Are you implying that being a programming "technician" is equivalent to being a bad programmer? Nobody has said "good developer" before you did.

I think the point is not to base the "goodness" of the developer on the person themselves - of course there will be people who 'get it' and excel at programming whether they go to bootcamp or college (or are self-taught for that matter), just as there will be people who don't get it, and they can just squeak through either program.

The point is to recognize that they are taught different (but overlapping) skill sets; skills that are hard to differentiate and could - from a business perspective - yield the same final product (user clicks button, correct things happen).

I interpreted it not as good/bad programmers, but as the level of project you might ask each person to complete.

A technician might be incredibly good at doing things like hooking a mobile app up to a REST API, building database frontends, and building on top of an established system. The engineer on the other hand is able to do all of the above, but is also someone you could trust to give a high level overview of the system as a whole and expect to come back with a considered approach to implementing it, taking into consideration things like fault tolerance, how an operations team would interact with and monitor it, and where to make tradeoffs between an ideal implementation and time/money limitations.

At least in my mind there's nothing to stop a sufficiently motivated technician learning the necessary skills to be considered an engineer - its not about credentialing, but about having experience that could come either from a college course, or just from working in the field for long enough to have picked it up.

Exactly. I'm a self-taught mostly-backend web developer and so I know a variety of related languages, I know the standard tooling and best practices for both front and back end, I know things like OO patterns and project architecture so that I can create sensible structures when writing a new system, and I know enough about the ops side of things to be able to do a lot of that when needed. All these things are practical and necessary to my day to day work.

On the other hand, I do not know basic things CS BS-havers learned, like how to implement a bubble sort from scratch, because that is not something that has ever been relevant or is likely to ever be relevant to my day to day work (outside of one-off interview questions from companies I likely don't want to work for anyway if that's their interview process). Algorithm design and high level math is the foundation of CS as a science and as a degree, but it just doesn't factor that much into writing code in a high level language for an established platform like the web.

And having a CS degree is no guarantee that you won't put an expensive call inside a loop or write monolithic functions or any of the other terrible practices I've had to train out of junior devs.

Your distinction sounds just like a junior developer compared to an experienced developer.

I was (I am?) guilty of that mental prejudice. A buddy poked me in the eye on that once, and now I make a conscious effort to realize that they're separate things as you've laid out here.

There really are multiple overlapping skill sets at play.

> Do you think there are smart people who would or could be good developers who did not major in computer science and later went on to attend a 'bootcamp'?

Of course. I know someone that would fit that description, and I don't think he's unusual.

> Do you think it's possible that developers who are not good could graduate from college with CS degrees?

Of course. I graduated with some and work with some. Strictly speaking, learning to write software is just a side-effect of learning how algorithms, data structures, and all that work. Some people never get very good at writing software.

I think you're missing the point, though. College vs boot camp isn't a matter of the skill of the resulting developers. It's more of a focus on different skills. Suppose a technician and an engineer are writing a program together. Maybe the engineer works on the "deep dive" aspects of the design (tough algorithms. the critical path of the program). Maybe the technician works on the overall architecture, wiring things up cleanly and producing an artful design. They're different focuses, and it's a division that doesn't currently really exist in SW dev, but does in some other fields (electrical engineers vs electricians, mech eng's vs various technicians, etc).

A CS degree doesn't make you a coder. Look, CS is born from specific mathematical events in the 19th/20th Century. For some people, a grasp of CS may be a liability - I've been places where it was like that.

The bootcamp thing may work out to equalize load on university CS programs. where us weirdos who were attracted to the discipline for abstract reasons can do what we do, and industry demand for talent can continue to be met through other means.

But!

I rather object strenously to the implied "status" differences between a software technician and a "scientist" but that's probably inevitable. If anything, "shallower" people with good organization skills offer more business value than somebody like me. All I can do is figure out what's really gone wrong, or not make things go wrong to start with. See, even I am using "shallower". I work for people like that all the time, and I admire them greatly.

An analogy is hardware engineers and hardware techs. You need both.

> Do you think there are smart people who would or could be good developers who did not major in computer science and later went on to attend a 'bootcamp'?

Yes.

> Do you think it's possible that developers who are not good could graduate from college with CS degrees?

Absolutely.

The difference is that the boot camp experience seems to provide a different skill set from a full-time degree (see the article that started this conversation).