Thank you so much for bringing a reasonable reflection to the sub. Most of my conversations with grads go like this and it's where most of much nuanced critique - good and bad - comes from.
As a moderator, thanks you for bringing good discussion here and hopefully the comments stay good too.
u/BlindElephant42 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Yep, totally agree on your points. Also ties into my comment of overly inflated self-worth.
I think about it with other non-SWE engineering roles. If someone interviewed at my current company with 0 years of work experience but they did a 9 month long bootcamp, it would be laugh
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Just a note for others reading, Launch School's Capstone projects are one level better than Codesmith's OSPs and follow a similar idea of building a developer tool.
I love the spirit of the OSP but they went about it all wrong. They responded to my criticism about OSLabs being a fake entity by establishing a charity only recently.
The director of the charity is now 'on leave' and it's my understanding from her that Annie and Phil run the day to day of the projects
Like instead of building a fake charity that's practically run by Codesmith people, put effort into making the OSPs better. Less effort on appearing legit and more effort on being legit.
Launch School is leveling up their projects by having paid mentors work on large open source projects like Firefox and mentoring students to work on those projects without distracting the core contributors (who otherwise don't have the time to mentor junior engineers).
u/CoastLongjumping6491 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
For sure, I think if it were billed as a final project that goes beyond a simple CRUD app and allows you to really push yourself to explore and work with different technologies you’ll see on the job, that would make a lot more sense. But that would require pretty dramatically shi
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
My opinions is that they don't have anyone qualified to do it.
I've reported a couple of major security problems in projects and no one seems to know what to do about it.
For example, they checked in passwords for some 3rd party charity into source code. They then claimed they removed them from the repo. But alas, they didn't wipe the Git history and the passwords were still there in past commits.
I pointed this out and was told I was wrong.
I sent a link to the password directly, publicly on GitHub.
It took far too much effort to explain this if I was talking to "mid level and senior engineers".
u/Parky-Park wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I'm guessing you also contacted the charities and let them know that their sensitive info was being played with fast and loose?
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Well the password seemed to work, they said they changed it, and then it appeared to stop working so I believe so.
u/s4074433 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
In light of the current market, would a in-person and 6 month bootcamp taught by seasoned developers who have bootcamp experience, at the same price of Codesmith be more appealing? Or sound too good to be true?
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
If those developers are making $500K a year and true senior top tier engineers, they won't just randomly want to teach a bootcamp and they won't do so consistently for 6 months.
Several have tried this and it's failed.
What you end up with is unemployed bootcamps grads who were laid off and doing it to make money, which is marginally better than a bootcamp instructor who has never worked in industry.
The free market in the USA makes it almost impossible to have the best engineers teach consistently like that.
Meta and Google both PAY their own engineers FULL SALARIES to do 6 month sabaticalls and teach courses at colleges.
People who would be interested in the above would much rather just get a job at Meta and do it via them.
u/s4074433 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
There's got to be other motivations to do things in life other than money right? Maybe some of them have enough already and want to give something back to the community, or maybe even try and make some changes that will fix the broken IT industry?
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
From my experience. There are a bunch of people who want to give back and mentoring yes.
The problem is they don't want to quit their jobs and run your program reliably for 6 months. They want to do casual mentorship.
If I'm making $1M a year as a principal eng at Meta, I need you do do a ton of coordinating around my life for me to do mentorship even if I WANT TO. You have to setup effective mentees for the person. It's not about the money but the opportunity cost.
A person like this wants to maximize their impact as a mentor and not waste time.
Who is going to manage all of this? It's completely different process and skillset to manage this than running a bootcamp.