This free coding course could bag you a starting salary of R240,000

[cguy]

I think it's great that someone is filling in a needed gap. My only concern with this (and other boot-camps in general), is that they're not always entirely honest or realistic about the scope of the education they provide.

The course is certified by the ICT Seta and trains its graduates to be full-stack developers equipped with the ability to build software solutions within any enterprise.

 

[hj007]

I think it's great that someone is filling in a needed gap. My only concern with this (and other boot-camps in general), is that they're not always entirely honest or realistic about the scope of the education they provide.

yes indeed - this isn't a traditional boot camp as you get paid to attend as such more of an internship. It is impossible that the grads that come out of this are able to do full stack, unless they already had skills before. The probability of this is pretty low, since those with skills would have had access to tech, and thereby probably had some money to be able to pay for studies.

The intake are students that don't have the financial means to pay hence the stipend. Also many/most of these students don't come from backgrounds that had decent schooling, so this is very much a program targeted to find diamonds in the rough. It matches the needs of corporates that want to develop the market through their CSI/SDL spend and youngsters that have potential but not the financial means to actually get to coding camps/diploma. Hence, there will be a gap between this program and the bootcamps that people pay for.

Fully agree that the promise of what these interns can do post the course is optimistic. I suspect that's to keep the sponsors/corporates on board and keep funding, as opposed to promising the applicants the world.

 

[cguy]

yes indeed - this isn't a traditional boot camp as you get paid to attend as such more of an internship. It is impossible that the grads that come out of this are able to do full stack, unless they already had skills before. The probability of this is pretty low, since those with skills would have had access to tech, and thereby probably had some money to be able to pay for studies.

The intake are students that don't have the financial means to pay hence the stipend. Also many/most of these students don't come from backgrounds that had decent schooling, so this is very much a program targeted to find diamonds in the rough. It matches the needs of corporates that want to develop the market through their CSI/SDL spend and youngsters that have potential but not the financial means to actually get to coding camps/diploma. Hence, there will be a gap between this program and the bootcamps that people pay for.

Fully agree that the promise of what these interns can do post the course is optimistic. I suspect that's to keep the sponsors/corporates on board and keep funding, as opposed to promising the applicants the world.

Yup - the accessibility by being sponsored is great vs the other R80k for nonsense types of course. I am just hoping that someone with the option of a university scholarship doesn’t choose this because “we place 98% of our students”, “you’ll be a FullStack Dev on exit”, “you’ll be able to work in any environment”, or the infamous “It’s practical, universities are all theory”, often cited by non-university students, etc.

 

[mr_norris]

If so, ew. C is better, no one writes decent OO code anyway - not even I do.

Please don't single out my bad C++ code. All my code is bad. Thanks.

 

[hj007]

Yup - the accessibility by being sponsored is great vs the other R80k for nonsense types of course. I am just hoping that someone with the option of a university scholarship doesn’t choose this because “we place 98% of our students”, “you’ll be a FullStack Dev on exit”, “you’ll be able to work in any environment”, or the infamous “It’s practical, universities are all theory”, often cited by non-university students, etc.

yes definitely!

Interestingly I was also highly disappointed by the quality of programming at University on a 4-year CS. The material was great overall, but unless you pushed yourself to code, companies were disappointed at the level of coding proficiency of CS grads. Then again, CS isn't supposed to be about the coding, but I didn't fully realize this till later.

 

[cguy]

yes definitely!

Interestingly I was also highly disappointed by the quality of programming at University on a 4-year CS. The material was great overall, but unless you pushed yourself to code, companies were disappointed at the level of coding proficiency of CS grads. Then again, CS isn't supposed to be about the coding, but I didn't fully realize this till later.

I’ve always viewed this as: there are things best taught yourself, things best taught at university, and things best learned on the job.

I taught myself coding before and during my university education, and then I learned a lot about real world development over the next 25 years or so (and am still learning).

I believe that it is mostly a waste of time to teach the “on the job stuff”, since this is so variable and particular, and most internalized insights only emerge from experience. Coding is something I could teach myself though, so by the time I got my first job, I could hit the ground running.

My advice to any CS student is to turn each prac into a project, have at least one large side/hobby project continuously being worked on, and to try evolve the project as you learn in your degree.

I also expect that a lot of CS grads who don’t know how to program probably plagiarized their pracs, but that’s another story.

 

[Herr der Verboten]

Yup - the accessibility by being sponsored is great vs the other R80k for nonsense types of course. I am just hoping that someone with the option of a university scholarship doesn’t choose this because “we place 98% of our students”, “you’ll be a FullStack Dev on exit”, “you’ll be able to work in any environment”, or the infamous “It’s practical, universities are all theory”, often cited by non-university students, etc.

As to DSTV it's so good it can't even sell itself on its own without MyPunting.

 

[CT_Biker]

Please don't single out my bad C++ code. All my code is bad. Thanks.

Mine is too - So is Uncle Bobs, if you look at the code examples of he gives in the talks he gives and his refactoring of messy OO code, he makes mistakes he preaches against.

But if you assume that he always that he prepares different examples for each seminar and he does this on relatively short notice, you can assume that he made a mistake and as much as Uncle Bob came up with some of the design mantras for agile and SOLID, he is perfectly capable of making mistakes - like everyone else.

 

[CT_Biker]

You can still do OO in C.

I knew you were going to bring this up....

Though I am not going to lie, the more I code, the less of an argument I see for writing a program that is mainly OO

 

[Genisys]

Yup - the accessibility by being sponsored is great vs the other R80k for nonsense types of course. I am just hoping that someone with the option of a university scholarship doesn’t choose this because “we place 98% of our students”, “you’ll be a FullStack Dev on exit”, “you’ll be able to work in any environment”, or the infamous “It’s practical, universities are all theory”, often cited by non-university students, etc.

The entire problem is that software development has turned into buzzword bingo. People want to "learn" these buzz words in order to impress others

 

[Johnatan56]

I knew you were going to bring this up....

Though I am not going to lie, the more I code, the less of an argument I see for writing a program that is mainly OO

What do you mean by mainly? You mix and match as needed, each design has its strengths, OOP is great for capturing models, FP is great for business logic, and we constantly use procedural. It would be pretty annoying to have to conform to only one, it's why I enjoy jumping between languages as each have a different design so you can try and solve a problem in a different way, taking advantage of the strengths (and taking into account the weaknesses) of every approach.