It's so important to realize that just because someone gives it away, doesn't mean it doesn't have a cost. If you use the service and want it to be around, it needs to be supported.
Yeah, the response to adversity is key. Being able to keep going and figuring things out even when you're stuck or out of the realm of your domain knowledge is so important.
If you're going to put in months of "prep work", you don't really need a boot camp to learn how to be a programmer. At best, it's an expensive job placement program that forces you to do a lot of homework to cover their own reputation. Which is brilliant.
Background: I've been programming for over a decade; I'm self-taught and I've taught a handful of other people very early in their programming careers. Even the folks who mastered the fundamentals didn't really grasp the advanced concepts in a few weeks (probably due to being really busy with work, etc.).
The interesting part of this is the "don't pay if you don't get hired" part of the policy. Sure, a couple of the big in-person boot camps have that, but I've never seen it online-only.
The trick here is the required 2000$ deposit upon obtaining a reserved spot in the course. This 2000$ is refunded (with fees deducted, I would guess) 6 months after the end of the course if no job offers were made to you.
I'm guessing that receiving a 40k/yr offer from a small-town business on the other side of the country means they clap their hands and claim their prize. Of course they want you to have the biggest salary you/they can find within 6 months, but other than that, location and conditions and other factors are irrelevant. If that's all they can find for you, they'll take it, and from what I could tell of the fine print you either take it too or pay the remaining 10800$ in full immediately.
I first learned on a variant of BASIC myself when I was in elementary school, and it was effortless then -- but that's a profoundly different thing from learning the professional tools/design patterns/development styles to get hired in a specific domain. As somebody who picked it up again after a long break, the whole point was not 'getting hired in some hot new lucrative industry,' but 'god, please let somebody hire me to do this thing that is so much more mentally satisfying than the last few things I've done for a living.'
From that perspective, I absolutely understand the urgency here, and appreciate how this article talks about how the moment when the tutorials break off is when the real learning begins.
At the time "design patterns" were somewhere in the distant future, development style was something you had rather than something you learned, and the list of professional tools was really short. I'm sure this is part of what made it incredibly fun.
I think today's students would also have a lot more fun if they ignored all the opinionated garbage about which flavor-of-the-month checkboxes they need on their resume. Figure out what you like and get really good at it. Many top employers are looking for passion, pragmatism, and adaptability rather than specific tools and libraries.
I may have been to harsh in my assessment. But still, how many of these people are sitting down and working on some puzzle/problem/project they find interesting vs saying I know I need rails, and angular to make web apps and then just going through tutorial after tutorial. How many of them are actually interested in it in and of itself. I learned how to program very far away from the concept of writing an app that I could deploy to heroku.
Really good discussion of what falls apart when these "anyone can learn to code!" tutorials leave you high and dry, and how to get past that next huge hurdle of self-sufficiency.
As someone who is currently learning how to code, the author gets it mostly right.
For me, the hardest parts of programming as a beginner - understanding OOP, data structures, etc. - didn't really 'click' until I stopped reading tutorials about them and start writing my own programs. The idea of 'objects' and 'instance variables' was mind boggingly confusing at first, but once I stopped worrying about how to make sense of them, the concepts somehow just fell into place.
I've also been trying to learn French simultaneously. The process was somewhat similar - taking a few Duolingo lessons and thinking that 'hey, I can do this!'. Then I read some actual French prose and everything seemed impossibly difficult. Things didn't 'click' until I started living and breathing French.
Indeed, you can only get good at programming by doing it.
As someone who learnt programming in the 90ies, one of the difficult things nowadays seems to be that there are so many languages, libraries, frameworks, hypes, etc. Of course, if you know your CS and have experience, most of it are variations on common themes. However, I can imagine that it can be very difficult to focus on one thing and learning it well. There must be many copy & paste programmers out there who never learn anything in depth.
At the beginning of the nineties things were much simpler. If you had a home PC (obviously without internet), you could get started with QBasic, or shell out some money for a compiler and get Turbo Pascal or Turbo C++.
I did quite a bit of Turbo Pascal programming at some point and it was all very understandable. A simple language, a small standard library that's probably all that you'll have, good documentation, and an IDE (which had a very nice debugger and profiler). And you just crafted tools with that.
I actually learned HTML, CSS and JS way back when I was in 6th grade. This was pre dot-com time and there were only a handful of resources. You could understand HTML and CSS in a day because there were so few HTML tags and requirements. 'Frameworks' was something that didn't even exist.
I somehow stopped my learning process before I hit 8th grade (around the same time I discovered that the opposite sex exists). When I picked it up again recently, the sheer number and complexity of frameworks and languages itself was daunting.
I can't imagine how hard it must be for someone who hasn't had a lick of coding experience. I could at least build a good looking website in HTML, CSS and simple JS before I started learning how to code.
It's damn tough and it has given me newfound respect for top coders. I work in marketing in my day job, and honestly, you could teach someone to replace me within a few weeks
I have been coding for a long, long time. Since the 80s. But I got started with the idea that I wanted to 'build' something...I think it was a randomized dice roll or something. Having something you are trying to actually 'make' will cause you to learn what you don't know, and keep going.
It's no different than saying 'I want to build a tree house'. as opposed to 'I'd like to learn how to do construction' or 'I'd like to understand how to build with lumber'. The first statement will drive you to figure out or learn what it takes to make something tangible, the second two statements are just nice ideas, easily discarded when things get difficult.
Yeah, that too. I have a humanities background, but I was always keen on mathematics. I know this is not true for a lot of my peers who studied the arts.
Really makes 'anyone can code' sound more like a marketing slogan than an evidence backed statement. If your math and logic game is weak, you'll have a hard time with anything beyond the most cookie cutter PHP code.
