When I was 19, I moved to San Francisco to do a coding bootcamp. I got a bunch better at Ruby programming and also learned a bunch of web technologies (SQL, Rails, JavaScript, etc).
It was a great experience for me, for a bunch of reasons.
I got a bunch better at programming and web development.
It was a great learning environment for me. We spent basically all day pair programming, which makes it really easy to stay motivated and engaged. And we had homework and readings in the evenings and weekends. I was living in the office at the time, with a bunch of the other students, and it was super easy for me to spend most of my waking hours programming and learning about web development. I think that it was very healthy for me to practice working really long hours in a supportive environment.
The basic way the course worked is that every day you’d be given a project with step-by-step instructions, and you’d try to implement the instructions with your partner. I think it was really healthy for me to repeatedly practice the skill of reading the description of a project, then reading the step-by-step breakdown, and then figuring out how to code everything.
Because we pair programmed every day, tips and tricks quickly percolated through the cohort. We were programming in Ruby, which has lots of neat little language features that it’s hard to pick up all of on your own; these were transmitted very naturally. I also was pushed to learn my text editor better.
The specific content that I learned was sometimes kind of fiddly; it was helpful to have more experienced people around to give advice when things went wrong.
I think that this was probably a better learning experience than most tech or research internships I could have gotten. If I’d had access to the best tech/research internships, maybe that would have been better. I think that this was probably a much better learning experience than eg most Google internships seem to be.
I met rationalists and EAs in the Bay.
I spent a bunch of time with real adults who had had real jobs before. The median age of students was like 25. Most of the people had had jobs before and felt dissatisfied with them and wanted to make a career transition. I think that spending this time with them helped me grow up faster.
I somehow convinced my university that this coding bootcamp was a semester abroad (thanks to my friend Andrew Donnellan for suggesting this to me; that suggestion plausibly accelerated my career by six months), which meant that I graduated on schedule even though I then spent six months working for App Academy as a TA (which incidentally was also a good experience.)
Some ways in which my experience was unusual:
I was a much stronger programmer on the way in to the program than most of my peers.
I am deeply extroverted and am fine with pair programming every day.
It seems plausible to me that more undergrad EAs should do something like this, especially if they can get college credit for it (which I imagine might be hard for most students—I think I only got away with it because my university didn’t really know what was going on). The basic argument here is that it might be good for them the same way it was good for me.
More specifically, I think that there are a bunch of EAs who want to do technical AI alignment work and who are reasonably strong but not stellar coders. I think that if they did a coding bootcamp between, say, freshman and sophomore year, they might come back to school and be a bunch stronger. The bootcamp I did was focused on web app programming with Ruby and Rails and JavaScript. I think that these skills are pretty generically useful to software engineers. I often am glad to be better than my coworkers at quickly building web apps, and I learned those skills at App Academy (though being a professional web developer for a while also helped). Eg in our current research, even aside from the web app we use for getting our contractors to label data, we have to deal with a bunch of different computers that are sending data back and forth and storing it in databases or Redis queues or whatever. A reasonable fraction of undergrad EAs would seem like much more attractive candidates to me if they’d done a bootcamp. (They’d probably seem very marginally less attractive to normal employers than if they’d done something more prestigious-seeming with that summer, but most people don’t do very prestigious-seeming things in their first summer anyway. And the skills they had learned would probably be fairly attractive to some employers.)
This is just a speculative idea, rather than a promise, but I’d be interested in considering funding people to do bootcamps over the summer—they often cost maybe $15k. I am most interested in funding people to do bootcamps if they are already successful students at prestigious schools, or have other indicators of talent and conscientious, and have evidence that they’re EA aligned.
Another thing I like about this is that a coding bootcamp seems like a fairly healthy excuse to hang out in the Bay Area for a summer. I like that they involve working hard and being really focused on a concrete skill that relates to the outside world.
I am not sure whether I’d recommend someone do a web programming bootcamp or a data science bootcamp—though data science might seem more relevant, I think the practical programming stuff in the web programming bootcamp might actually be more helpful on the margin. (Especially for people who are already doing ML courses in school.)
I don’t think there are really any bootcamps focused on ML research and engineering. I think it’s plausible that we could make one happen. Eg I know someone competent and experienced who might run a bootcamp like this over a summer if we paid them a reasonable salary.
See my comment here, which applies to this Shortform as well; I think it would be a strong top-level post, and I’d be interested to see how other users felt about tech bootcamps they attended.
Some chance it’s outdated, but my advice as of 2017 was for people to do one of the top bootcamps as ranked by coursereport: https://www.coursereport.com/
I think most bootcamps that aren’t a top bootcamp are a much worse experience based on a good amount of anecdotal evidence and some job placement data. I did Hack Reactor in 2016 (as of 2016, App Academy, Hack Reactor, and Full Stack Academy were the best ranked bootcamps, but I think a decent amount has changed since then).
When I was 19, I moved to San Francisco to do a coding bootcamp. I got a bunch better at Ruby programming and also learned a bunch of web technologies (SQL, Rails, JavaScript, etc).
It was a great experience for me, for a bunch of reasons.
I got a bunch better at programming and web development.
It was a great learning environment for me. We spent basically all day pair programming, which makes it really easy to stay motivated and engaged. And we had homework and readings in the evenings and weekends. I was living in the office at the time, with a bunch of the other students, and it was super easy for me to spend most of my waking hours programming and learning about web development. I think that it was very healthy for me to practice working really long hours in a supportive environment.
The basic way the course worked is that every day you’d be given a project with step-by-step instructions, and you’d try to implement the instructions with your partner. I think it was really healthy for me to repeatedly practice the skill of reading the description of a project, then reading the step-by-step breakdown, and then figuring out how to code everything.
Because we pair programmed every day, tips and tricks quickly percolated through the cohort. We were programming in Ruby, which has lots of neat little language features that it’s hard to pick up all of on your own; these were transmitted very naturally. I also was pushed to learn my text editor better.
The specific content that I learned was sometimes kind of fiddly; it was helpful to have more experienced people around to give advice when things went wrong.
I think that this was probably a better learning experience than most tech or research internships I could have gotten. If I’d had access to the best tech/research internships, maybe that would have been better. I think that this was probably a much better learning experience than eg most Google internships seem to be.
I met rationalists and EAs in the Bay.
I spent a bunch of time with real adults who had had real jobs before. The median age of students was like 25. Most of the people had had jobs before and felt dissatisfied with them and wanted to make a career transition. I think that spending this time with them helped me grow up faster.
I somehow convinced my university that this coding bootcamp was a semester abroad (thanks to my friend Andrew Donnellan for suggesting this to me; that suggestion plausibly accelerated my career by six months), which meant that I graduated on schedule even though I then spent six months working for App Academy as a TA (which incidentally was also a good experience.)
Some ways in which my experience was unusual:
I was a much stronger programmer on the way in to the program than most of my peers.
I am deeply extroverted and am fine with pair programming every day.
It seems plausible to me that more undergrad EAs should do something like this, especially if they can get college credit for it (which I imagine might be hard for most students—I think I only got away with it because my university didn’t really know what was going on). The basic argument here is that it might be good for them the same way it was good for me.
More specifically, I think that there are a bunch of EAs who want to do technical AI alignment work and who are reasonably strong but not stellar coders. I think that if they did a coding bootcamp between, say, freshman and sophomore year, they might come back to school and be a bunch stronger. The bootcamp I did was focused on web app programming with Ruby and Rails and JavaScript. I think that these skills are pretty generically useful to software engineers. I often am glad to be better than my coworkers at quickly building web apps, and I learned those skills at App Academy (though being a professional web developer for a while also helped). Eg in our current research, even aside from the web app we use for getting our contractors to label data, we have to deal with a bunch of different computers that are sending data back and forth and storing it in databases or Redis queues or whatever. A reasonable fraction of undergrad EAs would seem like much more attractive candidates to me if they’d done a bootcamp. (They’d probably seem very marginally less attractive to normal employers than if they’d done something more prestigious-seeming with that summer, but most people don’t do very prestigious-seeming things in their first summer anyway. And the skills they had learned would probably be fairly attractive to some employers.)
This is just a speculative idea, rather than a promise, but I’d be interested in considering funding people to do bootcamps over the summer—they often cost maybe $15k. I am most interested in funding people to do bootcamps if they are already successful students at prestigious schools, or have other indicators of talent and conscientious, and have evidence that they’re EA aligned.
Another thing I like about this is that a coding bootcamp seems like a fairly healthy excuse to hang out in the Bay Area for a summer. I like that they involve working hard and being really focused on a concrete skill that relates to the outside world.
I am not sure whether I’d recommend someone do a web programming bootcamp or a data science bootcamp—though data science might seem more relevant, I think the practical programming stuff in the web programming bootcamp might actually be more helpful on the margin. (Especially for people who are already doing ML courses in school.)
I don’t think there are really any bootcamps focused on ML research and engineering. I think it’s plausible that we could make one happen. Eg I know someone competent and experienced who might run a bootcamp like this over a summer if we paid them a reasonable salary.
See my comment here, which applies to this Shortform as well; I think it would be a strong top-level post, and I’d be interested to see how other users felt about tech bootcamps they attended.
This seems like really good advice, thanks for writing this!
Also, I’m compiling a list of CS/ML bootcamps here (anyone should feel free to add items).
Some chance it’s outdated, but my advice as of 2017 was for people to do one of the top bootcamps as ranked by coursereport: https://www.coursereport.com/
I think most bootcamps that aren’t a top bootcamp are a much worse experience based on a good amount of anecdotal evidence and some job placement data. I did Hack Reactor in 2016 (as of 2016, App Academy, Hack Reactor, and Full Stack Academy were the best ranked bootcamps, but I think a decent amount has changed since then).
Good to know—thanks Bill!
Of course :)