Re:Ask HN: If you worked with a grad from a code bootcamp, h...
by sciguy77 on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @06:21PM
(#7600897)
That's an interesting way to look at it. I see it more as a placeholder for "we expect a lot from you, and expect you to work hard."
I think any CS major can attest that there are periods in college that call for similarly excessive time investment. Perhaps it's less insidious, a way to give themselves some validity and show that students are covering a lot in those three months.
Again, I am biased, so who knows.
Re:Ask HN: If you worked with a grad from a code bootcamp, h...
by doktrin on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @09:57PM
(#7601630)
It's driven by the amount of material that students need to ingest over a 3 month period. As sciguy noted, this is totally normal in academic settings as well. For instance, OS (15-410) at CMU requires 70+ hours a week. That's a single class.
These are of course completely different animals, but the scale of learning is similar. Getting a solid intuition for not only web applications but programming fundamentals when starting with neither requires serious effort and is a challenge of breadth. 3 months worth of 40 hour weeks will probably not cut it.
Re:Ask HN: If you worked with a grad from a code bootcamp, h...
by greenyoda on Thursday April 17, 2014 @05:48PM
(#7606648)
Just because CMU does it too doesn't mean that it's reasonable. Students who are stressed out and sleep-deprived aren't going to be learning effectively - there's lots of research that indicates that sleep is necessary for forming long-term memories.[1] Better to split the course into two semesters.
Re:Ask HN: If you worked with a grad from a code bootcamp, h...
by doktrin on Thursday April 17, 2014 @07:55PM
(#7607265)
You've touched on an important point. Namely, that bootcamps actually can't very feasibly split or extend their curriculum. It's not a coincidence that most of these schools offer 10-12 week sessions. Moving past that and the logistics of relocation, tuition, expenses & health care become much more difficult to manage.
It doesn't seem like one could learn effectively while fighting physical and mental exhaustion.
Asking people to work 100 hours a week sounds more like an indoctrination program to make them believe that the long work hours they're likely to find in startups are "normal". Or maybe a way for the bootcamp to market their grads to startups: "Our graduates survived 100-hour weeks, so if you're looking for people who are willing to put up with abuse, we have lots of those right here."