I was the OP who posted the first thread which was linking to his life-threatening tweet minutes after he posted it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10803924). Unfortunately it got deleted just before reaching to frontpage because
"We are not going to have a thread to gawk at a human being saying he might kill himself."
Well, I was thinking exactly the opposite of gawking when I posted it. I wanted the community to pay attention, I wanted thousands of people writing him emails/tweets, supporting his fight against the traumatic experience he encountered with the police. So he could see that ending his life isnt the only way to reach out to people about his cause. I feel like we actually closed our ears to what he was trying to say by deleting that thread. What was so wrong about discussing it here as normal human beings? People in that thread were actually discussing his experience about police brutality. From his Twitter logs, you can see that he was tweeting to some Twitter accounts and was asking for help on his cause :( I just feel like it would be nice for him to see himself on front-page of Hackernews and see that community is also outraged by what happened to him. Instead, he was harassed by several random people on Twitter calling him names and wanting him to broadcast his suicide on twitch :(
I don't mean to hurt/blame anyone or any moderator. Maybe I just feel very emotional since I met with Debian when I was 18 and it completely changed my life. I also met with him at a couple of events and he seemed like a nice guy in person, too. I just feel a little responsible for not being able to do anything after reading his tweets :( I do hope that community doesn't let what happened to him forgotten and fight for his cause.
> Well, I was thinking exactly the opposite of gawking when I posted it.
I suppose it depends on how much faith you have in the community, particularly in its worst elements. If there is not an outpouring of support (> 95% of the responses are positive), then broadcasting his calls for attention probably won't help and it may even further have hurt Ian.
I personally believe that our community would care for this person: an established man of merit in our little community and certainly not a insecure attention-seeker.
I agree your original thread should have not been deleted.
The reason older photocopiers don't copy blue is very simply that the
drum was activated by reflected light from the scanner. The chemical
process that creates the "semiconductor" on the drum surface is
sensitive to a fair proportion of the light spectrum, but frequently
lost sensitivity t the blue portion of the range. Organic
photoconductors had a better response to blues but still cut off a
portion of the spectrum. Newer Photocopiers (Digital) operate
differently and are dependent on the frequency range of the CCD in the
scanner, they are usually pretty good at the blues, and frequently
have settings that enable Text enhancement, enabling a setting of a
contrast point, anything darker than that point is registered as black
anything lighter as white.
A while ago, someone wrote to Systers (a highly activated women in CS e-mail list) the following, which is highly accurate:
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What a great business model Grace Hopper Academy has.
First, you find women who are very smart and highly motivated. You make sure they are highly motivated by making them take the first part of the course online. (Massive Open Online Courses have a completion rate of 10%, and the vast majority people finishing them already have a Bachelor's degree). The cost to run the online course is very cheap, and now you are guaranteed to have easy students only.
You then teach these easy students Javascript stuff for one semester. (13 weeks).
Then you take 22.5% of their year's paycheck once they have a nice job -- and they will have a nice job because they are very smart and motivated. If they make $70,000, that's $15,750 a pop.
A state university education in Ohio is $12,000 for 15 weeks by the way. Other bootcamps range from free to $21000 with median around $8000. (Grace Hopper Academy is not the only one to get tuition paid via a cut of your pay after graduation either). http://www.skilledup.com/articles/the-ultimate-guide-to-codi...
The Dean of Grace Hopper Academy has no academic credentials listed whatsoever, nor is there any information about the instructors. Do they have academic credentials? Do they have industry experience and teaching experience? Do they have names? Are any of them female?
Buyer beware.
---
PS: The exact link to the discussion is somewhere in the Systers archive..
Makes sense. I'm a woman with a BS degree already from a highly-ranked college, still considering applying to this school, however, because:
I don't have the upfront money to pay tuition for other private schools. Total cost of a college degrees to job is ~$100K which is way higher. I don't want to spend 4 more years and accumulate a ton of loans. Colleges also don't share the risk with me of getting a job. This makes me think this school has much more incentive to educate me well. My undergrad college took my tuition whether I got a great job out of it or not (which I didn't :P). The school is new though so I'm a bit weary of not seeing a track record. I'm going to do more careful research now before applying.
A business like this has a strong incentive to get you a decent job for a few years after graduation, because that's how they get paid. The incentives of a regular college or university are longer-term, and play out over the course of decades. These are alumni networks, alumni donations, legacy students, general reputation, and so on.
As a result, this business has incentives to teach you what will be profitable for them in the near future and neglect the medium to long term. A college's incentives favor the medium to long term, with a corresponding potential short-term sacrifice.
Also, remember to consider the alternative of not getting more formal education. Going to a bootcamp will qualify you for a junior-level position, which you could also compete for by reading a couple of books and putting together a portfolio.
Source: my BA is in French literature, and I moved into a software engineering career with a Safari Books Online membership and a portfolio.
This is how they all operate. I used to work for MakerSquare which is now owned by Hack Reactor. Both schools have very selective interview processes and the point is to select highly motivated people who already have great qualifications. We were even instructed to screen for hireability (sp?). Then we teach them the basics of "software development" which really amounted to Javascript fundamentals and introductions to some commonly used frameworks.
Despite what was in my view an education that lacked a lot of depth the students were able to put together some impressive projects. Particularly impressive for the many who really hadn't written a line of code before they got involved with the program.
I've heard people who run bootcamps say things like "we're revolutionizing education" but I have to say I really didn't see anything revolutionary in the 15 months I was an instructor. What I saw was a process that took highly motivated people and gave them the tools they needed to get what they want.
Full disclosure: I'm a recent graduate of Fullstack Academy, the organization that is overseeing Grace Hopper Academy. Grace Hopper is going to use the same curriculum that Fullstack uses.
"You make sure they are highly motivated by making them take the first part of the course online... The cost to run the online course is very cheap, and now you are guaranteed to have easy students only."
While it's cheaper to run an online course than an in-person one, it's by no means cheap. The point of the first third of the course is to bring everyone up to speed and make sure everyone is competent in basic HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Considering the highly motivated students taking the course, there's no advantage to learning the very basics in person. I'm talking about getting comfortable with basic design patterns, JS prototypes, using higher-order functions. Callbacks and promises were only taught in the next part of the course, to give you an idea.
"They will have a nice job because they are very smart and motivated." No, they will get nice jobs because they're smart and motivated AND now know how to code, know how to work as part of a software team, know how to use coding best practices, and most importantly know how to learn new technical concepts and languages.
"That's $15,750 a pop." That's only slightly more than what Fullstack currently charges.
"A state university education in Ohio is $12,000 for 15 weeks by the way." Yes, things cost more in NYC. And Fullstack grads are WAY more competent than someone who's taken one semester of college CS courses. For four months I lived and breathed Javascript. Bootcamps focus on producing programmers who are ready to work in a production environment, something you absolutely cannot say for college grads.
"The Dean of Grace Hopper Academy has no academic credentials listed whatsoever..." For the last time, comparisons to academic college programs make no sense. The curriculum is already proven to produce good coders, and the staff constantly iterates to see how they can improve the program and the student experience.
"Do the [instructors] have industry experience and teaching experience?" Absolutely, every single one of them. They're likely not listed because it hasn't been decided which of the Fullstack instructors will transfer. From what I hear, it'll be a rotation, so you can look at fullstackacademy.com to see who'll be teaching there.
"Are any of them female?" WTF, the entire program is in place to ensure that more women will become coders because there currently aren't enough!
These sorts of bootcamps are more along the lines of an employment agency. They make the recruits pay the recruiting fee rather than the hiring company. They also maintain strong relationships with the hiring companies because they've trained the recruits well. I'm not sure how that alters your calculus for the value based on the recruit / student's benenefit, but it is definitely a good value for prospective employers. Also, I imagine these job placement agencies in disguise are much better at helping their students find work than a university even if they are not as good at traditional style education.
If they made the hiring company pay the fee, then you would be correct. That's how hacker school in NYC makes money while offering a tuition-free school.
This bootcamp instead makes its graduates pay. That's very, very different from an employment agency and more like the University of Phoenix.
I favor Python as well, but from what I see in industry, Python is best for exploration/initial experiments and Java (and recently, Scala) is for production.
I did my PhD in mid-west, and I literally only met 2 American PhD students during my entire PhD (majority was Chinese and Indian students who pursue a PhD as a gateway to a top job). I guess location is a big factor.
It also makes sense why there are less American PhD students in those kind of locations when you look from their perspective. If I were an American, there was no way for me to spend 5+ years of my life in mid-west with 1500K a month (instead, I could just lend to a top company in a good location with $$$$). But for most of the foreign nationals, such an experience is OK to bear with in return for a better life standard.
I experienced the two sides of the coin first hand. Right after college, I started to work at a start-up; everything was just awesome, people were cool, job was interesting, I was extremely happy. 3 months into the job, after I talked to my colleagues, I realized that I was severely underpaid. I asked for a raise, got something like 5%. After 2 weeks, I switch to a job paying me exactly x 2 of my salary.
Worst decision of my life, and I still regret it to this day. But knowing the fact that my old job was taking advantage of me just because I am a new-graduate, I couldn't return back there. But sometimes money isn't really worth comparing to being absolutely happy at work.
> Worst decision of my life, and I still regret it to this day.
Interesting framing. The way I see it, you were successful in determining that you're worth more, but you landed at the wrong place. Like, the issue isn't that jobs that are awesome AND that pay well don't exist, the problem was you just didn't land in one.
I stopped using a cellphone when I moved to US --it was way more expensive than what I used to have in my home country (so I just simply said "nope."). Now when people ask my phone number, I just give my Google voice (which is free text/talk within US). If I am traveling to a conference, for the sake of emergency, I just use a potato phone with prepaid credit -- which I connect its number to Google Voice, so everyone who calls my Google voice number are automatically being redirected to my temporary phone. So I get that going for me.
Reminds me when I was an instructor for a grad course and showed up in a very trendy outfit to the first lecture (nothing weird or revealing, but nothing you would often see in a campus either -- full make up, high heels, ripped jeans etc.) and I can't forget the look in the student's faces. I was trying to explain an algorithm on the board, and all students had a look in their faces like "you can't possibly know about this". When the class is over and the professor of the next class showed up, he had a grin on his face like "you can't possibly teach a class". Fast forward to 2 weeks later, when I was overwhelmed with the exams and didn't give a single damn anymore, I just showed up with my sweatpants, a hoodie, and no makeup. Students were listening the class with full focus and I was well respected. Not sure what to make out of this..
The funny thing is: I am programming since I was 17, and spent most of my youth in full-geeky and nerdy outfits (aka, in "programmer" style). But after I come to my mid-20s I started to feel like "Oh, I didn't even wear a dress or a high-heel in my entire life!!!11". That's when I started to dress like a woman, and that's what happens :')
>My wife is a nurse. A female dominated field. I also own a construction company. A male dominated field. In neither field would you see a company or an organization suggest hiring one gender over the other to satisfy a ratio.
The only difference between men and women is their physical power. Yes, construction company is a male dominated field, because men are more suitable for doing that kind of job because of their body strength.
On the other hand.. in computer science, there is no difference between men and women, everything runs on brain power. So I find it very weird that there is very few women in computer science.
On the other hand.. in computer science, there is no difference between men and women, everything runs on brain power. So I find it very weird that there is very few women in computer science.
It's sexism. People are being judged and losing opertunities based on their gender, which as you point out, is irrelevant.
Here's a mind blowing factoid: The lack of women in tech is strong evidence that tech is not a meritocracy.
Well, I was thinking exactly the opposite of gawking when I posted it. I wanted the community to pay attention, I wanted thousands of people writing him emails/tweets, supporting his fight against the traumatic experience he encountered with the police. So he could see that ending his life isnt the only way to reach out to people about his cause. I feel like we actually closed our ears to what he was trying to say by deleting that thread. What was so wrong about discussing it here as normal human beings? People in that thread were actually discussing his experience about police brutality. From his Twitter logs, you can see that he was tweeting to some Twitter accounts and was asking for help on his cause :( I just feel like it would be nice for him to see himself on front-page of Hackernews and see that community is also outraged by what happened to him. Instead, he was harassed by several random people on Twitter calling him names and wanting him to broadcast his suicide on twitch :(
I don't mean to hurt/blame anyone or any moderator. Maybe I just feel very emotional since I met with Debian when I was 18 and it completely changed my life. I also met with him at a couple of events and he seemed like a nice guy in person, too. I just feel a little responsible for not being able to do anything after reading his tweets :( I do hope that community doesn't let what happened to him forgotten and fight for his cause.