# Mailbox

A marketeer tells me, “you have to have accounts on all social media platforms to drive traffic to your blog!” He even has screenshots of Google Analytics to “proof” his point.

It’s a half truth, of course. The other half is that social media traffic does not convert (at all). Visitors come to check out what everyone else in their bubble is talking about and immediately leave again to contribute their two cents to a discussion that happens off-site, where it will be dead and buried in three days. The only thing you get out of this are impressive numbers in your webserver statistics. Marketing agencies love those numbers. They promise their clients eyeballs and social media delivers. So, from their perspective, that’s a job well done. Only, it isn’t. It is just an increase in window shoppers, nothing else.

I reader notes: Sure, Elon Musk acts erratically as the new owner of Twitter. But maybe there’s method to his madness. He’s a successful business man after all, so he probably has a plan?

Remember Game of Thrones ? Robert Baratheon was a pretty shit king who only got the job because he landed one successful coup in his youth (taking the throne). After that he realized that he liked being king, but hated running a kingdom. So, he simply delegated the day-to-day business to his small council and never attended even a single one of its meetings. When the king wanted something (let’s say a banquet), he usually had no ideas of how to make it happen (or how to pay for it) and the wish would simply be passed down the chain of command till it eventually reached someone who did.

The kingdom never had a problem with being ruled by an incompetent king, because everyone in the chain of command understood that his own power was granted by a superior and ultimately the monarch himself. In other words, it was in everyone’s interest to uphold the illusion that whoever sat on the throne was the right (wo)man for the job. Or as Jaime Lannister put it so eloquently: “The king shits, and the Hand wipes.

As far as Elon Musk is concerned, there are too many jobs (and investments) on the line. People just have to believe that he has a plan and deal with whatever he is actually doing, even when he’s running around Twitter HQ, carrying a bathroom sink and calling himself Chief Twit.

The Indian scam doesn't continue

Joel bailed on me.

Is there anything coming out of India these days that's not a scam?

I got mail (and a good laugh)

An Indian, named Dave

Why am I wasting my time, talking to cretins?

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.