I get the impression that web development is the overwhelming path of choice for bootcamps, etc. But it's only one field in dev/IT.
I wonder if we could do better to have more diversity in early career education.
Thoughts?
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Yes.
Though I would say pulled or drawn, rather than pushed.
It is the counterpart to the academic path of computer science or software engineering which often involve very abstract content and I have seen many students cancel their undergrad programs. Web dev in contrast can lead to fast results and require few to no prior knowledges so the potential customer base is huge compared to those who survive math or classes at the undergrad programs.
Its true of why I know anything about it, but its not bootcamps my dude its high paying jobs with a relatively low bar to entry due to the overwhelming demand for it and for anything relating to it via Javascript and its not a bad place to weed out the people who enjoy it enough to contribute to dev/IT overall from the multitudes after easy money that would engorge on the free snacks in the lunch room and leave the rest of us stuck with their work too.
Having come in first to Linux and expanded in every direction from there, it seems that the biggest thing creating the entrance funnel in web development other than market pressures is probably that web development is the easiest for people who are tech illiterate to comprehend in the first place as the jargon in this industry makes it nearly impossible to wrap your head around at first, if you aren't already somewhat into linguistics. There is a lot of distance between the world of the dev and popular culture because its something people aren't into or its something so heavily wrapped in incomprehensible jargon that how could anyone even be into it without getting their foot in the door through some specific interest that impacted them ?(most people and the internet, me and the Linux)
I think the two biggest reasons are low barrier to entry and the fast-moving pace of the web dev world. When things are constantly changing, it can drive demand, and with a low barrier to entry a lot of people will embrace these changes to meet that demand.
I think more diversity in paths would be awesome, but like others have said, the other paths are kind of stumbled into and imo aren't that glamorous (but can be just as exciting). I started out in technical writing, and that seems common for so many folks in tech, but I seldom see or hear it talked about. It's a great career, but marketing will never tell you that
Well theres always "something big" in the market when you're just out of college. In the early 90s the big thing was Windows development. Most jobs revolved around your mastery of WIN16 and WIN32 APIs and MFC and such. Also you needed to know C and C++. Not knowing this meant that most cool companies would pass you up.
These days the platforms we are programming for are AWS and Azure. That's the "computer" we're developing for. And they speak the language of the web. Mobile was an option for a while but the emphasis to make apps super cheap limited the amount of money behind these platforms and the Android vs IOS conundrum is lately being solved with React Native and other such Javascript technology.
So yeah.. The web is the big thing for now.
Data science is an alternative, and related Big Data backend as well. But its all for the same platform: AWS or Azure.
Even OS development is down compared to the 80s and 90s where "new OSes" where vying for people's attention. Nothing is really new these days.. just Windows vs Unix variants.
In my opinion, web development serves as the only way to actually show what else you have been doing. Web development becomes a force rather than a choice. I was in my first Hackathon, I made a deep learning model for solving the problem statements and presented my model on Anaconda prompt. The other guy did half of what I did but served the model using flask. Guess who won? He did. That's just one example, I wanted to do some ML / DL work for companies/individuals, I went with awesome proposals to them on how this can save up on a lot of people they need to employ for tasks that can be completely automated, all they were interested in was make an app for me, please make my website, etc. It seems like the only thing people want you to do.
Generally Web Dev is easy to learn and get a hang of it. You just have to learn HTML, CSS and JS which are pretty easy to learn. I agree that bootcamps usually teach Web Dev and they should add more stuff for DevOps, System Programming, IoT, Hacking open source games and etc. If it happens then I will really tell all my friends to do BootCamps. (I don't recommend them generally).
I've also wondered about this! I went to a full-stack development bootcamp and they wanted you to become exactly that... a full-stack developer. In our career classes, they talked about things like frontend vs backend development - but didn't even mention all of the other tech jobs that you can thrive in with a coding education. Things like technical writing, product management, QA engineering, devops, etc.
I see a lot of students obsessing over machine learing and deep learning as well. They start there and slowly come down to webdev after couple of attempts.
The obsession of ML decreases at the very moment they are told that it involves complex mathematics. Many students are unguided and also threatened about the complexity and difficulty they would face while working on ML. So most of them drop the idea at the very beginning and web dev is a great option as it looks easy.
I think now there's a huge surge in data science and ML bootcamps though 🤷🏻♀️
At the beginning I knew as an artist i just wanted to make not-breaking web things that would eventually help others, and hopefully in a facile way!
A thing I like to tell others is: figure out what you want to achieve whether it's hardware hacking, physical electronics, animation, mobile apps, robotics , websites, or games, and then work on learning the toolset for that... it would be otherwise too vast to expect to be a polyglot in <18 weeks
The thing with web development is that its really easy to start with.
No IDE is needed, everything works on the browser and the feedback is instant.
On the other hand, things can get complex when meeting real-life needs (network/performance issues..), which requires web developers to have a high level of engineering.
Personally, I think that the right path for development should involve both BE and FE, but as the FE domain is growing , more professionals are needed across many fields such as: CSS, UI frameworks, monitoring, tracking security, and even accessibility.
A complete beginner likely understands that the web—something they use every day—is built by programmers. I'm unsure the same is true for, say, the radio in your car, or the traffic lights on your street. I definitely don't consider the programmers involved when I open a fresh can of Tide pods. I wonder just how many things we use on a daily basis were never touched by someone's code.
Someone has to change hard drives all day in data warehouses, someone has to teach toy robots to slap you when they see that you've taken damage in a game of Doom (saw this on Twitch a few days ago), someone needs to remap our bodies' electrical signals to control our bionic parts, etc.
Where are the bootcamps to automate farming and garbage collecting/processing? I think it's something to do with the law of large numbers. Imagine the difference between the number of web applications and the number of auto manufacturing robots that need to be programmed. Bootcamps are a business and exist for profit, so it's hard to imagine starting one up that focuses on such a small piece of the pie.
That's a neat thought exercise, and if anything, it made me think about how we really need more InfoSec bootcamps. I've been curious if cyber theft/espionage has been on the rise while we're all on lockdown, but I haven't had time to go looking for an answer.
I wish I went for education in tech, probably would end in robotics/ai field or game industry. Instead my knowledge interests were spreaded all over the place so I ended not specialising in anything (economy, librarianship, publishing).
Webdev was something I did on the side and really enjoyed and felt passionate about, so I went for it full on several years ago, no regrets.
If I had chosen proper education before, maybe I would do something else!
Let's organize to write more about mobile, videogame development... and so on!
I have to constantly remind young devs that there are indeed other aspects to programming than just "front end" and "back end" - they're so far down that rabbit hole that those are the only two worlds they think exist.