whiteboarder

The people who break copyright laws are heros, not criminals. The whole reason the industry is moving forward is because of people like him, the pirate bay, and nabster.

If it weren't for rampant copyright infringement, the industry would still be stuck in the dark ages.

The name is intentional. It gets them free publicly by being quirky.

That's because graduate students at universities are shitty coders.

CS degrees teach you how to do math, not how to be a software engineer.

That's not what the statistics say.

The top coding bootcamps like Hack Reactor have 99% placement rates for their graduates within 6 months with average salary of 100k.

And if you don't get a job, hack reactor charges you NOTHING. That is how confident they are in their students.

I've received about a dozen job offers in the last 3 years. TBH, I don't even consider myself better than an average programmer. I've just practiced interview questions a lot.

I live in a bubble in San Francisco and post on HN, so when talking to people I usually assume (perhaps incorrectly), that they are all software engineers between the ages of 18-25 currently in the job market, interviewing at all the same hip 5 companies, so I apologize :P .

In software engineer, when applying for jobs at tech companies, you are universally asked to program solutions to algorithms problems on a whiteboard that follow a very specific formula. If you ever interview for a software position, you will get these exact kinds of questions.

Such questions are usually things like:

"Given a N sorted lists of numbers, join the lists into a single sorted list efficiently"

"Implement a Stack which has push, pop, and minimum operations in O(1)"

"Traverse a Tree and print out each item in level by level order" ect

They are all very formulaic and similar. In the last 3 years I've done about 100 algorithms interviews, and 9 out of 10 times it is a question I've been asked before.

You can find other examples at Glassdoor, hacker rank, or project Euler.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Interview-Question...

https://projecteuler.net/

You are being pedantic. The author obviously meant "algorithms that you might be asked to do on a whiteboard during a tech interview at Google, FB, ect"

Any response on the weird comments such as "DICE.COM EMPLOYEE SPAMMING LIVECODING.TV" that were put on the profile?

If one believes in a Malthusian apocalypse then one must explain why THIS time things are different.

People have been talking about a supposed Population Bomb for literally hundreds of years. And each time, they have been wrong.

Obviously, there exists some theoretical carrying capacity maximum on planet Earth, but perhaps that maximum is closer to 1 trillion people than 7 billion. That would be plenty of time for humans to figure that space travel thing out. Especially since it is predicted that pop size will peak within the next 40 years.

It is factually correct, but perhaps a little misleading.

Hack Reactor indeed has these statistics, but their application process is probably the most difficult/selective of any of the bootcamps. The people going into the program, are usually, already quite good.

As an example, I have a friend who graduated from General Assembly, didn't feel quite prepared, so did Hack Reactor AS WELL. (ie, 2 separate bootcamps, one right after the other). On top of, of course, a college degree (albeit non-CS)

It is kind of like how Harvard has very good hiring stats. Is Harvard really that good, or does their admissions process just select for people who are almost certainly going to be successful, no matter what college they go to.

My definition of a "software engineer" is someone who gets paid 6 figures for writing code, any code.

And it just so happens there there are quite of lot of 6 figure jobs that solely involve building crud apps by gluing together frameworks.

You can shit it on all you want, and talk about how "us real computer scientists are solving the Hard Problems by building compilers and OSs".

But at the end of the day, the person going to the bootcamp doesn't care about this opinion. All they care about is that they were able to spend 3 months of there time in order to double or triple their salary.

And the only other price they have to pay is having to put up with people like you shitting on them for not working on Hard Problems. And to me, that seems like a very small price to pay.

It depends on the school. The very best ones like Hack Reactor have a 99% rate for people getting jobs within 6 months, averaging at 100k.

The "average" ones are closer to 75k average starting salary.

Who gives a shit?

The tech industry currently doesn't need any more people to work on the Actually Hard Problems.

The tech industry currently pays people 6 figure salaries to build CRUD apps. There is such a huge shortage of tech people, that the industry can't even get the "Easy", low hanging fruit work done.

It doesn't matter how many PHDs work at Tesla designing space cars if the world has a cronic shortage of car mechanics. And right now the car mechanics get 6 figure salaries.

If what you say is true, then how come the dev bootcamp hiring statistics say otherwise?

Look at any of the statistics. These bootcamps graduate people making 80k-100k. That is a good salary for someone who didn't graduate with a CS degree from a top 5 tech school.

And yet the Developer Boot Camps work.

Just look at the job statistics for anyone of the top ones, like Hack Reactor, Flatiron School, ect.

They graduate people who get 80-100k salary jobs, within 6 months of graduating.

People go to these bootcamps for the singular goal of getting a high paying job, and these programs are wildly successful at achieving this goal.

And the fraud thing doesn't even look to be true. The NYT writer responded and said that was false.

There wasn't any fraud. There was a response to this accusation, by the NYT, and they claim that this is false.

My other sources have to remain private unfortunately. (official responses haven't been crafted yet)

But I can say that even if it ends up that they technically had the authority to do this, then us Hack the North organizers were mislead to an extraordinarily large degree about the nature of the relationship between MLH and Hack the North.

Here is one of the directors, he has lots of post on reddit about it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/uwaterloo/comments/3ln4cz/two_hacke...

From the link: "For the record: MLH kicked him out. HTN did not. I feel like I definitely need to make it clear that none of the directors of Hack the North were involved in this decision. As for me, personally: I am extremely unhappy about the decision."

Yes.

Here is a link to the response of one of the Hack the North Directors:

https://www.reddit.com/r/uwaterloo/comments/3ln4cz/two_hacke...

From the link: "For the record: MLH kicked him out. HTN did not. I feel like I definitely need to make it clear that none of the directors of Hack the North were involved in this decision. As for me, personally: I am extremely unhappy about the decision."

MLH had no authority to kick out the students. The hackathon is run by a separate group of Waterloo students, whereas MLH is a for-profit hackathon organization that just helps colleges with sponsorships.

It is not their event. MLH stands for major league hacking, and they are just a separate group that helps out colleges with hackathons.

The problem is that they kicked someone out even though they had no authority to do so. The real people in charge have objected to what happened.

An important thing that articles like these miss when talking about the "fundamentals of computer science" is that a CS degree doesn't actually teach you of lot of the necessary fundamentals that people use in the real world.

For example, what about the fundamental of building a website, or building an app?

I'm not arguing that "colleges should teach students rails or X technology that will be outdated in 2 year".

I'm saying that colleges do not teach you a lot fundamental computer science concepts, such as "How do I design a scaleable rest API/website". Or "how do I use a MVC framework (regardless of which MVC framework it is)", or "What design decisions do I need to make when building a mobile app".

These are all very important concepts, that I use in my day to day job, and they have NOTHING to do with "learning hip technology X". These are problem solving fundamentals that colleges don't teach!

Oh no! I am a poor professor who is being censored, because a few students want a 1 sentence warning about potentially traumatic experiences! Look at how my rights are being infringed on, because of a 1 sentence warning that I am being "Forced" to include!

Warnings are the same as censorship! Students should do exactly as I tell them to do, and have no right to ask me for any accommodations at all, no matter how trivially easy it is for me to include them.

Censorship! First Amendment rights! Big Brother!

/s

Build more houses. None of this shit would happen if SF would just build more houses.

Oh man, everything about this post rings true.

I myself am a pretty mediocre developer. But fortunately for me, I realized that tech interviews are complete and total BS.

So what I did was spend a whole bunch of time studying whiteboard algo questions, and I became really good at interviewing. I've gotten a couple awesome jobs that I had no business getting (and usually get fired after about 6 month, because I'm a shitty dev, but whatever, on to the next job).