I came across Clever Programmer when I was at the start and looking for ways to get into programming. I was turned off watching the first video, in which he was clearly beating his audience into a hype, building some boring NFT site and promised that this will get you a job 100%.
They were in fact using a Web3 website builder for the project. It was ridiculous, but I can see why people are willing to ignore red flags when you are keeping their eyes on some fantasy 100k job .
This is why I’m grateful for projects like the FCC and showing how careful you have to be when you are choosing to use a bootcamp.
I can recommend the YouTuber that made the video above, Dorian Dominguez. He really managed to get a 100k+ job as a self-thaught programmer. He is honest, talking about the downsides of the industry without sounding nihilistic.
Many of these people are influencers/Youtubers first and foremost. They may call themselves programmers but they earn the bulk of their income through Youtube videos and in some cases are not even working as a programmer.
Youtube is a great resource but I think it’s really easy to get sidetracked and watch all these “earn xyz in 3 months” videos.
You know the saying about the gold rush: The ones selling shovels are raking it in while only a select few digging for gold will make it rich.
I mean, these guys are scammers. People should know that, people should smell that. “If it sounds too good to be true…” But the best scams are the ones that prey on peoples fears, insecurities, and greed. It’s easy to blame the victims, but then again, these people are really good at hooking people.
Yeah, I mean a seasoned programmer can tell. But before I learned? I don’t know, I might have gotten sucked in. These people are really good at tricking people. They’ve been doing it for thousands of years. If it wasn’t this it would be something else.
Yeah I suppose you’re right beginners will have difficulty spotting the liars.
I just looked up one of this guys videos where he talks about Mastering JS in 12 hours. The rough part is that the people watching will really believe they are “job ready” in a few weeks.
But then when I see people giving realistic advice, they get labeled as a “gatekeeper” not here, but on a very large other forum (I think you know which one). Sometimes people hear what they want to hear and ignore everything else.
I think beginners should certainly talk to real people working in the industry to get an understanding of what to expect.
This post made me think of how I saw someone post earlier on FCC about their hopes of moving to the US to take a bootcamp there and getting a job etc. and I felt bad about immediately thinking that this person may be about to be scammed. What could I have said to make them see it, so I didn’t mention my misgivings. I think when you are wishing that hard for something, you will do what you will do. (and no single person’s warnings will prevent you from being taken in).
This trend has arrived in Germany unfortunatlely, we have our fair share of “get a job with our golden Amazon cert in three months” operations.
Incentive is the “Bildungsgutschein”, an educational voucher granted by the state to help you get employable again. There’s one in Berlin charging almost 18.000 Euros for their courses, offering modern UI/ UX design, with a website that looks like nobody has touched it since 2007 .
I’m in Canada and they have them here too. I almost took one that was affiliated with the largest university here but I delayed because of the price $16000 and because it was not actually UfT doing the teaching but a company based in the US who specialized in making bootcamps. I would have trusted them if they had provided a complete curriculum to me when I asked but they were unable to do so to my satisfaction.
ps. If I was eligible for an educational voucher from the Cdn government, I may have been in that bootcamp right now… (they have these supports but only for people who were laid off, which didn’t apply to me as I voluntarily quit my last position)
Interesting to hear that Canada has a similar voucher program, I didn’t expect that in North America.
If our governments are facing the same problem, it’s time for some stronger regulations, time for higher bars for the companies that want to offer IT education . Before giving out tax dollars without getting talent for the tech industry.
I don’t have high hopes for my country though, our polititians aren’t tech savvy. When discussing internet regulations, they say things like “social boots” instead of “bots”, they don’t even know the words .
Yeah, there is a strong anti-intellectual, anti-expert, anti-elite streak in us
(especially in the US). You see it especially in conspiracy theories and pseudoscience where they manage to convince people that the elites are hiding key information. The “gatekeeper” argument is a watered down version of that.
While well meant, this is holding down the people that help us to progress. I wish people would grasp that sometimes good intentions will lead to hell.
Well, it’s still an improvement over despotic elitism. But yeah, the issue comes when people think they “deserve” something “just because”. I (as an old man) like to blame it on the “there are no winners, everyone gets a participation medal” culture. I see a lot of younger people just expect respect. I remember someone I worked with (after being proven wrong yet again) barked at me, “Why do you always get to be right?” That stunned me. I explained that I didn’t get to be write, I tried to choose to be right. While he was spending his free time playing video games and reading comic books, I was spending (a fair chunk of) my free time reading and learning. But (on some level at least) he thought that that was somehow cheating him out of his “right” to be right.
I mean, it’s nothing new - people have always been dumb and wanting a shortcut. People have always wanted to believe that the real reason some people do better than them is because somehow they cheated, and if they could just find that secret…
It’s easy to pick on modern culture, but again, let’s remember that it is still an improvement. Hopefully things will correct back to something more sustainable.
I mean, the reality is that people think of ourselves as fundamentally logical, but the reality is that evolution has programmed a lot of cognitive biases. But of course, we can’t see it - a sort of species level Dunning-Krueger.
ps. do you remember me at all from when I was brand new here? You helped me a lot.
I think so. I don’t know, so many people come and go. I’m glad to see you’re doing well, I’m glad to see you’re paying it forward.
I was introduced to a clever programmer via an ad on youtube about an in-person meetup/conference in my local area in which he questioned why there weren’t more in-person events.
This was a year or so back, where there was significant concern around COVID, to the point most major in-person events had significant strings attached or were completely delayed, and would stay that way for months.
I was honestly surprised at how tone-deaf the ad seemed.
Even if you’re 100% in it for yourself, there are significant advantages to helping others and making the world a better place through means like helping with freeCodeCamp.
Sure you’re not paid to do it, but you can gain experience, learn new things, and improve your own experience directly. Ultimately it’s possible for you to help someone that later comes back and helps you, so in that sense your helping yourself the whole time.
So even if you are a grade-A narcissist, you can really benefit by helping others. This isn’t isolated to freeCodeCamp, and can be expanded upon in a multitude of ways and in other aspects of life.
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