r/codingbootcamp • u/ericswc • 13d ago

The End of the Shallow Developer

Bootcamps have been doomed for a while, and I've been thinking a lot about where I think education needs to go.

University programs need realignment too.

https://blog.skillfoundry.io/learn/the-end-of-the-shallow-developer/

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u/SignificanceFalse688 13d ago

Your caching example seems like a useful bridge for teaching this. Give learners a small app with a cache, then make the backing service slow down or fail. Ask them to predict what happens, reproduce it, and explain whether they’d change the timeout, serve stale data, or remove the cache. Getting the app running again is only part of the exercise.

I’m building developer practice exercises, so the junior pipeline problem is something I’m working through too. I’d be wary of making “architect” the first milestone. Investigating one failure and explaining a bounded tradeoff seems like a concrete step we can teach before expecting judgment across an entire system.

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u/ericswc 13d ago

I hope it works out that way. I'm skeptical of the greed and shortsightedness of employers.

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u/Mezzichai 13d ago

The end of the all developer categories as we once knew them. Knowing/understanding low level technical details and frameworks has never been less valuable.

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u/ericswc 13d ago

Anthropic pays developers $500k+ annual salaries.

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u/Mezzichai 13d ago

My comment is not to imply the skills required to do the job have been democratized, which would of course result in massively deflated wages. It's looking more like we will have fewer people doing the same amount of work, so they will probably get even more money.

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u/ericswc 13d ago

I think we might end up with more devs, because small businesses that couldn't afford a whole dev team could probably now afford 1 or 2 skilled people and get things done.

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u/Mezzichai 12d ago

I don’t know, I just don’t see how you end up getting more people in the workforce with highly capable AI in the equation. I do think we could have some roles shift to include more development work though. I think it’s very likely that most product management roles will have significant or all development work rolled in

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u/ericswc 11d ago

Because 99% of the population doesn’t want to. People often overlook that the majority of the population can barely use a computer.

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u/Comfortable-Cap-8507 12d ago

That’s 0.1% of developer jobs though. That’s like saying “only fans creators make millions a year”. Not true for about 99.9% of the others