SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Looking for a career change, Ken Shimizu decided he wanted to be a software developer, but he didn’t want to go back to college to study computer science.
Instead, he quit his job and spent his savings to enroll at Dev Bootcamp, a new San Francisco school that teaches students how to write software in nine weeks. The $11,000 gamble paid off: A week after he finished the program last summer, he landed an engineering job that paid more than twice his previous salary.
I like this kind of program as they teach vocational skills. US education focuses a lot of character building or conceptual thinking, which is not a bad thing. However, when people graduate, usually they are like “deeerp…”
I know nothing about this coding academy but I work with Devs so I have strong opinions…
What happens out in Sillicon Valley is there are a lot of bad programmers for a number of reasons. I consulted at a large tech co that trades on NASDAQ and these companies need to put a$$es in the seats so they might hire devs who can “program” but lack serious skills that I find to be critical in this field. When you take people straight from India/China and put them into the American workforce, they do not fit in culturally. They can not relate to Americans. At lunch time, all of the racial groups would segregate and eat lunch seperately. They have zero respect for the American educational system so they will hire their own race 95% of the time.
Now I am working for another publicly traded tech co and my group hired this American kid about 24 who I would fire today if I could. He does not ask questions, does not listen, has all of the answers, has wasted an enormous amount of time on things that do not matter, etc. He is a contractor but they actually want to bring him on because he is a “hacker” in the words of another zip. Essentially he lacks all soft skills and has not been able to focus on the project spec, but they like him because he can “program.” This is what happens out here, these companies need to hire people and there is a shortage of talent.
So these programs might teach you how to “program” but that is not going to make you a successful dev.
Seriously though, programming is great. I was a computer science major when I started college before switching to econ and math and I hated programming. However at work, because of necessity I regularly code in VBA and the occasional C#. VBA is quite common in the financial industry. I quite enjoy programming now and troubleshooting issues.
I wouldn’t get too excited about switching fields. You have to be reasonably good at it otherwise you’ll never see these promised riches. Eg. I have tried learning to program. I’m terrible. I have wasted 3 hours on a simple javascript program because I forgot a semicolon.
I think people who are really good at this are the types that can kill standardized tests - really good at stringing together simple logic.
Took an intro to programming class in college and was lost after day 2. There were a couple of Comp Sci majors taking it with me and to them it was like learning the alphabet.
I remember it took me a couple of hours to write a program to calculate the area of a circle and I had like 100 lines of programming. Then this kid comes in and writes it out on the board in 5 lines.
OK. He was writing pseudocode for an abstract Turing machine using only symbolic logic operators such as ‘and’,‘or’ and negation. He couldn’t assume the existence of any theoretical math library beyond euclids postulates for deriving the formula for area, and peano axioms for developing standard arithmetic system. His right hand was tied behind his back and he was kept on a diet of kale chips and mountain dew for 3 days before the start of the exercise.
They should pair that up with a quantitative investment additional bootcamp on the back end to get you to entry level quant programming skills. Come in at the bottom in a quant fund and build up.
If you guys are considering going into software but don’t have a CS degree, you should apply to MS in Computer Science. There is one good program at the UofChicago aimed at people just like that. I think Black Swan with his 760 GMAT would do well in this sort of field.
Itera: “if 100 lines of programming is required to make a circle, that language is useless”
not really
assembler requires a couple lines to do simple tasks like just adding two numbers together, and any HFT worth his salt is going to be using assembly liberally through his code.