"You qualify for a $500 scholarship if you're female or from an ethnic minority group underrepresented in the software engineering field (African American, Chicano/Latino, Native American, Pacific Islander, etc.). The tech world is notoriously unrepresentative of the larger population. We believe that the sooner that changes, the better off we all are."
How is that not discrimination?
http://www.etsy.com/blog/news/2012/etsy-hacker-grants-suppor... is why etsy is sponsoring this kind of grant at a different but similar Hacker School.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4441734
tl;dr: The worst argument in the world is "X is Y, therefore, X must be a typical case of Y". Here, "The DBC policy is discrimination, therefore you should associate with it all the bad things you usually associate with discrimination, irrespective of whether they apply here."
Stripped of its misdirection, your question/argument is, "Isn't that bad for the same reason that 'we don't hire blacks' is bad?" No, it's not. There is a sense in which this kind of discrimination is bad, but there's also a sense in which its good (i.e. disrupting the self-reinforcing cycle of certain demographics dominating the programming field and making those outside of it feel out of place).
There are great arguments about which effect is stronger and/or worse, but they aren't helped by saying "That is discrimination."
Disclaimer: I was in the Spring (first) cohort of DBC, though don't have as glowing a review of the program as everyone else seems to.
People with dwarfism are disproportionally not software developers, too, but it's not trendy to care about them, so DevBootCamp doesn't care.
Transgender people are disproportionally not software developers, but it's not trendy to care about them, so DevBootCamp doesn't care.
White males born into poverty are disproportionally not software developers, but it's not trendy to care about them, so DevBootCamp doesn't care.
Hey, DevBootCamp: What makes an affluent latina more important to you than an impoverished white male? What makes an affluent white woman more important to you than an impoverished Indian with dwarfism?
Your organization is toxic. Go away.
If you can think of better ways to encourage more balance in our industry I am sincerely open to suggestions.
I remember missing out on a college scholarship because I wasn't hispanic, and while I didn't let that stop me from pursuing my education, I'm still insulted by this sort of reverse discrimination.
Why is this OK?
Athletes, young mothers, honor students, mcdonalds employees, etc.
I'm curious about how employers have felt about the engineers they've hired from such services vs fresh / semi-experienced engineers with CS degrees.
The fact that TapJoy is hiring people straight out of DevBootCamp makes me seriously question the quality of their engineering organization, rather than causing me to think highly of DevBootCamp (which may be an excellent program).
Chris Jennings (from http://chrisjennings.com) did all the creative work.
I'm more than happy to answer any questions about Dev Bootcamp, but I think this does a good job at tackling a few of them: http://www.quora.com/Programming-Bootcamps/Other-than-locati...
The tl;dr is "No, not really. It's the right mix between what we know and a good beginner language."
The language and technologies you learn are not the most important bit when it comes to becoming a programmer. When friends ask me whether they should learn Ruby or Python I respond by asking "Which language do more of your friends know?"
Motivation, frustration tolerance, social support, and access to expertise are all more important than the raw language when you're trying to become a programmer. Python, Ruby, C#, Clojure, Objective-C, etc. are just means to that end.
Consider this: if you speak Ruby, understand the fundamentals of software engineering, and maintain a beginner's mind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin) then it will take weeks -- if not days -- to reach the same level of competence in Python.
Dev Bootcamp focuses on Ruby, Rails, and JavaScript, for example, but two students from our most recent class received job offers from Hipmunk, a Python shop. Some students from the spring work at companies where most of the code they write is Java or PHP.
IMO a good programming bootcamp aims to teach you to program as if it were teaching you English poetry. Knowing a particular language, whether it's Python or anything else, is like knowing how to write in English.
To be sure, you have to know how to write English before you can write English poetry, but that's the smallest part of being a poet.
Good fit for a fast growing Ruby shop that is not too picky about depth of technical skills.
dpritchett 104 days ago | link | parent
Despite being really jealous for how easy this makes it look to 'learn to be a hacker', I personally will stick to the Zed Shaw school of learning.
