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by c-hendricks 1077 days ago
There's space between "read this giant c++ tome" and "you're good to go with a couple of months of React", quite a lot even.

From my experience with bootcamp people, it leaves them woefully underprepared. But my sample size is small: 3 people, 3 separate bootcamps, similar results. They knew one portion of react, no fundamentals.

And sadly a couple of them really took to using Copilot. So they don't know how to do what they're doing and couldn't explain their submitted code.

Just the worst of all worlds there. They were effectively incredibly expensive Copilot subscriptions (not to belittle them, they did that themselves)

1 comments

definitely.

I just think for some, bottoms up learning has quite some disadvantages and was an approach that I've used for a long time with okay results. It would get me to where I wanted to be...but it takes way too long sometimes.

Of course there are people like you mentioned though who only do top down learning but just never go into learning the fundamentals ever, which is another problem in its own right.

I've gradually taken towards "always learn as if it's a sport" as the approach to learning. Which, if you look at the sports science recommendations is:

* Isolate highly specific techniques into drills.

* Then go directly to practicing live gameplay. Ignore intermediate exercises.

And the approach with programming can, in fact, do this, if presented properly: definitely, we know how to isolate things into short follow-along examples. What tends to be missing is the "live gameplay" element, because it's hard to set up sample projects that are complex enough to reveal the need for a particular technique.