It's like the movie Ratatouille: Not everyone can be a good coder, but a good coder can come from anywhere.
While they may receive an impossibly large number of candidates, in the end, they will boil it down to roughly 15 students. That means that as long as their application process is sane, they will have found 15 good candidates who are going to be 'coding for the right reasons', whatever that means.
This is different from codecademy, which says that anyone and everyone should learn to code. Instead, they're claiming that you don't need a CS degree to be a professional programmer. That doesn't mean they're also saying you don't need to be dedicated, and analytical. Ultimately, the people who enter these programs are the kinds of people who would have made it on their own, albeit on a much longer timeline. I don't see any problem with jumpstarting it with careful curation and guidance.
Is that a problem, underpricing the competition if the market bears it? Dev Bootcamp's cost has risen meteorically since they first opened their doors in February of this year. It is now roughly the same cost as a year's tuition at a UC. Apples to oranges, sure, but it gives the number some perspective.
The difference in the pricing model here is that you don't have to pay it back should things go pear-shaped after the course. Obviously, it's in their interest to secure 100% placement, but at least it's not a financial burden on a student if it doesn't work out. This is an important consideration for some people: these bootcamps are sometimes a last resort for people jump starting a new career after long bouts of unemployment in the current economy. As good as any of these schools are, the risk of dedicating months to a program and taking on additional debt with no guarantee of a job is a tough thing to swallow.
Not only has Dev Bootcamp's cost risen, they're getting super selective about who they let in the program. The other huge issue would be for people who don't live in SF. On their website they say they work with the best recruiters in SF who are "waiting for you to graduate.". Yeah, so if I'm not from SF, then what are my odds of getting in? Probably slim to none.
Regarding the issue of Dev Bootcamp and international students, I live and work in London England and I'm in the Fall cohort. So I can categorically confirm that they do accept international students.
Just wanted to clear that point up.
I find the matter of fact tone of your comment interesting. From what are you basing "they're getting super selective about who they let in the program". Our interview structure and selection criteria has remained the same for a long time, only just now is that changing and by no means is it becoming more selective.
We also don't discriminate based on location, gender, etc.
I've read somewhere that Dev Bootcamp applications for future sessions is now 1000+ for future cohorts. Does everyone have a chance at an interview, or are there specific qualities you look for in an application before giving the interview 'greenlight'?
In 2005, I worked support for a company with a mobile offering. At the time, app purchases were handled exclusively by the carrier and were completely opaque. A little while prior, we had partnered with a shady marketing company, netting us a bunch of unintentional signups that I had the displeasure of fixing.
Since we didn't handle billing, I had to call AT&T with the customer on the line and talk them both through the process of removing the charges(AT&T was feeding customers a line about not handling billing either, for some reason). After doing it a few times, I realized I could do it without the customer, all I needed was a name and a phone number.
It never came down to impersonating the customer, instead, I would just say I was calling on behalf of a customer. Once, a call got escalated to a higher support tier, with the miscommunication that I was a VP of a partner company, which made the agents more responsive, making the process easier, so I just kept reusing that line.
Eventually, I just asked, "what do I tell the next agent I have to deal with so we can just bypass all the lies?" (regarding their inability to modify billing charges). This was happily given to me, and I could now call AT&T support and say, "I'm calling for user X with number Y. I need you to go into the tool and click on Z and then remove the charge from such and such service." Again, when delivered with authority, the rep would do it, no questions asked.
It's hard to fault them, I probably would have done the same in their position. Still, it's scary knowing how little it takes to get customer service to reveal/modify things without hard verification.
I bought a Palm Pre2 last year on ebay and had to go into an AT&T store to activate it. The person helping me had a little trouble activating it, so he called AT&T support and got help so quickly without being asked stupid questions, I've been using his technique ever since.
Whenever I call tech support of a company that has physical locations, I always start with:
"Hello, my name is Kevin, I'm an associate with [company] at the [store] location. I'm trying to help a customer with [my problem] issue..."
And very quickly I'm having a conversation with someone who knows their stuff and doesn't insult my intelligence.
I learned a similar lesson working for RadioShack as a teen except with Sprint phones/service. After handling charges for upset customers I learned the ins and outs of Sprint's phone support and could basically get them to do whatever I wanted.
Needless to say I too carried a Sprint handset at the time.
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They had a guest list and all my students were on it. This particular student was also on it, along with a note to exclude her specifically from entering the office.
Ah, I read your post as if you guys literally just showed up and expected to get in. Did they know you were all together?
I think you did the right thing by allowing the rest of the class to attend, but I feel terrible for your student, especially given the push for more women in engineering.
The story was abbreviated: I talked to several people to figure out what was going on before they insisted we were blocking the entrance. By then she had decided it was not worth the trouble and wanted to leave.
I had another 9 students inside, and the talk was worthwhile for them. Furthermore, the problem was not with the organizers (who were generous and accommodating) or the speakers (who were similarly generous), but with the venue. Nothing would have been solved by protesting: I'm not important enough that anyone would have noticed.
You would have demonstrated that moral authority is on the side of the student who was wronged. It doesn't matter whether or not they change their policy, what matters is that you went along with excluding a student for no reason.
EDIT: Sorry, this came off a bit too personally. I'm a teacher too and I got angry when I read this story. I'll just say more generically that it is easily possible (and justifiable) for a student to feel alienated after a situation like this, especially if they feel like their educator didn't stand up for them. Whether or not "standing up for them" involves canceling the entire trip is a contextual issue, and I really don't know if it would have been a good idea in this case.
Imagine you're a student in that class; you're stoked to see this talk, but one of your classmates can't get in. You feel terrible but you've been looking forward to this. If the teacher decides to "stick it to the man", you and 8 other of your classmates miss out and possibly become bitter towards the excluded one because of Yelp's security measures.
His having to direct her to the nearest transit might seem cold, but he was responsible for all of those students, and he was trying to offer them an experience they would grow from. I would have been incredibly bummed if I were her, but it wasn't anyone in her group's fault and they shouldn't have missed an opportunity to learn because the teacher decided he wanted to take some sort of personal, "Yeah, well I'll show you!" stand.
What kind of students are we talking about here? I assume they're not explaining how Pinterest is scaling to eighth-graders. If we're talking about adults here -- and apparently just 10 of them --, why not let them quickly huddle together and figure it out?
I think this is not so much teacher blaming as wishing to put additional pressure on Yelp for being terrible dickheads, via those teachers. If nobody ever stands up to bullies they just keep doing their thing.
I understand why you disagree, but I don't think there's an obvious right answer here, it sucks either way. I don't think you're in a position to pass judgement unless you were actually there and knew the students personally. What if this would have made the rest of the class resent the one student? That would be a far more damaging outcome in my mind.
Isn't this the kind of mentality that is 'dangerous'?
"Why vote, I'm just 1 vote. It's not going to make any difference."
And you said you're not important enough that anyone would have noticed? So all the 'unimportant' people, when faced with difficult choices, should just roll over and go with the flow? (Not saying you made the wrong/right choice, but your reasoning is off.)
While you had to weigh a group of students' benefit from the talk against 1 missing out on some talk, this also could've been an opportunity for you to teach your students to a different kind of lesson.
I hate to say it but leaving a student alone waiting is pretty shitty.
I agree. This is the place to take a stand. It seems minor and annoying, but when we overlook minor violations like this, they soon evolve into major ones.
Your problem is actually with the organizers. You don't care a bit about random venues except for where organizers of events you are likely to attend decide to use them, I would guess. Therefore, if you have a problem with the venue, you should take it to the organizers, and take it up with them at the time, e.g. by leaving with your student, because wrangling the venue is what they're doing as organizers setting up an event.
Other venues are much more reasonable about this sort of thing. I have a friend who is banned from all Microsoft buildings, including non-Microsoft events hosted by Microsoft. He was informed clearly in writing, and knew the reason for his being banned. That makes Microsoft-operated venues more appealing (on at least this axis) than Yelp ones, since organizers of an event can't be sure that attendees will actually be able to enter. In the Microsoft case, at least a person seemingly knows whether they can attend.
It had everything to do with her name: she was turned away by the person with the guest list, but not by the security guy checking for fake IDs. That was the only piece of information they had.
And no, she's got a down-home 'good old American' type name, if I've ever heard one.
chriszf says nothing to the contrary in the article. We are given the facts: 1) You may only get in if you are on the list (of names) and 2) Student X did not get in.
There are certainly more than two facts in those 500 words. Some relevant ones:
1. chriszf wasn't aware of the guest list requirement at the gate
2. No one at Yelp told him of this in response to his inquiries
3. Yelp was provided with a guest list
4. The security guard said "undisclosed security risk", not "not on the list"
5. Everyone except this student got in without a hitch
6. chriszf came to the conclusion that, since the only information Yelp had on her was her name (due to the guest list), that that was why they had barred her.
Fact 6 implies that chriszf did check the guest list (as later confirmed here). I'm just wondering at how, especially in spite of facts 2 and 4, so many people decided that the most logical conclusion was that chriszf is an idiot that is unable to confirm whether a student's name appears on a guest list.
There are many reasons for a name to not be on a guest list. I never implied anyone was an idiot. Not one of the items listed confirm whether or not student x's name is on the list.
chriszf was able to come to the conclusion you state because chriszf had more information than was written in the blog post.
But why did you come to the conclusion that only possible problem was that she absolutely must not have been on the guest list, when the entire point of the post was that Yelp was excluding people based solely on their name?
It's wrong to offer up the idea that women somehow are biologically averse to tech. You need only look outside the US to verify this: Malaysia's tech sector is almost evenly split between men and women.
It's a cultural thing, which we're loth to admit. We look around and say, "We treat women the same around here", not thinking for a second that maybe that's the problem.
I run the Hackbright Academy, a hacker school for women, and I ask all applicants what compels them to apply to our program. Invariably, part of every story is the idea that they were intimidated out of the field in college or high school by their male peers. Whether or not that's the grand reason for the disparity, it's still something that shouldn't be a reason at all.
Malaysia may not constitute good evidence for it being a cultural thing. Reason: a young male social outcast in Malaysia can't teach himself computer programming the way a young male social outcast in the United States can. So all programmers are college taught, which results in an even gender split. Whereas in the US, male geeks get a head start as kids and intimidate women in college with their accumulated skills.
Repeat after me: programming is not computer science.
Got it? Good. Now, for actual advice.
Contrary to the prevailing sentiment, there actually is a career path in engineering that starts at the bottom and takes you to the top, all classical-like.
It goes something like this:
Customer Support/QA -> QA Engineer -> Support Engineer -> Junior Developer
QA is very easy to get into. If you play your cards right, you can get into QA at a place that encourages automation and whitebox testing, which will expose you to a lot of the fundamental skills.
From there, it's a short hop to QA Engineer, which is exactly the same as what I just said, except they expect you to be more than a warm body clicking on things till they break. You'll be required to write code here.
A support engineer is someone who's midway between dev, QA, and customer support. Here, your customers are developers, so the discourse is a little bit more elevated than a normal customer support role. Support engineers are often asked to produce sample code for customers learning to use the product. Take this opportunity to write it yourself rather than sending canned samples.
(Optional) Dev Evangelist: This is much like the previous role, except you spend all your time at hackathons being cool and showing off how cool your API is.
Do well at these, and it'll be a little more straightforward landing that junior dev job. Congratulations, you're a programmer.
If you want to program, start doing that and don't accept a job doing anything else. Doctors don't accept nursing jobs and civil engineers don't dig holes. I have never employed people who have been 'happy' to start in QA or whatever other role. Why would you accept anything else other than what you really want to do, and are capable of? If you can't land a job as a junior developer, then perhaps you are not cut out to be a programmer?
Also, being a good QA person or customer support person is valuable in itself, and isn't just a 'starting point' for a programming career. I have several friends who have been dedicated QA people for their entire careers, and definitely do not see their role as being 'less' than being a developer.
While they may receive an impossibly large number of candidates, in the end, they will boil it down to roughly 15 students. That means that as long as their application process is sane, they will have found 15 good candidates who are going to be 'coding for the right reasons', whatever that means.
This is different from codecademy, which says that anyone and everyone should learn to code. Instead, they're claiming that you don't need a CS degree to be a professional programmer. That doesn't mean they're also saying you don't need to be dedicated, and analytical. Ultimately, the people who enter these programs are the kinds of people who would have made it on their own, albeit on a much longer timeline. I don't see any problem with jumpstarting it with careful curation and guidance.