Is this for real? Can a person be employed after only nine weeks and make a reasonable salary? Thoughts? I’m a rookie, and it seems to promise that after 9 weeks one could be very employable. What are your thoughts?
Thanks,
If was interviewing someone for a position a general developer and this was their only qualification, no.
If I was looking for a very specialized web developer, maybe. But then that would probably be a short-term contract position.
In a job market with lots of qualified candidates, I would look for experience rather than qualifications. The latter can be bought and mean little. It’s better than nothing but not much.
My experience has been that getting your first programming job is relatively tough (not true in all cases, YMMV). My CS degree not long post dot-com wasn’t enough. It was stuff I’d done in my free time that impressed an employer enough to give me a shot.
Once you’ve gotten that job, though, you’re very employable regardless of skill. We’ve fired horrible developers that you’d rather have thrown away most of what they’ve done than ever move it into production (which wouldn’t be too much of a setback because they were lazy to boot) and they were working elsewhere within a couple months.
So by just clicking on the link and reading the first 6 or so words, I’d say it’s only valuable if you look at it as your first step towards working as a developer. I’d imagine it teaches you the skills but there are many, many experienced web developers out there (apparently web development is the only focus of the course). An employer generally will want to see that you’ve applied those skills somewhere before hiring you.
I’d wonder how many of the real crucial concepts you’d even grasp in the first place, much less recall a month later, after a 9 week boot camp type course.
From their FAQ:
And:
From reading that, I think the ideal candidate is someone who already works in IT and has a sponsor. For example, if my company had a rather talented young person employed as a software tester, and we said to ourselves, “You know, Jimmy is a pretty smart guy, it’s a shame he doesn’t know how to code,” I could see the company paying to send Jimmy to this course with the promise of a provisional development job when he gets back.
If Jimmy was a lackluster employee who decided to attend this course on his own, I’m not sure it would help his chances of moving to development.
It will provide an applicant with some small incremental advantage over another candidate who has less than 9 weeks of intensive training.
For someone who has a reasonable plan to combine some education with self acquired experience in creating web pages to achieve an entry level skill set in a time frame of less than a year, this course could potentially be useful, depending on the content and cost. For most people capable of doing that, it’s possible to do the same thing without this course. There’s plenty of free courseware online in this area, and the real effort will be in actually creating web pages to gain the experience, not absorbing the preliminary information.
So I guess doing a full Comp Sci degree would be more beneficial? The tuition is something like 12k, and I could probably earn a comp sci degree for 18k living with my folks, and work while doing it.
Coursework is just a small step in developing an IT career. The first thing to determine is if you an aptitude for it. It’s not the kind of work for everyone, for a variety of reasons. After that you need both education and experience. Depending on your particular skills and interests there are many ways to go about that.
Do you have even minor computer skills now such as using Excel spreadsheets? Do you have any existing experience in a field that would enhance new computer skills such as knowledge of Billing and Coding for medical applications? Would you be better off in an area like web page design combining some computer skills with graphic arts or language skills, or in the very technical fields of general software development? Would you want to work for a computer software company, or the IT department of a more specialized business? Will you go to school in an area where there are a lot high tech jobs available so that you can add to your education through work experience as you progress? Are you a self-starter that can take the skills you acquire and develop your own experience?
If this is all you have to show you are a web developer, no it will not get you a job. In fact getting a BS and having ten times as much training will only get you a foot in the door, and that foot will be underpaid.
Whoa, 12K for this course?! Definitely not worth it. As someone said, if you had a job already and they wanted to train you on programming I could see it being a good choice, but it’s nothing like a real CS degree, and even that will only get you an entry level job without some experience.
Do realize that “comp sci” and “programming” are not exactly synonyms. Comp sci includes a lot more theory than is strictly required for a rote programmer and skills in specific technologies (e.g. Ruby on Rails, like that course gives) are not emphasized, while more general skills are.
So a comp sci degree will not necessarily give you an in on “requires experience in trendy technology X”, jobs. But it also will not be made obsolete by “technology X is no longer trendy, having been replaced by trendy technology Y”.
Yeah. That’s why it’s called “entry level”.
http://www.code.org/learn/codecademy
I just saw the video for this site but haven’t checked it out much. What do you guys think of this?
Codecademy is okay for learning the very basics, but it isn’t something you’d put on a resume to get a job. It’s more like ‘I’m interested in programming, but have no idea what it entails, so I’m going to try this for fun in the evenings and decide if I want to learn more’. Sort of like how taking a cooking workshop from a community association will not make you a chef.
Wow this bootcamp provides computers…Mac computers. Do most development shops use Macs now?
Macs and PCs are about equally popular. Macs can easily run Windows in a variety of ways if it’s necessary. In many environments the computer on your desktop is just a client anyway. It’s not really a significant factor here.
I dig. It just seems weird to me because I develop using Microsoft products (MS SQL, Visual Studio) It also seems expensive considering you could do the work on cheapy Linux boxes 
Yeah, but is it on-par with the bootcamp discussed in the OP?
The question is whether you want to do programming or web development. Programming in general is much broader, and this class won’t do much to prepare you for it. I see the resumes of lots of students with CS degrees, and few have Ruby listed. I didn’t even find many Ruby people on elance.
You might look at how much time they devote to each subject. $12K seems a lot for a course which is mostly Ruby on Rails and a tiny bit htm5 and Javascript.
Another thing to do - check out job listings and try to figure out the demand. A real CS degree will take a lot longer, but I think will do much better for you in the long run.