Sounds like the difference between me and an acquaintance of mine. I went into software development with a burning passion for it. Nobody was going to stop me from doing it. He on the other hand went into it because it was considered a good career path and you could make a lot of money.

He rushed through college and graduated quickly with good grades (< 4 years if I remember correctly). I putzed around, had bad habits, muddled my way through every course, got 90% through my degree and said "fuck it, I can't do this school thing anymore" in my 5th year and got a job.

I never finished my degree, but he languished while I excelled in my career. He's at least as smart if not smarter than me.

What I did do is co-op (work for a semester, and then take classes for a semester). I wrote my own software. I created my own websites. I built and managed a primitive social network for my gaming buddies. I took a generic job at a no-name mortgage company for very little pay and worked my way up. He didn't do any of these things. He got out into the real world expecting things to be handed to him, and it never happened. He never did the work-work, just the school-work.

I don't know how else to account for it, we went to the same schools. I simply didn't learn the same lessons he learned. Most of what I still build on to this day was the more practical in the field work from the bottom up and fight for it experience. His was from schooling.

Great comment, I absolutely agree. I learned to code largely through problem sets, HIGHLY defined, clear issues with pre-cleaned (!!!) data. Once I'm out coding in the wild, I am the one creating the dataset, it's highly messy in its infancy, and most of my collaborators are in flux about what they want, how they want it, and which subgroup and sample they want to examine. The name of the game seems to be quick iteration and fast communication loops.

Just naming stuff, you'd think that would be obvious and easy and then things change and: "Why the hell did I name it that?" is a common thing I think.

Good education should teach fundamental principles and theories that apply to every real world scenario within a domain. Unfortunately the push for "real world" education seems to have won in a lot of places. So you get people educated in how to solve very specific problems and are completely lost when any of the parameters are changed.

The typical highly-structured educational environment seems to be an increasing disservice to those being educated, if indeed it ever was useful.

I wish I could speak intelligently about it because honestly I'm jealous of all the CS grads ;)

Personally, don't think it would take a great deal of adjustment to really improve the structured educational setup that would provide specific curriculum ... but also more open ended experiences.

It could be less about them being CS grads per se and more about their age and relative experience in the world. I'm a CS grad who originally dropped out and screwed around for a few years, but in the end came back to it. In fact, while researching at the graduate level, I realized then that even professors and advisors aren't necessarily going to teach you everything you need to know or set you on a course, it's your job to extract their knowledge and find the answers to the questions you come up with. I also worked all through high school and college. I think my experience sets me up for disappointment in the workforce because I know how to get things done and see what's important, and often I feel like the only adult in the room with a bunch of kids who don't want to listen and who don't know how to really chug through long-term challenges while minding short-term issues.

At one point I did a bootcamp as part of a career change.

Some folks who completed it with me went on to work on a CS degree as well.

We talk a lot and many of them think a bootcamp like experience before a CS degree would be a good idea. A sort of fast paced, intense, and "ok now it is time for you to hit the internet and figure out steps 7 through 10" might be a good place to start for a lot of them.

But more specifically to your point working with people is so important. I did some customer service years ago, and I find myself using that all the time, no job asks for it, but when talking to customers (and people who talk to customers) it is indispensable.

That's a fantastic idea, and I haven't really heard of people who do bootcamp then CS. It would serve as a good motivator and also a way to weed out the people who really have no idea what they're getting into (as long as some good expectations can be set during the bootcamp).

Several people in my program wanted to do fun stuff like work with video games, which is totally fine! But they were not prepared for the not-so-fun linear algebra, Unix gruntwork, UML modeling and algorithm analysis involved in the course study. Sadly some people washed out, others cheated their way through it (neither of which is exclusive to CS students, to be sure). Seems like doing bootcamp first would give them a chance to decide not to go with CS and just start their career from there, or do something else altogether. Or like your cohort, discover that they just want to know more.

And yeah, nothing taught me how to work with people like working for tips–your livelihood literally depends on your figuring out how to make them happy! Or at least making them think they're happy :)

The downside being that CS and bootcamps are similar topics but diverge in important ways. There's limited math in bootcamps and etc... but at the same time it would give them exposure to "You're gonna be working stuff out that you haven't been told ... and you have to go figure it out without hand holding."