Notes by Lex Toumbourou

Despite their occasional ridicule within the industry, the software boot camp model works - the top boot camps tend to have a higher success rate at landing people in jobs than computer science departments at top universities ^{1 2}.

Anecdotally, I've hired many devs who came straight out of boot camps, and they all rocked and are in the industry to this day - most of them have become seniors.

From day 1, they came to work knowing Git, how to use their IDE (shortcuts, etc.), the basics of typical Agile-like practices and had practical experience building web applications.

Yes, a Survivorship Bias is at play here - not everyone "made it". However, their fellow students who found that software wasn't for them only took 3-6 months of their lives learning it instead of 3-10 years to get a degree.

On the flip side, for a typical Computer Science degree, the engineering content is often unaligned with the expectations of a junior developer ³. In the field, you're going to spend a lot less time concerned with the complexity of search algorithms or building abstract syntax trees, and a lot more time creating CI pipelines, dealing with merge conflicts, and investigating complex customer issues, which, in my experience, are usually a tiny part of one engineering module, if covered at all, in a CompSci degree.

The fundamentals are useful and typically must be in place to progress into senior roles, and they can't be taught in depth at a short boot camp. However, I argue that fundamentals are much more efficiently learned alongside a career as a practising software engineer. Instead of learning them all up front, they'd be much more effectively taught after an engineer has some practice building products with software. For example, learning about worst-case complexity and Big O notation is much easier when you have already blown up prod, thanks to a nested loop in your code.

And that's much closer to how an apprenticeship works: some study, followed by lots of hands-on experience, followed by more study, and so on until you're a professional.

Like a trade, writing software can only be mastered by practising it - a lot, and we should educate developers accordingly.