Hi all, founder here -- does this problem resonate with anyone else?
I feel like I've been on a lot of projects that kinda blew up (in a bad way) at the end, and the PMs seemed surprised. But it was kinda predictable, to all of the devs, in a vague way. And there wasn't a great way to raise these vague concerns _during_ the project. :/
I think honest 'feelings' feedback from dev teams up to PMs could help. Track responses, see if confidence is trending down -- if things look bad, at least PMs know there's a problem.
Isn't the incentive here to choose the most buzzwordy and low-barrier-to-entry technologies, and spend just enough time/effort to get the students through an interview so the bootcamp can get paid?
Incentives are hard in this space. Not sure how for-profit companies who get paid by students can ever be exactly incentivized to focus on honest evaluation and strong fundamentals.
Maybe the FAANG companies should start/fund a bootcamp, but then you'd have to be selective, and you'd end up with something totally different... :/
The long-term incentives are to create a brand of students that are so good people come to us and say, “We love Lambda School grads; I want to hire 50 Lambda School grads next year.”
As much as I've been very skeptical of Lambda School in the past, it's worth noting that their incentive structure seems aligned well. 17% of your first 2 years salary is a huge number, but it depends on you getting a good job and keeping it for 2 years. Otherwise they have to invest more time into you.
> Isn't the incentive here to choose the most buzzwordy and low-barrier-to-entry technologies, and spend just enough time/effort to get the students through an interview so the bootcamp can get paid?
This reminds me of some recent comments about the iPhone XS performance for the Speedometer 2.0 JavaScript benchmark [1]. The comment was something like "Apple just optimized their processor to beat benchmarks." In reality, the benchmark uses the TodoMVC project to run through dozens of real-world JavaScript frameworks. So even if Apple was just optimizing for some benchmarks, they've also improved the performance of real-world applications that use React and Ember.js.
Lambda School might be teaching some "buzzwordy" programming languages and frameworks, and the students might learn just enough to pass technical coding interviews and get a job, and they might have just enough experience to start contributing code and working on features that bring in more paying customers (or raise more VC funding), and they can ramp up quickly enough to not get fired. And those customers/VCs give money to the company, so the company can pay the employee, who gives some of the money to Lambda. This seems like a good "benchmark" to optimize for.
Lambda itself may be fine, I can't judge it specifically (and appreciate Austen engaging :)).
That said, I agree that if they come in with "enough experience to start contributing code [etc]", that's a good benchmark!
But for the school to be successful, they don't really _need_ to go that far, which is my point about incentives: They just need them to look good enough on paper to get in the door, and know just enough that someone will take a chance on some percent of them, and rely on the fact that firing is hard -- in this model, their 'incentive' is to just churn out as many grads as possible, with the nicest resumes possible.
After writing that, though, I think I'm being more cynical than needed, prob based on some sub-par bootcamp grad interview experiences. I hope Lambda is really committed to good education, and I wish them the best, it's a worthy ambition and a hard problem.
> They just need them to look good enough on paper to get in the door, and know just enough that someone will take a chance on some percent of them, and rely on the fact that firing is hard
We sometimes hire mid/jr-level FE developers, which means we get _lots_ of bootcamp applicants.
It feels like the main goal of the bootcamp is to produce portfolios/resumes that make you indistinguishable on paper from developers that learned any other way.
Not necessarily bad, but the quality difference among bootcamp grads (from the same program!) is crazy. Some people understand the fundamentals of what they learned and continue to learn and expand their skills, but some are just copy/pasting code and debugging by typing random character combinations until something works. Both got through the bootcamp with identical group-project portfolios and class assignment personal websites and resumes.
We've recently started sending an at-home coding challenge to all jr. FE applicants, just to cut down on amount of time wasted if we bring them in and they don't know anything. This has worked okay so far.
I'm generally very cognizant of wasting peoples time, so I don't want to do this as a general rule for more experienced candidates. But for junior/first-job candidates, I'm not sure it should be as offensive. Do any of y'all see a reasonable distinction here?
Is a bootcamp grad much different than a university grad?
While in school, I read blogs claiming that the majority of CS grads can't code. I got the hint this may be true in one of my 3rd-year classes where we had to work in groups of 2 or 3 over the course of the semester to write a program that was essentially like an alpha version of SimCity. At the last day of class, we had to present our work. Half the groups didn't complete the project, and one group only had a blank window with a Help button that presented a wall of text. Then, during my senior project, in my group of six, two of them admitted to not knowing how to code, with one of them saying they didn't even want to code, they just became a CS major because they heard CS majors have low unemployment and good salaries.
I've digressed a bit, but...
When I finished my degree, I didn't have a software engineering internship under my belt, so I made sure to list personal projects on my resume. I think the presence of projects done on my own time for my own enjoyment and learning was a key factor in landing my first job.
So no, I don't think there's anything offensive about rejecting a candidate if a bootcamp is all they have to show.
I’ve worked with people who have MBAs but aren’t really developers or even devops types.
It’s interesting to see them get frustrated so easily and have a hard time plowing through problem after problem making small changes until they finally get to something that works.
Someone who has only done a boot camp hasn’t demonstrated that they can work on problems for weeks or months before they can see real progress.
Someone who has an actual degree from a legit university or college, has at least proven that they can spend months or even years working on something until they get their reward. They won’t necessarily be able to program their way out of a wet paper bag, but they have at least one advantage on people who only have the boot camp certificate.
I've been hiring people for a long time and have always been against coding challenges. That was possible when I was only looking for more senior roles or hiring junior roles at a startup or small company. I'd generally talk to anyone that didn't appear incompetent to HR during an initial screen.
Now that I'm hiring for multiple junior openings at a fairly well known public company, hundreds of resumes come in each week, and I added a code test is there to help weed out those who are tragically lacking in skill or effort. The test is about as simple as could be and I generally don't even look at the score. I do look at the code, however.
Offensive, interesting. Yes, I don't think it's offensive. I do think the attitude of "my time is worth more than yours" isn't one I particularly appreciate. When I was interviewing and got at-home coding challenges, I appreciated it when the assumption was I was going to get actual helpful feedback if I didn't pass to the next level. A solid code review, if you will.
At least then there's some sort of reciprocity in time.
Out of curiosity, if it wasn't the environmental or family differences, and if the cops aren't preventing crime in the higher-income neighborhoods, what do you think caused the first school to be low-performing and the other to be high-performing?
I don't think it was negative environmental differences, but the positive ones.
The kids in the burbs had been taught to read before they entered school. The teachers are just better, as they're paid better there (school funding comes from property taxes). The kids are pushed to succeed, internalize that, and push eachother to succeed, whereas school in the city felt more like daycare going into prison.
Also, your teenage screwups are far more likely to be swept under the rug or not be noticed in the burbs. Saw more guns in school there. Saw kids get busted for literal pounds of drugs, but because their dad knew the DA or something they got a sealed misdemeanor possession, and had it expunged as quickly as possible.
You know the saying "you're fine as long as you aren't breaking more than one law at a time"? Like don't speed if you have a joint in your car, etc.? That comes from a huge position of privilege that isn't afforded to a lot of the population.
EDIT: Also I was told (but haven't confirmed) that apparently colleges were weighting grades from the higher background school in such a way that you could be a B or C student, and after weighting it was the equivalent of off the charts in the other district. Like literally unattainable, straight As with AP classes (if they were even offered) would still be weighted as less.
If you have no problem with focus, perhaps you don't need it.
I've found it useful at my work (consulting/team lead) where I'm expected to be somewhat responsive to email/slack. Rather than leaving Slack/email open (rookie move, I know), I use Pomodoro (currently at 45/5) just to remind me to open them, check for new stuff, and then close them again for my next chunk of work.
Contrariwise, I just read and loved Deep Work: it's made me more purposeful about directing my attention, and aware of how my environment and lower desires work against this focus.
The journalistic model of doing deep work does seems different than the others, but he's not recommending it, just pointing out that there are outliers who can train themselves to reach intense focus states quickly and do deep work in short periods of time. Not sure why this would bother you -- if it doesn't apply to you, ignore it!
I felt like there was a ton of value here. Recommended for all!
Glad it helped you! In my case, as I was already exposed to the concept of being in the flow[0] while coding and the basic rule of reserving the biggest chunk of time to my most long term or important work in my day, it was a waste of time.
Are Americans outliers in loneliness? I know Pinker mentions this in Enlightenment Now, but I feel like it's glossed over a bit since it doesn't really align with his thesis.
I'm very interested in the reasons for this, though. Loss of community structures without replacements? (Wider spread families for work, not going to church...)
