[navyrain]

These "bootcamps" delude students into believing they can be placed in a good job if they pay up. I've worked with graduates of these programs, and found them to be eager and optimistic, but woefully ill-prepared for professional software development.

I'd love to see more programmers, but this cash-grab bootcamp practice makes our entire industry look bad.

[namocat]

> eager and optimistic, but woefully ill-prepared for professional software development.

Mind elaborating on this? I'm currently going through one of these and am curious for when I am applying for my first post-bootcamp job.

[navyrain]

Coming from the webapp world: How do you work with a team of people committing to the same repository? How do you review code? How do you find solutions to problems when they're not being spoon-fed to you in a bootcamp? What makes an application reliable? Well-designed? Scalable? When should something be improved upon, and when should it be chucked and rewritten? How can an application be hacked? How do you design DB schemas, and query them efficiently?

These are the sorts of things you implicitly trust a developer to know. The bootcamp students I've seen fail to realize that these are even issues, and get a big wake-up call to when they come up short in their first job. As a result, they struggle at the lowest rung in the ladder, as their coworkers cannot trust them to do any reliable work.

[namocat]

Any advice on how to develop these skills? Would it just be experience?

If so, it seems to me to be a chicken-egg scenario where it sounds like you'd need several years of experience to even get an entry-level or "lowest rung" position in the industry.

I view my "accelerator" experience as just that: an acceleration of my learning, so that I can transition (even if it is at the lowest rung) into an industry that I feel is exciting and fascinating. I view these bootcamps as being the beginning of one's education, not the end.