
How coding boot camps are filling the talent gap - dean
http://www.macleans.ca/work/jobs/how-coding-boot-camps-are-filling-the-talent-gap/
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acconrad
I have this theory that coding boot camps are an attempt at further increasing
the wage gap. Globalization has brought down developer prices, but the quality
dropped too far below what was needed.

How can we reduce costs without having to pay market rates? We'll hire someone
with less experience than a college graduate in the field of web development!

Since most websites are nothing that difficult to implement, we can offer
courses on teaching people basically how to build these apps, and then hire
them at these companies! The employee is happy to be making more than they
were (which was either nothing because their previous job has become
irrelevant or less because the floor for software development is so high), and
the employer is happy to be employing cheap labor.

My guess is the net effect can only be negative. If the business scales, it
will need more talented engineers to help with that scale, and either keep
these boot camp engineers to do the simple tasks or fire them for failing to
continue to provide value. Or the business can't scale because the developers
aren't talented enough to scale these apps, and they can't hire talented
engineers because they refuse to pay market rates for quality workers. The
third scenario I see is that it becomes a Mythical Man-month problem, where
companies just decide that high quality engineers at these types of businesses
simply aren't worth it, and would rather have a cadre of low cost boot
campers, making the demand for quality software engineers drop, save for a few
specialized roles.

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lordCarbonFiber
I think the demand for quality software devs is honestly an illusion born out
of the mysticism that surrounds tech for much of the older generation. When
all systems involving tech map to ~magic~ you end up with highly educated
people being highly paid to do work that honestly could be done by nearly any
layperson with enough practice. There will likely be some turmoil as ratios of
full engineer to effective technician get sorted out but I feel like the end
result is not necessarily negative. Odds are that those people with
technically fulfilling jobs have little to worry about. The rest of us
probably should polish those resumes because the days of six figures to do
simple dev work are coming to an end.

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lordCarbonFiber
With the caveat that I don't have any person experience with the situation in
Canada, I get immediately suspicious of any article that talks to a "talent
gap". At least in the states, it's not hard to find a developer. What is hard
however, is finding a developer that wants to code your uninspired CRUD app at
below market rates and I that's the issue these bootcamps tend to address.

~~~
chaghan
in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king How much time can a man
invest in learning a really complex stuff so he can work on compilers,
creating programming languages or implementing extraordinary search
algorithms. And who will pay for that ?

That is the downside of capitalism.

Just take a look at what happened to Oracle when the most brilliant engineers
left after they acquired Sun Microsystems. They literally could not find
anyone for ages to replace these people just because there is not enough
talent out there.

And that's Oracle. Who else is there that can afford to pay these people ?
Google ? Maybe. Netflix ? aye IBM ? likely And maybe few dozens of other
corporations.

But these people do not want to work for corporations instead they need to be
treated as special unicorns.

