Self-Taught Programmer vs Coding Bootcamp vs Computer Science Degree

what's up everybody how's it going in this video i'm gonna compare the three primary options that exist in the world right now to learn how to code and to become a software engineer these three options are being a self-taught software developer so teaching yourself how to code alone attending a coding bootcamp and just getting a conventional computer science degree at a university or college the point of this video is to hopefully get to a conclusion as to which of these three options is the best option that you can take if you want to learn how to code with the goal of becoming an employable software engineer now i was originally going to film this video just by kind of ranting and i have in my mind already a ranking of these three options but then i figured that it might be better to do this a little bit more rigorously and even pragmatically so what i'm going to do instead is i'm going to compare very objectively these three options on seven seven seven axes and characteristics so i've written them down here i'm going to compare them on price usefulness difficulty speed support slash motivation opportunities in other words what opportunities do you have to get a job afterwards with the three options and access how easy or difficult is it to access these three different options i'm going to rank these three options on all these axes we're going to give three points to the one that wins a particular comparison two points to the one that's in the middle and one point to the worst option whenever we're comparing them then at the end we're going to tally up all the points and we will have our final ranking now i haven't actually gone through this exercise of giving all of these points so i'm very curious if by the end of the video the point ranking is gonna match the mental ranking that i currently have in my mind for these three options we're gonna find that out together one little caveat before i jump into all these comparisons i do wanna say that i personally attended a coding bootcamp i don't have a cs degree i have a math degree and i never coded when i was in college and i'm not a self-taught developer but i did attend a coding bootcamp full stack academy in new york city that being said i am going to do this as unbiasedly if that's a word as possible in other words i don't have any skin in this game i don't care which of these three options is best at the end of the day i just want to give you the most objective information that i can and my thoughts on this matter so with that sit back pulverize the like button i want this like button to disappear by the end of the video and let's get into these comparisons so we'll start with price and here i think that we can all agree this one is pretty straightforward the cheapest option and therefore the best option from a pricing point of view is gonna be being a self-taught developer at worst you will spend maybe a few thousand dollars depending on how expensive the courses or tutorials that you end up buying are but the point is it's going to be fairly cheap so the self-taught route is going to take first place in the pricing comparison then the coding bootcamp is going to take second place because with the coding bootcamp you might actually pay nothing up front if you go with a deferred tuition model or income share agreement model or at worst if you pay everything upfront you'll pay maybe you know fifteen thousand twenty thousand dollars i paid seventeen thousand dollars for mine but if you compare that to a cs degree at a private institution for example in the united states you might be looking at literally fifty or sixty thousand dollars a year even if you have a decent amount of financial aid you're still going to be looking at tens of thousands of us dollars per year so that's going to be more expensive than your coding bootcamp that's going to be third place now let's look at the second characteristic usefulness and here once again the self-taught route is gonna take first place now the reason i'm saying that it's gonna take first place is because in an ideal world and i realize that this is not easy but that's why i have multiple characteristics we're gonna compare difficulty level a bit later but in an ideal world as a self-taught developer you can teach yourself the most useful targeted material that you would need to become employable if i could go back in the past now and be a self-taught developer self-teach myself how to code knowing the knowledge that i have now i would really be extremely pragmatic in what i would teach myself i would learn the very basics of some programming language probably python or javascript i would learn the basics of full stack development you know the front-end client-side stuff apis and then i would immediately get into data structures and algorithms for coding interviews i would definitely use my own company i'll go expert by the way if you're preparing for coding interviews or your system's design interviews check out my company i'll go expert go to algoexpert.i and use the promo code clem clem freda scout on the platform but the point is we can make the self-taught route as useful as possible so that takes the first place then i'm going to put the coding bootcamp as the second place because at a coding boot camp you're going to learn very targeted skills as well you will have a little bit more fluff than you would in an ideal self-taught scenario but still you're learning really useful stuff and then i'm gonna have to put the cs degree in third place because when you're doing a four-year cs degree you're naturally going to have courses that are required that are really useless that are going gonna teach you stuff that's never gonna be used on the job and so on and so forth so cs degree third place for this characteristic so now let's look at the third axis or characteristic and this one is gonna be difficulty and this is where i think the self-taught route is gonna start to look a little bit worse than the other two as far as difficulty is concerned i have to put the self-taught route in third place that's the thing about going down the self-taught route it is very difficult to do like i said before if i could go back knowing what i know now with all the knowledge that i've accumulated over the last four years or so then i could craft the ideal self-taught curriculum but when you're a beginner and you know nothing about coding or software engineering it is extremely daunting extremely difficult so it has to go in third place now if we look at coding boot camps and cs degrees it's kind of hard to compare them against each other as far as difficulty goes depending on the type of person that you are you might think that a coding bootcamp is more difficult because everything is more jam-packed or if you're another type of person you might think that a cs degree is more difficult because you have potentially harder classes or more theoretical stuff so here it's really hard to stack rank them against each other so i'm actually going to say that they are tied both in first place they're far easier than the self-taught route because you have literal guidance from professors tas people who have created these companies like coding boot camps or institutions like universities who are there to guide you so it's far easier than self-taught we're going to give both of those three points in first place and self-taught route only one point fourth characteristic speed in other words how fast can you go from never having written a line of code in your life too employable as a software engineer here i'm gonna have to go back to giving the self-taught route first place because again in an ideal scenario you can teach yourself the most targeted most useful stuff you can also code basically all day long you don't have to deal with professors with you know other people in your coding bootcamp or in your cs classes who might for whatever reason be slowing you down you can go as fast as you want and do as much as you want so it is gonna be in an ideal world the fastest option so first place first self taught then naturally coding boot camps are gonna come in as a close second because with a coding bootcamp you can go from never having written a line of code in your life like i was before i went to my coding bootcamp to employable as a software engineer and as quickly as six months even quicker depending on how long your job process takes after the coding bootcamp so it's definitely gonna be the second place here and then the cs degree which is going to take four years maybe you'll be able to finish it in three years or even two years if you do an associate's degree but still you're looking at far far far more time than the coding boot camp or the self-taught route characteristic number five support system slash motivation this one i think is very important and it's one that some people might not really think about when they ask themselves should i teach myself how to code basically how easy will it be for you to stay motivated throughout this endeavor of becoming a software engineer and will you have a support system in place to help keep you motivated and keep you happy keep you sane as you go through it and here i think that the obvious answer is that if you go down the self-taught path you will have basically no support system and you will have to be very self-motivated you will have to to be able to tell yourself this is going to be worth it what i'm doing will lead to a job you will have to be able to go through all of that alone if you have bugs if you're stuck on a project or on something you're not gonna have people to ask of course you have the internet you have youtube you have me your friendly neighborhood clem but at the end of the day i don't know how much motivation or maybe motivation i can give you but how much support and you know tailored help i can give you so self-taught definitely going to be in last place here and this is a really bad one i think for the self-taught developer and it's one of the toughest hurdles to get over whereas coding boot camps and cs degrees you have your professors instructors tas you have all your peers you're in this together they have specific facilities in place to help you if you're stuck or if you're feeling down or not motivated so it's hard again to stack rank those two i'm gonna probably tie them here in first place but they are far better than the self-taught route so self-taught third place the other two tied in first place now let's look at characteristic number six opportunities will you have opportunities to land a job or multiple jobs or interviews after you go through all three of these options and here once again i think it's pretty obvious that if you go down the self taught path you will have a more difficult time if you're self-taught you are by definition probably alone and it's just going to be more difficult for you to get access to opportunities to have a network and it will also be more difficult for you to get opportunities because as a self-taught developer you have to prove yourself a little bit more if you go to a boot camp or university you have some form of credential now whether the credential means much is a different argument but the point is you have a credential that some companies are going to view as a positive sign as a self-taught developer you don't really have a credential or you don't have the same kind of quality of a credential you know you don't have an institution backing you for example you don't have harvard backing you or you don't have a really good boot camp backing you again for so not everyone is going to go to harvard and even that we can argue about how good these credentials or big brand names are and how good they're going to be in the future but still as a self-taught developer you don't have any of that so you're going to be in last place now if we compare coding bootcamps and cs degrees to each other here once again i don't think it's that easy to stack rank these two some people would argue that oh at a university with a normal cs degree you have far more opportunities you have internship opportunities if you go to a really good college like harvard stanford whatever ivy league you have a lot more access people just naturally give you preference yada yada yada i'm not sure that that's actually true or that that trumps or beats what you get with a coding bootcamp because at coding bootcamps you also have certain career fairs now a lot of coding boot camps have specific partnerships with companies that basically give you instant access to a company so i would argue and also especially with everything going on right now with the pandemic and all that where colleges are going remote and we're seeing colleges lose a lot of value in my opinion in the next 10 years we're gonna see most universities basically die out and all the big names like harvard for example are gonna lose a tremendous amount of brand value in my opinion in the next decade or so but so my point here is that it's hard to say whether cs degrees or coding boot camps give you better opportunities i'm still going to say that they give you far more opportunities than the self-taught route so i'm going to tie them once again in first place with self-taught in third place last but not least the seventh characteristic access in other words how accessible are each of those three options and here keep in mind that we've already talked about difficulty about motivation about all these other characteristics in our previous comparisons but if we're looking at just the pure barriers to entry for each of these options i think that it's pretty clear that the one with the least amount of barriers to entry is the self-taught route after all all that you need is a computer maybe a laptop and an internet connection if you've got access to youtube to google to wikipedia to all of these websites that are for the most part free even or even some paid websites but that aren't that expensive you can self-teach yourself how to code so the self-taught route is going to be in first place here then i'm going to have to put the coding bootcamp in second place because the coding bootcamp is less expensive than a cs degree like we said before and you don't really need you know any sort of impressive background to attend a coding bootcamp you just need to pass their application process and that's mostly an assessment of your skills of very basic programming skills that you know they give you resources to learn it's not so much oh did you ace the sats when you were younger or did you go to really good high school did you have great extracurriculars which might be stuff that you didn't have access to when you were young and also you know as part of the access thing the fact that a coding boot doesn't take that big of a time investment or that their options to do it part-time like at night over one year or two years makes it far more accessible than a cs degree that really takes longer you know a cs degree or most cs degrees are going to take four years a lot of them are just specific to people who are between the ages of 18 and 21 or 22 or 17 and 21 whereas a coding boot camp no matter how old you are you can go to it and it's not a typical you're not going to feel like you don't belong so i do think that coding boot camps are a little bit more accessible than cs degrees so the self-taught route is in first place here coding boot camp second place and cs degrees in third place and now it is time to tally up all the points so if i add them all up here it looks like the self-taught route has a total of 15 points coding boot camps have a total of 17 points and cs degrees have a total of 13 points so that means that according to these seven comparisons coding boot camps are in first place and cs degrees are in last place now the interesting thing to note here is that the variance is kind of like equal right in other words they're all two points apart so it's not like cs degrees are absolute garbage or like coding bootcamps are amazing right they're all fairly close and i will say that this stack ranking is actually what i had in mind like at the very beginning of the video when i said that i had an idea of how i would rank these i would have put coding bootcamps at the top self-taught as second and cs degrees at the bottom with i probably would have would have put cs degrees and self-taught closer together just because i think that the lack of motivation and the and support system and the difficulty of being self-taught is just like very bad and i think that it pulls it even more it's almost like you could weight you could add weights to these you know seven characteristics and some are more important than others but you know we'll just go with this and we'll keep things pretty simple anyway so that is the end result of all these comparisons i hope that you found this video insightful informative i am very curious especially for those of you who are already software engineers or who have gone through one of these three options i mean if you're a software engineer you probably have what do you think do you agree with my comparisons with my assessments let me know in the comments down below if you haven't already pulverized the like button what are you waiting for subscribe to the channel if you haven't already if you enjoy short form written content follow me on linkedin and twitter if you enjoyed pictures follow me on instagram and otherwise i will see you in the next video

Channel: Clément Mihailescu

Views: 127,141

Rating: 4.8871827 out of 5

Keywords: self taught programmer vs degree, self taught programmer vs bootcamp, coding bootcamp vs self taught, coding bootcamp vs computer science degree, coding bootcamp vs college, coding bootcamp vs cs degree, coding bootcamp vs self learning, coding bootcamp vs bachelors degree, Andy Sterkowitz, is coding bootcamp worth it, self taught programmer google, is a computer science degree worth it, becoming a self taught programmer, how to learn to code, how to become a software engineer

Id: 3EUDyn_31-Q

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020