What's your take on bootcamps? I worked pretty hard to get my BS CS, but now it seems like a lot of people I knew from college who were liberal arts majors are going to bootcamp. It's got me wondering about the value of my own degree.
Stuff they don't teach at bootcamps: Algorithmic complexity. "Don't roll out your own data structures" and "just use a library" works until it doesn't. Operating System fundamentals is another one.
It seems a lot of bootcamps teach with rote, rather than by looking at the underlying concepts. My favorite example is git. I've seen bootcamp grads claim they can use git, but what it really meant is that they memorized a few git commands and as long as they don't stray too fart from those they can sort of work using git. But cherry-picking, rebase, proper branching forget it.
I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning that some of the TA's at Lambda (the most famous one) are hired to help with teaching as little as two months into the program as students[0]. I guess that counts toward their "placement" stats!
Not only that, but Lambda seems so desperate that they will offer a fresh grad at no cost to any company for a 4 week trial period. [1]
Interesting, thanks for the information. So it seems bootcamps are not really the same type of quality signal that you would get from a degree and GPA. This assuages my fears somewhat.
As an aside, I always considered git to be in the category of "Easily Google-able Technologies". In that whatever I am trying to do in git, it is generally very easy to find a resource online that tells me exactly what to do. For this reason I actually never really bothered to really "learn" git beyond git commit, git add, git push, etc. It's the same attitude I take towards technologies like CSS. Wanted to hear your thoughts on this as you seem experienced and I have < 3 YOE.
You should learn the basics of the git object model. It's really very simple and can help you understand better what some of the commands are actually doing. Lots of git stuff is just stored as plain text file inside the .git folder - the magic 'HEAD' ref is just a textfile that contains the hash of the HEAD commit.
