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Discussion on: College vs Bootcamp vs Self-Taught

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cbrintnall profile image
Christian Brintnall

and prepare students more for the theoretical aspects of CS instead of learning how to code well

Most should teach you both, as a Computer Science is theoretical. My debt was nowhere close to $70k, not even half of that. Although I do agree, the demand for developers greatly surpasses the throughput of college CS grads.

A four year degree will help you understand what / why you're writing certain pieces of code, and also help with problems you may be having.

Not saying you can't achieve these by yourself / with a bootcamp, but a deep dive into computer science theory is extremely helpful.

How dated? Flash was still listed as required material, and the most recent tech in that curriculum was jQuery.......in 2016.

Thats fair, but thats a matter of doing research first, no? Web development was an elective at my college and was fairly arcane as well, learning jQuery, PHP, etc.

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dylanesque profile image
Michael Caveney

Agreed, all developers should spend time with CS basics, and at the very least understand the data structures available to them, and how understanding the strengths and weaknesses of those structures helps them write better code.

As for research, I had been assured before signing up for the program that Flash and other deprecated technologies like .NET (YMMV on how deprecated that is.....) were being struck from the curriculum and replaced with newer tech, but 2 years later, ¯_(ツ)_/¯ was the only answer that the dept head had for me. Even with more updated curriculum, I would be deeply skeptical of most traditional college's ability to teach web development well. Software engineering is another matter since the tools don't move as fast.