[austenallred]

>All the evidence shows that programming requires a high level of aptitude that only a small percentage of the population possess.

>The current fad for short learn-to-code courses is selling people a lie and will do nothing to help the skills shortage for professional programmers.

Outside the obvious lack of definition as to what a "programmer" actually is, this is a non sequitur (the conclusion doe not follow). There's an assumption built in that those who do possess a high level of aptitude already have CS degrees or are self-taught because it comes to them naturally. What if there are people who possess that high level of aptitude and they want something to help them learn in a structured way?

Extrapolated, the author's argument could be seen as, "Sorry, there's no point in teaching programming, because everyone with the aptitude to program already knows how to program," and I think that is a recognizable falsehood, if only anecdotally.

In other words, even given the assumption that programming does require a higher aptitude than some subset of the population does possess, there is no surefire way to determine who that subset is based on credentialing.

[serge2k]

The lie they are selling is that anyone can learn to code in 10 weeks. While this maybe true if you are targeting the correct subset of the population (those who do have a natural aptitude), it's not true of a random sample of the entire population. Since these schools sample from the entire population, their chances of producing large numbers of skilled software developers are low, and therefore they will do little to help with the shortages of those developers.

Sounds like a reasonable argument to me.

[austenallred]

I don't think anyone pretends like you can "learn to code" in 10 weeks any more than I "learned to speak Russian" in my three-month intensive Russian course. Of course I didn't speak fluently by the time I left.

But I learned enough that when I lived in Ukraine I understood a bit of what people were saying, I could communicate somewhat, and a couple of years later I was reading Tolstoy.

People think about bootcamps all wrong. You don't leave like "holy shit I'm a master programmer." You leave knowing, "OK, it'll take a while longer, but I can contribute a bit now, and I'll pick up more as I go."