'Coon Cave

Isn’t it lovely, how social media always markets itself as the spearhead of free speech, while at the same time giving users voting tools to bury anything that’s not echoing the popular opinion of the platform in question?

Top 10 best Android safety tips 2022

Kidding, there's actually just one and the title is clickbait. Welcome to the internet, have a nice stay.

Preventing developer burnout: it is OK for your open source project not to have a public bug tracker

A bit of perspective about platforms, choosing beggars and psychological manipulation. There's also a sneaky sixty four thousand dollar question at the end to flash your mind.

Implementing a single class Java parser for semantic versioning with correct precedence ordering

Ok, why are coding bootcamps even a topic here? Well, Google more or less popularized this shit with the Associate Android Developer program back in 2016. The certificate was then sold as an extra qualification to people desperately looking for things to plump up their resume with, was quite obviously an attempt to build a low cost labor pool of Android developers with micro degrees and in reality only attested that you could “program” by copy&paste.

So, show of hands please, who else thinks that the Android ecosystem consists dominantly of questionable apps that look like they were cobbled together cheaply?

The shadiest type of coding bootcamps are, of course, those without the camp part: held completely online, using otherwise freely available materials, with the only redeeming factor being the possibility of voice chatting with an instructor.

Total waste of money, if you ask me.

The compiler is your instructor, information gathering and problem solving is part of your skillset as a programmer. If you can’t do either without someone holding your hand and walking you through, then maybe that’s a sign that you are embarking on the wrong career.

So, I have been looking at some coding bootcamp websites now as a basis for a blog article. Most are happy to teach HTML + CSS + JavaScript.

JavaScript is an interpreted language that may be sandwiched in between a markup language. That makes it already slow to begin with. Things don’t improve, performance wise, by adding frameworks to do the heavy lifting and rendering the page on the client (over and over again). Shit really hits the fan, when would be programmers then start plugging their application together from ready made NPM modules because they don’t understand algorithms themselves, hope that someone else does (flip a coin) and end up creating a dependency hell, where no one knows any longer what code the computer is actually running.

That ladies and gentleman is, in a nutshell, the cost of cheaply trained labor: industry standard, slow and bloated, potentially insecure websites with a huge CO₂ footprint, because people think that taking shortcuts and focusing on just programming languages is sufficient to become a programmer.

The three main issues I have with career jumpers in tech are:

• They are motivated by the prospect of a high paying job as a programmer, but somehow fail to understand that the high income results (in part) from the expenses of the 4 year degree course, they are so desperately trying to skip.
• They are taking shortcuts by signing up for coding bootcamps. When engineers take shortcuts, bridges collapse, cars crash and software gets hacked.
• They sound like they are ginding experience points to invest in their skilltree. Learning how to program is not the same as playing an MMORPG!

I mean, “Hello, I went to a coding bootcamp for 4 months to become a fullstack developer” is about as ridiculous as a proposal as “Hello, I went to a construction bootcamp for 4 months to become an architect, a mason and a plumber”

The problem with coding bootcamps is pretty much that their business model revolves around analyzing the skill requirements for high income jobs, building courses to re-train career jumpers to meet these requirement, then hunt for low income people with big dreams, but little patience, that can be piped through the system.

Naturally, those courses always consist of the latest hype in programming languages and frameworks, but little else. That’s not teaching how to program, that’s just teaching how to cheat past job interviews and hoping for the graduate to stay employed long enough to pay off tuition.

In other words: coding bootcamps are a matchmaking service for people with unrealistic expectations on both sides.

The thing about luring low income career jumpers into coding bootcamps is that, contrary to what market and politicians belief, you can’t simply re-train anyone to be a programmer in the same way you can’t just turn anyone into an Olympic athlete. Learning a programming language is not the same as learning how to program in the same sense as knowing how to hold a paintbrush doesn’t make you an artist. Creativity is not something that can be taught.

Writing software requires abstract thinking and problem solving skills. Coding bootcamps cater to a clientele that prefers to follow step-by-step instructions and is mainly motivated by the prospect of a higher income. So, what could possibly go wrong when we use money to bait people, with a mechanical way of thinking and a willingness to take shortcuts, into that career path, then switch by telling them that they don’t quite cut the mustard, to actually earn an engineer’s wage, were mainly hired to do grunt work and are utterly replaceable, but should probably stick around to pay off their tuition fees?