My experience with code bootcamp trained developers is positive, due to the follow reasons:
- Most of them have engineering background: electrical engineering, civil engineering, petroleum engineering.
- Since they lack formal education in IT, they have to train twice as hard, which our company encourages (2 months of probation = 2 months of training, it's almost impossible to find developer with Scala experience around here anyway).
- We work with the Bootcamp to improve their program: giving reference to 'hard', 'theoretical' books such as Algorithms & Datastructure or Database Design and cutting down some unnecessary parts.
- Most importantly, we strongly prefer people who switched to IT because they actually love programming, not just looking for higher wage.*
* It may sound weird but actually many people here didn't picked their university by themselves but by the guidance of their parent, so they might study something else than their favourite.
>Most of them have engineering background: electrical engineering, civil engineering, petroleum engineering.
That's great, but what about the people who come from a non-engineering background? I feel like people with a technical background will be able to pick up coding a lot quicker than people who don't have a lot of engineering aptitude.
>We work with the Bootcamp to improve their program: giving reference to 'hard', 'theoretical' books such as Algorithms & Datastructure or Database Design and cutting down some unnecessary parts.
That's great that you guys do this. I'm a real big proponent of this private/public model since it benefits both businesses (they get people who are trained in key business areas) and colleges/bootcamps (they can brag about knowledgeable grads whose job placement boosts their numbers).
> That's great, but what about the people who come from a non-engineering background? I feel like people with a technical background will be able to pick up coding a lot quicker than people who don't have a lot of engineering aptitude.
You're almost certainly correct. It's perhaps possible that the bootcamp model, which can work well for people with solid technical backgrounds, might not work equally well for others.
That's fine. Not every tool is a fit for every job. A hammer is very useful, but it makes a poor saw.
Reminds me of one Computer Science professor I had whose degree was in Philosophy - of course he predated computer science degrees. He is part of the older branch of "self-taught" as opposed to degree trained in programming - it is now rarer for someone new to get into the field at a higher level without formal training.
A CS professor at my school graduated after 2000 with a bachelor's in creative writing. She did do her graduate studies in CS, however. So it's still possible to be a professor without studying the field at an undergraduate level.
However, she certainly had formal training in CS, just not at the undergrad level.
I'd say that simply suggests boot camps for people without STEM backround should likely take longer.
(Best, they should take as long as they need to until the student demonstrates competence, but that would break the "pay up-front, train a fixed amount of time, get a nice job" business model / marketing strategy.)
I think the basic business model is akin to any other kind of school. The issue at hand is that they're dropping the things that make other schools work: admissions and structured instruction.
Unfortunately, those things aren't fripperies to be tossed away lightly.
That is true but the cohort that have that background is relatively small - in the example mentioned ex miners there will have been a small proportion of such people but a lot will have retrained and gone to work in gas oil or fracking which pays a lot more.
> It may sound weird but actually many people here didn't picked their university by themselves but by the guidance of their parent, so they might study something else than their favourite.
Hello! This was me. Studied music because it’s what my parents wanted me to do, and kept finding ways to shoehorn “computer stuff” into any music I was doing: making digital synths, making music analysis programs, and coding up generative music machines.
That path worked well enough, so it took me awhile to realize I ought to give up the pretense of music and just do the thing I was interested in full-time. The pay difference was indeed the incentive to re-tool, however.
I used a boot camp, where I learned the current faddish tools of frontend, to get connected into the industry, and have since happily transitioned to backend work. I’m not sure the boot camp itself was necessary, and 20 years ago I probably would have found an enthusiast group at a city library or something, but it was a short term functional community that worked for me.
I learned programming at 12 years old. I think its funny that people think you need a engineering degree. It does help to get a higher paycheck though.
I honestly don't know how people can sit through so many classes that are nearly a complete waste of time. Potentially wasting up to four years of life. I tried, was really motivated in the beginning despite it, then slowly burnt out on classes I absolutely didn't need. I left for a job even though I only need a handful more classes.
Also, because I know it coming, not wanting to waste four years of life absolutely does not imply that anyone lacks "grit." I could refer to a dozen current and former coworkers who I am certain will say I don't lack it. Give me an interesting and hard problem to solve and I'll be on it until it is solved. If you don't have one then I don't want to work for you anyway.
My friends who also learned programing at young age, and later got a engineer degree, say they didn't become better at programming, but it sure helped to get a job.
There's no such thing as someone you're not going to have to train. Every single company does something different. To suggest that you're not going to have months of train up isn't feasible. I wish this mindset would go away. Training is, and should be an integral part of any workplace. It's what makes your whole team better, it's what makes everyone have a similar style, and shows people the expectations. This goes for internal code process as well as external code and tools. Embedded especially is going to be hard because it's a specialized skill set that's far harder than people realize especially once you get into space constraints.
I agree with this 100%, even as an experienced engineer I want to continue to give and receive ongoing training. Yet I've actually been told in some settings not to even mention the "T" word because it would be seen as offensive. Instead as an industry we have ridiculous expectations in hiring and an inefficient, informal training process in the form of production failures.
> There's no such thing as someone you're not going to have to train.
Not for employees but for contractors or consultants they better be able to hit the ground running. That’s why they get paid 3x and up what employees get. If you need someone right now you can pay the premium for it and get it.
my experience is that you have to babysit the senior hires a little bit more because they bring their own baggage and habits into the team even if it doesn't support the existing workflow or even goes against.
they are also more resistant to change than a fresh hire, or may be a bit more convincing when they want things to move their way (to the team's detriment).
if you want to incorporate new cultural elements into your team, especially if your team has already strong, well-developed culture, you have to be aware of what is good and what is bad within your existing team, what to keep and what to give up, and be quick to nip any unintended side effects of a cultural/workflow change in the bud.
> commit to 6 months of training for anyone I hire.
Google broadly believes it takes 6-12 months for a new hire to become completely productive, so I doubt that particular aspect of your experience is due to shallowness of the embedded (straight) C (not C++) talent pool in your area.
Google did a lot of pioneering work and created a proprietary stack. This used to be a big competitive advantage, but the industry largely caught up and now the incompatibility is mostly just tech debt that everyone has to ramp up on.
A lot of what's required in onboarding is domain knowledge. Say a fintech engineer gets a job in industrial controls or vice versa; there will be considerable time spent learning about the industry itself, regulatory environment, etc.
Are you speaking as a Googler/Xoogler? They come out with impressive projects like Kube and their build system, I would be surprised if their in house stack can really be described entirely as "tech debt".
Xoogler from a few years ago. I'm not saying they have nothing cutting edge, just that the rest of the industry eventually reached parity with a lot of their everyday platforms. If you come in knowing HDFS and Cassandra and Spark and k8s, moving to CFS and BigTable and Flume and Borg involves learning a whole lot of minor differences that don't make you much more capable but screw up code reuse.
I was pleased to see Cloud Spanner hit the market, and trying to nudge the industry towards hermetic builds with Bazel.
Out of curiosity, what's your area, and what channels do you use for hiring? Sounds like exactly the kind of work I might enjoy (and spent several years doing for my old startup) depending on industry, location, and compensation, but all I ever see are Java and web jobs.
- Most of them have engineering background: electrical engineering, civil engineering, petroleum engineering.
- Since they lack formal education in IT, they have to train twice as hard, which our company encourages (2 months of probation = 2 months of training, it's almost impossible to find developer with Scala experience around here anyway).
- We work with the Bootcamp to improve their program: giving reference to 'hard', 'theoretical' books such as Algorithms & Datastructure or Database Design and cutting down some unnecessary parts.
- Most importantly, we strongly prefer people who switched to IT because they actually love programming, not just looking for higher wage.*
* It may sound weird but actually many people here didn't picked their university by themselves but by the guidance of their parent, so they might study something else than their favourite.