Boom Or Bust: The Lowdown On Code Academies 130
snydeq writes "Programming boot camps are on the rise, but can a crash course in coding truly pay off for students and employers alike? InfoWorld's Dan Tynan discusses the relative (and perceived) value of code academies with founders, alumni, recruiters, and hiring managers. Early impressions and experiences are mixed, but the hacker school trend seems certain to stick. 'Many businesses that are looking at a shortfall of more than a million programmers by the year 2020 are more than willing to give inexperienced grads a chance, even if some are destined to fail. The zero-to-hero success stories may be relatively rare, but they happen often enough to ensure that the boom in quick-and-dirty coding schools is only likely to accelerate.'"
Public education problem (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the same public education problem. If you provide universal education--that is, provide for a way for everyone to buy into education on their own--then what you get is market speculation by students, which often fails. For example: now again we have a need for programmers because things like Roku are becoming popular and we want to build more Android and iOS apps for phones and smart TVs; everyone in the world will want to be a programmer for those $90k, $110k, $150k salaries, and then in 5 years there will be so many programmers that none of them can get a job because some 10% of them filled all the slots and got $60k salaries out of it to boot.
The summary directly acknowledges that, short on a crop of self-made resources, businesses are buying into low-experience, low-training wannabe poor kids who can't afford college degrees and then supplying career development. Which is something I've said again and again: universal access to education doesn't provide greater upward mobility for the poor; it forces them to speculate, which gives them a hit-or-miss chance of success if they bother putting in the hard work to become career-worthy, which only the rich can manage to absorb in the case of landing in the "not useful because saturated market" bin. Government-backed loans and government-provided vocational education is bad for the poor.
I mean christ, I'm looking right at it. Right here. Do you see this? This is what happens when not enough people can get an education: the businesses need these educated kids to succeed, and not enough rich kids have those degrees and those skills, so the businesses grab anyone who can absorb those skills and makes sure they get it. Because hell if I'm going to lose market share to that goat fucker Cogswell when he publishes an iOS app selling his cogs to a huge market I can't reach.
Yeah right (Score:4, Insightful)
Where are all the no experience needed programming jobs then? Everywhere I look 3 years of X 5 years of Y extensive knowledge of Z.
Wrong Operator (Score:4, Insightful)
It's Boom and Bust. [wikipedia.org]
There's no OR about it, one precedes the other.
Re:Not anyone can be a coder (Score:4, Insightful)
I personally don't think a code monkey should even exist. It's another aberration invented in an attempt to commoditize software development. The logic goes like this:
1. Hire 1 smart guy instead of 5.
2. Smart guy lays out the architecture/skeleton of the application
3. Hire cheap labor to "fill in the blanks."
It works about as well as it sounds.
Every "architect" should play a major role in the implementation of his ideas. Otherwise, it could be a complete failure and no one would know until it's too late. It's easy to make an architectural mistake from 10,000 feet up. Architects need to be able to land and see what's going on.