[skewart]

> Flatiron, a for-profit school, has seized on a clear need in the economy that some academic experts say reveals a failing among traditional universities.

Teaching highly specialized skills currently in demand has not traditionally been the mission of universities. In professions like architecture and medicine there is an expectation that new graduates won't have much in the way of practical knowledge about current practices, and so apprenticeships are more or less built in to the transition from student to practitioner.

Is a disinterest in teaching current professional practice really a failing of universities?

It seems more likely that bootcamps are simply a way for software firms to outsource part of the apprenticeship process. Most of the people who go to good bootcamps already have strong university educations and would likely have been able to be hired into junior dev roles anyway without the bootcamp.

[twblalock]

> Most of the people who go to good bootcamps already have strong university educations and would likely have been able to be hired into junior dev roles anyway without the bootcamp.

That depends on how much programming experience they have. Many boot camp attendees have college degrees in non-technical majors and have no coding experience at all.

A boot camp is a way to get coding experience in a structured environment that has credibility with employers. In the view of many companies, self-taught coders don't have that level of credibility, even when they have decent Github portfolios or other proof that they can program.

[skewart]

Interesting. I wonder if that necessity for lending credibility is a somewhat recent thing. Perhaps the popularity of bootcamps makes people who recently got into coding and didn't attend one look worse - companies might assume they couldn't get in to a decent one?

I'm a developer who didn't study CS in undergrad, and I didn't have a problem getting job offers when I was starting out several years ago, self taught and unproven. But bootcamps weren't really a thing back then.

[bdcravens]

I'm self-educated as well, but back then (starting around 1999) there was no Github (so less visibility into a prospect's activity) and no frameworks (so problem solving was more valuable than structure)

[twblalock]

I think it's partially a new form of credentialism. But there is also the question of a candidate's suitability for the job. If you want to hire a Rails developer, for example, someone who just got out of one of the Rails boot camps is probably a more attractive candidate than a self-taught programmer who did not focus on Rails -- even though that self-taught programmer might know more about programming in general.

[enraged_camel]

>>Is a disinterest in teaching current professional practice really a failing of universities?

I think the issue is that universities are not in a good position to judge what is "fundamental knowledge" and what is simply a current professional practice.

I have a B.S. in Informatics from the University of Washington. It's basically a degree at the intersection of computer science and humanities[1]. During the course of my studies, I also took a lot of non-degree courses from other schools at the university, including a three-semester program focused on Information Security and Assurance.

After I earned my certificate from that program, I went to the dean of the Information School and argued that information security should be made a core part of the Informatics curriculum.

He said: "Just because information security is the hot thing right now doesn't mean it should be a part of the curriculum. Students can take courses on it and count it towards their degree, but it doesn't seem to me like it's fundamental knowledge."

So yeah. To this day, when I see poorly designed, unsecure systems, I think of that moment: some academic declaring that information security does not constitute fundamental knowledge for a degree program about information, technology and computers.

[1]https://ischool.uw.edu/academics/informatics

[argonaut]

Security is not a required class for pretty much all CS degrees, including at other top CS schools like MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. And from my experience, academics at these schools know exactly what professional practice is, given how many professors start startups out of these universities.

Students are not dumb. I personally think no specific classes should be required of a CS degree (other than a specific number of classes), and while the department should make recommendations, they should trust the intelligence of their students and give them freedom to pick the right classes.

[enraged_camel]

>>Security is not a required class for pretty much all CS degrees, including at other top CS schools like MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley.

Next time a bunch of credit card data is stolen from a high-profile retailer, or credentials with plaintext passwords leaked from some company's database, you should think long and hard about what factors may have contributed to it.

>>Students are not dumb. I personally think no specific classes should be required of a CS degree (other than a specific number of classes), and while the department should make recommendations, they should trust the intelligence of their students and give them freedom to pick the right classes.

Wait, hold on. You are expecting a bunch of 19-23 year olds to make intelligent and wise decisions about what classes they need to take in order to succeed in their field?