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Thank you for a fair comment. You never know who you are going to get.
I have interviewed people with degrees that were horrible.
And I have met people who learned programming on their own because they loved it (Myself included).
I later went on to get a degree after having 2+yrs of professional experience.
Is a CS degree better? It depends on the school. Some of them are so watered down that the kids can't explain the conceptual difference between a rock sort and a bubble sort.
In the end, we find that the key is an ability to RELATE and SOLVE the problems at hand in a way that is better than patch work. If you can't relate to the customer, you are going to do the wrong thing. If you can't solve the problem correctly, you will get the wrong answer. And if you are hacking code to make it work, you will be covering the wrong set of inputs, or a limited set of outputs.
Experience is the final key. Having read lots of code, having written lots of code, and learning to debug someone elses code.
4 Years of University. There was probably 1.5 - 2yrs of FULL TIME programming courses in that degree. So 1yr of programming course work, online, pretty much full time is a great start! The is the beginning of me being interested, unless they are a rock star from the start.
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Many, many moons ago, I was one of Maggie's millions having lost my job at the local hospital. After 6 months of failing to find myself a McJob, I wound up on a government sponsored course in C.
The course was full time - 40 hours a week, I think - followed by 6 months of working for sweet F.A. but it did lead to a job working for the company that I'd spent 6 months working for nothing for (albeit on cr@p money because they knew that I couldn't get another job with only 6 month's experience so they knew that they had me over a barrel).
Did I learn a lot in the initial 6 months? Hell, yes! The course was actually really good. That may just be that I hit it lucky in getting a really good lecturer, though.
Did I learn anything in the next six months? Hell, yes! You can't eat well on promises of jam tomorrow.
Would I have been better off sitting at home (not that I really had one at the time) with a copy of Herb Schildt's Teach Yourself C? Well, possibly, had I been able to afford a computer, but would I have got a job at the end of it? Probably not - there really weren't many jobs around in any field back in those days and a CV that said "I haven't got any qualifications but I taught myself to code" probably wouldn't have got me too many interviews, so for me at the time it was the only viable route.
But a 3 month bootcamp? Well, yes, I think you can get a pretty good grounding in 3 months providing that it's full time and providing that you're taught by a good teacher. I think it's perfectly possible to learn more about coding in a 3 month bootcamp than you'd learn in a 3 year CS degree but ... and it's a really big but ... would it leave you in an employable position?
Add in the possibility that you're paying a whole load of cash and there's no guarantee that you will get a decent teacher and it all sounds like a very bad idea. It's not just a case of risking the X-thousand in fees, there's also the costs of living through a period of zero income to factor in along with all the sundry expenses - even with an A1 training provider, the potential losses are massive. Factor in the possibility (probability perhaps) that the provider could well turn out to be dodgy and/or substandard and it starts to sound like asking someone to sell their house to buy a lottery ticket.
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Bloody well said and good on ya for making something of it.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I hear there is also a pill to make your d*** bigger too.
Jeremy Falcon
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The way I see it, having a certain level of intelligence isn't too much too ask. I don't mean knowledge, I mean intelligence: The abiltiy to think critically and to deduce new knowledge from existing facts. Everyone with that inelligence can see for himself that those camps are a rip-off. Sure, they can get one started in the world of software engineering, but there's no way they can be the one-stop jumppad into the (well-paid) job.
If someone doesn't see that, it's really is his own fault.
Yes, I am blaming the victim here, but hey, if someone walks alone into a dark alley in the Bronx (or Berlin East, pick your poison) at night, then the victim is clearly to blame for stupidity. Same goes with those boot camps. If someone falls for clearly false promises, well, one has to learn about life somewhere.
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Pretty much a scam.
Yes, there are _loads_ of people who learn better with a teacher than just reading textbooks and doing some tutorials and then coding a few small projects to learn.
Unfortunately, those same people don't make the best developers - because after they've got the job, coders need ongoing development and training, and I've only once come across companies who will pay for formal training for developers. We're expected to learn on the job or train in our own time.
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I've been learning much the same way (with a lot of help from Code Project of course  ). My job is pretty secure where I'm at, but if something ever happens here, I don't think any other HR department would consider me for an equivalent position based on the fact that I don't have that piece of paper from an accredited source that says I can do what I do now.
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Code boot camps are part of the for-profit education business. It's a sleazy business which exists to part fools from their money, particularly to siphon off federally insured tuition grant money. This money is loaned to students and guaranteed by the government (in the US). The student is responsible to repay the loans, and to determine that they are getting a good education. But the young and the desperate are not in a good position to judge quality or understand how burdensome the student loan debt will become if the education does not lead to a job.
- $12,500 would pay for two years at a public university or 4 years at a community college, but only three months at a coding boot camp.
- A 4 year degree in the US is about 1,800 hours of instruction, and probably about an equal number of hours of homework. An AA degree in the US is 900 hours of instruction, and an equal amount of homework. A boot camp that runs 8 hours a day, five days a week for 3 months (the poster's parameters) is about 500 hours of instruction and labs, and maybe another 200 hours of homework.
- Any "guarantee" of employment has to be read very carefully or it is meaningless. Is it a full time job? Is it permanent? Is it a software developer job? What does it pay compared to the market rate? If any of these things are not spelled out, the guarantee is worthless.
- Not all software jobs are created equal. A front-end job slinging HTML and a little JavaScript doesn't pay the same as a core developer position using C++ or Java, and has limited growth potential.
Now you make the call. Which option is worth the money? Which option provides the most instruction? Which candidate would you hire if you were the hiring manager.
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Not being cynical for a change - I almost shed a tear of this and it's implication not only to Computer Science but anything else that can be gotten through without ever learning anything.
Perhaps humanity has always been primarily a colony of drones - but I'd like to think better of it.
| Ravings en masse^ |
|---|
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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That's not how I read it.
SO and CP are incredible resources of knowledge. If someone uses those resources to help them learn, and to get them through the bits they have trouble understanding, then I say: Job Well Done!
So I see it as saying "SO was like a mentor to me".
I would hope that there are people who feel the same about CP.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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The trouble is that I don't think he's joking. 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I've been programming for many years and when I have a question or can't remember a certain syntax, I don't have to refer to books anymore. I use the internet. Nothing wrong with that.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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I've been programming for many decades and when I started MS hadn't even developed IntelliSense and there was no internet so we used MSDN on CD.
But I fear I'm straying from the point, I don't think looking up syntax is quite the kind of help we're talking about here 
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F-ES Sitecore wrote: looking up syntax is quite the kind of help we're talking about here
Probably.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Difference is us Senior Citizens Developers know what we're trying to do, it is normally a little detail, especially syntax, that is missing.
veni bibi saltavi
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I think as resources - processors, storage, memory, display, networking; pick any or all - have improved a lot of the black arts of the developer's life that we grew up with are being lost.
There is a tendency to treat any bottleneck as a hardware issue rather than a software issue. I remember programming tricks from the old personal computing days to gain that extra few bytes of memory, knowing how many steps a command took so you could tune down performance, even plugging in dirty peeks & pokes to get that little tiny extra performance.
That was software art, using the latest library and downloaded tutorial? Nah.
veni bibi saltavi
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For the masses it's not done anymore - a tablet is enough for the 90% of the population. On server business it's hardly done especially because often the service provider sells also hardware so it's more profitable selling more units.
The real challenges still happen in computing-intensive and real-time systems, where rewriting core blocks in Assebler is still considered a feasible approach.
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
When I was six, there were no ones and zeroes - only zeroes. And not all of them worked. -- Ravi Bhavnani
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This is programming as an art[^]
(For the unaware, this is the youtube recording of a 64kbyte executable - all real time calculation, including the music playing. The executable can be downloaded from pouet.org)
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I'd like to know how many of you out there will join me in the pledge:
My Upgrade From Win7 is Linux
Actually, this could be the basis for an extremely good survey question (hint hint hint).
| Ravings en masse^ |
|---|
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Sorry, Win 10 working fine.
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Perhaps you missed these:
The Lounge 0[^]
The Lounge 1[^]
And that's because I don't feel like diving to far back into the history of the Win10 Lose10
| Ravings en masse^ |
|---|
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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No, I read most of the rants in the Lounge, but rarely have the same problems.
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Agreed! 
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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