I've been looking into these schools as of late (including the one in SF - forgot the name)
And I've been trying to calculate how good of an investment these programs are. They help with job placement, which is valuable. Then again, the market is so hot for developers now that anyone who self-studies for 6 months could find a job fairly easily on his own.
As for the instruction itself, there are so many resources online (free, I might add) that it seems almost wasteful to drop 20k to learn when you could learn for free, assuming one possesses sufficient self-motivation and knows where to look.
Finally, there is the possibility of a potential huge opportunity cost one can't overlook:
the option of finding a paying jr developer job where one learns on-site. Instead of -20k you get 30k (based on 60k/year working for 1/2 year) and I assume end up roughly even in coding ability. That's $50,000 extra in your pocket, with demonstrable real-world experience rather than "school" experience.
All of this just begs the question of how good these guys are.
Yes, you can find a job on your own. But not all jobs are the same. Maybe they'll find you a better job.
Yes, you can learn on your own. But I don't think there's any question that a good teacher can help you learn faster.
gSchool is new. So it's too early to find hard evidence either way about the quality of jobs you'll get, etc. But if they give you the right teacher, education can be a good investment.
gSchool is run by Jumpstart Lab (my employer), who also did Hungry Academy for LivingSocial a while back. I wasn't directly involved in teaching HA, but I did do evaluations of the students from time to time, and they were all competent developers.
What they weren't was super quick to resolve errors. That can only really come from experience. They'd be able to figure out if something went wrong, but whereas I (#50 on the Rails contributors list) would know instantly what was wrong, it'd take them some time. That's to be expected from new devs, though, no way around that but time.
The guys at gSchool believe strongly that truly learning everything online is really hard. The instructors are world class - IMO that will make all the difference.
I've never heard of gSchool. Maybe I'm out of the loop, but what evidence is there that the instructors are world class?
Also, there are people who have learned everything online. They are out there - thousands- heck- tens of thousands of them on the web. Granted, maybe gSchool will help educate some people who can't learn themselves. To those people the 20k will be worth it.
Nothing will speak more clearly than the results, so I can understand some skepticism.
I'm the lead instructor for gSchool, Jeff Casimir. I've been teaching Ruby since 2005 and started Jumpstart Lab in 2009. I have both more classroom experience (total) and more hours spent teaching these technologies than anyone in the world.
I wish there were dozens or hundreds of people learning these skills by themselves on the web, but it's just not happening fast enough. The talent shortage is the #1 problem facing most small software businesses, and there's no fix in sight. This is just our little contribution.
gSchool is run by Jumpstart Lab (my employer), and we did Hungry Academy for LivingSocial a few months ago. Our client list includes Nasa, Boeing, Sony, BlueBox, LivingSocial, Accenture, and a host of other companies.
I personally am #50 on the Rails Contributors list all-time, so I know a thing or two about Rails. ;).
> To those people the 20k will be worth it.
While there are many people who are able to learn online, there are many that are not. Also, our schedule is just a tad more intense than most autodidacts go for. And the money isn't worth it just for money: it's for cred. I once had a funded startup, and the fact that we went through a YC-like program opened many doors, simply due to social proof. Those who teach themselves have to gain this proof some other way.
Caveat lector: I help run Dev Bootcamp (http://devbootcamp.com), which is probably "the one in SF" whose name you forgot. :)
I have two thoughts.
First, there's more to learning how to be a software developer than downloading a bunch of information into your head. Most software projects fail for human reasons, not technical reasons. Giving feedback effectively, receiving feedback non-defensively, articulating your ideas to other people of varying backgrounds and skill, convincing teammates to follow your plan, inspiring your co-workers with your clarity of thought and action, etc. are all real, hard-to-learn skills that are critical to being a great software developer which. One would also be hard-pressed to learn on them on their own since each is, by definition, an interpersonal skill.
As someone who has interviewed and hired dozens of engineers, my experience is that "junior developers," as deep as their knowledge of data structures and algorithms might be, are lacking in exactly this dimension. It's the #1 reason people are afraid to hire them and dismiss as "too junior."
As a case study, Hipmunk (http://hipmunk.com), a Python shop, hired a summer student from Dev Bootcamp. He was a great developer, but they obviously didn't hire him for his mad Python skills since DBC teaches Ruby and Rails. He had no significant prior programming experience when he entered DBC.
I know, I know: anecdotal, etc. etc.
Second, when developers talk about self-learning, I think there's a huge selection bias. The way people are "meant" to learn computer science, software engineering, etc. selects for autodidacts. There are so many more dimensions to how people learn effectively.
This is coming from someone who taught himself C using K&R in high school.
The two things you said are categorically false for many people: they just don't possess the internal mental models necessary to learn how to program on their own, and don't know how to find answers. They might not even know what they're seeing is an answer, unless they've formed the question correctly.
When friends ask me what programming language they should learn, I tell them they should learn whatever programming language more of their friends know.
Social support, similarly motivated peers, role models, and even just the knowledge that they have access to expertise that can get them unstuck when they're tired and frustrated are huge factors in getting people to learn. They will be more fearless, more intrepid, and work their way up to a place where they have the confidence and skill to both learn on their own and on the job.
If you're curious about the skill level of some of the students graduating from programs like gSchool and Dev Bootcamp, here are some examples from the fall:
Dev Bootcamp's fall cohort graduates next week, and December 7th is our hiring day. If you're interested in attending, sign up here: http://bit.ly/hn_dbc
>"Social support, similarly motivated peers, role models, and even just the knowledge that they have access to expertise that can get them unstuck when they're tired and frustrated are huge factors in getting people to learn. They will be more fearless, more intrepid, and work their way up to a place where they have the confidence and skill to both learn on their own and on the job."
Yes! That's what makes this kind of thing worthwhile!
I fully buy into the value of apprenticing and have been trying to get into a program since moving to SF this summer. You'll be seeing my application shortly. Any suggestions on the video that would maximize my chances of acceptance?
I know Jeff. Jeff taught me rails. If my kid was of the age where it was productive for me to spend this level of money on Jeff teaching him, there's no question in my mind I'd do it. Fwiw, I've been trying to get Jeff to teach me a "How to Teach" class for 5 years.
Interesting!
My view is that "how to teach" is way more difficult, and therefore important, than simple subject knowledge. I can find dozens of very expert Developers, willing to teach for a good salary. However, rarely these people have the skills to teach effectively.
Can you tell us more about why Jeff is great at teaching? Examples?
Agreed 100%. There's a big difference between a developer with a big heart and a developer who actually knows how to teach.
Teaching, just like programming, takes a ton of practice. I spend four years in the classroom, another two coaching teachers, and have been running training classes for Jumpstart Lab since 2009. I don't think I'm a gifted teacher, I've just practiced more than most.
Frank Webber, who's joining me, spent a significant amount of time teaching a year-long course at the University of Washington as well as spending time 1-on-1 mentoring other developers in Seattle.
Steve Klabnik has spent a lot of time with me co-teaching private training sessions and spends a tremendous amount of time "teaching" online through open source work.
It's just a matter of understanding the methodologies of teaching and a bunch of practice. We've practiced more than anyone else.
Jeff in particular taught high school in inner-city DC with Teach for America. He then went on to help start-up a school and served as principle-ish, if I remember my history right. So he has quite a bit of Actual Teaching Experience.
As someone who's taught alongside him, Jeff's really good at making sure that everyone is paying attention, that he's not going too fast or too slow, and balancing questions with moving the lecture forward.
Oh, and Jumpstart believes in its teaching so much that we put our curriculum online: http://tutorials.jumpstartlab.com/ We sell teaching, not secret-sauce lessons.
I'm planning to write an overview article about the various bootcamps and online courses teaching programming. If you know of any I'd appreciate pointers so I can have as broad a survey as possible.
It is nice to see these more expensive variants of colleges spring up. At least they're more honest than most universities - but then as [intellegacy] already noted, the opportunity cost is well hidden under this startup craze. Indeed, one does make more money by selling axes to gold miners than to mine gold.
And a fairly sweet deal for the instructors involved. 24 spots at $20,000 a pop = $480,000 split 3 ways for 6 months work, an annualized income of over $300,000.
Assume that other people's economics sound a lot easier from the outside :)
One big consideration is that there'll be a three-month window in between sessions for the instructors to recuperate, revise the curriculum, and recruit a new class. A facility for 24+3, the laptops, administrative help, marketing, design...
If we were each making 300K the first thing I'd do is drop the price. The costs dictated the tuition.
Consider that this course probably bumps its students' earning potential by ~$30k/year, and that there aren't many cheaper substitutes. (Imho, learning on your own isn't a substitute for this program -- your odds of getting a dev job 6 months in are pretty low, and the odds of your getting distracted/frustrated and never achieving your goal are pretty high.)
Disclaimer -- I'm a cofounder at a similar program.
To give you some perspective, I am in $70,000 in debt from my undergrad CS degree, and that took four years. If this program would have existed when I was a freshman, I would have done the math, dropped out, and done this in a heartbeat.
It's guaranteed to be at least $60K, but lots of people will likely end up at around $80K. Plus, you can defer a big chunk of the $20K into $199/mo payments.
I suppose that really depends on the screening process to determine how well and prepared, ready for learning, a person is entering the program. There's no guarantee a person will learn how to program as a language, where they may not be able to become fluent in it. This is where the risk is. And sometimes people take longer to learn than others. A program like this would be best IMHO to split into a condensed version and a longer variation.
"More often than not, graduates receiving Computer Science degrees are not very good software engineers." Lot of people make these statements, but are there any statistical data to back this up. In opinion CS Degree person is always better bet to invest in long term (even if they wont be productive in webapp development right away) than one who finished 6 month webapp development crash course.
Having a CS degree is going to be a tremendous advantage in a program like this, for sure.
But I'm guessing Bart, like me, has interviewed kids coming out with CS degrees who just can't program. To be honest, it breaks my heart. If you complete a four year program and can't program FizzBuzz in a language of your choice then you have been completely bamboozled. I would not have believed this possible until I saw it myself.
You certainly would not walk away from those classes with a strong understanding of Ruby, Javascript, HTML, and CSS, plus a primer on agile project management. An associate degree in web development will probably teach you the basics, but there's no way it would be equivalent to six months of intensive training.
And at a community college you can qualify for traditional student loans, GI funding, etc -- making the equation a lot easier. If you know of anyone who's completed one of these programs and is now a full-time developer I'd love to meet them and pick their brain.
Having taught at Boston College's Center for Digital Imaging and Arts (CDIA), I was not impressed with the curriculum and, most importantly, the expectations for students were disappointingly low. It was more of a "pass the time, get the certificate" than a genuine learning environment. I hope it's different here in Denver.
And I've been trying to calculate how good of an investment these programs are. They help with job placement, which is valuable. Then again, the market is so hot for developers now that anyone who self-studies for 6 months could find a job fairly easily on his own.
As for the instruction itself, there are so many resources online (free, I might add) that it seems almost wasteful to drop 20k to learn when you could learn for free, assuming one possesses sufficient self-motivation and knows where to look.
Finally, there is the possibility of a potential huge opportunity cost one can't overlook:
the option of finding a paying jr developer job where one learns on-site. Instead of -20k you get 30k (based on 60k/year working for 1/2 year) and I assume end up roughly even in coding ability. That's $50,000 extra in your pocket, with demonstrable real-world experience rather than "school" experience.