bootcamp grad myself, and have done very well.
Every time Lambda is on the front-page there seems to be a new influx of accounts on the site.
> I'm curious what skills engineers use on the job that are taught well in university but are hard to pick up from experience?
Algorithmic complexity. "Don't roll out your own data structures" and "just use a library" works until it doesn't. Operating System fundamentals is another one.
It seems a lot of bootcamps teach with rote, rather than by looking at the underlying concepts. My favorite example is git. I've seen bootcamp grads claim they can use git, but what it really meant is that they memorized a few git commands and as long as they don't stray too fart from those they can sort of work using git. But cherry-picking, rebase, proper branching forget it.
They don't teach time/space complexity in Bootcamps, true.
I remember the first time I ran into O(1) vs O(n), I was building a toy Game of Life simulation and trying to lookup cells by finding them in an array. Took me a minute to realize I should use an object instead to index the cells!
And then there was the first time I read through the examples in Cracking the Coding Interview. It filled in a lot of gaps.
Nowadays I work on distributed systems that receive 100M requests/hr with other devs who similarly lack a college education but somehow manage
Hope this helps you feel less frustrated next time you're paired with a colleague who has a different background than you do!
> And then there was the first time I read through the examples in Cracking the Coding Interview. It filled in a lot of gaps.
The issue is, the book approaches algorithms and data structure as something to "crack" and rote memorize instead of a new way of thinking. And it's easy to spot if you ask an interview question that looks a lot like one from the book but different enough that there's another data structure better suited for it.
> Nowadays I work on distributed systems that receive 100M requests/hr with other devs who similarly lack a college education but somehow manage
That's 12x what Stack Overflow does [0], so that's quite impressive!
> Hope this helps you feel less frustrated next time you're paired with a colleague who has a different background than you do!
Since your account is brand new, you might want to get familiar with the rules and guidelines of this community [1].
> I don't think I've seen a single hire out of a bootcamp work out in the end.
Anecdata: I used to place bootcamp graduates into their first jobs. After 3 months 90% of each cohort were in technical roles.
After that pretty much all of them went onto further roles. Only a handful didn’t work out and that was mostly my fault for placing them into the wrong companies. Placing them elsewhere seemed to solve that problem.
> I guess that counts toward their "placement" stats!
I'm constantly amazed how badly people respond. This is blatantly false, they're explicitly noted in the outcomes reporting.
Furthermore, they don't "help with teaching", they're basically paid tutors.
You're taking the weakest interpretation to strawman Lambda with, and I'd argue you're mostly just arguing against falsehoods.
Yes I went to Lambda, and yes I'm employed as a Software Engineer.
"Bootcamps"/Vocational schools, or whatever you want to call them, are the market's response to the college system falling apart at the edges. IMO the weakest universities are as bad as the worst bootcamps.
Edit: Also just curious, have you compared placements rates for Lambda or any other "bootcamps" to any universities?
> So they teach the class or just help the teacher (hence helping with teaching)?
They don't teach any part of the class, an instructor gives a live lecture practically identical to any other traditional pedagogy. Some students tutor others, also not a new idea. What do you think is wrong with this idea?
> Ahh, so there's an incentive to defend the brand here.
Wow that was a full disclaimer and you're...leaning on it, with no elaboration? Do you think my question wasn't worth addressing?
You mentioned algorithmic complexity in another reply, and presumably you don't realize that Lambda actually does teach computation complexity.
But if you're going to just lean on my disclaimer and be dismissive in discussion, I suppose that's that.
> Some students tutor others, also not a new idea. What do you think is wrong with this idea?
In college it's frequent to have TAs, students who completed the course and did well in it and help with grading assignments, labs and so on. But they aren't just a few weeks ahead of the students they teach.
> Wow that was a full disclaimer and you're...leaning on it, with no elaboration?
Honestly, every time Lambda is mentioned there's a flow of new accounts who "graduated" from these bootcamps and companies that are "extremely satisfied" with these hires... but never is a company actually named! That's strange, to say the least.
>But they aren't just a few weeks ahead of the students they teach.
Sure, and I find trying to teach something extremely useful for retention. I found it useful to have students who had just finished the content attempt to explain it.
> Honestly, every time Lambda is mentioned there's a flow of new accounts who "graduated" from these bootcamps and companies that are "extremely satisfied" with these hires... but never is a company actually named! That's strange, to say the least.
Agreed, although it's not obvious to me that it's orchestrated or automatically invalid which seems to be in a background implication here.
I saw a discussion about Lambda where upvoted comments were stating clearly false things, and I felt compelled to engage and I'd have made an account to do it. That also looks like astro-turfing/brigading/dislike-attacks/whatever you want to call it. It also looks like individuals voicing their opinions.
Having an 'incentive to defend the brand' goes without saying IMO, and is the whole purpose of a disclaimer.
Not only that, but Lambda seems so desperate that they will offer a fresh grad at no cost to any company for a 4 week trial period. [1]
I don't think I've seen a single hire out of a bootcamp work out in the end. Except a few cases where the person actually came from a STEM degree from a good school (and more crucially, already had some exposure to programming during the degree) but it's unclear to me that they actually needed the bootcamp and not just a good primer on modern software development and something like the Missing Semester [2] or a few classes at their school covering software engineering.
[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25138610
[2] https://missing.csail.mit.edu/