Coding Bootcamps

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41

re: Salary by location

I know the “Maine Software Circuit” intimately. Some companies try to pull that bullshit. Folks have to know what they are worth in a global economy. Maybe if you’re a programmer for, I don’t know, Marden’s, or something, you might have to deal with local salaries, but L.L. Bean knows that to pull in top-notch Java programmers, they need competitive salary/benefits structure. The old “but, you get to live in Maine” line has gotten stale.

Maybe if you live in Presque Isle or Calais and not willing to move, you may take the 20k difference from Portland, 35k difference from Boston.

These days, I judge a company on whether they require me to be in an office versus telecommute. I have a nice mix now where I drive into an office 1-2x a week, mostly for facetime with boss, but mostly work remotely or onsite at customer. That trend, I think, is swinging in favor of employees.

I’d rather have the right guy/gal in a different timezone than a substandard or mediocre-at-best right in the office everyday. A good company knows to pay for and retain talent.

42

[quote]SteelyD wrote:
re: Salary by location

I know the “Maine Software Circuit” intimately. Some companies try to pull that bullshit. Folks have to know what they are worth in a global economy. Maybe if you’re a programmer for, I don’t know, Marden’s, or something, you might have to deal with local salaries, but L.L. Bean knows that to pull in top-notch Java programmers, they need competitive salary/benefits structure. The old “but, you get to live in Maine” line has gotten stale.

Maybe if you live in Presque Isle or Calais and not willing to move, you may take the 20k difference from Portland, 35k difference from Boston.

These days, I judge a company on whether they require me to be in an office versus telecommute. I have a nice mix now where I drive into an office 1-2x a week, mostly for facetime with boss, but mostly work remotely or onsite at customer. That trend, I think, is swinging in favor of employees.

I’d rather have the right guy/gal in a different timezone than a substandard or mediocre-at-best right in the office everyday. A good company knows to pay for and retain talent.[/quote]

I think your assessment is pretty spot-on. At the end of the day, your salary boils down to what you can negoitiate as much or more than the location.

I actually make substantially more here than I did when I worked in the NYC metro area, but a stint as an independent between that job and this job plus my employer’s acute need for my skill set put me in a position of strength when I accepted my current job (Business Analyst).

Without going into details, let’s just say that I would have negotiated things differently than our well-credentialed developer did if I were in her shoes.

And yes, remote work is great. In another 10 years I would very much like to be working from a lake house up north. I only have a 5 minute commute now, so I prefer to work at my office.

43

Any Java programmers reading this? I mean, like, professional you make your living Java programmers.

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x

45

yup. My day is spent using Java, JSP, and javascript for the most part.

I have a BMath (Comp Sci) from the University of Waterloo. (Comp sci didn’t have it’s own ‘school’ when I attended and was under Math).

I live in Ottawa and work remotely for a Math Software company based in Waterloo, Ontario (Maplesoft, possibly familiar anyone who had to take a math course in university). I only live 5 hours away and haven’t been in the office in over a year. I grew up in waterloo and have friends/family there and am back quite often, but don’t go in.

I’m probably biased, but I agree completely with the differences expressed towards the ‘coding camps’ vs an getting an education.

I learned to code in multiple languages. When I started my undergrad (1998), Java was just getting introduced to the corricullum. Only a few courses were offered in Java at the time. I programmed in turing, modula-3 and then we settled on c++. We weren’t taught to use a certain language, those were just the ones used to learn the concepts: creating languages, syntax readers, compilers, operating systems, etc. We learned how and why different sorting algorithms are better than others and when. Do coding camps teach O-notation? It may not seem too important with todays CPUs and memory but knowing the difference between sorting millions of data points vs hundreds can be important. Maybe not everyday, but it’s a skill I’m glad I have.

I graduated without ever touching Java. I got a support job at my company after doing coop with them, and eventually moved to a developer position. Learning Java (or javascript, or perl, etc.) or any new language now is fairly easy. I know how to code, so all I rally have to learn is the syntax. Sure different languages have little nuances that you pick up over time, but knowing the fundamentals, and why they work, is vital.

46

[quote]SteelyD wrote:
Any Java programmers reading this? I mean, like, professional you make your living Java programmers.[/quote]

I started off as a Java developer. I’m now a C# .Net developer.

47

What did you decide to do?

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I was a java programmer once upon a time.

In my current position I wouldn’t hire someone without a degree or experience or both unless they blew me away in an interview but I’m not sure they’d make the cut to get an interview. However if I were looking for cheap labour I might give them a chance, depending on what else was on the resume and the business I’m supporting (i.e.-If I worked for a printing company, someone with a background in printing + bootcamp might be a good fit) Since industry specific knowledge is hard to come by. We often get stuck bringing people who’s experience is retail and commerce and they just don’t get the nuances of the industry I am in-which has some similarities but more differences.

Up the chain beyond junior programmers, there are fewer and fewer folks who don’t have degrees. And those who don’t are usually just naturally outstanding. I don’t think degrees actually make better professionals though, it’s just they act as a filter and they identify people who have good work ethic and ambition. Not having a degree doesn’t mean you lack those things but you need to convince someone somehow to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Also, people who have the degrees have a vested interest in having their own efforts and choices validated, so if most hiring managers have degrees, then that’s what they are going to be biased towards.

49

[quote]maverick88 wrote:

[quote]spar4tee wrote:
I don’t think it’s worth it. They can’t guarantee you a job, and you can find the same resources online for free.[/quote]

IDK, I do not think it can compare. It is never going to be the same to working with both instructors and students pushing each other to learn and be better. The job placement comes from established industry connections that you will not get when learning on your own. The job placement of many of these camps is really high.

OP, A friends younger brother did one of these with his friend and one thing I took away is that they are really hard and time consuming 12 hr days 6 days a week. It is very challenging. They learned mostly open source like Ruby on Rails and Python. I can not remember the name of it but, it was in northern CA.[/quote]

But the ONLY ones that would guarantee job placement would be the most difficult ones because they will have the most credibility. Meaning, some people that through the camp just might not cut it

I can’t name any off the top of my head but there are some online programs for learning web development. Trouble is, anyone can be web developer (its easy), especially since a large part of the market is dominated by shops churning out cookiecutter wordpress sites. This business model always outsources most of the web development and has very little exceptional talent on the development team, maybe one or two qualifed software engineers

50

I almost became a Java programmer, but they changed their mind literally 3 days before I was about to change teams.

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How hard would it be to teach myself SQL?

I have no experience in programming or database management systems.

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[quote]Dr. Pangloss wrote:
How hard would it be to teach myself SQL?

I have no experience in programming or database management systems.

[/quote]

I did it, and I’m probably dumber than you. I do not call myself a programmer, but I am literate in SQL and use it on a near-daily basis to directly interact with the tables behind the software I support.

A bit of understanding the relational part of relational databases is necessary to make it work, but I did not find that particularly challenging either. You just need to understand how the information you are working with is stored, concepts like primary keys and secondary keys, how joins work, and probably lots of other stuff I am not thinking about right now.

Back to your question, I think it depends on what you are after. You can easily become literate in SQL on your own. Mastering it, on the other hand, is a much taller order. I haven’t done that, so I can’t speak to its relative difficulty.

53

[quote]Dr. Pangloss wrote:
How hard would it be to teach myself SQL?

I have no experience in programming or database management systems.

[/quote]

Not hard at all.

SQL, in my opinion, is probably one of the best languages you can learn, if not the best.

It’s easy to learn, it’s highly “portable”, i.e. pretty much all major database platforms use it or a “dialect” of it, and it’s IMMENSELY useful. From correcting data issues, to running a custom report for someone, to running a business process that may be “data intense”, there are a lot of reasons someone would need to use SQL day-to-day.

Here’s the book I used to learn it when I first started dabbling in it:

There’s really nothing hard or difficult about it. Most people when first learning SQL tend to get hung up on JOINS, particularly OUTER JOINS, but once you start right your first few queries, it will all make sense.

54

[quote]Dr. Pangloss wrote:
How hard would it be to teach myself SQL?

I have no experience in programming or database management systems.

[/quote]
Should be pretty easy. Querying and higher level programming are looked at as separate disciplines by many (I won’t say most) people. What extension were you thinking about picking up? There are numerous subsets as you probably know by now.

55

SQL is pretty straightforward. The basic logic behind it is just working with groups and categories.

E.g., “give me a list of all animals that have brown fur, weigh greater than 500 lbs, live in the forest, and walk on two feet”.

And then, “give me a list of people who claim to have seen such a creature”.

And then, “for each of those people, how many people have called them ‘crazy’, ‘looney’ or ‘insane’”.

Once you have the basic concepts of filtering things (animal description), relating different categories of things (people who’ve seen them), and aggregation (counts of people who think they’re crazy), you pretty much have it down.

SQL is just another way of saying the same thing.

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Now, if you’re talking about SQL for the purpose of actually designing a database, it gets a bit more complicated… not just syntactically, but conceptually. There’s a lot of tradeoffs that need to be considered as far as performance vs maintainability vs simplicity.

There’s plenty of really complex stuff that can and does get done in SQL.

The concepts are simple, but how they get combined, and the aggregate sum of decisions made over time, can take these simple concepts and turn them into monstrosities… especially if you’re trying to make your way around a database that’s been in use and developed over a period of many years.

57

You may want to take some sessions on using Access before jumping into SQL, just to have kind of the visual on how relational DBs work.

Also, if you’re going to go the cheap route and do MySQL, be aware that it has a few bugs (nothing you can’t work around), that can be a headache if you don’t know about them.

Also, for OP, you may want to look into your region’s local workforce development initiatives. My city will pay for you to take Cisco networking, CompTIA, SharePoint, SQL, and Java at the local community college if you are unemployed or underemployed.

They’re also trying to develop an apprenticeship program, but I don’t think they’ve been able to get enough employers to sign up.

58

Thanks for the excellent responses, I’m looking into some options right now.