Just over a year ago I posted this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267133
And this community's response is what convinced me to ditch my startup and start devbootcamp.
I only know very few of you people in person, but I'm sincerely grateful for the impact you've had on my life. Thank you!
That post was a major turning point in my life, as it was exactly the kind of thing I had been looking for, to transition to what I really wanted to do. Eventually it led to my current job.
Edit: Interestingly, looking back at the comment thread for that post, I see this comment, where someone responds to a skeptic by saying that he picked up Django and got a job using it from 10 weeks of self-study.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3268469
Similarly, after the 8-week DBC, which used Rails, the job I got used Django, but I was able to pick it up quickly enough.
No offense, Shereef, but I prefer it to Rails ;-)
And I heard about it here on HN.
To me DevBootcamp is CCE, and CCE has been around for years (what is cce: http://www.ccc.edu/programs/pages/web-design-basic-certifica...). Unfortunately I don't believe CCE is at all effective in training people on being programmers or designers.
So here's my throwdown: Is DevBootcamp really effective or is there a participant bias? Would DevBootcamp's employment percentage be just as high when applied to the general population that would take CCE; unemployed, unskilled?
Disclaimer: I was involved in CCE with two colleges for about 7 years and frankly I see the whole thing as a scam. I would love to see that industry get shaken up.
edit: wording, formatting
Tough to argue at this point that there isn't participant bias. Time will tell, particularly as we increase the number of participants in 2013. I've spent a significant amount of time at several different programs like Dev Bootcamp and found it to be the most effective program out there. It is truly immersive with students spending 80-100+ hours/week in the trenches with over 40 hours/week of structured learning. More thoughts at: http://nuts.redsquirrel.com/post/37111323801/of-feet-doors-a...
To use an example, think of no-kill-shelters vs pounds. No Kill shelters can boast a high success rate and a low return rate because they only handle a fraction of the animals a pound handles. Not only that but the no-kill selects animals they believe will be likely to be placed and leaves animals that are not good candidates.
Someone has to be a pound, willing to take in any animal off the street and give it a chance, while at the same time admitting that it just does not have enough space for every animal and that tough decisions will be a result.
Someone else has to be a nokill shelter, willing to select those that seem the brightest and invest to give them the most opportunity available while leaving the others.
I wonder though if there could be a more independent model for this kind of thing. Perhaps like the "N-reduce" of programming bootcamps.
* Citation needed
