There are three essential ways to begin a career as a developer. The first is to get a college degree in the subject, which is normally a Bachelor of Computer Science or a Bachelor of Information Technology (amongst other degrees). The second is to teach yourself the trade, which means spending a lot of time with books and in front of your screen working through online tutorials. The third is a new option, coding school. The third option has become extremely popular due to limitations in the first two techniques.
The cost of a college education has continued to skyrocket over the past few decades until it has started to elude the grasp of more than a few people. I’ve read estimates that a college degree now costs between $20,000 and $100,000 in various places. How much you actually pay depends on the school, your personal needs, and the electives you choose. The point is that many people are looking for something less expensive.
A college education also requires a large investment in time. A four year degree may require five or six years to actually complete because most people have to work while they’re going to school. A degree is only four years when you can go full time and apply yourself fully. Someone who is out of work today and needs a job immediately can’t wait for five or six years to get a job.
Teaching yourself is a time-honored method of obtaining new skills. I’ve personally taught myself a considerable number of skills. However, I’m also not trying to market those skills to someone else. My self-taught skills usually come in the areas of crafting or self-sufficiency (or sometimes a new programming language). The problem with being self-taught is that you have no independent assessment of your skills and most employers can’t take time to test them. An employer needs someone with a proven set of skills. Consequently, self-teaching is extremely useful for learning new hobbies or adding to existing (proven) skills, but almost valueless when getting a new job. In addition, few people are actually motivated enough to learn a new skill completely (at the same level as a college graduate) on their own.
Coding schools overcome the problem with self-teaching because they offer proof of your skills and ensure you get a consistent level of training. You get the required sheepskin to show to employers. They also address deficiencies in the college approach. The time factor is favorable because most of these schools promise to teach you basic development skills in three months (compared to the five or six years required by a college). In addition, the cost is significantly less (between $6,000 and $18,000). So, it would seem that going to a coding school is the optimum choice.
Recently people have begun to question the ability of coding schools to fulfill the promises they make. It’s important to consider what a coding school is offering before you go to one. The schools vary greatly in what they offer (you can see reviews of three popular code schools at http://www.mikelapeter.com/code-school-vs-treehouse-vs-codecademy-a-review/). However, there are similarities between schools. A coding school teaches you the bare basics of a language. You don’t gain the sort of experience that a college graduate would have. In addition, coding schools don’t teach such concepts as application design or how to work in a team environment. You don’t learn the low-level concepts of how application development works. I don’t know if building a compiler is still part of the curriculum at colleges, but it was one of my more important learning experiences because I gained insights into how my code actually ended up turning switches on and off within the chips housed in the computer.
I see coding schools as fulfilling an important role—helping those who do have programming skills to build competence in a new language quickly. In addition, a coding school could provide an entry point for someone who thinks they may want a computer science degree, but isn’t certain. Spending a short time in a coding school is better than spending a year or two in college and only then finding out that computer science isn’t what the person wants. Coding schools could also help people who need to know how to write simple applications as part of another occupation. For example, a researcher could learn the basic skills require to write simple applications to aid in their main occupation.
People learn in different ways. It’s the lesson that readers keep driving home to me. Some people learn with hands on exercises, some by reading, and still others by researching on their own. Coding schools can fulfill an important role in teaching computer science, but they’re not even close to a complete solution. In order to get the full story about computer science, a student must be willing to invest the required time. Until we discover some method for simply pouring information into the minds of people, the time-consuming approach to learning must continue as it has for thousands of year. There really aren’t any shortcuts when it comes to learning. Let me know your thoughts about coding schools at John@JohnMuellerBooks.com.
