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There's free resources on the internet that let you teach yourself programming, if you don't want to pay the money.
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Mar 21, 2015 22:32
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Pollyanna posted:I'm not super fond of that, to be honest. It makes sense and is understandable why, but I feel that coding schools should be more accessible for people who aren't as well-off as the programs assume them to be. Considering that those things cost $20k and (apparently) they basically make you hireable for $100K/year jobs within 3 months, the price is peanuts. I'm wondering if there's a way to pay for these types of bootcamps with student loans...probably not since they aren't accredited educational institutions, right?
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Mar 21, 2015 22:35
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Pollyanna posted:I'm not super fond of that, to be honest. It makes sense and is understandable why, but I feel that coding schools should be more accessible for people who aren't as well-off as the programs assume them to be. Seriously think about what you're saying. "These programmers that are teaching other people to become programmers so that they can get jobs making bank, should themselves voluntarily take a huge pay cut." If some are willing to do that, great, but expecting it is silly. bonds0097 posted:Well, looking at MakerSquare and AppAcademy (which is actually 18% of your first year's salary) both being in SF, it would seem to me that based on AppAcademy's reported average first year salary (105k), that it's a fair bit more expensive to use AppAcademy. Furthermore, since you have to pay AppAcademy off within 6 months, you're looking at 36% of your first six months of salary going to them, which sounds rough.
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Mar 21, 2015 23:05
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shodanjr_gr posted:I'm wondering if there's a way to pay for these types of bootcamps with student loans...probably not since they aren't accredited educational institutions, right? Nope, the one that was linked can't get access to government-approved student loans because of that. That'd make my life a lot easier if that was the case though.
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Mar 21, 2015 23:14
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If you're worth it, you can make some or all of tuition back on your signing bonus -- I don't know the percentages there, but i've talked to a couple people in my cohort who did.
Fish Ladder Theory fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Mar 22, 2015 |
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Mar 22, 2015 01:08
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I think one of the ones mentioned in this thread has a deferred payment option that lets you pay after you're done, when you are working already. That's pretty sweet. The truth is that it's pretty miraculous that this field has options like that at all; many other fields do not, and you are out of luck without a degree. There's a place in St. Louis called launch code that a friend of mine is trying to get into, they place aspiring devs with no degree and only a bit of background into paid apprenticeships with tech companies in the area, with the idea to hire them on afterwards. They have a good success rate, and they are trying to expand to other cities I think.
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Mar 22, 2015 01:27
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shodanjr_gr posted:I'm wondering if there's a way to pay for these types of bootcamps with student loans...probably not since they aren't accredited educational institutions, right? I know that at least Code Fellows (seattle, portland, chicago) has it set up so that you can get a loan through Upstart. The interest rate's higher than with student loans, but you'll only have to worry about it for a few months, maybe less depending on which option you choose.
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Mar 22, 2015 02:27
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It's still a fraction of the money you'd spend on tuition getting a degree. A university is out of the question for me and dropping 20k on a three month education in programming where they claim a 90% job placement rate literally feels like the bargain of the century. I can't even believe how good of a deal it is.
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Mar 22, 2015 02:47
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Vincent Valentine posted:
Even if you could afford, it I would not suggest going through a BSc if you knew for sure that you wanted to do software development. More expensive, much more time consuming, probably 75% of the stuff that you will learn will be irrelevant to your career and you will be surrounded by kids that have absolutely no idea what they are doing and instructors who last developed software when they were doing their PhDs.
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Mar 22, 2015 03:04
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Vincent Valentine posted:It's still a fraction of the money you'd spend on tuition getting a degree. Research the hell out of it. Not all code schools are alike. Hire rates can easily be inflated, so ask pointed questions about how they define full time employment, and also their drop out rates. Some schools encourage people who aren't getting it to drop out so they can keep their hire rates up. Which if you get a full refund, well and good I guess.
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Mar 22, 2015 03:19
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Cicero posted:Seriously think about what you're saying. "These programmers that are teaching other people to become programmers so that they can get jobs making bank, should themselves voluntarily take a huge pay cut." If some are willing to do that, great, but expecting it is silly. I don't know how those things work, but how much is going to the instructors anyway vs the people running the classes.
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Mar 22, 2015 04:09
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good luck dude
Tomahawk fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Aug 14, 2019 |
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Mar 22, 2015 04:29
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Vincent Valentine posted:It's still a fraction of the money you'd spend on tuition getting a degree. I'm a few months away from being done with a two year, online masters program and it only cost me 16k total. There are even cheaper ones also if you look for them.
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Mar 22, 2015 04:44
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Cicero posted:Seriously think about what you're saying. "These programmers that are teaching other people to become programmers so that they can get jobs making bank, should themselves voluntarily take a huge pay cut." If some are willing to do that, great, but expecting it is silly. Hey gently caress you, I never said that. I just wish it was more accessible to people who don't necessarily have $12k to drop, and women/minority scholarships are a great step in the right direction.
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Mar 22, 2015 07:53
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Of the people that can't afford to drop $12k, there's no reason why the women and minorities should be singled out. I wonder if restaurants should charge different amounts by race too.
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Mar 22, 2015 08:28
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Pollyanna posted:Hey gently caress you, I never said that. Although as people have pointed out, if you're looking at it as the equivalent of a bachelor's degree (in terms of helping one get a job), 12k is actually really cheap. Cicero fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Mar 22, 2015 |
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Mar 22, 2015 08:40
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sarehu posted:Of the people that can't afford to drop $12k, there's no reason why the women and minorities should be singled out. You're being an idiot, as usual. But this is a topic for an entirely different thread.
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Mar 22, 2015 14:42
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bonds0097 posted:You're being an idiot, as usual. But this is a topic for an entirely different thread. No you're being an idiot. But let's stop talking now that I've had my word.
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Mar 22, 2015 21:08
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You're tearing this thread apart, code school!Tomahawk posted:I just graduated from App Academy NYC (starting my job search on Monday) but I'm willing to discuss my experiences with anyone who is interested. Let us know how the job hunt goes. I'm mostly curious about how much resistance you face not coming from a non 4 year CS degree background. I read reddit threads (I know, I know) about code schools and they're mostly overrun with CS majors listing all the reasons they'd never hire someone with a boot camp background. Raskolnikov2089 fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Mar 23, 2015 |
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Mar 23, 2015 01:34
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Raskolnikov2089 posted:I'm mostly curious about how much resistance you face not coming from a non 4 year CS degree background. I read reddit threads (I know, I know) about code schools and they're mostly overrun with CS majors listing all the reasons they'd never hire someone with a boot camp background. I hear the last bit of your post all the time on the internet, and have never come across anything like it offline. I don't have a CS degree, I went through one of those schools, and I'm more than capable of the position I currently occupy at my company. They hired me for my skills and drive, not for a piece of paper. Not to come off as snippy, but it's a bit of a sore point for me, since I've been having familial troubles over that very topic recently.
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Mar 23, 2015 02:54
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This isn't the thread for arguments about affirmative action or whatever the gently caress that was, just FYI.
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Mar 23, 2015 03:11
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Raskolnikov2089 posted:Let us know how the job hunt goes. I'm mostly curious about how much resistance you face not coming from a non 4 year CS degree background. I read reddit threads (I know, I know) about code schools and they're mostly overrun with CS majors listing all the reasons they'd never hire someone with a boot camp background. An old boss (the same rear end in a top hat I've complained about on this forum numerous times) said he wouldn't hire anyone for a position like mine without a 4-year degree. For reference, my position was writing basic line of business applications for a company that didn't make software as part of its business. It was a CRUD factory, rarely anything more complex than that. Anyone who has ever made an app or two from start to finish could have handled the work, and I say that as someone with a Bachelor's in CS myself. So yeah, there is a certain segment of people who have hiring power with this bias. I don't have a big sample size, but I'd wager that the majority of those people are old crusty traditional businessmen and MBAs, who have no idea what the difference is between computer science and practical programming skills and experience (if they're even aware of a difference). Those people are probably going to roundfile your application as soon as they get it. I think the bigger point is that it's not a black & white thing - the person with the 4-year degree has an edge in most people's minds, all else being equal. If you are hiring and down to two finalists, and they both have 2 years of job experience and one of them has a 4-year degree, that's probably going to outweigh a certificate from a bootcamp, at least subconsciously. Hopefully if that's the only difference on paper, they'd interview both and hire the one who would be a better fit from a personality perspective, but it's still a concern. Doesn't mean you need a 4-year degree to get a job, but having one is going to give you more options (and also probably put you in debt which takes away a different set of options for a while  ).
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Mar 23, 2015 04:24
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Che Delilas posted:An old boss (the same rear end in a top hat I've complained about on this forum numerous times) said he wouldn't hire anyone for a position like mine without a 4-year degree. For reference, my position was writing basic line of business applications for a company that didn't make software as part of its business. It was a CRUD factory, rarely anything more complex than that. Anyone who has ever made an app or two from start to finish could have handled the work, and I say that as someone with a Bachelor's in CS myself. Your old boss is one of those guys that bitches on Slashdot about the H1Bs taking away all the jobs, isn't he?`
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Mar 23, 2015 04:29
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Pollyanna posted:I hear the last bit of your post all the time on the internet, and have never come across anything like it offline. I don't have a CS degree, I went through one of those schools, and I'm more than capable of the position I currently occupy at my company. They hired me for my skills and drive, not for a piece of paper. Nah I'm glad to hear it since I'm leaning heavily toward Hack Reactor. Che Delilas posted:If you are hiring and down to two finalists, and they both have 2 years of job experience and one of them has a 4-year degree, that's probably going to outweigh a certificate from a bootcamp, at least subconsciously. Totally fine with that, and that's as it should be. I'd hire the CS degree in that instance as well. Raskolnikov2089 fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Mar 23, 2015 |
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Mar 23, 2015 04:30
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Raskolnikov2089 posted:Totally fine with that, and that's as it should be. I'd hire the CS degree in that instance as well. I'd argue that for most jobs of that level, personality fit is going to matter a lot more than "4-year degree yes/no." But your post is an example of what I was talking about : some people think that the situation is "as it should be," no matter how much sense it does or doesn't make for a given position. shodanjr_gr posted:Your old boss is one of those guys that bitches on Slashdot about the H1Bs taking away all the jobs, isn't he?` Huh? How did you get that from my post? My old boss is an egomaniac, someone obsessed with controlling his employees because it made him feel powerful. He managed primarily by intimidation and fear; he resorted to manipulation and lies when that didn't work. He probably would have loved to hire H1Bs because he could leverage the fear of being fired and deported to make them work longer hours for no reason and kiss his rear end. Che Delilas fucked around with this message at 12:00 on Mar 23, 2015 |
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Mar 23, 2015 11:55
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It really seems like the less they know about CS or SWEng, the more likely they are to insist on a degree. Probably because they don't know enough to judge anyone on their actual skills and aptitude.
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Mar 23, 2015 14:03
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Che Delilas posted:Huh? How did you get that from my post? I was being facetious  . It feels to me that people who got a degree fetish also tend to be dismissive of folks that they view as educationally inferior (for example, folks from other countries). But obviously your mileage may vary  .
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Mar 23, 2015 18:03
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Pollyanna posted:It really seems like the less they know about CS or SWEng, the more likely they are to insist on a degree. Probably because they don't know enough to judge anyone on their actual skills and aptitude.
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Mar 23, 2015 19:07
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Just wanted to give an update on my situation. I talked it out with my professor, and while he was a little upset he understood my reasons and we ended it amicably. I have also just received my first offer, which is super overwhelming. Is there a good resource on where to read about the quality of benefits/401K plans etc? That stuffs a new world to me.
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Mar 23, 2015 20:43
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Also, if you're looking at hiring two people with equivalent/no work experience, and one of them spent 4 years in college in theory focusing on computer science and/or software engineering or whatever the gently caress you want to call it, and the other spent a few months in a bootcamp, it doesn't seem prima facie retarded for hiring managers without any exposure to bootcamp graduates to prefer 4 year college grads. I've personally never worked with someone who went to a bootcamp, and it's entirely possible that they are, for the large part, highly capable, or at least as capable as your average fresh college grad, but I don't really know that since I have no experience or really any real data, so I'm skeptical, naturally.
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Mar 24, 2015 03:22
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I've read experiences saying that bootcamp devs are bad, and some saying that they're good, iirc about the same program? I think it depends on the kind of dev you're looking for -- the good kind that went to MIT? Or the not so good kind that went to Tufts?
sarehu fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Mar 24, 2015 |
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Mar 24, 2015 03:29
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I'd like to see the metrics of where the bootcamp grads end up, as I wouldn't be surprised if most of them are getting hired by the bottom of the barrel startups who can't get the best talent but still have tons of VC money to throw around, meaning if/when the bubble pops a lot of those bootcamps should go away.
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Mar 24, 2015 04:24
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I see a lot of talk about bootcamps here, but what about going back for an associates degree? Once upon a time I was a humanities grad., but 10 years later I've decided that it is time to make a career change (I've been a stay at home dad for three years now, so I am getting the itch to go back to school for *something*). Looking at what's around me I am kind of leaning towards this program. I know that learning how to program on your own is kind of in vogue right now, but I'd really like to get some classroom experience before I started to self-teach myself and make programs worthy of talking about in an interview. Money isn't particularly a concern either, so it wouldn't break the bank to spend two years at a school - particularly if I was able to get an internship or apprenticeship under my belt at the same time! Thanks!
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Mar 25, 2015 00:57
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I would not do an associate's degree in CS. Bachelor's or bust (or bootcamp).
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Mar 25, 2015 01:01
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Cicero posted:I would not do an associate's degree in CS. Bachelor's or bust (or bootcamp). Would you do a second bachelor's in CS? Four years seems like a lot of schooling, but this is a hypothetical! The degree can transfer to ABET accredited programs.
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Mar 25, 2015 01:26
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Hot Dog Day #82 posted:Would you do a second bachelor's in CS? Four years seems like a lot of schooling, but this is a hypothetical! The degree can transfer to ABET accredited programs. Some people have said good things about this program: http://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/online-degrees/undergraduate/computer-science/
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Mar 25, 2015 01:41
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Pollyanna posted:It really seems like the less they know about CS or SWEng, the more likely they are to insist on a degree. Probably because they don't know enough to judge anyone on their actual skills and aptitude. There are certainly software engineering / development jobs that make honest to god use of the skills and intuition one likely develops studying computer science or computer engineering at a four year university. Some examples might be writing a database or working on an operating system kernel. It seems to me that asking for a CS or CE degree (from a reputable institution) of your applicants is reasonable for these jobs. I bet it's possible to develop this skill set and intuition in a non-traditional setting, but I'm skeptical that a 3-6 week boot camp would be sufficient... maybe something more like a couple years of rigorous self-study. Having said that, many (most?) programming jobs don't demand this kind of highly technical work with heavy reliance on theory and low-level understanding of computers. A typical web or mobile development job, for instance, could be too selective listing a CS/CE degree as a requirement. edit: there are also programmers with very deep understanding of computer science and engineering, like thestinger/strcat, who don't have degrees, but they tend to find a way to demonstrate that just in the course of their natural lives (becoming the #2 contributor to jemalloc, writing their own memory allocator, writing a bunch of flame war bull crap about memory locality and 1:1 threading and "spreading FUD" on the rust mailing list) Deus Rex fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Mar 25, 2015 |
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Mar 25, 2015 01:44
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Hot Dog Day #82 posted:I see a lot of talk about bootcamps here, but what about going back for an associates degree? Once upon a time I was a humanities grad., but 10 years later I've decided that it is time to make a career change (I've been a stay at home dad for three years now, so I am getting the itch to go back to school for *something*). Looking at what's around me I am kind of leaning towards this program. I know that learning how to program on your own is kind of in vogue right now, but I'd really like to get some classroom experience before I started to self-teach myself and make programs worthy of talking about in an interview. Money isn't particularly a concern either, so it wouldn't break the bank to spend two years at a school - particularly if I was able to get an internship or apprenticeship under my belt at the same time! Learning to program on your own isn't "in vogue right now", it is the constant state of affairs for every real developer. Once you get out of school, you get to basically spend most of your time teaching yourself to program. The school part just gets some math out of the way. I would spend some time learning on my own first, and see if you actually like developing software, before going to school over again.
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Mar 25, 2015 01:45
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Welp. Bombed an interview today where I needed to solve a BST problem. The way I screwed up was that I thought of and stepped through a graphical example of my approach as an in-order traversal, while describing it verbally as a pre-order traversal and, at the same time, implementing it in code as a post-order traversal. I don't think I could have possibly done any worse, but maybe someone else here has? Or seen a candidate do worse? On the other hand, a later interviewer skipped three different questions because I had done them before. I found that funny. Then, he came up with one that was extremely obvious and straight-forward and I after I solved it, he asked me another that I had done before, and then skipped to an extension of that one after I told him I had done it. Which I failed to figure out. x_x
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Mar 25, 2015 02:03
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Safe and Secure! posted:Welp. Bombed an interview today where I needed to solve a BST problem. The way I screwed up was that I thought of and stepped through a graphical example of my approach as an in-order traversal, while describing it verbally as a pre-order traversal and, at the same time, implementing it in code as a post-order traversal. I don't think it's a big deal. If the implementation in code was correct and you just messed up the terminology it's probably fine, more or less. An empathetic interviewer probably understands that interviewees (especially inexperienced ones) are under a massive power imbalance and might make more silly mistakes in an explanation or diagram than they would in a real work situation. quote:On the other hand, a later interviewer skipped three different questions because I had done them before. I found that funny. Then, he came up with one that was extremely obvious and straight-forward and I after I solved it, he asked me another that I had done before, and then skipped to an extension of that one after I told him I had done it. Which I failed to figure out. x_x I don't think you should feel obligated to say you've already seen an interview question before, unless you mean something like you were asked that same question by an earlier interviewer from the same company in the same interview cycle.
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Mar 25, 2015 02:25
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