[LRUG] Juniors

[Sam Livingston-Gray]

Over here, I've seen a few different sorts of code school students: from the graduates of Hungry Academy (I've paired with a handful of them, all of them incredibly sharp) and the inaugural cohort at Ada Developers Academy (cofounded by an HA alum) to people going through n-week courses. I was extremely skeptical of HA when it was first announced, but seeing it in action was...amazing.

One big difference, as someone else pointed out, is the selection process. HA had something like a 3-5% acceptance rate, and ADA had quite a few applicants to select from. On the other hand, while I've certainly spoken to some very smart people who've gone through shorter programs...I've also been underwhelmed by others, who probably would not have made it through a selection process more rigorous than "can you pay us"? (Speaking of, another key difference is that HA paid a reasonable salary and ADA, a nonprofit, pays a nominal stipend.) I've not spoken directly to any gSchool students, but knowing some of the people involved, I'd definitely pay attention to gSchool on a resume as well.

Point being, I wouldn't discount code schoolers out of hand. :)

--
Sent from a device with a virtual keyboard. Please excuse terseness, top-posting, hilarity introduced by autocorrect.

> On May 21, 2014, at 11:40 AM, "George Drummond" <georgedrummond at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> In my experience, "Graduates" of GA type courses leave with a very elementary knowledge in rails/testing/development and hugely inflated expectations of how valuable they are as developers. 
> 
> How much can one really learn in 8 weeks from an unaccredited course taught by self proclaimed educators? I also feel the "graduate" label they like to throw around is completely bogus and only clever marketing to quantify their extremely high course fees from an unlicensed educational establishment.
> 
> One good thing GA does do is encourage open source contributions. The first thing I generally do when receiving a speculative email from a candidate is check out their GitHub. For me this is a very powerful indicator to their experience, commitment and skill set. Another important thing for me is if they have any interesting personal projects. 
> 
> Unpaid internships are totally unethical but at least you aren't paying thousands for a phony qualification. 
> 
> The minimum wage is a right everyone in this country shares and businesses should not be exploiting people asking them to do work for free. 
> 
> The best engineers I've worked with are either self taught or university graduates. Maybe one day I'll meet a brilliant GA graduate but I'm still waiting for that to happen. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 6:04 PM, Michael Pavling <pavling at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 21 May 2014 15:57, Louis Goff-Beardsley <louisror at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>  the developers [boot camps] produce are often not immediately employable.
>> 
>> I can't speak for others (other 'boot camps' that is), but my experience teaching at General Assembly (as a contractor... so I have no corporate axe to grind) is absolutely antithetical of that - as is the employment stats of the grads from the WDI courses that have run over the last year, and the attitude of employers that attend the recruitment 'meet-and-greets' that run at the end of each course.
>> 
>> From what I hear of other providers' courses though, the stories are very similar, so I'd be interested to find out what you're basing that assertion on. What sorts of things do you feel the graduates you meet are often lacking that causes them to not be immediately employable? (since the curriculum of the courses are generally based on the premise that they should be... and if we're missing anything, it would be nice to know)
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lists.lrug.org
> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lrug.org/pipermail/chat-lrug.org/attachments/20140522/c749d0f8/attachment-0003.html>