[autotune]

1) That's not really a "bootcamp" issue as it is with a candidate who can't be bothered to learn basic programming concepts or open a book on their own. Almost every book I've read on programming covers OOP in most languages. You can even hack it together in BASH (http://lab.madscience.nl/oo.sh.txt), not that you should.

2) LAMP stack is still probably the safest bet (substitute PHP for Python maybe), but yeah, just because it's the current hotness for a few startups doesn't mean it'll get you hired to know the most hyped tech.

3) Stop looking for candidates from Manhattan, or only hire those looking to move who have done just a little bit of research? CNN's COL calculator shows $100K in NYC is equal to about $54K in NJ so you don't seem too far off base for what you're looking for (http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/). From personal experience their calculations were accurate when I made my move from the midwest to SF. Regardless, again that doesn't sound like a "bootcamp" issue so much as "candidates who can't be bothered to do basic googling/research issue."

[bobwaycott]

> 1) That's not really a "bootcamp" issue as it is with a candidate who can't be bothered to learn basic programming concepts or open a book on their own. Almost every book I've read on programming covers OOP in most languages.

I wholeheartedly disagree here, and think it very much is an issue with bootcamps. If a bootcamp doesn't even introduce its students to such concepts as classes, instances, OOP, and basic data types, then it has failed to adequately serve its students with fundamental knowledge and offered a shitty introduction to programming. I've worked to mentor a few people who have come out of bootcamps, and I see this lack of knowledge consistently. When I do, it has never been because the student couldn't be bothered to read or study. It has always been because the concepts were never mentioned and introduced, and thus the student didn't even know it existed, thus that it was something they should understand. Whenever I have introduced the concepts, the students eat that shit up, because they really are interested in learning.

Personally, I think a great many bootcamps are poor places to learn programming because they overwhelmingly focus on web-stack. When you're learning to place shit into the DOM, you don't need to care if it's an int, string, dictionary, array, etc. When you aren't being taught to store your data in an SQL table, you don't become aware of data types, parsing ints, casting strings, coercing one type to another, validating types, etc. You're just being introduced to storing blobs of JSON into Mongo or whatever. Hell, when I started with JS so many years ago, I was rather dumbfounded there was a difference between == and ===. This leads to fresh, potentially valuable developers who don't even know what they don't know. And when that's your starting point, it's a bit unfair to think it's the students' fault. We wouldn't say that of CS graduates.

Bootcamps provide an often too-rudimentary introduction to programming with poor technologies chosen for education. They'd be much better if they sought to teach real CS concepts, not just web-stack basics.

[Zeno84]

>If a bootcamp doesn't even introduce its students to such concepts as classes, instances, OOP, and basic data types, then it has failed to adequately serve its students with fundamental knowledge and offered a shitty introduction to programming.

Honestly, if someone doesn't understand these very basic concepts, what's his/her curiosity level regarding computer programming? I would not want to hire him/her based soley on that.

[bobwaycott]

Honestly, if someone doesn't know these very basic concepts exist, the fundamental error of attribution here is passing judgment on them and their curiosity level. If we fail to teach, we cannot blame the students for not knowing they were failed, and specifically how.

If someone goes through and passes a bootcamp, it is fair to be generous in granting them some level of curiosity about programming. If the bootcamp doesn't introduce the fundamentals of programming, that's no more the student's fault than it would be the fault of an art history student to not know what chiaroscuro is if it wasn't introduced as part of art history.

Bootcamps market and position themselves as good alternatives for people to learn how to program and, often, get a job. I see no reason to neglect holding them to their promise.

[st3v3r]

It's still the bootcamp's fault for not at least introducing them to those concepts. I mean, you can't really google what an int is if you don't even know that an int is a thing.

[Zeno84]

Oh, bootcamps are certainly failing here, but if I were to google "Computer Science," or "Computer Programming," I'd eventually run into the concept of types.

As an analogue, I learned about the functional programming paradigm far before it was ever brought up in a classroom setting. Sure I knew what programming paradigms were, so maybe it's not a perfect example...

[HNcow]

We're not looking, they are applying. Like I said, I understand why they aren't a good match COL/salary wise, just kinda of was writing about how I think it's interesting that they teach what salary they should be seeking minimum. That was never brought up in my BS degree.

[35bge57dtjku]

Are the candidates aware of the differences in CoL?

[st3v3r]

I have to disagree with #1. If they don't even know what an int is, that's a complete failure of the bootcamp.

[tps5]

Every number in JavaScript is a floating point number of type, you guessed it, "number."

[jkaptur]

It's just an IEEE 754 double.