This is the first time I hear about this training program, but my impression (as somebody living outside the US) is that at the moment there is a shortage of programmers in the Silicon Valley, and therefore it is relatively easy, at least for people with the appropriate cognitive structure (those who can “grok” programming), to get a relatively high-paying programming job, even with minimal training. I suppose this is especially true in the web app/mobile app industry, since these tend to be highly commodified, non-critical products, which can be developed and deployed incrementally and have often very short lifecycles, hence a “quantity over quality” production process is used, employing a large number of relatively low-skilled programmers (*).
Since the barriers to entry to the industry are low, evaluating the effectiveness of a commercial training program is not trivial: just noting that most people who complete the program get a job isn’t great evidence. You would have to check whether people who complete the program are more likely to get a job, or get higher average salaries, than people who taught programming themselves by reading a few tutorials or completed free online courses like those offered by Code.org, Coursera, etc. If there was no difference, or the difference was not high enough to pay back the training program cost, then paying for it would be sub-optimal.
(* I’m not saying that all app programmers are low-skilled, just that high skill is not a requirement for most of these jobs)
And/or “shortage of programmers ticking all the boxes on this highly specific technology stack we’re using”. I get the impression that the greatest advantage of these development bootcamps from a hiring perspective is having a turnaround time short enough that they can focus narrowly on whatever technologies are trendy at the moment, as opposed to a traditional CS degree which is much more theory-centric and often a couple years out of date in its practical offerings.
It seems to me they already tend to offer quite high salaries. Further increasing them could increase the number of available programmers, although there are going to be both short-term and long-term availability limits. And obviously, companies can’t afford to pay arbitrary high salaries.
More specifically, I suppose that much of this labor demand comes from startups, which often operate on the brink of financial viability. Startups have high failure rates, but a few of them generate a very high return on investment, which is what makes the whole startup industry viable: VCs are as risk averse as anybody else, but by diversifying their investments in many startups they reduce the variance of their return and thus obtain a positive expected utility. However, if failure rate goes up (for instance due to increased labor costs) without the other parameters changing, it would kill the whole industry, and I would expect this to occur in a very non-linear fashion, essentially as a threshold effect.
Are you asking what makes people self-motivated, have burning curiosity, and be willing to just dive headlong into new fields of study?
I have no idea, but I suspect carefully choosing one’s parents helps :-)
There is also the standard stereotype of high-functioning autistics with superhuman ability to focus, but I don’t know how well it corresponds to reality.
Few people have the mental starmina to just teach themselves 8 hours a day via reading a few tutorials and complete free online courses.
True, but I suspect that the effect of training time runs into diminishing returns well before you reach 8 hours a day, in particular after you have been doing it for a few days.
It also likely that the enviroment will make it easy to network with other programmers.
I think there are many smart people that have issues with akrasia. Being in an enviroment with other people who also work makes it much easier to just sit down and follow the course.
The fact that the deal with App Academy is that you only pay when you get a job also makes it in their interest that the logistics of the job search are settled.
For someone without a programming job the way to find work as a programmer might not seem straightforward even after completing a bunch of tutorials.
For this description the only reason I won’t go to App Academy is that it’s in the US. If I could just do this is a a European city I would likely pursue it because it’s a path that’s much more straightforward than my current one.
I’m not saying that they offer no value, I’m saying that the fact that they have high hiring ratios statistics is, by itself, not strong evidence that they offer enough value to justify their price.
This is the first time I hear about this training program, but my impression (as somebody living outside the US) is that at the moment there is a shortage of programmers in the Silicon Valley, and therefore it is relatively easy, at least for people with the appropriate cognitive structure (those who can “grok” programming), to get a relatively high-paying programming job, even with minimal training.
I suppose this is especially true in the web app/mobile app industry, since these tend to be highly commodified, non-critical products, which can be developed and deployed incrementally and have often very short lifecycles, hence a “quantity over quality” production process is used, employing a large number of relatively low-skilled programmers (*).
Since the barriers to entry to the industry are low, evaluating the effectiveness of a commercial training program is not trivial: just noting that most people who complete the program get a job isn’t great evidence.
You would have to check whether people who complete the program are more likely to get a job, or get higher average salaries, than people who taught programming themselves by reading a few tutorials or completed free online courses like those offered by Code.org, Coursera, etc.
If there was no difference, or the difference was not high enough to pay back the training program cost, then paying for it would be sub-optimal.
(* I’m not saying that all app programmers are low-skilled, just that high skill is not a requirement for most of these jobs)
“Shortage of programmers” often means “shortage of programmers willing to work for the salaries we offer”.
And/or “shortage of programmers ticking all the boxes on this highly specific technology stack we’re using”. I get the impression that the greatest advantage of these development bootcamps from a hiring perspective is having a turnaround time short enough that they can focus narrowly on whatever technologies are trendy at the moment, as opposed to a traditional CS degree which is much more theory-centric and often a couple years out of date in its practical offerings.
It seems to me they already tend to offer quite high salaries.
Further increasing them could increase the number of available programmers, although there are going to be both short-term and long-term availability limits. And obviously, companies can’t afford to pay arbitrary high salaries.
More specifically, I suppose that much of this labor demand comes from startups, which often operate on the brink of financial viability.
Startups have high failure rates, but a few of them generate a very high return on investment, which is what makes the whole startup industry viable: VCs are as risk averse as anybody else, but by diversifying their investments in many startups they reduce the variance of their return and thus obtain a positive expected utility. However, if failure rate goes up (for instance due to increased labor costs) without the other parameters changing, it would kill the whole industry, and I would expect this to occur in a very non-linear fashion, essentially as a threshold effect.
Few people have the mental starmina to just teach themselves 8 hours a day via reading a few tutorials and complete free online courses.
If you go with your mattress to App Academy it takes effort to not spent time programming when all the people around you are programming.
It also likely that the enviroment will make it easy to network with other programmers.
It’s actually a defining characteristic of hackers, except that it’s more like 16 hours a day.
It depends on the teacher. If you have a specific well defined project than a good hacker can work his 16 hours focused on the project.
From the people I know few have the same ability for the kind of general tutorial learning that provides broad knowledge.
I think I certainly spend many days where I spent most of my time learning but it wasn’t the kind of focused learning you have in school.
Which teacher? ”...mental stamina to just teach themselves”
If that’s the case do you have any idea what makes them so exceptional?
Are you asking what makes people self-motivated, have burning curiosity, and be willing to just dive headlong into new fields of study?
I have no idea, but I suspect carefully choosing one’s parents helps :-)
There is also the standard stereotype of high-functioning autistics with superhuman ability to focus, but I don’t know how well it corresponds to reality.
You might consider this interesting.
I do, thanks.
True, but I suspect that the effect of training time runs into diminishing returns well before you reach 8 hours a day, in particular after you have been doing it for a few days.
Agreed.
I think there are many smart people that have issues with akrasia. Being in an enviroment with other people who also work makes it much easier to just sit down and follow the course.
The fact that the deal with App Academy is that you only pay when you get a job also makes it in their interest that the logistics of the job search are settled.
For someone without a programming job the way to find work as a programmer might not seem straightforward even after completing a bunch of tutorials.
For this description the only reason I won’t go to App Academy is that it’s in the US. If I could just do this is a a European city I would likely pursue it because it’s a path that’s much more straightforward than my current one.
I’m not saying that they offer no value, I’m saying that the fact that they have high hiring ratios statistics is, by itself, not strong evidence that they offer enough value to justify their price.